Coda Consonants Research Articles

Free Variation in Epenthesis and Syncope in a Jordanian Arabic Dialect: An Optimality-Theory Perspective

This paper sets out to investigate aspects of free variation in a variety of Jordanian Arabic spoken in the northern parts of the country. The study will consider two basic linguistic phenomena; namely segment addition ‘epenthesis’ in word final coda clusters, and segment deletion ‘syncope’ between word final identical coda consonants. Both phenomena in the dialect feature cases of free variation. These phenomena will be analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory with reference to free ranking of constraints. The paper details three major approaches within Optimality Theory used to account for cases of free variation and will provide evidence that in Jordanian Arabic, free variation in epenthesis and syncope results from the interaction of constraints that are freely ranked in the phonology of the language. Keywords: Jordanian Arabic, Epenthesis, Free variation, Optimality theory, Syncope

Reconciling “Heavy” and “Long”: The Typology of Lexical Geminates

After decades of research, opinions are still split over whether geminates should be represented as long or as heavy. We attempt to resolve this issue by entertaining a model that rests on the assumption that all underlying geminates are moraic consonants but they might not emerge as such on the surface. We argue that this intuition—due to Davis (2011)—can be formalized in a theoretical model where (a) different degrees of prosodic integration are possible and (b) phonetic interpretation can refer to the difference between epenthetic and underlying elements. This model predicts that the questions of whether a mora has an effect for segmental length and whether it has an effect for syllabic weight are independent from each other. We show that this representational consequence correctly predicts the typology of attested combinations of geminates in different positions and singleton coda consonants in the languages of the world.

Underapplication Opacity Beyond the Non-Local Compensatory Lengthening in Modern Colloquial Persian

This research discusses the underapplication opacity, namely counterbleeding, of non-local compensatory lengthening in Modern Colloquial Persian, a style of informal speech in Iran (mostly in Tehran) motivated by moraic glottal consonants in the postconsonantal position in the coda. It concludes that building a moraic structure occurs before segmental changes, such as glottal deletion, Flop, and Spread (i.e., double flop), through weight-by-position. After building the moraic structure of coda consonants, a postconsonantal glottal is prone to deletion, resulting in a floating mora that precedes coda consonant flops while delinked from its mora. In this environment, stem vowels can spread to the neighboring mora and lengthen. Stratal OT is capable of accounting for counterbleeding through strata with different sets of OT constraints established on the basis of Persian morphology. The first stratum ensures the construction of the moraic structure before any segmental change, while the second stratum is where the counterbleeding order is covered.

The role of the tongue back on contrasting voicing properties of English coda consonants: Evidence from an ultrasound imaging technique

This study explores how voicing properties of stop consonants at the coda of a syllable are reflected in the articulation of the tongue back in American English. The association between the laryngeal control of the voicing property of consonants and the positioning of the tongue back has been increasingly reported (e.g., Ahn, 2018; Coretta, 2020). A recent study (Coretta, 2020) reported that longer vowel duration indicating the following voiced stop consonant corresponds to greater tongue root advancement at the offset of the vowel in Italian and Polish. Since the vowel with a following voiced stop consonant has a longer duration than that with a voiceless stop consonant, the later offset of TB movement should be correlated with the offset of vocal folds vibration in American English as well. The preliminary result suggests that the later offset of TB advancement is positively correlated with the longer vowel duration of voiced consonants at the coda of a syllable; therefore, contrasting voicing property of coda consonants in English is phonological and phonetically evidenced in the articulation of the tongue back. Articulatory data from ultrasound images of the tongue from three native speakers of American English will be presented.

Deep learning assessment of syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants.

In English, a sentence like "He made out our intentions." could be misperceived as "He may doubt our intentions." because the coda /d/ sounds like it has become the onset of the next syllable. The nature and occurrence condition of this resyllabification phenomenon are unclear, however. Previous empirical studies mainly relied on listener judgment, limited acoustic evidence, such as voice onset time, or average formant values to determine the occurrence of resyllabification. This study tested the hypothesis that resyllabification is a coarticulatory reorganisation that realigns the coda consonant with the vowel of the next syllable. Deep learning in conjunction with dynamic time warping (DTW) was used to assess syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants. The results suggest that convolutional neural network- and recurrent neural network-based models can detect cases of resyllabification using Mel-frequency spectrograms. DTW analysis shows that neural network inferred resyllabified sequences are acoustically more similar to their onset counterparts than their canonical productions. A binary classifier further suggests that, similar to the genuine onsets, the inferred resyllabified coda consonants are coarticulated with the following vowel. These results are interpreted with an account of resyllabification as a speech-rate-dependent coarticulatory reorganisation mechanism in speech.

Moraic mismatches in Somali phonology

This paper reconsiders the moraic status of coda consonants in Somali. It is argued that Somali joins a growing list of languages presenting a challenge to the Moraic Uniqueness Hypothesis. Several phenomena are explored that suggest that Somali exhibits moraic mismatches whereby moras associated with segments of different types contribute to, or “count” differently for particular phonological processes. Evidence in support of this proposal is drawn from the literature on tonology and poetic metrics, but also from word shape and minimality requirements, and from the distribution of syllable shapes of different types in Somali words. It is argued that an approach to Somali phonology that permits reference to moras associated with different segment types offers a unified and more transparent account of the language’s segmental and tonal phenomena. Notably, such an approach precludes the assumption of “early” coda consonant moraicity followed by a global dissociation of consonantal moras by rule before high tone assignment, as argued for in earlier work. The findings presented here illustrate that standing points of view on the role of the mora in Somali phonology must be reconfigured.

국어의 변(邊)자음

Traditionally, consonants are classified in terms of place and manner of articulation. In this article, it is claimed that a third parameter called mode of articulation is needed in some languages. In Korean the two modes are the mode of occlusive articulation and the mode of centrifugality. The two modes are in a tangential relationship, the latter mode deriving from the former mode. Thus, as the central region in the oral tract is clogged, articulation is pushed toward the peripheral regions, that is, labial and velar areas. In places of articulation then, Korean consonants are divided into two classes: central and peripheral. In this paper, several phonological phenomena showing the preference of the peripheral articulation are presented. (1) In progressive assimilation, central consonants assimilate to peripheral consonants, but not vice versa (e.g., 준비→줌비, but 삼도→*산도). (2) In umlaut, the intervening consonant must be a peripheral one (e.g., 어미→에미, but 언니→*엔니). (3) epenthetic consonants in hiatus and additive consonants in texting are usually peripheral consonants (e.g., 소아지→송아지, 하네요→하네욤, 아닌데→아닌뎁. (4) In consonant cluster simplification, of two coda consonants, it is usually the peripheral consonant that survives and the central consonant that deletes (e.g., 없다→업다, *엇다, but 젊다→점다, *절다). (5) In Chinese characters whose coda is ㄹ, the following central consonant is tensified, but not if it is a peripheral consonant (e.g., 일도(一度)→[일또] [ilt'o]; 일장(一章) [일짱] [ilʧ‘aŋ], *[ilʤaŋ], but 일과(日課)[ilgwa], *[ilk'wa]; 일분(一分) [ilbun], *[ilp'un]. Why this is the case is not yet known.

An Optimality-theoretic Approach to Weight of Superheavy Syllables in Qassimi Arabic

The ultimate purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution of superheavy syllables (i.e. CVVC and CVCC) in Qassimi Arabic (QA), a sub-dialect of Najdi Arabic, which is mainly spoken in central Saudi Arabia, particularly, in the cities of Qassim Region. In order to do this, an Optimality-theoretic account is used to account for the moraic structures of these superheavy syllables. In general, the study finds out that CVVC and CVCC are both allowed to surface in Qassimi Arabic in final and non-final positions. Furthermore, using mora-sharing analysis (Broselow 1992; Broselow et al. 1995 and 1997; Watson 2007), the study observes the occurrence of CVVC and CVCC both in word-finally and word-internally. In particular, the study maintains that by proposing the dominant of (MORAICCODA) constraint over (FINAL-C-μ) constraint, the analysis of mora-sharing is superior to that of extrametricality. Thus, the paper suggests that the notion that all coda consonants in Arabic are moraic, including the last consonants of final-CVC syllables (Broselow et al. 1997).

Interaction between Phrasal Structure and Vowel Tenseness in German: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study.

Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the 'uniform lengthening hypothesis' (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs varying in vowel tenseness and boundary type. In line with the ULH, the results show that the acoustic durations of lax vowels are lengthened phrase-finally, similarly to tense vowels. We find that acoustic lengthening is stronger the closer the segments are to the boundary. Articulatory parameters of the closing movements toward the post-vocalic consonants are affected by both phrasal position and identity of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed with regard to the interaction between prosodic structure and vowel tenseness.

A phonetically-based phoneme analysis of the Danish consonant system

ABSTRACT The traditional phoneme analysis of the Danish consonant inventory links onset and coda consonants on the basis of historical alternations and morphologically conditioned alternations within a small subset of the Danish lexicon. This traditional analysis proposes a system resulting in a large number of neutralizations that cannot be dissolved, and in which allophones of the same phoneme lack shared phonetic content. We argue that the system proposed by the traditional analysis is impossible to learn from the language input, which renders the analysis an implausible description of the Danish consonant system. On the basis of theoretical discussions, we offer an alternative phoneme analysis, which we believe to be learnable from the data available in the language input. Our analysis is based on insights from Natural Phonology and Bidirectional Phonetics and Phonology. We propose a system without undissolvable neutralizations, with shared phonetic content between allophones of the same phoneme, and without the need to rely on alternations that children are unlikely to learn in early childhood.

Complementary length in Danish. Why not?

This paper argues that the Danish coda consonants in kat and tal or the intervocalic obstruents in katte and stokke are, in fact, moraic. First, there is no difference in duration nor the possibility of a phonological contrast between long and short consonants, even in cases of contrast, such as in pen, with stød, versus ven, without. Second, if obstruents cannot be moraic, it is impossible to state important interdependencies between the length of the vowel and the size of consonant clusters in the same syllable, regardless of which major class the first consonant of the cluster belongs to. Similarly, systematic alternations between long and short vowels in pairs like ska[æ:]be – ska[ɑ]bt are arbitrary processes, if obstruents cannot be moraic. Making syllable structure dependent on the traditional notion of ‘stød basis’ severs syllable structure from the rest of the phonology. A more consistent view emerges if Danish, like the rest of the Scandinavian languages, Insular and Continental, is analyzed as a strict ‘complementary length’ type, such that stressed syllables are all parsed as heavy, that is, with a strictly bimoraic syllabic nucleus.

Effects of L1 Inventory Size and L2 Experience on L2 Speech Perception: Evidence From Canadian English and Mandarin Learners of Korean

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of native language (L1) phoneme inventory size and second language (L2) learning experience on adult learners’ perception of L2 sounds. Perception experiments compared the Korean vowel and coda identification accuracy of 28 English- and 28 Mandarin-speaking learners differing in their amount of university-level Korean language experience. The results showed that the English-speaking learners, whose L1 has a rich vowel and coda inventory, were better at identifying both Korean vowels and coda consonants compared to the Mandarin-speaking learners, who have a relatively small L1 vowel and coda inventory. These findings suggest that learners with a larger phoneme inventory have an advantage in the perception of L2 segments. In the case of L2 experience, results from segment identification tasks were less conclusive. Learners who had more L2 experience (i.e., more experience with the Korean language at a university level) performed better only in the vowel identification task compared to learners with less L2 experience. Results also showed no significant difference between more experienced versus less experienced learners in the case of coda identification. These outcomes indicate that learners’ L2 identification accuracy is influenced by the amount of their L2 experience but the presence and degree of this effect can differ depending on the type of L2 segment regardless of L1.

The Treatment of Final Coda Consonants in the Acquisition of Romanian Phonology

Abstract Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), Chinese (Hua 2002), Dutch (Fikkert 1994), Hebrew (Adi-Bensaid 2015), Spanish (Goldstein–Citron 2001), and Indonesian (Ulaimah et al. 2016). Previous studies on the acquisition of Romanian phonology (Buja 2015a, b) indicated an extremely low incidence of this phenomenon among the Romanian-speaking children. A possible explanation for it could be the inconsistency in collecting the data (child diaries and longitudinal corpora). By means of an experimental study, i.e. a picture-naming task, this paper aims to prove whether Romanian children do drop final coda consonants. The words describing the pictures presented to the children have a C1(-2)VC1 structure (e.g. drum ‘road, way’, cap ‘head’, nas ‘nose’). The subjects in this small-scale research study were nine monolingual Romanian children aged between 2 and 4 years, who were recorded by their parents. Their spontaneous or imitated productions of the target words were transcribed by using IPA. The results of the analysis confirm the predictions made in my previous study (Buja 2015b) – namely that final consonant deletion, a very frequent phonological process in the acquisition of various other languages, is not characteristic of the acquisition of Romanian phonology.

The vowel system of Eastern Andalusian Spanish speakers with articulation disorders

Eastern Andalusian Spanish deletes coda consonants and the effects of such deletions have been widely studied. However, this has been done almost exclusively for /s/. Furthermore, no study has considered Eastern Andalusian speakers with articulation disorders. The present paper explores the consequences of /s/, /r/, and /θ/ deletion on preceding vowels in Eastern Andalusian speakers with articulation disorders. The vowels from eight speakers with articulation disorders are analysed in word-final position and before underlying /-s/, /-r/, and /-θ/. Acoustic and statistical analyses show that speakers with an articulation disorder do not simply delete word-final consonants, as posited in the literature for these type of speakers, but they also display lowering and fronting/backing, which is typical in this variety of Spanish. The results from the analyses of the 524 vowels from the present study are compared to data of speakers not affected by articulation disorders from the literature. While the vowels of both groups of speakers suffer different alterations depending on the underlying consonant they precede, the intensity of such alterations varies between both groups. It is hypothesised that functional compensation forces explain why speakers with articulation disorders acquire some features of Eastern Andalusian vowels but not others.

Nasality in Dagbani prosody

Abstract This paper presents a detailed analysis of nasality in Dagbani, a Gur language of Ghana, and the role it plays in Dagbani prosody. It demonstrates that the nasal is at the centre of defining the range of what is possible in Dagbani prosodic patterns. Nasals provide the basis for determining the full range of syllable types and the tone bearing unit of Dagbani; nasals are the only coda consonants that licence vowel lengthening; and nasals provide the only cases of phonological non-vocalic geminates. The overall effects of the influence of nasality is the emergence of complex prosodic structures. Contrary to the crosslinguistically acclaimed marked position of the coda, the CVN syllable is the default, unmarked syllable in Dagbani.

AN OT ACCOUNT OF PHONOTACTIC AND CODA NEUTRALIZATION OF ENGLISH LOANS IN PILIBHIT HINDI-URDU

This paper provided the basic information of the phonological processes as the Coda Neutralization and Phonotactics of English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The objectives of this paper were to represent the aspects of the coda neutralization in the sense of voiced obstruent segment becomes voiceless obstruent segment in the final syllable structure of the loanwords, and the consonant clusters break within the insertion of an extraneous segment in any location of the English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In the another framework, this paper revealed the phenomena of devoicing features of coda consonants and the grades of the additional segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu loanwords within the principles of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). The central idea of this paper was to explore the process of conflicts between the candidates at the surface level and reflects the properties of the input candidate by the observation of the constraint rankings. In this study, it was propounded the effective formalities of the hierarchy of the constraint rankings and drew one of the best candidates as an optimal candidate out of the output candidates from English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. The groundwork of this paper was related to the significant aspects of the English loans that were adapted within the addition, insertion, or deletion of the segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In this paper, it was also determined the facts of the coda devoicing of the speech segments in terms of neutralization at the end of the syllable structure of English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu.

Aquisição da fonologia do português brasileiro: evidências da fala infantil

A conferência intitulada Adquirindo a Fonologia do Português brasileiro, proferida pela Prof.ª, Dr.ª Raquel Santana Santos (USP), busca apresentar questões acerca da aquisição de propriedades fonológicas do Português brasileiro, através de pesquisas realizadas pela conferencista e em cooperação com outros investigadores. Para tanto, utilizam-se dados do Português brasileiro para descrever como as unidades, as estruturas, as regras, as propriedades prosódicas e os processos são adquiridos pelas crianças, de modo a explicar como funciona o sistema fonológico em aquisição. Busca-se discutir como se configura a aquisição das regras de acento primário, de ditongação/elisão em fronteira vocabular e vozeamento de consoantes fricativas em coda.

Dynamic acoustic-articulatory relations in back vowel fronting: Examining the effects of coda consonants in two dialects of British English.

This study examines dynamic acoustic-articulatory relations in back vowels, focusing on the effect of different coda consonants on acoustic-articulatory dynamics in the production of vowel contrast. This paper specifically investigates the contribution of the tongue and the lips in modifying F2 in the foot-goose contrast in English, using synchronized acoustic and electromagnetic articulography data collected from 16 speakers. The vowels foot and goose were elicited in pre-coronal and pre-lateral contexts from two dialects that are reported to be at different stages of back vowel fronting: Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English. The results suggest similar acoustic and articulatory patterns in pre-coronal vowels, but there is stronger evidence of vowel contrast in articulation than acoustics for pre-lateral vowels. The lip protrusion data do not help to resolve these differences, suggesting that the complex gestural makeup of a vowel-lateral sequence problematizes straightforward accounts of acoustic-articulatory relations. Further analysis reveals greater between-speaker variability in lingual advancement than F2 in pre-lateral vowels.

Phonetics and phonology of schwa insertion in Central Yiddish

Central Yiddish (CY) has inserted schwas that occur between long vowels or diphthongs and certain coda consonants. In the most restrictive varieties, schwas are inserted only between long high vowels or diphthongs and uvular or rhotic codas (as in /biːχ/ → [biːəχ] ‘book’), and between long high vowels or diphthongs and coronal codas, as long as the vowel is [+back] (as in /ʃuːd/ → [ʃuːəd] ‘shame’). These patterns of insertion are both typologically unusual and synchronically hard to explain. In this paper, I argue that they can be traced back to the phonetic transitions between specific vowels and coda consonants: vowel-coda sequences that produce formant transitions through the mid-central acoustic vowel space are those that are most likely to exhibit schwa insertion. An analysis of 19th-century CY verse demonstrates that these inserted schwas were intended to count for purposes of poetic rhyme, suggesting that they are phonological schwas rather than exclusively phonetic transitions. This study thus adds to the phonological description and analysis of Central Yiddish, and provides novel predictions regarding the spreading of vowel epenthesis across different phonological environments.

영어와 한국어 자음동화에서의 두음선호현상 분석

The purpose of this study is to investigate assimilations between heterosyllabic consonants aligned in syllable boundary and analyze whether the onsets have more influence in consonantal assimilations than codas standing on agreement constraints. In English and Korean, the phonetic and phonological changes in sequential consonants of the coda and onset in heterosyllabic structures show the phenomenon that the coda consonants are preferentially assimilated into the place or manner of articulation in the onset position, resulting in showing the sound pattern of /x.y/→[y.y]. As a result, this consonantal assimilations can be well explained in accordance with constraint-based theory. The constraints for the preferred onset AGREE[O-place] and AGREE[O-manner] are higher-ranked, whereas the constraints for codas AGREE[C-place] and AGREE[C-manner] are relatively lower-ranked. However, AGREE[C-place]/AGREE[C-manner] for assimilations to codas and Lat-Pre for them to lateral sonorant could be high-ranked. In short, this analysis substantiates onset-preferred generalizations in consonantal assimilation.