Recent bling_reports items

Tonal coarticulation in Mandarin-English code-switching

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Question: How is tonal coarticulation affected by code-switching?

Cross-linguistic f0 differences in bilingual speakers of English and Korean

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Languages may differ in fundamental frequency of voicing (f0), even when they are spoken by a bilingual individual. However, little is known in bilingual/L2 acquisition research about simultaneous bilinguals. With the expectation that speakers who acquired two languages early use f0 differently for each language, this study measured f0 in English–Korean early bilinguals’ natural speech. The f0 level was higher for Korean than English, regardless of gender, age, or generational status (early and late bilinguals did not differ). The f0 span showed a language-gender interaction: males’ span was larger in Korean, while females’ span was larger in English. This study demonstrates that languages differ in f0 independent of speaker anatomy and suggests that children may acquire these differences in early childhood.

Individual differences in speech production: What is "phonetic substance"?

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Is phonetic variation speaker-independent?

The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Although Proto-Bantu had a vowel length contrast on roots which survives in many daughter languages today, many other Bantu languages have modified the inherited system. In this paper I distinguish between four types of Bantu languages: (1) Those which maintain the free occurrence of the vowel length contrast inherited from the proto language; (2) Those which maintain the contrast, but have added restrictions which shorten long vowels in pre-(ante-)penultimate word position and/or on head nouns and verbs that are not final in their XP; (3) Those which have lost the contrast with or without creating new long vowels (e.g. from the loss of an intervocalic consonant flanked by identical vowels); (4) Those which have lost the contrast but have added phrase-level penultimate lengthening. I propose that the positional restrictions fed into the ultimate loss of the contrast in types (3) and (4), with a concomitant shift from root prominence (at the word level) to penultimate...

The Segmental and Tonal Structure of Verb Inflection in Babanki

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we present a phonological and morphological analysis of the inflectional marking of the verb in Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of the Ring subgroup in Cameroon. We show that both the segmental markers and tonal patterns are sensitive to multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, indicative vs. subjunctive mood, and negation. Of particular interest is the discovery of a conjoint-disjoint (CJ/DJ) contrast better known from Eastern and and Southern Bantu languages. After presenting the different tense aspect markers, we develop rules assigning tone patterns by tense-aspect-mood-negation. Fourteen appendixes provide full (color-coded) conjugations of eight verbs of different syllable structure and tone.

Articulatory patterns in contrasting nasal-stop sequences in Panãra

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this paper is to describe the articulatory properties of Panãra [NT] sequences that arise from prenasalization and postoralization, including the relative timing of the oral, glottal, and velic gestures in the two types of [NT] sequences.

Prosodic asymmetries in nominal vs. verbal phrases in Bantu

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Investigations into phonological differences between nouns and verbs focus almost exclusively on the lexical (word) level, showing that underlying contrasts are more numerous and stable (“faithful”) on nouns (Smith 1998, 1999). This raises the question of whether these (or other) alleged differences in word level phonology generalize to the nominal vs. verbal phrase. The Bantu family provides an ideal testing ground for such an investigation. Based on Bantu, I show that nouns are more likely to undergo modification at the phrase level than verbs, thereby obeying less “faithfulness” to the input than verbs. Nominal phrases also show more distinct outputs and complex idiosyncracies than their verbal counterparts. After establishing that there are distinct asymmetric properties in the phrasal phonology of nominal vs. verbal constituents in Bantu, I raise the question of what causes these asymmetries and whether they are general or pertain only to Bantu and other African languages.

Head correction of point tracking data

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short paper comparing two approaches to head correction for Electro-MagneticArticulography (EMA) data collected with the Northern Digital Instruments “Wave” system. Inboth of these approaches, it is necessary to translate and rotate the sensor locations to theocclusal coordinate system. We found that point tracking error is greater by as much as doublewith the built-in NDI head correction method, compared to a three-sensor head correctionalgorithm. However, we conclude that the data are comparable, and that the two-sensor NDImethod is acceptable for phonetic research. A Python library for head correction was developedfor this work, and is available on github.com.

Speech Production Patterns in Producing Linguistic Contrasts are Partly Determined by Individual Differences in Anatomy

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This study explored correlations between (a) measures of vocal tract anatomy and (b) measures of articulatory/linguistic contrasts in vowels and coronal fricatives. The data for the study come from the Wisconsin X-Ray MicroBeam Database (Westbury, 1994). The anatomical measures included vocal tract length, oral cavity length, palate size and shape, as well as measures of maximal tongue protrusion and jaw wagging amplitude. Measures of the articulatory vowel space included the range of x and y location at vowel midpoints for four pellets on the tongue, the interpolated highest point of the tongue, and the locations of pellets on the upper and lower lips and to the lower incisor. For each of these clouds of vowel midpoint measurements, the orientation of variation was also measured. For fricatives, measures of tongue advancement and tongue tip lowering were taken. The results showed that the articulatory vowel space was related to both the length of the vocal tract,...

A Case for Parallelism: Reduplication-repair Interaction in Maragoli

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper carries out a detailed investigation into new data from Maragoli displaying an interaction between reduplication and hiatus repair. The data give rise to paradoxical, opportunistic orderings of phonological processes: in one set of inputs, copying before repairing avoids a complex onset, while in another set, repairing before copying avoids an onsetless syllable and maximizes word-internal self-similarity. Based on attested words and nonce probedata elicited from a native speaker, I argue that a successful analysis of the interaction requires direct comparison between forms derived by opposite orders of phonological changes. Theorderings receive a full analysis in Parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) but translate into constraint ranking paradoxes in Harmonic Serialism with Serial TemplateSatisfaction (McCarthy et al. 2012). The data thus constitute evidence for irreducible parallelism in the sense of McCarthy (2013).

Causative and Passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto?

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this study is to survey and evaluate the tonal effects of the two Bantu vocalic verb extensions *-i- ‘causative’ and *-ʊ- ‘passive’ in order to determine whether they carried a H in Proto-Bantu (PB).

A Longitudinal Acoustic Study of Two Transgender Women on YouTube

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The current study addresses the normativity of gendered voices in two ways. First, it is a study of transgender voices outside of the clinical setting: voices that belong to transgender individuals who desire to change how their voices are perceived, but are not undergoing direct treatment or medical intervention of any kind to do so. Second, it tracks their vocal characteristics over many years and nds that not only are their voices following completely dierenttrajectories as time progresses, they are in several ways deviating from the expectations for their gender. Obviously, if a transgender individual does not follow a particular treatment program, their voice is unlikely to change in the way the treatment program would predict. However, this doesn't mean that the individuals are any less successful in their transition. The study concludes by speculating about the myriad ways in which a transgender person may use vocal and visual cues to index their gender, despite not changing...

Articulatory Uniformity Through Articulatory Reuse: insights from an Ultrasound Study of Sūzhōu Chinese

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis explores the role of uniformity of speech articulation in shaping phonological systems of contrast and their phonetic implementations. The observable effect of uniformity for an individual speaker is that a given phonological primitive (such as a distinctive feature value or gesture, depending on one’s theoretical framework) tends to be implemented with maximum articulatory similarity across the speech sounds sharing that primitive. Although less discussed than other organizing principles in substance-based phonology such as phonetic dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972), focalization due to quantal effects (Stevens and Keyser, 1989; Schwartz et al., 1997b), or articulatory ease (Martinet, 1955; Lindblom, 1990), uniformity has been observed in a range of the world’s languages, mainly in the timing of laryngeal articulations in stop inventories (Keating, 2003; Chodroff and Wilson, 2017) but also in place-of-articulation primitives (Maddieson, 1996; Chodroff,...

The Influence of Dialect in Sound Symbolic Size Perception

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Prior research on sound symbolism and referent object size establishes that words with front vowels are perceived to refer to smaller objects than do back vowels (Ohala 1997; Klink 2000). Some dialects of American English exhibit vowel movement along the front-back axis which may influence perceived object size. This study focuses on California English /u/-fronting (Hinton et al. 1987) and predicts that shifting from a standardly back vowel [u] to a more front vowel [ʉ] is paired with a shift from a large perceived object size to a smaller perceived object size. This paper describes two experiments in which participants either silently read (reading task) or listened (listening task) to stimulus words and rated perceived object size. California English speakers in the reading task experiment perceived words with /u/ to be smaller than did non-California English speakers. This result suggests that sound symbolic perception is sensitive to fine phonetic variability due to a person’s...

1.5 Generation Korean Americans: Consonant and Vowel Production of Two Late Childhood Arrivals

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This project is about the "in-betweeners". Korean Americans can be grouped according to generational status, beginning with those who were born in Korea and immigrated to the United States (1st generation), and those whose parents were 1st generation and were born in the United States (2nd generation) (Park, 1999; Chun, 2009). Thereafter, successive generations of Korean Americans born and raised in the United States would take on additional numbers (3rd generation, 4th generation, et cetera). However, there is an additional category distinct from the whole number generations: 1.5. Between first and second.

Phrase-level Prosodic Smothering in Makonde

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper focuses on the issue of ‘prosodic idiosyncrasies’ as it arises in the Bantu language Makonde [kde]. Recently, Bennett, Harizanov, & Henderson (2018) proposed ‘prosodic smothering’, whereby prosodic requirements of an outer morpheme override (i.e. ‘smother’) prosodic properties of inner morphemes. We extend their analysis to phrase-level phonology in Makonde. Previous description has established that whether a nominal modifier forms a single phonological phrase φ with the noun is an idiosyncratic property, e.g. a [NOUN ADJECTIVE] phrase maps to 2 phonological phrases φ(N) φ(ADJ) while a [NOUN DEMONSTRATIVE] phrase forms a single phonological phrase φ(N DEM). Prosodic smothering is seen in [NOUN ADJ DEM] sequences which form a single φ(N ADJ DEM) phonological phrase, where the ADJ has been ‘entrapped’ and its prosody ‘smothered’. We highlight three contributions which Makonde makes to understanding smothering: (i) smothering targets the lexical head, (ii) smothering...

Effects of Learning Strategies on Perception of L2 Intonation Patterns

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the role that learning strategies play in L2 acquisition by comparing students learning French in a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) or immersion setting and those learning French in a Foreign Language Acquisition (FLA) or classroom setting. These students were tested on their ability to distinguish common French rising intonation patterns, the polar question and the continuation rise, by their conversational significations. After hearing a sentence that had been manipulated by the researcher to follow a standardized contour that matched either the polar question or continuation rise, the subjects were asked to judge whether the sentence ended the speaker’s turn or instead whether the speaker had not finished speaking. Since unfinished speech is characteristic of the continuation and not of the polar question, this allowed the researcher to determine the subjects’ ability to identify the two similar patterns. The FLA students outperformed the SLA students...

An Acoustic Outlook on Initial Stops in Northern Shoshoni

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Shoshoni is a member of the Uto-Aztecan language family and consists of three dialects: Western Shoshoni, Northern Shoshoni, and Eastern Shoshoni. While there has been descriptive research done on the phonetic and phonological properties of all three dialects of the language, little to no acoustic analysis has been done thus far. This paper seeks to begin the discussion of the acoustic properties of Northern Shoshoni. Specifically, the discussed data are from a speaker of Northern Shoshoni from the Shoshone1-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation; in this paper I examine the voice onset time of initial stops in Shoshoni.

Kejom (Babanki)

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Kejom, the preferred autonym for the language more commonly known as Babanki, is a Central Ring Grassfields Bantu language (ISO 693-3: [bbk]) spoken in the Northwest Regionof Cameroon (Hyman, 1980; Simons and Fennig, 2017; Hammarstr¨om et al., 2017). The language is spoken mainly in two settlements, Kejom Ketinguh and Kejom Keku, also known as Babanki Tungoh and Big Babanki, respectively (Figure 1), but alsoto some extent in diaspora communities outside of Cameroon. Simons and Fennig (2017) state that the number of speakers is increasing; however, the figure of 39,000 speakers they provide likely overestimates the number of fluent speakers in diaspora communities. The two main settlements’ dialects exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. The variety of Kejom described here is the Kejom Ketinguh variant spoken by the second author.

Speaker Normalization in Speech Perception

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Talkers differ from each other in a great many ways. Some of the difference is in the choice of linguistic variants for particular words, as immortalized in the song by George and Ira Gershwin “Let’s call the whole thing off”.

You say either [iðɚ] and I say either [aᴵðɚ],You say neither [niðɚ] and I say neither [naᴵðɚ]Either[ iðɚ], either [aᴵðɚ] Neither [niðɚ], neither [naᴵðɚ]Let's call the whole thing off.You like potato and I like potahtoYou like tomato and I like tomahtoPotato, potahto, Tomato, tomahto.Let's call the whole thing off

Listeners have experienced different pronunciations of words, and many of the variants that we know are tinged with social or personal nuance. This “multiple-listing” notion, that listeners store more than one variant of each word in memory is the dominant hypothesis, among sociolinguists regarding the cognitive representation of social phonetic variation (Thomas, 2011), and has been proposed as a way to account for the listeners’s...

Holistic Lexical Storage: Coarticulatory Evidence from Child Speech

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Adult speakers readily decompose morphologically-complex words into their component parts. Overgeneralizations in children’s early speech (e.g. goed) demonstrate that they must share in this ability. However, acoustic evidence from child speech suggests that children do not always break words down, instead storing language in more holistic chunks such as syllables or even entire words.

How are morphologically-complex forms represented throughout childhood? To answer this, we measured coarticulation within and between morphemes in adult and child (age 5-10) South Bolivian Quechua speakers. Coarticulation was quantified as the difference between the averaged Mel frequency cepstral coefficient vectors of the adjacent phones. Experiment 1 replicates known coarticulatory findings from the literature, demonstrating the validity of the MFCC measurement for calculating adjacent coarticulation. Experiment 2 then measures coarticulation between a single biphone sequence, [ap],...

Strengthening, Weakening and Variability: The Articulatory Correlates of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation in the Production of English Dental Fricatives

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A number of influential approaches to understanding phonetic and phonological variation in speech have highlighted the importance of functional factors (Blevins, 2004; Donegan & Stampe, 1979; Kiparsky, 1988; Kirchner, 1998; Lindblom, 1990). Under such approaches, speaker- and listener-oriented principles—ease of articulation vs. perceptual clarity—often work in opposite directions with respect to consonantal articulation. Minimization of effort is thought to drive a general “weakening” of consonants (resulting in decreased articulatory constriction and/or duration) which often makes them more articulatorily similar to surrounding sounds. This can result in assimilation, lenition, and ultimately deletion, and generally comes at the expense of clarity. By contrast, maximization of clarity drives consonantal “strengthening” processes (resulting in increased articulatory constriction and/or duration) that makes target segments more distinct from neighboring sounds, which can result...

Vocal Tract Length Normalization

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The resonant frequencies of the vocal tract during vowel production convey information about the linguistic vowel intended by the talker - whether they mean to say ‘hey’ or ‘hoe’, for example - while also conveying information about the talker. One particularly salient bit of talker information that partially determines the frequencies of the vowel formants is the length of the talker’s vocal tract. Vowel formant normalization aims to remove the effects of talker differences without also removing important linguistic information. This paper presents a study of vocal tract length normalization using a new ΔF method, and compares this method to other vowel normalization methods. A key point of comparison in this study is the number of vowel tokens that are needed in order to derive a stable estimate of vocal tract length. Several of the vowel normalization methods that are most commonly used in phonetic studies are shown to need a full set of vowels in order to be reliable, while...

Possessive Tone in Tswefap (Bamileke): Paradigmatic or Derivational?

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I consider two analyses of the possessive pronoun tonal paradigm in Tswefap, a Bamileke language spoken in Batoufam, Cameroon. As in the case of related languages that have been previously described, Tswefap has a rather complex tone system that involves multiple tone heights, tonal contours, and tone alternations. Although simplified, it also maintains several of the inherited noun class distinctions. In this study attention is on the tones of possessive pronouns and their effects on a preceding modified noun. I first present a paradigmatic account as one might find in a descriptive or pedagogical grammar indicating which possessive pronouns receive which tones. I then turn to a more traditional Bamileke and Grassfields Bantu analysis in terms of underlying representations and floating tones. It is argued that all possessive pronouns are preceded by a floating L tone which affects a preceding mid tone noun in one of two ways, depending on the syllable shape of the...

Word prosody II: Tone systems

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Word prosody II: Tone systems

VOT merger and f0 contrast in Heritage Korean in California

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recordings of read speech in Korean and English were made by native South Koreans and Korean Americans of varying generational status (“second-generation” American-born or “1.5-generation” foreign-born) and analyzed for differences in usage of VOT and fundamental frequency to contrast production of Korean lenis and aspirated stops and affricates. The speech was then played back to listeners of Korean heritage and judged metalinguistically regarding proficiency in Korean and other attributes relevant to the speech and demographics of immigrant speakers. Results show that second-generation Korean speakers, especially females, are not showing the collapse of VOT contrast found in the other two groups, one part of the “tonogenetic” sound change nearing completion in Seoul. Female second-generation speakers are also not using f0 to differentiate between the stops to the extent that first- and 1.5- generation speakers are. These second-generation speakers were easily identifiable as...

The Distribution of Advanced Tongue Root Harmony and Interior Vowels in the Macro-Sudan Belt

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we investigate the distribution of vowel systems in the Macro-Sudan Belt, an area of Western and Central Africa proposed in recent areal work (Güldemann 2008, 2011; Clements & Rialland 2008). We report on a survey of 615 language varieties with entries coded for two phonological features: advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony and the presence of interior vowels (i.e. non-peripheral vowels, such as [ɨ ɯ ɜ ə ʌ …]). Our results show that the presence of ATR harmony in the Macro-Sudan Belt is limited to three separated zones: an Atlantic ATR Zone, a West African ATR Zone, and an East African ATR Zone, all geographically unconnected to one another. We additionally show that between the West and East African ATR Zones is a geographically extensive, genetically heterogeneous region of Central Africa where ATR harmony is systematically absent which we term the Central African ATR-less Zone. Our results also show a large region where phonemic and allophonic interior vowels...

Phonetic Accommodation to Non-Native English Speech

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Phonetic accommodation is the process in which a speaker becomes more phonetically similar to his or her interlocutor over the course of a conversation. This experiment investigates phonetic accommodation in the English speech of Mandarin speakers after exposure to a model speaker who shares their language background. The results show that when including phones, tasks, and conditions as dependent variables, there are statistically significant differences across tasks and phones. Phonetic accommodation is observed in all shadowing tasks and the effect remains in post-shadow task in some dependent variables. The social manipulation of this study is only statistically significant in formant durations and word-final consonant clusters durations and the pattern suggests that subjects who were in the condition that encouraged speakers to achieve a closer social distance with the interlocutor accommodated more than subjects in the condition that were encouraged to be native-English like....

Phonologically Determined Agreement in Guébie

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Most current models of grammar assume that syntax has no sensitivity to phonological information (Pullum and Zwicky, 1986, 1988). Phonologically determined agreement, also called alliterative concord, challenges the assumption that syntax is phonology-free, because it appears that phonological form determines morphosyntactic agreement. Here I present a pattern of phonologically determined agreement from Gu´ebie, an endangered Kru language spoken in Cˆote d’Ivoire, assessing whether phonologically determined agreement is, in fact, phonologically determined. I show that with a combination of Distributed Morphology operations (Halle and Marantz, 1994) plus category-specific phonological grammars (Smith, 2011) via Cophonology Theory (Orgun, 1996; Anttila, 2002; Inkelas and Zoll, 2005), we need not modify our model of syntax as phonology-free. In addition to accounting for phonologically determined agreement in Gu´ebie and across languages, the proposed analysis includes a formal account...

Rhythmic Repair of Morphological Accent Assigned Outside of a Metrical Window

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Rhythmic Repair of Morphological Accent Assigned Outside of a Metrical Window

Synchronic vs. Diachronic Naturalness: Hyman & Schuh (1974) revisited

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I present and update some of the major points Russell Schuh and I made in our 1974 Linguistic Inquiry paper concerning universals of tone rules. Emphasis is on the distinction we made between synchronic and diachronic naturalness. Any diachronic change can be a synchronic rule while the reserve is not the case. We suggest(ed) that it is profitable to talk about natural synchronic rules that could not be (phonetically motivated) sound changes. This includes tone shifting, tonal polarity, and tonal downstep among possibly other commonly occurring tonal phenomena.

Sound symbolism, speech identity, and size

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sound symbolism is the hypothesized property for sounds to convey semantic meaning. Shinohara and Kawahara (2010) proposed that features of vowels (frontness, height) and obstruents (voicing) cause listeners to perceive words as either larger or smaller. Study 1 firstly replicates the original experiment then repeats the experiment using a speech perception paradigm. The speech perception experiment assesses whether listeners perceive sizes differently between spoken language and visual reading. The results from Study 1 were consistent with Shinohara and Kawahara (2010) except that words with /u/ were perceived as smaller in our results. We hypothesized that this result may be due to u-fronting which is an iconic feature of Californian English so we repeated both the written word and speech perception experiments in Study 2 with non-Californian English speakers. Our results support Shinohara and Kawahara’s claims and suggest that speakers perceive dialect-specific phonetic properties...

In Search of Prosodic Domains in Lusoga

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In Search of Prosodic Domains in Lusoga

Bantu Tone Overview

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Bantu Tone Overview

Functional load and frequency predict consonant emergence across five languages

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Frequency can often predict when children will acquire units of language such as words or phones. An additional predictor of speech development may be a phone’s functional load (FL), or the contrastive work that a sound performs in a language. A higher FL may correlate with earlier phone emergence in child speech as children selectively converge upon highly meaningful contrasts in their input. This hypothesis is tested across five typologically-diverse languages that vary by phone inventory size and structure as well as word composition. Consonant FL was calculated over more than 390,000 words of child-directed speech. Results demonstrate that FL correlates positively with earlier consonant emergence in all languages. Models fit to bootstrapped corpus data include both FL and frequency as predictors, but suggest that frequency may be the stronger of the two. A need to complicate assumptions on the relationship between environmental effects and phonological development is discussed.

Lusoga Noun Phrase Tonology

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lusoga Noun Phrase Tonology

Costs and Cues to Code-switched Lexical Access

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Costs and Cues to Code-switched Lexical Access

The Berkeley Phonetics Machine

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Berkeley Phonetics Machine is a Linux virtual machine imageproduced and used by the UC Berkeley Phonology Lab asa platform for phonetic research. It contains a full data analysisstack based on Python and R and also specialized tools for phoneticresearch. The machine is designed as a flexible and productiveplatform for established and novel research agendas thatcan be easily shared and reproduced. We list the software availablein the machine, which includes many command-line toolsfor acoustic analysis and media file manipulation, as well asspecialized Python libraries. We also discuss the use of this machinein the Phonology Lab and in phonetics courses. The overallexperience with the machine has been positive, as facultyand graduate students are able to share and execute scripts ina common working environment. Undergraduate students haveless opportunity to master the virtual machine environment butbenefit from simplified instructions and fewer installation andoperating problems....

An Ultrasound Analysis of Tswefap Back Consonants

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

An Ultrasound Analysis of Tswefap Back Consonants

The Effects of Singing on Speech in Geriatric Voice: An Acoustic Study

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Effects of Singing on Speech in Geriatric Voice: An Acoustic Study

Multiple Exponence in the Lusoga Verb Stem

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Multiple Exponence in the Lusoga Verb Stem

Modeling the effect of palate shape on the articulatory-acoustics mapping

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Previous research [1, 2] shows that articulatory variability is reduced for people with flatter palates. It has been hypothesized [1] that this is because the mapping between articulation and acoustics is more linear for flatter than for more domed palates. A combination of two synthesizers were used to model how vocal tract anatomy influences the mapping of articulation onto acoustics, using American English /r/ as a test case. A retroflexable tongue tip was added to the articulatory parameters. Two additional palate shapes and a sublingual cavity that appears during /r/ production were also added to the synthesizer. A Python script searched the articulatory-acoustic space for vocal tract configurations that resulted in a low F3 (the hallmark acoustic cue for /r/) for each palate. Palate shape influences not only the overall sensitivity of the articulatory-acoustic mapping, but also the effect of each individual articulatory parameter on F3.

Underlying Representations and Bantu Segmental Phonology

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Underlying Representations and Bantu Segmental Phonology

Gradient phonemic contrast in Nanjing Mandarin

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sounds that are contrastive in a language are rated by listeners as being more differentfrom each other than sounds that don’t occur in the language or sounds that areallophones of a single phoneme. The study reported in this paper replicates this findingand adds new data on the perceptual impact of learning a language with a new contrast.Two groups of speakers of the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin Chinese were tested. Onegroup was older and had not been required to learn standard Mandarin as school children,while the other younger group had learned standard Mandarin in school. Nanjing dialectdoes not contrast [n] and [l], while standard Mandarin does. Listeners rated the similarityof naturally produced non-words presented in pairs, where the only difference betweenthe tokens was the medial consonant. Pairs contrasting [n] and [l] were rated by olderNanjing speakers as if two [n] tokens or two [l] tokens had been presented, while thesesame pairs were rated by younger Nanjing speakers...

Nasals and Low Tone in Grassfields Noun Class Prefixes

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As it is well known, noun class prefixes are low tone in Narrow Bantu and classes 1, 3, 4, 6(a), 9,and 10 have nasals (Meeussen 1967). However, just outside Narrow Bantu, noun class prefixesare usually high tone and the nasals are typically missing. A dichotomy is found in GrassfieldsBantu where Eastern Grassfields resembles Narrow Bantu but the Ring and Momo sub-groups ofWestern Grassfields have high tone prefixes and lack nasals except sporadically. Drawing ondata from Babanki and other Ring languages, we show that this relationship is not accidental. Ina number of contexts where we expect a high tone prefix, a stem-initial NC cluster requires thatit rather be low. We provide some speculations in this paper as to why nasals should beassociated with low tone, an issue that has not been fully addressed in the literature on consonanttypes and tone.

A Survey of English Vowel Spaces of Asian American Californians

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A phonetic study of the vowel spaces of 535 young speakers of Californian Englishshowed that participation in the California Vowel Shift, a sound change unique tothe West Coast region of the United States, varied depending on the speaker’s selfidentifiedethnicity. For example, the fronting of the pre-nasal hand vowel varied byethnicity, with White speakers participating the most and Chinese and South Asianspeakers participating less. In another example, Korean and South Asian speakers ofCalifornian English had a more fronted foot vowel than the White speakers. Overall,the study confirms that CVS is present in almost all young speakers of CalifornianEnglish, although the degree of participation for any individual speaker is variable onaccount of several interdependent social factors.

Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three syllable window in Ese’eja

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three syllable window in Ese’eja

‘Many to One’ in the Articulation to Acoustics Map

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The “many to one” problem arises when trying to map inversely from acoustic patterns tovocal tract configurations. In one famous demonstration, Atal et al. (1978) searched through theacoustic outputs of a synthetic vocal tract for vowels that matched each other exactly on the frequenciesof the first three resonances (F1-3) and found that for each vowel tested [i], [a] and [u] there wereseveral vocal tract configurations that gave the same formant frequencies. This result has been used toshow that one (whether speech technologist or listener) cannot inversely map from acoustics to derive aunique possible vocal tract shape. We synthesized vowels using the formant frequencies reported byAtal et al. and show that listeners can detect differences between them even though the vowels areidentical in the first three formants. Our conclusion is that listeners may not be as troubled by a manyto-oneproblem as has been assumed before.

In Search of Prosodic Domains in Lusoga

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In Search of Prosodic Domains in Lusoga

Social network structure, accommodation, and language change

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Social network structure, accommodation, and language change

Scalar tone shift as evidence for morphology without morphemes∗

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Scalar tone shift as evidence for morphology without morphemes∗

On Reconstructing Tone in Proto-Niger-Congo

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On Reconstructing Tone in Proto-Niger-Congo

Social and Structural Constraints on a Phonetically-Motivated Change in Progress: (str) Retraction in Raleigh, NC

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Social and Structural Constraints on a Phonetically-Motivated Change in Progress: (str) Retraction in Raleigh, NC

Context, Predictability and Phonetic Attention

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lindblom et al. (1995) proposed two modes of listening to speech: a “what” mode, in whichlisteners focus on meaning, and a “how” mode, where listeners attend to details ofpronunciation. This theory fits with Hickok and Poeppel’s (2004, 2007) more recent dualstream model of speech perception. What conditions then are necessary for modulating the useof one listening mode or the other? Following observations concerning the effect of higher levellinguistic information on speech perception (Cole & Jakimik 1980, etc.), I will detail the resultsof two experiments which consider how structural and semantic context (word predictability)interact with the listener’s attention to phonetic details. The experiments use the phoneticaccommodation or imitation paradigm (Goldinger 1998, etc.) as a tool to determine whatphonetic details subjects noticed after hearing target words in a variety of contexts. The firstexperiment compares the degree of accommodation in isolated phrase vs. sentence...

Differences in the relationship between palate shape, articulation, and acoustics of American English /r/ and /s/

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This ultrasound and acoustics study of American English /r/ and /s/ investigates whether variability in production is related to individual differences in vocal tract morphology, namely the shape of the palate. There was reduced articulatory variability for flatter palates for both /r/ and /s/. There was a relationship between acoustics and palate shape for /s/ only, where flatter palates had increased acoustic variability, but for /r/, there was no relationship between palate shape and acoustic variability.

The Autosegmental Approach to Tone in Lusoga

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Autosegmental Approach to Tone in Lusoga

Acquisition of the passive in Spanish-speaking children

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This work examines three- to six-year-old children’s acquisition of the Spanishpassive. This structure, a notoriously difficult concept for early learners, exhibits great variationin age of acquisition cross-linguistically. Spanish, with two passive constructions, is an ideal casestudy for the role of frequency in the development of the passive. This study utilizes data fromCHIEDE, a spontaneous oral corpus spanning more than 20,000 words of child speech. Only alimited number of studies examining the passive have utilized spontaneous corpus data; as aresult, it is unclear if lexical semantic patterns are due to experimental or task effect - an issuethat only the inclusion of natural data can resolve. Results show that children only produce oneof two possible forms of the Spanish passive. Their production is also limited to action verbs.Finally, while children as young as 3;0 produce the passive, cross-sectional data show thebeginnings of a downward U-shaped developmental pattern....

A Study on Perceptual Compensation for /u/-fronting in American English

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A Study on Perceptual Compensation for /u/-fronting in American English

Listening Under Cognitive Load Makes Speech Sound Fast

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Listening Under Cognitive Load Makes Speech Sound Fast

Why Underlying Representations?

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Why Underlying Representations?

The Production and Perception of a Lesbian Speech Style

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Production and Perception of a Lesbian Speech Style

Audio-visual Factors in Stop Debuccalization in Consonant Sequences

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Audio-visual Factors in Stop Debuccalization in Consonant Sequences

Preface

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

Single URs vs. Allomorphy: The case of Babanki Coda Consonant Deletion

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Single URs vs. Allomorphy: The case of Babanki Coda Consonant Deletion

Phonetic Sources of Morphological Patterns in Sound Change: Fricative Voicing in Athabascan

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Phonetic Sources of Morphological Patterns in Sound Change: Fricative Voicing in Athabascan

Vowel Perception Asymmetry in Auditory and Phonemic Listening

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Vowel Perception Asymmetry in Auditory and Phonemic Listening

Initial Vowel Length in Lulamogi: Cyclicity or Globality?

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Initial Vowel Length in Lulamogi: Cyclicity or Globality?

Effects of Native Language on Compensation for Coarticulation

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Effects of Native Language on Compensation for Coarticulation

Positional Prominence vs. Word Accent: Is there a difference?

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Positional Prominence vs. Word Accent: Is there a difference?

Morphology, Irregularity, and Bantu Frication: The Case of Lulamogi

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Morphology, Irregularity, and Bantu Frication: The Case of Lulamogi

Convergence through Divergence: Compensatory Changes in Phonetic Accommodation

Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Convergence through Divergence: Compensatory Changes in Phonetic Accommodation

Perception of Fricatives by Dutch and English Speakers