CV Syllables Research Articles

Epenthetic prefixation in Alawa and Marra

ABSTRACT Languages adopt a number of strategies to avoid dispreferred phonotactic structures. The general pattern is that such strategies involve minimum departure from the input form. One of these strategies is epenthesis. With epenthesis, the minimum departure from the input form is usually the addition of a singleton consonant or a singleton vowel. We show that Alawa and Marra have epenthetic CV syllables in prefix complexes, and that this epenthesis of a syllable is not motivated in phonological theory. We provide evidence that these prefixal structures did not originate in epenthesis, but rather were by-products of reduction processes targeting prefixed article paradigms. We propose that the synchronically epenthetic prefixes are remnants of old article roots.

Attenuated brain responses to speech sounds in moderate preterm infants at term age.

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy moderate preterm infants (mean gestational age at birth 33weeks) matched in maturational age with 20 full-term neonates, thus differing in their previous auditory experience. This design allows elucidating the contribution of extra-uterine auditory experience in the immature brain on the encoding of linguistically relevant speech features. Specifically, we collected brain responses to natural CV syllables differing in three dimensions using a multi-feature mismatch paradigm, with the syllable/ba/ as the standard and three deviants: a pitch change, a vowel change to/bo/ and a consonant voice-onset time (VOT) change to/pa/. No significant between-group differences were found for pitch and consonant VOT deviants. However, moderate preterm infants showed attenuated responses to vowel deviants compared to full terms. These results suggest that moderate preterm infants' limited experience with low-pass filtered speech prenatally can hinder vowel change detection and that exposure to natural speech after birth does not seem to contribute to improve this capacity. These data are in line with recent evidence suggesting a sequential development of a hierarchical functional architecture of speech processing that is highly sensitive to early auditory experience.

Estudio fonético-acústico de los segmentos que realizan las secuencias grafémicas <hi> y <hu> seguidas de vocal en el castellano hablado en Chile

Este estudio entrega la primera evidencia destinada a determinar la naturaleza fonética de los sonidos articulados en las secuencias ortográficas <hi> y <hu> más vocal para el castellano hablado en Chile. Para ello, se anotaron instancias de estas secuencias y se midieron algunas de sus propiedades acústicas. Luego, se compararon los datos provenientes de las secuencias en estudio mediante modelos generalizados lineales mixtos con los de diptongos crecientes (por ejemplo [je] y [we]) y también con sí­labas de tipo CV (por ejemplo [dÍ¡Ê’e] y [gʲe]), con el fin de determinar si el primer elemento de las secuencias <hi> y <hu> más vocal tení­a más parecido a unidades de tipo vocálico o de tipo consonántico. Los resultados sugieren que el primer elemento de las secuencias ortográficas tiene propiedades acústicas más similares a las de sí­labas de tipo CV, lo que presenta importantes desafí­os para la interpretación de esta sección del sistema fonético y fonológico del castellano.

Listening Difficulties in Children: Behavior and Brain Activation Produced by Dichotic Listening of CV Syllables.

Listening difficulties (LiD) are common in children with and without hearing loss. Impaired interactions between the two ears have been proposed as an important component of LiD when there is no hearing loss, also known as auditory processing disorder (APD). We examined the ability of 6–13 year old (y.o.) children with normal audiometric thresholds to identify and selectively attend to dichotically presented CV syllables using the Bergen Dichotic Listening Test (BDLT; www.dichoticlistening.com). Children were recruited as typically developing (TD; n = 39) or having LiD (n = 35) based primarily on composite score of the ECLiPS caregiver report. Different single syllables (ba, da, ga, pa, ta, ka) were presented simultaneously to each ear (6 × 36 trials). Children reported the syllable heard most clearly (non-forced, NF) or the syllable presented to the right [forced right (FR)] or left [forced left (FL)] ear. Interaural level differences (ILDs) manipulated bottom-up perceptual salience. Dichotic listening (DL) data [correct responses, laterality index (LI)] were analyzed initially by group (LiD, TD), age, report method (NF, FR, FL), and ILD (0, ± 15 dB) and compared with speech-in-noise thresholds (LiSN-S) and cognitive performance (NIH Toolbox). fMRI measured brain activation produced by a receptive speech task that segregated speech, phonetic, and intelligibility components. Some activated areas [planum temporale (PT), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)] were correlated with dichotic results in TD children only. Neither group, age, nor report method affected the LI of right/left recall. However, a significant interaction was found between ear, group, and ILD. Laterality indices were small and tended to increase with age, as previously reported. Children with LiD had significantly larger mean LIs than TD children for stimuli with ILDs, especially those favoring the left ear. Neural activity associated with Speech, Phonetic, and Intelligibility sentence cues did not differ significantly between groups. Significant correlations between brain activity level and BDLT were found in several frontal and temporal locations for the TD but not for the LiD group. Overall, the children with LiD had only subtle differences from TD children in the BDLT, and correspondingly minor changes in brain activation.

Adaptation of Loanwords by Saraiki Speakers

The study presents a basic analysis of loanwords adaptation process by Saraiki speakers. Loanwords from three languages are analyzed and results reveal that native grammar used different strategies for different languages. In one language the onset/initial CC is adapted while in the other the final CC is modified by Saraiki speakers. It is observed that if the loanwords structure is absent in native grammar, it is not adapted though it follows universal principles. Native grammar allows clusters on both initial and final positions but loanwords do not. The study also discloses the strange behaviour for different languages, Saraiki speakers used fix vowel to break the cluster of English loanwords but vowel harmony and gemination in Arabic loanwords. It is noted that loanwords grammar preferred to have CV and CVC syllables rather than clusters at margins. Apart from grammatical adaptation, prosodic structure of receiver is also maintained. In many examples Saraiki follows universal principles but sometimes presents its own way to adapt loanwords

Estimates of functional cerebral hemispheric differences in monolingual and bilingual people who stutter: dichotic listening paradigm

ABSTRACT Recent studies indicate functional cerebral hemispheric processing differences between monolinguals and bilinguals who stutter, as well as monolinguals and bilinguals who do not stutter. Eighty native German speakers, half of whom were also proficient speakers of English as a second language (L2), were assessed on a dichotic listening paradigm using CV syllables as stimuli. The participants were organised into four different groups according to speech status and language ability: 20 monolinguals who stutter, 20 bilinguals who stutter, 20 monolinguals who do not stutter, and 20 bilinguals who do not stutter. A right ear advantage (REA) was observed across all groups with no significant group differences in regard to hemispheric asymmetry. Although MWS (18 dB) and BWS (16 dB) crossed over to an LEA at an earlier point compared to the MWNS (5 dB) and BWNS (2 dB), the difference between groups was minor and not significant. Thus, a significant difference in REA resistance, as proposed by other researchers, was not reflected in the current study neither for people who stutter nor for bilinguals. In addition, no meaningful relationship was found between dichotic listening and stuttering severity, as well as the four language modalities (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Thus, we contend that neither stuttering nor bilingualism has any non-trivial effect on functional cerebral hemispheric differences in language processing in dichotic listening.

Duration and amplitude of tone production in children with cochlear implants

The purpose of the present study was two-fold: (1) to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children with CIs showed distinctive durational and amplitude features for the four lexical tones in their tone production; (2) to compare the duration and amplitude patterns of Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllables produced in citation form between CI children and age-matched normal-hearing (NH) children. The participants included 14 prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with CIs and 14 NH children, all aged between 2.9 and 8.3 years old. Each participant produced five CV syllables (fa, fu, pi, xu, ke) in four tones through a tone drill activity. The vowel duration and rms amplitude values at nine equidistant time locations over the vowel duration were obtained. The results revealed that the CI children can produce distinctive duration and amplitude features for the four lexical tones. Their durational pattern and amplitude contours were highly similar to the NH children on tone 1, 2, and 4 but differed from the NH children on tone 3. In addition, NH children showed positively correlated amplitude contour and F0 contour but the CI children demonstrated inconsistent amplitude and F0 contours for tone 3. This finding suggested that the amplitude contour of a tone and the F0 contour of the same tone may not always be highly correlated.

Coordination patterns in Essential Tremor patients with Deep Brain Stimulation: Syllables with low and high complexity

This study investigated syllable coordination patterns in Essential Tremor (ET) patients treated with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) by using electromagnetic articulography. We analyzed articulatory timing patterns for nine ET patients with activated and inactivated DBS and compared them to a group of healthy age-matched controls. We focused on timing patterns among gestures in syllables with low and high complexity in natural sentence production (simple CV versus complex CCV syllables). These articulatory patterns were interpreted in the framework of a coupled oscillator planning model of speech timing. In simple CV syllables, ET patients did show a similar coordination pattern to healthy control speakers. However, when complexity increased, the patients showed deviant coordination patterns for complex CCV syllables. These deviant patterns even aggravated under activated stimulation. We were able to show that the behavior of the speech system changes when the stimulation was activated, inducing a change in the dynamical system the ET patients have to adapt to. We conclude that coordination problems are not categorical but gradient in nature, pointing to the fact that there are dynamic mechanisms of regulation behind phonetic realization of phonological syllable parses.

Determining underlying presence in the learning of grammars that allow insertion and deletion

The simultaneous learning of a phonological map from inputs to outputs and a lexicon of phonological underlying forms has been a focus of several research efforts (Jarosz 2006; Apoussidou 2007; Merchant 2008; Merchant & Tesar 2008; Tesar 2014). One of the numerous challenges is that of computational efficiency, which led to the investigation of learning with output-driven maps (Tesar 2014). Prior work on learning with output-driven maps has focused on systems in which the only disparities between inputs and outputs were segmental identity disparities (differences in the value of a feature). Inclusion of segmental insertion and deletion disparities exacerbates computational concerns, as it increases the number of possible correspondence relations between an input and an output, and makes the space of possible inputs for a word infinite due to the possible presence of an unbounded number of deleted segments. We propose an extension of that earlier work to handle phonologies that permit insertion and deletion, and evaluate the proposal by applying it to cases in Basic CV Syllable Theory (Jakobson 1962; Clements & Keyser 1983; Prince & Smolensky 2004). First, we propose that a learner represent information about the possible presence/absence of a segment in an underlying form via a presence feature. The presence feature can be set using the same inconsistency detection method that has previously been used to set other segmental features. This allows the learner to combine evidence from paradigmatically related words in a single compact representation. Second, we propose that the learner only consider for underlying forms segments that surface in at least one surface realization of the morpheme. This approach is justified by the structure of output-driven maps, and avoids the potential for an unbounded number of possibly deleted segments in an underlying form. A proof is given for the validity of the method for avoiding unbounded deletion. The resulting learner is able to learn some grammatical regularities about segmental insertion and deletion; this is shown via two manual step-by-step applications of the algorithm. Verificatory simulations for learning the entire typology of Basic CV Syllable Theory are left to work in the near future.

Coarticulation varies by consonant identity in adult and child speech

Consonant-vowel coarticulation varies by manner of articulation: speakers coarticulate less between segments in V[stop] sequences than V[glide]. There are different approaches to modelling consonant identity effects upon coarticulation (Iskarous et al., 2013). However, these effects have not been studied in non-literate populations—young children or non-literate adults. This is relevant since literacy heightens phoneme awareness, affecting coarticulation. 40 South Bolivian Quechua speakers who were not literate in the language, 30 children (aged 5–10) and 10 adults, completed a picture-prompted word elicitation task. Coarticulation was measured between [a] and the consonants /p, t, k, kh, qh, ch, s, m, w/ in VC and CV syllables. Because the child speech apparatus poses problems for typical spectral analysis, we quantify coarticulation as the Euclidean distance between Mel frequency cepstral coefficient vectors averaged over adjacent phones (Gerosa et al., 2006). Mixed effects models predicting the Euclidean distance between adjacent phones show that all age groups are sensitive to changes in consonant manner. Adults and children restrained coarticulation more between sequences containing obstruents than glides or liquids. These results suggest that literacy and heightened phoneme awareness are not required for consonant identity to affect coarticulation.Consonant-vowel coarticulation varies by manner of articulation: speakers coarticulate less between segments in V[stop] sequences than V[glide]. There are different approaches to modelling consonant identity effects upon coarticulation (Iskarous et al., 2013). However, these effects have not been studied in non-literate populations—young children or non-literate adults. This is relevant since literacy heightens phoneme awareness, affecting coarticulation. 40 South Bolivian Quechua speakers who were not literate in the language, 30 children (aged 5–10) and 10 adults, completed a picture-prompted word elicitation task. Coarticulation was measured between [a] and the consonants /p, t, k, kh, qh, ch, s, m, w/ in VC and CV syllables. Because the child speech apparatus poses problems for typical spectral analysis, we quantify coarticulation as the Euclidean distance between Mel frequency cepstral coefficient vectors averaged over adjacent phones (Gerosa et al., 2006). Mixed effects models predicting the Euclide...

Phonological Motivation for the Acquisition of Onomatopoeia: An Analysis of Early Words

ABSTRACTOnomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants’ early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants’ early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in early acquisition. Cross-linguistic evidence from 16 infants demonstrates how these forms fit within a phonologically-systematic developing lexicon. We observe a predominance of consonant harmony and open cv syllables in infants’ early words—structures that are typical of onomatopoeia across languages. Infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia is shown to be driven by a preference for structures that are easy to plan and produce. These data present an original perspective on onomatopoeia in early development, highlighting the role of production in language acquisition in general, and onomatopoeic words in particular.

AQUISIÇÃO FONOLÓGICA TÍPICA E ATÍPICA DO PADRÃO SILÁBICO CCV: DADOS ACÚSTICOS E ARTICULATÓRIOS

RESUMO O objetivo principal deste estudo é caracterizar a produção de palavras com as sílabas-alvo do tipo CCV e CV em crianças com desenvolvimento fonológico típico e atípico. As hipóteses foram: H1 - a produção de palavras-alvo com sílaba CV e CCV das crianças típicas apresentariam diferentes medidas ultrassonográficas e acústica; H2 - as medidas ultrassonográficas e acústica poderiam diferenciar a condição clínica das crianças; H3 - as crianças com produção atípica poderiam apresentar diferenças nas medidas ultrassonográficas e acústica entre os alvos CCV (sendo o tepe na posição de C2) e CV (CCV julgadas auditivamente como CV). Dez crianças gravaram palavras com as sílabas-alvo CCV e CV. Em seguida, foram feitas análise de oitiva, análise acústica e ultrassonográficas (razões entre ponta e lâmina da língua (PL/LL), ponta e dorso da língua (PL/DL), e a lâmina e dorso da língua (LL/DL)), sendo analisadas pela ANOVA de medidas repetidas. A H1 foi corroborada pelas razões entre PL/LL, PL/DL e LL/DL, indicando que as crianças típicas produzem maior elevação de ponta e lâmina de língua na sílaba-alvo CCV se comparado à sílaba-alvo CV. As H2 e H3 foram parcialmente confirmadas pelas razões entre PL/DL e LL/DL e entre PL/DL e LL/DL, respectivamente. Os resultados sugerem que as crianças com desenvolvimento típico parecem estar em direção da produção-alvo, já que, em CCV, ocorre maior elevação da PL e de duração se comparado à sílaba CV. Para as crianças atípicas, as razões entre a PL/DL mostram que têm elevação de ponta de língua em 18,23% nas sílabas-alvo CCV, enquanto na sílaba-alvo CV é de 13,58%, sugerindo a presença de elevação da PL para produzir o tepe com magnitude reduzida e a não sobreposição dos gestos do alvo CCV, bem como gestos indiferenciados.

Core syllables vs. moraic writing

AbstractIt is generally accepted that the units of writing systems represent categories found in spoken language; in phonographic writing, these categories traditionally include the syllable and segment, which correspond to syllabic and alphabetic systems. But it has been claimed that some or most “syllabaries” are actually based on moras, well known from phonological theory as units of syllable weight. I argue that apparent moraic systems are in fact built on signs that stand for core CV syllables, and consequently that moras do not appear to play a central role in any writing system.

Adult imitating child speech: A case study using 3D ultrasound

Voice actors are interesting for linguistic study because of their unique abilities to manipulate their vocal tract and convey different social identities. This is essentially a field of professional folk linguistics where professionals manipulate their vocal tracts to convey socially indexed, linguistic features. This study uses Ultrasound paired with acoustic analyses to address what one amateur voice actor does while imitating a child voice. Previous studies have looked at anatomical and acoustic variations defining different character types such as laryngeal setting (Teshigawara, 2003; Teshigawara & Murano, 2004) and breathy voice in Anime (Starr, 2015). This study addresses specific tongue morphology resulting from an adult imitating a child’s voice and serves as a pilot for future study of professional actors. The participant is one adult, amateur actor who produced CV syllables at different places of articulation with different vowel qualities. Notable manipulations are hyoid bone raising, gesture fronting, and tongue “troughing” where the sides of the tongue are used to narrow the oral cavity. The actor constricts the filter in multiple ways to shrink the usable space in the oral cavity and imitate the acoustic signal from a child’s vocal tract. This presentation explores the anatomical manipulations the actor utilizes.

Wavelet Based Feature Extraction for The Indonesian CV Syllables Sound

This paper proposes the combined methods of Wavelet Transform (WT) and Euclidean Distance (ED) to estimate the expected value of the possibly feature vector of Indonesian syllables. This research aims to find the best properties in effectiveness and efficiency on performing feature extraction of each syllable sound to be applied in the speech recognition systems. This proposed approach which is the state-of-the-art of the previous study consist of three main phase. In the first phase, the speech signal is segmented and normalized. In the second phase, the signal is transformed into frequency domain by using the WT. In the third phase, to estimate the expected feature vector, the ED algorithm is used. Th e result shows the list of features of each syllables can be used for the next research, and some recommendations on the most effective and efficient WT to be used in performing syllable sound recognition.

Wavelet Based Feature Extraction for The Indonesian CV Syllables Sound

Wavelet Based Feature Extraction for The Indonesian CV Syllables Sound

Modeling talker- and listener-based sources of variability in babble-induced consonant confusions.

Speech communication often occurs in the presence of noise. Patterns of perceptual errors induced by background noise are influenced by properties of the listener and of the noise and target speech. The present study introduces a modification of multilevel general recognition theory in which talker- and listener-based variability in confusion patterns are modeled as global or dimension-specific scaling of shared, group-level perceptual distributions. Listener-specific perceptual correlations and response bias are also modeled as random variables. This model is applied to identification-confusion data from 11 listeners' identifications of ten tokens of each of four consonant categories-[t], [d], [s], [z]-produced by 20 talkers in CV syllables and masked by 10-talker babble. The results indicate that dimension-specific scaling for both listeners and talkers provides a good account of confusion patterns. These findings are discussed in relation to other recent research showing substantial listener-, talker-, and token-based sources of variability in noise-masked speech perception.

Aquisição de encontros consonantais: uma análise de dados naturais e experimentais

Neste trabalho, analisa-se o processo de aquisição dos encontros consonantais tautossilábicos em produções orais de crianças falantes do português brasileiro (PB), com idades entre 1:4 e 5:0 (anos:meses). A aquisição da estrutura CCV tem sido foco de investigação em algumas pesquisas, mas, em boa parte desses estudos, etapas intermediárias de aquisição, identificadas por meio de análises acústicas, não são reportadas. Em trabalhos mais recentes, nos quais a análise acústica desempenha importante papel, identifica-se a existência dessas etapas intermediárias, as quais são evidenciadas pela presença de contrastes encobertos. Busca-se, assim, neste artigo: (i) fazer uma descrição de etapas intermediárias presentes na produção de encontros consonantais, (ii) verificar o emprego do alongamento vocálico enquanto mecanismo de distinção entre sílabas CCV e CV e (iii) verificar se o emprego da aspiração de oclusivas também cumpre função distintiva. Foram analisados dados de fala naturais, gravados em interação entre criança e cuidador, e experimentais, coletados em cabine acústica. Esses dados foram submetidos à análise acústica juntamente a palavras sem encontros consonantais e, por meio da comparação entre medidas acústicas – duração absoluta e duração relativa –, encontraram-se indícios do uso de alongamento vocálico e de aspiração enquanto mecanismos distintivos no processo de aquisição da estrutura CCV.

Intelligibility of sinewave consonants

A good deal of experimental work has assessed the intelligibility of sinewave speech (SWS), synthesized by mixing sinusoids that follow the formants of natural utterances. While SWS is clearly intelligible at some level, most SWS work has been conducted using sentences, whose intelligibility is affected by many factors in addition to those related to recognition at the phonetic level. Earlier work [Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am, 129, 3991–4000] measuring the intelligibility of SWS vowels in isolated syllables reported an identification rate of 55%, far above chance but ~40 percentage points lower that of the original signals. The present work tested the intelligibility of SWS versions of 23 consonant types in CV and VCV syllables with three vowel types ([ɑ i u]) spoken by one man and one woman. SW signals were generated from unedited envelope peaks rather than formants. Intelligibility averaged across 59 listeners was 59%, with large variability across both listeners (sd = 9.9) and, especially, c...

Arabic stop consonants characterisation and classification using the normalized energy in frequency bands

In general, speech is made with sequences of consonants (fricatives, nasals and stops), vowels and glides. The classification of the stop consonants remains one of the most challenging problems in speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the normalized energy in frequency bands in the release and closure phases in order to characterize and classify the Arabic stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /t/, /k/ and /q/) and to recognize the CV syllable. Classification experiments were performed using decision algorithms on stop consonants C and CV syllables extracted from an Arabic corpus. The results yielded to an overall stop consonants classification of 90.27% and syllables CV recognition upper than 90% for all stops.