Onset Of Emptying Research Articles

Empty onset repairs in the semi-spontaneous speech of Spanish child and adult heritage speakers

Aims: In this study I investigate whether child and adult Spanish heritage speakers (HS) use English-like strategies to repair word-external empty onsets preceded by consonants (e.g., el.#o.so ‘the (male) bear’). That is, I examine whether HS produce glottal phonation at /C#V/ junctures. I also examine whether stress predicts the use of glottal phonation to repair word-external empty onsets. Design: Semi-spontaneous speech was elicited from a group of child HS (10 females (F), six males (M), mean age = 9.44 years, standard deviation ( SD) = 0.69), adult HS (13 F, two M, mean age = 20.6 years, SD = 1.12), adult Spanish speakers in Mexico (six F, four M, mean age = 22.88 years, SD = 1.64), and long-term Mexican immigrants (seven F, two M, mean age = 45.16 years, SD = 9.49, mean age of arrival = 25.33 years, SD = 9.89). Data and analysis: Type of phonation (i.e., glottal or modal) was categorically coded and compared across groups and stress types. Acoustic measures, such as amplitude difference between the first two harmonic (H1*−H2*) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), were also analyzed to examine gradient group differences. Findings/conclusions: My findings show that child HS and adult HS present higher rates of glottal phonation than Spanish speakers in Mexico. The child HS, but not the adult HS, show higher rates of glottalization than those of long-term immigrants. Lastly, stressed syllables are more often glottalized than unstressed syllables. Originality: In this research I explore connected speech (i.e., word-external empty onsets), an understudied area in heritage language phonology. More specifically, this is the first study that examines empty onset repair strategies in both child and adult HS and analyzes the role of prosodic prominence. Significance and implications: I provide evidence for a greater pressure of the majority language during childhood than during adulthood. My results also show that divergent attainment in heritage language production is conditioned by quality of input.

Paradigm Structure in French Verbal Inflection

Verb inflectional morphology in French exhibits a range of complexities both in the structure of verb stems (stem-final latent consonant; vowel variation; stem-final nasal vowel ; suppletive forms ; etc.) and the organization of the inflectional system, marked for five grammatical categories: tense, aspect, mode, person and number, which in the majority of cases cannot be identified as a morphological or phonological unit. The main objective of this paper is to show that these morphosyntactic properties should be analyzed as a global affix, which operate within the same space, with no fixed order. This strategy has the advantage to 1) take into account all the verb syntactic properties, 2) avoid multiple zero suffixes, 3) avoid the use of different analyses depending on the verb class, 4) avoid non-productive and phonologically unmotivated rules of insertion of theme vowels as in [dorm-i-r-ons] dormirons, and epenthetic consonants as in [ku-d-r-ons] coudrons, 5) account for French verb inflectional system in a simple and more explanatory way than strictly segmental analyses without "motivated" processes, using massive suppletion and/or stems dependencies, where inflected verbal forms are related by arbitrary implicational associations or quantitative measures based on extensive memorization. This analysis also has the property of explaining by means of a very general principle (the Onset principle) the realization of a stem-final FC in front of the affixes 'ions' and 'iez' as in before any suffix beginning with an empty onset. The verb inflectional paradigmatic structures is captured within Construction Morphology (CxM) as stated in Booij, 2010.

Exceptional Arabic Diminutive Forms of Nouns with [aa]: An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis

Most diminutive forms in Arabic adhere in their derivation to certain simple phonological and morphological processes without any complications. However, there are exceptions to be found, including diminutive forms of nouns with [aa] in which the segment [w] surfaces. Using Optimality Theory (OT) as a framework and using syllable weight as a base of analysis, this study aims to provide an accurate explanation of such phenomena. This work will show that the root of words with [w] is not simply biconsonantal with an emphatic segment (i.e., [w]) inserted to fill the empty onset. Instead, the root is triconsonantal in which [w] is an essential segment. It also reveals that syllable-weight constraint is inviolable in Arabic dialects.

English Vowel Hiatus and Consonant Epenthesis

Vowel hiatus arises when two vowels are locally adjacent but heterosyllabified within words or across word boundaries. In English, as well-described, vowel clash is resolved by two strategies; glide insertion and glottal stop insertion. In fact, these sounds are not underlyingly present but added for ease of articulation in casual or fast speech. Following sonority-driven prominence scale in V1-V2 sequences, the least marked glides are the most favored to fix vowel hiatus. Which glide is adopted is closely related to the feature of the first vowel; for a palatal /j/-glide, V1 is a high front vowel, for a labio-velar /w/-glide, a high back vowel and for a central liquid /r/-glide, also called the intrusive r, a non-high vowel, i.e. homorganic. Furthermore, provided that V2 gets stressed, a laryngeal plosive also fills an empty onset even though it is the most marked at the point of vowel hiatus. These hiatus resolution strategies are well-couched into Optimality Theory(OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince, 1995) where Dep[F] type constraints ranked over the sonority-driven markedness constraints determine the glide j/w-epenthesis the best and the intrusive r the second-best if the former is banned. Glottal stop addition is also employed as a rescue strategy to remove vowel clash when glides are all blocked, i.e. before V2 bearing stress.

Empty Consonants in Root-medial Position

Broselow 1995 notes that “all of [the cases of empty onset slots in stems] involve empty C slots in the initial (never internal) position of a stem” (p. 196). She cites the analysis of Seri found in Marlett and Stemberger 1983, in which verbs with empty consonants in stem-initial position are presented. In this brief note, I present some facts which I believe could be or should be analyzed with root-internal empty slots. These facts contribute more evidence of empty onsets, which Broselow notes are predicted not to exist by moraic theory.

Contextuele invloeden op de productie van /h/ in het Nederlands van Belgisch-Franstalige leerders

Abstract The phoneme /h/ is absent in French and its acquisition has been described as being difficult for second language learners of Dutch, a language with /h/ in its phoneme inventory. In this study, several factors were examined that may affect the production of /h/ by Belgian-French learners of Dutch. Specifically, the factors included in this exploratory study were (1) L1-to-L2 transfer, (2) semantic contrastiveness, (3) the monitoring of one’s speech, and (4) educational grade. L1-to-L2 transfer was operationalized as the effect of liaison/elision contexts on /h/-production. The expectation was liaison contexts might transfer and would therefore hinder /h/-production. Semantic contrasts in minimal pairs including an h-initial word would elicit more /h/-productions if that word was contrasted with an empty onset than an onset (oor-hoor) filled by some other consonant (hand-tand). If a speaker pays more attention to his/her speech in an increased-monitoring task, the speaker is expected to produce /h/ more often, and finally it was expected that increased exposure to Dutch would result in more correct productions. In a cross-sectional study, students from the first, third and sixth grades of secondary education (60 in total, aged between 12 years and 19 years old) took part in two reading-aloud tasks, which were assumed to differ in the degree of speech monitoring they require. The first task was a text, with which L1-to-L2 transfer was assessed, and the second a list of minimal pairs containing h-onsets contrasting with either empty or filled onsets. Monitoring was assessed by comparing results between reading tasks. Results showed that increased monitoring positively influenced the numbers of [h]s produced, but that L1-to-L2 transfer of liaison/elision contexts did not occur. A small difference between conditions was found, but in the opposite direction. There was large between-learner variability and no performance increase with amount of exposure from first to sixth grade. Overall, performance left much room for improvement relative to native Dutch speakers and to the learners’ teacher. Further research is needed to better understand the development of French-speaker learners’ production of Dutch /h/.

Vowel hiatus at Polish word boundaries – Phonetic realization and phonological implications

This paper presents an acoustic phonetic study of Polish V#V sequences designed to shed light on the phonological representation of glottal marking. Independent phonological evidence from Polish suggests that initial vowels contain an empty onset that may be realized as glottal marking. The results of the experiment suggest that glottal marking in Polish is quite robust, and may be realized by increases in spectral balance. In the Onset Prominence environment, the empty onset is derived from phonetic principles, realized as specification for the Vocalic Onset layer of structure. VO parameter settings capture important ambiguities in speech perception and allow for a unified analysis of glottal marking, distributional restrictions on Polish vowels, and ambiguities underlying palatalization processes

Capacitance–voltage characteristics of selectively doped AlxGa1−xAs/GaAs heterostructures containing deep traps

The low- and high-frequency capacitance–voltage characteristics of a selectively doped AlxGa1−xAs/GaAs heterostructure containing deep traps in the AlxGa1−xAs layer are calculated. It is shown that the low-frequency capacitance–voltage characteristic features a rising portion when the deep traps are localized at the heterointerface, this rising portion being due to the onset of emptying of the deep traps. The calculated results agree with the experimental data.

French verbal inflection revisited: Constraints, repairs and floating consonants

This article updates Paradis and El Fenne (1991, 1992). The C/0 alternation (including the Ṽ/VN one) in French verbal inflection (e.g. dort [dor]/ dorment [dorm] ‘to sleep’ 3sg. and 3pl. Present Indicative), which occurs in 588 regular (non-suppletive and non-defective) verbs, is explained and related naturally to the C/0 alternation found in many other morphological and syntactic environments. More specifically, we maintain that the notion of ‘floating consonant’ (i.e. a consonant without a timing slot) along with two principles, the No Empty Onset Principle and the Licensing Principle, used in the framework of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (cf. Paradis, 1988a,b), suffices to handle the C/0 alternation in verbal inflection and elsewhere. Not only does the system we propose result in a considerable simplification of French verbal inflection (it gets rid of numerous thematic segments and ad hoc - when not contradictory - context rules), it makes important new predictions concerning the selection of Infinitive suffixes in relation to the nature of a stem-final consonant (floating/non-floating). We show that these predictions are confirmed by the results of production tests, administered by El Fenne (1994), which clearly indicate that the floating consonant system we propose reflects the competence of French speakers.

Effect of food consistency on gastric emptying in man.

The gastric emptying of two radiolabelled pancake meals of identical composition, but different consistency, was compared with the rates at which they could be broken down in vitro by mechanical agitation in a solution of either acid-pepsin or saline. Neither of the pancake meals were broken up within 150 minutes by mechanical agitation in a normal saline medium, but both were disrupted in the presence of acid-pepsin, the light consistency pancake being broken up more rapidly than the heavy consistency pancake (0.5 +/- 0.1 v 0.2 +/- 0.1% radioactivity appearing in the bathing medium per minute, p less than 0.01). Under normal conditions, the pattern and rate of gastric emptying of both meals was similar. Stimulating acid secretion with pentagastrin (6 micrograms/kg bodyweight sc) delayed the onset of emptying of both pancakes and tended to increase the slope of emptying. Under these conditions, the denser pancake was emptied more slowly than the lighter pancake because of an increase in the lag period. Thus the data did not confirm the hypothesis that the rate of emptying of disruptible solid food from the stomach under normal conditions of acid secretion is influenced by the ease with which it can be broken down by mechanical agitation in an acid-pepsin medium. The trend for an accelerated rate of emptying after administration of pentagastrin, however, may well be explained by the increased rate of disruption of the food in the presence of acid, but the longer lag periods are more compatible with inhibition of gastric emptying caused by free acid in the duodenum.

THE INITIAL PHASE OF GASTRIC EMPTYING BEFORE AND AFTER VAGOTOMY AND PYLOROPLASTY

The initial phase of gastric emptying of solid food was monitored with the use of a gamma camera and on-line computer facilities. In normal subjects a consistent pattern was seen comprising an early delay in the onset of emptying ("plateau"), followed by an exponential decay curve. After vagotomy the plateau was lost, and the exponential pattern of emptying commenced once the stomach was full. There was no evidence of sudden "dumping" of contents from the stomach. The overall rates of emptying as measured by the half emptying time (T 1/2) were the same in normal and postvagotomy subjects.