Disyllabic Nouns Research Articles

Internal speech is faster than external speech: Evidence for feedback-based temporal control

A recent model of temporal control in speech holds that speakers use sensory feedback to control speech rate and articulatory timing. An experiment was conducted to assess whether there is evidence in support of this hypothesis by comparing durations of phrases in external speech (with sensory feedback) and internal speech (without sensory feedback). Phrase lengths were varied by including one to three disyllabic nouns in a target phrase that was always surrounded by overt speech. An inferred duration method was used to estimate the durations of target phrases produced internally. The results showed that internal speech is faster than external speech, supporting the hypothesis. In addition, the results indicate that there is a slow-down associated with transitioning between internal and external modes of production.

Deficient Audiovisual Speech Perception in Schizophrenia: An ERP Study.

In everyday verbal communication, auditory speech perception is often disturbed by background noise. Especially in disadvantageous hearing conditions, additional visual articulatory information (e.g., lip movement) can positively contribute to speech comprehension. Patients with schizophrenia (SZs) demonstrate an aberrant ability to integrate visual and auditory sensory input during speech perception. Current findings about underlying neural mechanisms of this deficit are inconsistent. Particularly and despite the importance of early sensory processing in speech perception, very few studies have addressed these processes in SZs. Thus, in the present study, we examined 20 adult subjects with SZ and 21 healthy controls (HCs) while presenting audiovisual spoken words (disyllabic nouns) either superimposed by white noise (-12 dB signal-to-noise ratio) or not. In addition to behavioral data, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Our results demonstrate reduced speech comprehension for SZs compared to HCs under noisy conditions. Moreover, we found altered N1 amplitudes in SZ during speech perception, while P2 amplitudes and the N1-P2 complex were similar to HCs, indicating that there may be disturbances in multimodal speech perception at an early stage of processing, which may be due to deficits in auditory speech perception. Moreover, a positive relationship between fronto-central N1 amplitudes and the positive subscale of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) has been observed.

Phonetic differences between nouns and verbs in their typical syntactic positions in a tonal language: Evidence from disyllabic noun–verb ambiguous words in Standard Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates how word categories, namely noun and verb, influence acoustic realizations (duration, F0, intensity) in Standard Mandarin Chinese, a language having phonemically distinctive tones and a simple morphological system. Noun-verb ambiguous words were selected and presented in the final positions of typical syntactic contexts in order to avoid the interference of prosodic boundary, syntactic complexity, contextual predictability, tonal environment, F0 range and syllable properties (consonant, vowel, tone, syllable length). Linear mixed models were fitted to duration, and generative additive mixed models were fitted to F0 and intensity. The results showed that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs were still evident in duration, F0 and intensity after lexical frequency, speech rate and some other related factors were taken into consideration in the models. The second syllables of nouns were longer than those of verbs, and both syllables of nouns were higher in F0 and greater in intensity than those of verbs. Since the prosodic boundary, frequency and other factors were controlled for, the phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be attributed to their differences in information load and number of syllables. This study provided evidence that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be driven by the grammatical classes themselves and is not an epiphenomenon of other processes.

At the intersection of synchrony and diachrony: A phonotactic analysis of the lexicon of Wan

This study explores the phonotactics of Wan (Mande, Côte d’Ivoire) using an extended version of the lexical statistical method introduced in Pozdniakov & Segerer (2007). A lexical dataset was prepared for analysis based on nouns and verbs extracted from a dictionary. Disyllabic nouns and verbs were analyzed for correlations between the initial and the intervocalic consonant and for correlations between the two vowels. The analysis has confirmed the Similar Place Avoidance generalization proposed as a universal by Pozdniakov & Segerer. It has also revealed significant correlations between the two vowels on two parameters: in height, and in backness. Initial syllables of all nouns and verbs were analyzed for correlations between consonants and vowels and correlations between consonants and tone. The consonant’s place of articulation has been revealed to correlate with the vowel’s backness, and the consonant’s voicing has been revealed to correlate with the vowel’s tone. The results suggest that Pozdniakov & Segerer’s method can be useful not only when applied to a typological sample but also in the study of phonotatics of individual languages. The specific findings can potentially shed light on the history of Wan and related languages.

Reconstruction of Ryukyuan tone classes of Middle Japanese Class 2.4 and 2.5 nouns

Abstract It is generally accepted that of the five tone classes reconstructed for disyllabic nouns in Middle Japanese (MJ), Classes 2.4 and 2.5 exhibit a split correspondence with proto-Ryukyuan (pR) tone Classes B and C. This split correspondence is of tremendous importance for the reconstruction of the proto-Japonic (pJ) tone system, because, in the absence of a conditioning factor accounting for the split, it has led to the reconstruction of additional tone classes at the pJ level. However, of the approximately 100 nouns belonging to these classes, the tone class of only half of them has been reconstructed for pR. Before embarking on the reconstruction of the pJ tone system, we must therefore first reconstruct the pR tone class of the nouns belonging to MJ Classes 2.4 and 2.5. This study provides a reconstruction of the tone classes in pR for 75 cognates using the latest comparative data of Northern and Southern Ryukyuan dialects. The results confirmed the existence of a split correspondence, where Class 2.4 and 2.5 nouns are found to be roughly split in half between pR Classes B and C, demonstrating that it is not a merely sporadic irregularity.

Sensorimotor norms for Chinese nouns and their relationship with orthographic and semantic variables

ABSTRACT Sensorimotor information is vital to the conceptual representation of our knowledge system. This study collects perceptual and action ratings for 664 disyllabic nouns among 438 native speakers and creates the first and largest dataset of sensorimotor norms for nouns in Chinese. Using aggregated semantic covariates, including concreteness ratings from a concreteness rating study, as well as the reaction times and error rates from a lexical decision study, our current work demonstrates the strengths of sensory modalities and action effectors in Chinese nouns and explores the contributions of embodied experiences in reflecting orthographic representations and semantic processing in the Chinese language. This study contributes valuable data sources to the study of Chinese lexical processing and highlights the importance of sensorimotor information and embodied manifestations in the semantic representations of concepts. Our results also support the language universal that orthographic awareness in lexical processing and reading supersedes phonological awareness.

Vowel Elision in Ikhin, an Edoid Language in South-south Nigeria

In this paper, attention is on the basic factors that come into force in determining whether or not vowel will elide and which of the V1 and V2 in a sequence should disappear in any environment. This paper also examines the phonological, morphological and syntactic reasons behind vowel elision as a syllable structure process in Ikhin language. As in the case of related African languages that have been previously described by various scholars, this paper presents how vowel elision works in Ikhin and the problems arising from its analysis. In this study, the focus is on the explanation and analysis of factors such as boundary, morpheme structure and vowel quality which actually determine whether or not elision should take place in Ikhin. Apart from factors such as vowel quality and boundary, one other factor with respect to elision or glide formation is the syllable structure of the verbs and nouns in Ikhin. Ikhin nouns are either disyllabic i.e. V(C)V or trisyllabic, etc. It is argued that the operation of vowel elision is blocked in disyllabic nouns as /i/, /o/ and /u/ form glides when either of them occurs as V1 whereas vowel elision rather than glide formation takes place in trisyllabic nouns. The study concludes based on data not previously discussed in the language that elision is driven by syllable-based and syntactic-based analyses and that a major strategy of discouraging vowel cluster in Ikhin is vowel elision because the syllable structure of the language prohibits cluster of vowels within word or across word boundary.

Hidden prosody in philology: yìyŭ 'transcriptions' in the 15th century

This paper investigates how prosody is hidden behind transcriptions in historical resources. Three historical sources are used in the analysis. They are Chinese transcriptions from the 15th century in which Japanese, Korean and Ryukyuan phrases are recorded using Chinese characters. The argument concentrates on the prosodic patterns of disyllabic nouns in the three historical sources. The results of chi-square tests show that in the transcriptions Korean is significantly different from Japanese and Ryukyuan. In disyllabic nouns, the Chinese tonal category shăngshēng is favored in the first syllable of the Korean data to show changes from low to high tone. On the other hand, the transition is not salient in the Japanese and Ryukyuan data. In addition, the Chinese tonal cateogry yīnpíng is disfavored in the first syllable of the Korean data, whereas Chinese yīnpíng is not overtly excluded from the first syllable of Japanese and Ryukyuan data. This paper also discusses the projection of prosodic characteristics from Chinese onto the transcriptions: the second syllable in a disyllabic noun tends to be qùshēng.

동일 형태소를 포함한 1?2음절 명사의 통사 특징 분석

동일 형태소를 포함한 1?2음절 명사의 통사 특징 분석

Does lexical stress influence 17-month-olds' mapping of verbs and nouns?

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong) stress. We explored whether 17-month-old infants use word stress to resolve an ambiguous labeling event where objects and actions are equally plausible referents. Infants were habituated to 2 words paired with 2 objects, with each object performing a distinct path action. They were subsequently tested on (a) a change in object but not path action or (b) a change in path action but not the object. When infants were taught verb-friendly iambic labels, their looking times increased both when the action switched and when the object switched. Infants who were taught noun-friendly trochaic labels demonstrated an increase in looking time only when the object switched. These results demonstrate that in ambiguous labeling events infants map iambic labels to both actions and objects, and trochaic labels to the objects but not to the actions, suggesting a bias for words with trochaic stress to refer to objects. Seventeen-month-old infants can use trochaic lexical stress to guide their word learning in ambiguous situations, but iambic stress cues may not preferentially guide infants' mappings of actions or objects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Dviskiemenių daiktavardžių kirčiavimo modeliai pietų aukštaičių patarmėje

Straipsnyje nagrinėjami kirčiavimo gretybių turinčių dviskiemenių ā, ē, a ir i̯a1 kamienų daiktavardžių akcentuacijos polinkiai pietų aukštaičių patarmėje. Remiantis1952–2015 m. garsinių ir rašytinių šaltinių medžiaga aptariamas šių žodžių ir jų formų kirčiavimo variantų paplitimas toje pačioje šnektoje, paskirose šnektose ir (ar) jų grupėse, aprašomi įvairiai kirčiuojamų dviskiemenių daiktavardžių produktyviųjų ā, ē, a ir i̯a1 kamienų akcentiniai modeliai, nustatomas jų paplitimo pobūdis patarmės plote. Tyrimui atlikti pasirinkti kiekybinis, geolingvistinis ir lyginamasis metodai.Nevienodas kirčiavimo variantų paplitimas patarmės plote (toje pačioje šnektoje, paskirose šnektose ar jų grupėse) leidžia manyti buvus skirtingų produktyviųjų kamienų kirčiavimo tendencijų pietų aukštaičių patarmėje. Atlikus tyrimą nustatyti trys svarbūs dalykai. Pirma, kad toje pačioje šnektoje įvairiai kirčiuojamų ā, ē, a ir i̯a1 kamienų žodžių ir jų formų didžiausio kirčiavimo variantų paplitimo plotas yra tas pats – palyginti nedidelis pietvakarinių pietų aukštaičių šnektų arealas. Antra, kad moteriškojo ir vyriškojo linksniavimo kamienams būdingas skirtingas variantų vartojimo dažnumas ir intensyvumas toje pačioje šnektoje visame pietų aukštaičių patarmės plote – ā ir ē kamienų gretybės užrašomos gerokai rečiau nei a ir i̯a1 kamienų variantai. Trečia, kad aptariamų kamienų daiktavardžių kirčiavimo gretybių toje pačioje šnektoje ir to paties informanto kalboje einant nuo pietvakarių šiaurės kryptimi mažėja netolygiai – moteriškojo linksniavimo žodžių akcentinės gretybės vartojamos mažesniame plote nei vyriškojo linksniavimo daiktavardžių.Moteriškojo ir vyriškojo linksniavimo daiktavardžių arealinių paplitimo skirtumų esama ir tada, kai paskirose šnektose vartojamas vienas iš daiktavardžio akcentinių variantų. Produktyviųjų ā ir ē kamienų pietų aukštaičių patarmės vakarinėje ir pietinėje ploto dalyje labiau paplitusios oksitoninio kirčiavimo gretybės, rytinėje ir šiaurinėje dažnesni yra baritoninio kirčiavimo atvejai. Dviskiemenių a ir i̯a1 kamienų daiktavardžių tiriamoje patarmėje, ypač vakarinėje ir pietinėje dalyje, linkstama apibendrinti oksitoninio kirčiavimo modelį.

Analysis of the Cause of Vowel Lengthening in the Initial Syllables of the Class-C Disyllabic Nouns in Northern Ryukyuan Dialects

Analysis of the Cause of Vowel Lengthening in the Initial Syllables of the Class-C Disyllabic Nouns in Northern Ryukyuan Dialects

Revisiting English word stress and rhythm in the post-nuclear domain

In English, grammatical category and word stress are often highly correlated: disyllabic nouns and verbs frequently occur with trochaic and iambic stress, respectively. Kelly and colleagues (1988,1992) suggest that this relationship was shaped by rhythm but may also be subverted by rhythm. We revisit a 1978 production study by Huss, who argued that the usual stress correlation is neutralized in postnuclear position and that acoustic differences are subject to effects of sentence rhythm. Twelve pairs of homophones were embedded in full sentences preceded by a possessive or plural noun with ultimate or penultimate stress: e.g. farms produce, farm’s produce, farmers produce, farmer’s produce. A postnuclear environment was elicited by prepending a contrastive sentence (e.g., Some say that only supermarket produce may vary in quality but also a farmer’s produce may vary in quality.) Results suggest, contra Huss, that prosodic differences between nouns and verbs persist in the postnuclear environment, despite effects of rhythm. In a mixed-effects logistic regression (N = 18), acoustic cues of syllable duration and maximum intensity were significant predictors of part of speech in nuclear and postnuclear position. We also discuss results of a perception experiment in progress using the production stimuli.

Tibetan Trisyllabic Light Verb Construction Recognition

The Tibetan trisyllabic light verb construction is a type of widely used verb phrase that is composed of a disyllabic noun or adjective and a light verb. A large number of Tibetan trisyllabic light verb constructions are widely found in Tibetan. Successfully recognizing this type of phrase greatly contributes to Tibetan information processing, however, thorough and systematic academic research in this field has not yet been launched. Therefore, we propose a model for the recognition of Tibetan trisyllabic light verb constructions based on an integrated strategy in this paper. Firstly, we extract all trisyllabic light verb construction candidates from a Tibetan corpus. In this step, light verbs are used as retrieval marks. Secondly, we filter candidates using a statistics-based model, rule-based model, and integrated model separately. Experimental results show that the integrated model performs much better than the other strategies, which proves that linguistic features contribute a lot to the automatic recognition of Tibetan trisyllabic light verb constructions by computers.

Nouns and verbs in Chinese are processed differently: Evidence from an ERP study on monosyllabic and disyllabic word processing

Abstract This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the neural processing of nouns and verbs in Chinese, especially the processing of monosyllabic nouns (MNs) and verbs (MVs) versus disyllabic nouns (DNs) and verbs (DVs). All four types of words were embedded in syntactically well-defined contexts and a semantic relatedness judgment task was performed. Results showed that, regardless of the number of syllables, verbs elicited more negative N400 than nouns, which may be due to the semantic difference between object and action rather than concreteness or imageability. Furthermore, DVs elicited a greater N1 and a smaller late positive component than DNs whereas such differences were absent in the comparison between MNs and MVs. The N1 and late positive component seem to reflect the early detection and late integration of the syntactic mismatch between the verb contexts and noun usage of DVs, respectively. The findings of the current study indicated that the word class effect in Chinese is due to the semantic differences between nouns and verbs, calling into attention the importance of distinguishing monosyllabic words from disyllabic words when examining the word class effect in Chinese.

Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Uyghur

The present study examined lexical stress patterns in Uyghur, a Turkic language. The main goal of this research was to isolate and determine which acoustic parameters provide cues to stress in Uyghur. A number of studies have investigated the phonetic correlates of lexical stress across the world's languages, with stressed syllables often longer in duration, higher in pitch, and greater in amplitude. The present study systematically investigated the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur, examining duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. Three experiments were conducted: one utilizing minimal pairs in Uyghur, one examining disyllabic nouns in Uyghur that contrasted in the first syllable, and one investigating the interaction of lexical stress with Uyghur sentence intonation. The data consistently show that duration was a robust cue to stress in Uyghur, with less consistent effects for intensity. The data also clearly show that fundamental frequency was not a cue to lexical stress in Uyghur. Uyghur does not use the fundamental frequency to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. The results suggest that Uyghur does not pattern like a pitch-accent language (e.g. Turkish), but rather like a stress-accent language.

Vocal overimitation in preschool-age children

Overimitation—copying incorrect, idiosyncratic, or causally irrelevant actions—has been linked to our species’ long history with artifacts whose functions are often opaque. It is an open question, however, whether children overimitate outside the artifact domain. We explored this question by presenting preschool-age children (3- to 5-year-olds, N=120) with an elicited imitation task that included high- and low-frequency disyllabic nouns (e.g., ‘pizza) and nonwords (e.g., ‘chizza), all of which had a stressed first syllable. However, during testing, half of the stimuli were incorrectly pronounced by stressing the second syllable (e.g., pi’zza). More than half of the children copied the model’s incorrect pronunciation of high-frequency familiar words, consistent with overimitation. This pattern of response persisted even after children had themselves correctly named the familiar words prior to the start of testing, confirming that children purposefully altered the pronunciation of known words to match the incorrect pronunciations used by a model. These results demonstrate that overimitation is not restricted to the artifact domain and might extend to many different tasks and domains.

Asymmetric Correlations between English Verb Transitivity and Stress

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Phonetic correlates of phonological quantity of Yakut

We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes have short and long contrastive counterparts. The study aims at revealing acoustic characteristics of the binary quantity distinction in vowels. We used two sets of data: (1) A female native Yakut speaker read a 200-word list containing disyllabic nouns and verbs with four different combinations of vowel length in the two syllables (short–short, short–long, long–short, and long–long) and a list of 50 minimal pairs differing only in vowel length; (2) Spontaneous speech data from 9 female native Yakut speakers (aged 19–77), 200 words with short vowels and 200 words with long vowels, were extracted for analysis. Acoustic measurements of the short and long vowels’ f0-values, duration and intensity were done. Mixed-effects models showed a significant durational difference between long and short vowels for both data sets. However, the preliminary results indicated that, unlike in quantity languages like Finnish and Estonian, there was no consistent effect of f0 as the phonetic correlate in Yakut vowel quantity distinction.

The nominal pitch accent system of South Kyungsang Korean

The current paper investigates the nominal pitch accent system in South Kyungsang Korean through an acoustic study and presents a phonological analysis for the system based on the acoustic results. The data were collected from four male South Kyungsang speakers by recording monosyllabic and disyllabic nouns with various types of suffixes. The pitch results confirmed the accent distinctions reported in earlier works on the language, and we found that suffixes may also bear contrastive accent. We analyzed the pitch accent system as having three pre-linked accents and one default accent. Two of the pre-linked accents count from the left and are linked to the initial and peninitial moras of the root, respectively, and both spread one mora to the right. The other pre-linked accent counts from the right (penult) and does not spread. This analysis fits in with the culminative tone typology established in Evans (Types of tonal culminativity in language of Sichuan and elsewhere, 2009). An Optimality Theoretic analysis that derives the surface tone patterns for both the default and pre-linked accents is proposed, and the proposal is compared with earlier analyses of pitch accents in North and South Kyungsang Korean.