Gestural restructuring beyond coarticulation in Korean /w/-vowel sequences: Evidence from phonetic, dialectal, and gender variation

One of the strategies used as a hiatus resolution is glide insertion. Previous Kurdish phonological works involve only a description of glide insertion in one dialect neglecting the segmental context. This study provides an analysis of glide insertion in word-medial vowel clusters in Kurdish and it is the first attempt to analyse the effects of dialect and segmental context. The speech material includes a set of words consisting of a stem plus a suffix with different vowel sequences at their boundaries. It is produced by four native speakers from four Kurdish speaking areas. The data analysis involves word transcription, their segmentation and the comparison of vowel sequences within and across the subdialects. The results indicate that glide insertion is not the only strategy used as word medial hiatus resolution, but it depends on the segmental context and dialect. Generally, the vowel hiatus is resolved by /j/ insertion. Vowel deletion is also used obligatorily in some segmental contexts when the second vowel in a sequence is /i/ and also when there are identical vowels in a sequences. Dialectal variations are observed in some vowel sequences in which /j/ insertion and vowel deletion both are used and when the first vowels in the sequence are the high back vowels in that /j/ and /w/ insertions are used. The findings suggests that /j/ insertion is the default strategy to resolve word-medial vowel clusters in Kurdish, the insertion of /w/ or vowel deletion are other strategies which are limited to some dialects and vowel sequences.

Machine learning based sample extraction for automatic speech recognition using dialectal Assamese speech

This study analyses the time-varying acoustics of laterals and their adjacent vowels in Manchester and Liverpool English. Generalized additive mixed-models (GAMMs) are used for quantifying time-varying formant data, which allows the modelling of non-linearities in acoustic time series while simultaneously modelling speaker and word level variability in the data. These models are compared to single time-point analyses of lateral and vowel targets in order to determine what analysing formant dynamics can tell about dialect variation in speech acoustics. The results show that lateral targets exhibit robust differences between some positional contexts and also between dialects, with smaller differences present in vowel targets. The time-varying analysis shows that dialect differences frequently occur globally across the lateral and adjacent vowels. These results suggest a complex relationship between lateral and vowel targets and their coarticulatory dynamics, which problematizes straightforward claims about the realization of laterals and their adjacent vowels. These findings are further discussed in terms of hypotheses about positional and sociophonetic variation. In doing so, the utility of GAMMs for analysing time-varying multi-segmental acoustic signals is demonstrated, and the significance of the results for accounts of English lateral typology is highlighted.

گویش‌سنجی، گرایشی نوین و برآمده از گویش‌شناسی کلاسیک است که در آن تفاوت‌ها و تمایزات گویش‌های یک ناحیه به صورت آماری محاسبه و با نقشه‌ها و اطلس‌های گویشی بازنمایی می‌شود. در پژوهش حاضر کوشیده‌ایم براساس روش تحلیل انبوهۀ داده‌های گویشی و با بهره‌گیری از بستۀ نرم‌افزاری گویش‌سنجی و نقشه‌نگاری RuG/L04، چشم‌اندازی از تنوعات آوایی زبان تالشی را ارائه دهیم. جامعۀ آماری این پژوهش ساکنان آبادی­های تالش­زبان 5 شهرستان تالش، رضوانشهر، ماسال، فومن و شفت است. از هر شهرستان 10 روستای بالای 100 خانوار انتخاب، و روستای تالش­زبان «عنبران» از شهرستان نمین استان اردبیل نیز اضافه شد و جمع روستاها به 51 رسید. از هر روستا سه گویشور در رده سنی نوجوان، میان­سال و سالمند انتخاب، و با آنها مصاحبۀ حضوری انجام شد. ابزار پژوهش، از پرسشنامه­های زبانی سوادش و لایپزیک بود که مشتمل بر 65 واژه در 10 مقولۀ واژگانی بود. نتایج پژوهش نشان داد که در تمام گونه‌های تالشی تشابهات و تنوعات آوایی وجود دارد که در حوزه­های تناوب آوایی و تنوعات در همخوان­ها و واکه­ها بررسی گردید.

Spirantization is one of the most frequently studied phonological phenomena of Spanish (Barlow, Jessica A. 2003. The stop-spirant alternation in Spanish: Converging evidence for a fortition account.Southwest Journal of Linguistics22. 51–86; Zampini, Mary. 1994. The role of native language transfer and task formality in the acquisition of Spanish spirantization.Hispania77. 470–481; among others). For a majority of dialects, Spanish voiced plosives have been traditionally described as having a continuant and a non-continuant realization in complementary distribution (Navarro Tomás, Tomás. 1977.Manual de pronunciación española. 19th edn. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Hualde, José Ignacio. 2005.The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; among others). Yet, phonetic studies reveal a more complex picture consisting of a great deal of phonetic variability and gradience among continuant realizations (Carrasco, Patricio, José Ignacio Hualde and Miquel Simonet. 2012. Dialectal differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony: Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish.Phonetica69. 149–179; among others; Simonet, Miquel, José Ignacio Hualde and Mariana Nadeu. 2012. Lenition of/d/in spontaneous Spanish and Catalan. Paper presented at INTERSPEECH) which is not captured by existing generative accounts (Bakovic, Eric. 1997. Strong onsets and Spanish fortition.MIT Working Papers in Linguistics23. 21–39; Harris, James W. 1984. La espirantización en castellano y la representación fonológica autosegmental.Estudis Gramaticals1.149–67; Hualde, José Ignacio. 1989. Procesos consonánticos y estructuras geométricas en español.Lingüística1.7–44; Kirchner, Robert. 2001. Phonological contrast and articulatory effort. In Linda Lombardi (ed.),Segmental phonology in Optimality Theory, 79–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; among others). Furthermore, most analyses focus almost exclusively on the general distribution of spirantization, excluding other dialectal patterns (Amastae, Jon. 1995. Variable spirantization: Constraint weighting in three dialects.Hispanic Linguistics6(7). 265–285; among others). The current proposal accounts for the phonetic variability and gradience evinced by phonetic studies, as well as dialectal variation in one optimality theoretic-analysis. Spirantization is explained as the result of effort reduction, rather than the result of assimilation (contra Harris, James W. 1984. La espirantización en castellano y la representación fonológica autosegmental.Estudis Gramaticals1.149–67; Hualde, José Ignacio. 1989. Procesos consonánticos y estructuras geométricas en español.Lingüística1.7–44, among others). Phonetic variability in the general dialects is argued to be related to the underlying representation: voiced obstruents are underspecified for continuancy both in the input and the output of the phonology, which explains gradience in implementation and responds to the need to avoid the marked configuration represented by a combination of voicing and maximal stricture found in voiced stops (Colina, Sonia. 2016. On onset clusters in Spanish: Voiced obstruent underspecification and /f/. In Rafael A. Núñez Cedeño (ed.),The syllable and stress: Studies in honor of James W. Harris. Boston, MA: Mouton de Gruyter). Dialectal variation stems from differences in the underlying representation and in the ranking of the constraints. The proposal is also able to explain variations on the two major dialectal patterns.

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. Apps have been used to train acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (de Vries et al. 2014) and to archive endangered languages (Iwaidja Inyaman Team 2012). Leemann and Kolly (2013) developed a free app for iOS—Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ) (>78k downloads)—to document language change in Swiss German. Here, we present results of sound change based on DÄ data. DÄ predicts the users’ dialects: for 16 variables, users select their dialectal variant. DÄ then tells users which dialect they speak. Underlying this prediction are maps from the Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS, 1962-2003), which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. If predicted wrongly, users indicate their actual dialect. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Results revealed robustness of phonetic variables; lexical and morphological variables were more prone to change. Phonetic variables like to lift (variants: /lupfə, lʏpfə, lipfə/) revealed SDS agreement scores of nearly 85%, i.e., little sound change. Not all phonetic variables are equally robust: ladle (variants: /xælə, xællə, xæuə, xæɫə, xæɫɫə/) exhibited significant sound change. We will illustrate the results using maps that show details of the sound changes at hand.

The Hexi dialect of the 12thc. recorded in Tangut literature, such as Fanhan Heshi Zhangzhongzhu, was a Tangut-Chinese language, i.e., an ethnic variant of the ancient Chinese Northwest Dialect. Under the influence of their native languages, non-Chinese people tend to make phonemic alternations, additions and deletions when they speak Chinese. These phonetic variants have nothing to do with diachronic evolution and cannot be brought into the sequence of Chinese phonological development as real forms of dialectal evolution. In researching Ancient (Middle) Chinese on the basis of the Chinese and non-Chinese transcriptions, only by stripping out phonetic variants and by carefully analyzing phonological divergences between Chinese and non-Chinese languages can we restore ancient forms better.

Phonetic Variation in Dialects

The aim of the present paper is to investigate intergenerational variation in the realization of interdental fricatives among speakers of Berkani Arabic, a variety spoken in north-eastern Morocco. Our survey is based on data gathered during fieldwork in the city of Berkane in December 2019. It is well known that, unlike mainstream Moroccan dia- lects, some varieties in the far north-east have retained old interdental fricatives to this day. Yet it seems that these phonemes are slowly fading or have already disappeared in some of the aforementioned vernaculars. This is the case, for instance, in the western division of the Huwwāṛa tribe and in the city of Oujda, respectively. As regards the city of Berkane, a preliminary analysis of our data indicates an almost complete loss of the voiceless inter- dental /ṯ/ and the voiced interdental /ḏ/. Conversely, instances displaying a voiced pharyn- gealized /ḏ/̣ are abundant in the speech of our informants, even if this sound is seemingly in free variation with its dental counterpart /ḍ/. Interestingly, this phonetic variation seems to be related to the age of the speaker. Thus, the number of occurrences of /ḏ/̣ is higher among middle-aged and older individuals. Such a finding could be indicative of the regres- sion of /ḏ/̣ in the speech of young Berkanis, which may be due to a process of convergence towards the mainstream varieties of Moroccan Arabic. The abandonment of other local features would seem to support this supposition.

Summary: Based on the experience of the Maria Montessori Teaching Resources Centre in Alghero, the Algherese adaptation of Tintín al país de l’or negre (Barcelona, 1995; English title: Tintin in the Land of Black Gold), coordinated by the author of the present article, constitutes one of the most successful publications in terms of the creation and utilization of a useful Algherese language model for schools. On the basis of criteria presented in the paper “L’ensenyament del català a l’Alguer i la qüestió del model de llengua” at a meeting of the Philological Section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in 2000, the model employed applies Catalan spelling standards but, at the same time, is in greater alignment with the Catalan spoken in Alghero from a morphological, lexical and syntactic point of view. The article reflects upon two possible methods of codification, e.g. of Algherese, put forward by the sociolinguist Enrico Chessa who in the process regarded the disparities and differences between spelling and phonetic transcription: on the one hand, the adoption of “Italian spelling to represent sound sequences in Algherese”; and, on the other hand, codification using Catalan spelling with “deviation from the phonemic principle”. Apart from analysing of the language model used and problems posed by Algherese codification, the article pays tribute to the work of Joaquim Ventalló (1899–1996), translator of the Tintin albums from French into Catalan, the basis for the Algherese adaptation of Tintin in the Land of Black Gold. [Keywords: Codification of Algherese; standardisation; dialectal variation; phonetic variation; translation; literary adaptation]

Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set of hypothesis about phonetic variation and its conditioning factors (among them geographical / dialectal variants). This paper illustrates this vision and proposes to challenge automatic methods for the analysis of a not easily observable phenomenon: vowel length contrast. We focus on Wolof, an under-resourced language from Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, we propose multiple features to make a fine evaluation of the degree of length contrast under different factors such as: read vs semi-spontaneous speech ; standard vs dialectal Wolof. Our measures made fully automatically on more than 20k vowel tokens show that our proposed features can highlight different degrees of contrast for each vowel considered. We notably show that contrast is weaker in semi-spontaneous speech and in a non standard semi-spontaneous dialect.

Background. Since the beginning of the XXI century, Ukrainian linguistics has intensified the study of the morphological paradigm of nouns, taking into account several factors. The researchers focus not only on appellatives but also on propriatives of different classes and subclasses. The need for a comprehensive study of the declension system of footwear names is caused by the predominantly fragmentary representation in grammatical descriptions of the Ukrainian language of the morphological paradigm of these nouns and their often different grammatical characterization according to number category (nouns with grammatical singular and plural meaning / pluralia tantum nouns), as well as the emergence of new lexemes in the Ukrainian language that are not recorded in dictionaries, and their grammatical status, phonetic and graphic design, and word formation require unified regulation. Methods. The study of more than 150 footwear titles used general scientific and linguistic methods: solid sampling, comparison, structural and distributional analysis, systematization, descriptive, statistical, and prognostication. Results. The article identifies and describes 33 elementary paradigmatic classes of noun names of footwear taking into account relevant factors (full/incomplete case-number paradigm, belonging to a certain gender and gender variation, belonging to one of the cases or being outside them, belonging of nouns of the first and second declensions to hard, soft or mixed groups, identity of word-change affixes and their letter designation, morphonemic phenomena, including phoneme alternation and stress, case variant forms, phonetic and graphic variation, etc.). The nouns with homonymous forms are identified and the means of realizing their case-number semantics are elucidated. Elementary paradigmatic classes of footwear nouns, which have the status of pluralia tantum nouns and whose phonetic, graphic and grammatical development is ongoing, are proposed. Conclusion. The obtained results can be used in the compilation of printed and electronic dictionaries, as well as in the unified representation of the morphological paradigm and phonetic and graphic design of noun names of footwear in current electronic dictionaries.

Understanding how and why pronunciations vary and change has been a dominant theme in variationist sociolinguistics (Labov, , ). Linguistic variability has also been an area of focus in psychology and cognitive science. Work from these two fields has shown that where variation exists in language, an alternative form, once used, persists in working memory and has a greater chance of reuse (Bock, ; Bock & Loebell, ; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, ). While there have been efforts to connect priming research with sociolinguistics at the level of grammar (Poplack, ; Travis, ), there has been less work which explicitly considers the potential role of priming as a motivating factor in accent variation and change. This paper explores the role of priming in a socially conditioned sound change. There are two main findings: (a) phonetic variants with the same voicing tend to cluster together in naturally occurring speech and (b) repetition of phonetic form interacts with widely attested sociolinguistic predictors of variation. I argue that there are benefits to both cognitive science and sociolinguistics from this synergy: Incorporating research from cognitive science into sociolinguistics provides us with a better understanding of the factors underpinning a sound change in progress; incorporating insights from sociolinguistics into cognitive science shows that priming does not always operate in the same way for all speakers.

Dialect and Gender Variations in the Place and Manner of Articulation of the Korean Fricatives

This article illustrates the utility of a variety of quantitative techniques by applying them to phonetic data from the traditional English dialects. The techniques yield measures of variation in phonetic usage among English localities, identify dialect regions as clusters of localities with relatively similar patterns of usage, distinguish regions of relative uniformity from transitional zones with substantially greater variation, and identify regionally coherent groups of features that can be used to distinguish some dialect regions. Complementing each other, the techniques provide a reasonably objective method for classifying at least some traditional English dialect regions on the basis of characteristic features. The results largely corroborate standard presentations in the literature but differ in the placement of regional boundaries and identification of regional features, as well as in placing those systemic elements in a broader context of largely continuous and often random variation.