Final Vowel Research Articles

Ibibio Causative and Anti-Causative Verb Alternations

Causative and anti-causative verb alternations include the commonly attested cross-linguistic morphosyntactic phenomena and most languages have different ways of marking the alternations. Whereas in some languages, there is a clear morphological marking on the verb to indicate the causative/anti-causative distinction, in some others, there is no such morphological reflex or marker to indicate a verb’s status with respect to causativity. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of causative and anti-causative verb alternations in Ibibio. Following the categorizations of Haspelmath’s (1993) the paper highlights the two major ways by which the causative/anticausative verb alternation can be expressed in Ibibio. The first is through the directed (morphological) alternation, by which the distinction between the causative/anti-causative is indicated by a morphological reflex on the anti-causative verb. In Ibibio, the anticausative verb morphology can be expressed in three different ways; germinating the final consonant of the verb (root) of the lexical causative with a high tone vowel whose [ATR] value harmonizes with that of the final vowel of the root verb, suffixation (to causative verb root) of a harmonizing high tone vowel with a consequent weakening of the final consonant and by lengthening the first vowel of the causative verb root. The other option is the non-directed (lexical) alternation which is further divided into the suppletive and labile alternations (Haspelmath 1993). For the suppletive alternation, different verb roots are used for the causative/anti-causative alternations while the labile alternation is not yet observed in Ibibio The paper further observes that as has been noted in some languages, the anti-causative construction in Ibibio unlike its causative counterpart is characterized by a change in word order, absence of causative agentive noun phrase and an anti-causative affix (a morphological reflex of detransitivization and anti-causativization in the directed alternation. The data on which this study is based were collected from adult speakers of Ibibio by the author using an elicitation list. The database consists of acceptable words/expressions collected from standard Ibibio speakers within Uyo metropolis in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria.

Information theoretic approaches to phonological structure: the case of Finnish vowel harmony

This paper offers a study of vowel harmony in Finnish as an example of how information theoretic concepts can be employed in order to better understand the nature of phonological structure. The probability assigned by a phonological model to a corpus is used as a means to evaluate how good such a model is, and information theoretic methods allow us to determine the extent to which each addition to our grammar results in a better treatment of the data. We explore a natural implementation of autosegmental phonology within an information theoretic perspective, and find that it is empirically inadequate; that is, it performs more poorly than a simple bigram model. We extend the model by means of a Boltzmann distribution, taking into consideration both local, segment-to-segment, relations and distal, vowel-to-vowel, relations, and find a significant improvement. We conclude with some general observations on how we propose to revisit other phonological questions from this perspective.

ASSIMILATION OF FINAL LOW BACK VOWEL IN EGHLIDIAN DIALECT

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of this article is a native speaker of the dialect, the verity of the data is confirmed. In writing this article, the collected data were classified in terms of different alternations of the vowel /A/, then related contexts were analyzed. Analysis of data showed that, firstly, in individual words, the final vowel /A/ is pronounced as [o] when it is preceded by a non-glottal consonant; however, it is pronounced as [A] when preceded by a glottal consonant and, secondly, in continuous speech, as a result of an assimilation, the final position vowel /A/ is pronounced as [o] and [@], respectively according to the graveness and acuteness of its preceding consonant.

On the origins of the Turkic directive suffixes -jar(y) and -sar(y)

This study is devoted to the problem of the interrelationship between Turkic syŋar ‘direction’ and jak ~ jan ‘side’ on the one hand, and the Khakas, Shor and Oyrot directive suffixes -jar(y) ~ -sar(y) ~ -sāra, and so on, on the other. The paper seeks to answer four questions: (1) Are jak ‘side’ and jan id. two derivatives ultimately of the same root *√ja?; (2) How do jak ‘side’ and sak id. compare?; (3) If it is true that jar, sar < *jagar, *sagar, how, then, should the final vowel in jary, sara, etc. be explained?; (4) How do Old Tkc. syŋar ‘direction’ (also used as a directive postposition) and sar ~ jar

Adaptation of English complex words into Korean

Most previous studies related to loanword adaptation have centered on segmental mappings between source and loanword sounds in morphologically simplex words (LaCharite and Paradis, Ling Inq 36:223–258, 2005; Kang, Phonology 20:1–56, 2003). However, few have considered the adaptation of complex words, specifically words made of multiple free morphemes. Examining the adaptation of complex English words into Korean, the present study makes four claims. First, it proposes that each component of a complex word is a unit for loanword adaptation in calculating sound mappings. Second, it suggests that each component word is a stem, whereas a loanword as a whole is categorized as a nominal word in Korean. Third, apparent single-unit adaptation is possible only when the first component allows variable final vowel epenthesis at the end of the first component word; this is analyzed in terms of split-base effects. Fourth, the allophonic realization of phonemes plays a crucial role in loanword adaptation. These claims are empirically supported by loanwords found via the National Academy of Korean Language (NAKL 1991) and Google searching (March–June 2011). Furthermore, this study provides an explicit formalization of the analysis of complex loanwords within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, Opimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar, 1993). The present study contributes to the literature of loanword phonology by shedding light on several issues. First, the study proposes a model for the adaptation of complex loanwords wherein both morphological structure and the phonetic information of the source language play important roles. There has been intense debate about the effect of input information on loanword adaptation, broadly split between a phonological view (LaCharite and Paradis, Ling Inq 36:223–258, 2005) and a perceptual view (Silverman, Phonology 9:289–328, 1992; Steriade, in: Hume and Johnson (eds.) The role of speech perception in phonology, 2001; Peperkamp and Dupoux, Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2003). The adaptation of complex English words in Korean supports the perceptual approach, in that the allophone realized in a complex word determines the loanword sound. It also reveals that sound mappings in loanwords are determined by the morphological structure of source words. There has been a discussion about whether the morphosyntactic base is isomorphic to the phonological base (Steriade, Lexical conservatism and the notion base of affixation, 2000). Component-by-component analysis of the apparent single-unit adaptation provides support for the existence of a split-base effect as well as for the lexical conservatism proposed by Steriade (Lexical conservatism and the notion base of affixation, 2000). Finally, it makes a contribution to evaluation of the internal structure and morphological category of complex loanwords, which has been rarely considered in the literature on loanword phonology.

Task‐dependent activations of human auditory cortex to prototypical and nonprototypical vowels

Research in auditory neuroscience has largely neglected the possible effects of different listening tasks on activations of auditory cortex (AC). In the present study, we used high-resolution fMRI to compare human AC activations with sounds presented during three auditory and one visual task. In all tasks, subjects were presented with pairs of Finnish vowels, noise bursts with pitch and Gabor patches. In the vowel pairs, one vowel was always either a prototypical /i/ or /ae/ (separately defined for each subject) or a nonprototype. In different task blocks, subjects were either required to discriminate (same/different) vowel pairs, to rate vowel "goodness" (first/second sound was a better exemplar of the vowel class), to discriminate pitch changes in the noise bursts, or to discriminate Gabor orientation changes. We obtained distinctly different AC activation patterns to identical sounds presented during the four task conditions. In particular, direct comparisons between the vowel tasks revealed stronger activations during vowel discrimination in the anterior and posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG), while the vowel rating task was associated with increased activations in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). We also found that AC areas in or near Heschl's gyrus (HG) were sensitive to the speech-specific difference between a vowel prototype and nonprototype during active listening tasks. These results show that AC activations to speech sounds are strongly dependent on the listening tasks.

The effect of duration on vowel categorization and perceptual prototypes in a quantity language

According to the identity group interpretation of the quantity opposition in Finnish, long vowels are perceived as two successive short vowels of the same spectral quality. Some recent studies, however, challenge this general view. To investigate this, 16 listeners were first asked to categorize four sets of 19 synthesized stimuli, each set representing the Finnish vowel continuum /y/–/i/ at one of the following stimulus durations: 50ms, 100ms, 250ms, and 500ms, which cover the reported durational variations of short and long Finnish vowels. The stimuli on the /y/–/i/ continuum varied for the second formant (F2) in steps of 30mel. Large individual variation was found in the categorization, but the category boundary F2 value and the boundary width were independent of duration in the group level, suggesting that quantity does not affect the category formation between /y/ and /i/. Normalized reaction times showed that the categorization was most difficult at 100ms, that is, a duration that falls between a typical short and long Finnish vowel. Following the categorization task, in order to find the prototypical /i/, the same listeners were asked to evaluate the goodness of those vowels they had individually identified as /i/. The goodness rating scores and F2 frequencies of the /i/ prototypes thus found were essentially the same at all durations, suggesting that phoneme prototypes are not demonstrably dependent on the phonological quantity opposition. In conclusion, the results of this study are in accordance with the identity group interpretation of Finnish quantity opposition.

Articulating Finnish Vowels: Results from MRI and Sound Data

We present anatomic and acoustic data from a pilot study on the Finnish vowels (ɑ, e, i, o, u, y, ae, o). 1 The data were acquired simultaneously with 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a custom built sound recording system. The data consist of a single static repetition of each vowel with constant F0. The imaging sequence was 7.6 s long and had an isotropic voxel size of 1.8 mm. We report results of listening tests and acoustic analysis of audio data as well as manual analysis of MR images.

&lt;span style="color: black; font-family: &amp;quot;Times New Roman&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;serif&amp;quot;; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-ansi-language: LT; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;"&gt;Ar prūsų kalboje egzistavo lie. &lt;em&gt;tekė́ti, tẽka &lt;/em&gt;veiksmažodžių tipas?&lt;/span&gt;

WERE THERE IN THE OLD PRUSSIAN LANGUAGE ANY VERBS ANALOGOUS TO LITH. tekė́ti, tẽka VERBAL TYPE?SummaryThe article seeks to determine whether the Old Prussian language could have had verbs analogous to the Lithuanian type ending in -ėti in the infinitive, -a in the present tense and -ėjo in the past tense. Vytautas Mažiulis’ Prussian Etymological Dictionary directly attributes only one reconstructed verb to this type, *skelētvei, *skela ‘to owe, to be at fault’, and indirectly connects several suffixal verb forms, *peldētvei ‘to earn; to obtain’, *kabētvei ‘to hang’, *bīlet ‘to tell’ and *kalsēt ‘to ring’. The OPr. verbs under discussion, however, belong to another verbal type (with variable suffix) - inf. -ī-, praes./praet. -ā-/-ē-.The tekė́ti, tẽka verbal type arose from the past tense stem, *-ē, of root verbs with the addition of thematic personal endings, i.e., a secondary stem *-i̯ā (*tekēi̯ā). The past tense stem *-ēi̯ā suffix *-ē was then introduced into the infinitive (*tekti > *tek-ē-ti). The Prussian language added plural personal endings to vowel suffixes athematically (directly after the suffix vowel), and because the first, second and third person singular usually had a zero ending – the final vowel was that of the suffix (see Kaukienė 2000b, 58 f.). Therefore there was no basis for tekė́ti, tẽka verbs to arise.Hence we may conclude that tekė́ti, tẽka verbal type is an East Baltic innovation.

Žodžio galo ir priegaidžių fonetinė evoliucija &amp;scaron;iaurės žemaičių tarmėje

PHONETIC EVOLUTION OF WORD END AND SYLLABLE ACCENTS IN THE NORTHERN ŽEMAITIAN DIALECT Summary In this investigation an attempt is made to test if the accent, which is placed in the pe­nultimate syllable, in the Northern Žemaitian dialect has any influence on the ending re­duction. The analysis of the corpus of 4000 items has shown that word end reduction is greater after a circumflex accent. The drawn-out nature of the circumflex accent in the Northern Žemaitian dialect causes the concentration of the main energy on the distinctly drawn-out sound, weakening the intensity of the ending and as a result reducing it more. The vowel heard more distinctly after the acute accent, which in the dialect is most often realised as a broken one, apparently is determined by the nature of the broken accent it­self: when the break is very distinct, the final vowel following it becomes more distinct as well. The investigation has also shown that ending reduction is significantly greater after voiceless and non-palatalized (‘hard’, ‘dark’) consonants.

Contributions of static and dynamic spectral cues to vowel identification by cochlear implant users

Relatively little is known about cochlear implant (CI) users' ability to make use of static versus dynamic spectral cues in vowel perception tasks. The present study measured vowel identification in CI users and young normal hearing (YNH) listeners using naturally produced /dVd/ stimuli (deed, did, Dade, dead, dad, dud, and Dodd). Vowel identifcation was tested for (1) the unmodified syllables, (2) syllables modified to retain only 60 or 80 ms of the vowel center (center-only conditions), and (3) syllables modified to retain only 30 or 40 ms of the initial and final vowel transitions, with vowel duration neutralized (edges-only conditions). YNH listeners achieved high levels of performance for the unmodified stimuli (avg. 99.8%) and for the center-only stimuli (90.8%); their performance dropped to more moderate levels (68.1%) for the edges-only stimuli. CI users demonstrated moderate performance for the unmodified stimuli (avg. 72.0%) but demonstrated substantially poorer performance for both the center-only (41.1%) and edges-only stimuli (27.8%). Findings suggest that CI users (1) have difficulty identifying vowels in syllables when one or more cues are absent and (2) rely more strongly on quasi-static cues from the vowel center as compared to dynamic cues at the syllable edges.

Chimwiini phonological phrasing revisited

This paper revisits the topic of phonological phrasing in Chimwiini. Previous discussion of Chimwiini phrasing has been based entirely on the evidence provided by the vowel length alternations found in the language. Unfortunately, these alternations do not allow an exhaustive account of Chimwiini phrasing. Chimwiini accent (or High tone) provides a new source of evidence. Accent falls on the final vowel in certain morphosyntactic contexts, otherwise on the penult. This accent is phrasal in nature: it is the final or penult vowel in the last word in the phrase that bears accent. Furthermore, what counts as a phrase for the purposes of accent are exactly the same phrases that are required to account for the vowel length alternations in Chimwiini. This accentual evidence is used to verify the general principle that a phonological phrase occurs at the edge of every (lexical) maximal projection, but it also establishes that a focused element resides at the end of a phonological phrase. The accentual evidence, particularly as it is revealed in sentences involving focus, suggest that phrasing may be recursive in Chimwiini, and that both Align-XP R and Wrap-XP (constraints well known in the literature) play a role in the language.

Final Syllables in Northern Malakula

Although nearly all languages of Malakula in central Vanuatu regularly lose Proto-Oceanic (PO c ) word-final vowels, there is a group of four languages spoken along the north coast—Nese, Vovo, Botovro, and Vao—in which final vowels are retained if the vowel in the preceding syllable was high. These languages also show a paragogic vowel added after a PO c word-final consonant, but again only if the preceding vowel was high. I suggest in this short paper that paragogic vowels were added after all retained final consonants, that a sonority-driven stress shift moved stress from a high penult to a more sonorous nonhigh final vowel, and that only then were final unstressed vowels deleted.

Vowel devoicing in Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan.

The results of the research on vowel devoicing in Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan are presented. In this research, 30 Taiwanese who have lived in Taipei area at least 10 years are served as subjects. They read the sentences written in traditional Chinese, whose final syllables consist of voiceless fricatives or aspirated affricates and high vowels. The results agree with the previous study conducted by Shirai et al. The vowels carry tone 3 (rising and falling tone) tend to undergo devoicing. In addition, some final vowels with frication in high frequency, also known as syllabic sibilants, are partially devoiced. The devoicing of syllabic sibilants is discussed. Furthermore, vowels in penult syllables undergo devoicing. Whether devoicing in Mandarin Chinese is delted or replaced is also discussed.

Regional differences in the listener’s phonemic inventory affect semantic processing: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study

Using the mismatch negativity (MMN) response, we examined how Standard French and Southern French speakers access the meaning of words ending in /e/ or /ε/ vowels which are contrastive in Standard French but not in Southern French. In Standard French speakers, there was a significant difference in the amplitude of the brain response after the deviant-minus-standard subtraction between the frontocentral (FC) and right lateral (RL) recording sites for the final-/ε/ word but not the final-/e/ word. In contrast, the difference in the amplitude of the brain response between the FC and RL recording sites did not significantly vary as a function of the word’s final vowel in Southern French speakers. Our findings provide evidence that access to lexical meaning in spoken word recognition depends on the speaker’s native regional accent.

Apports mutuels entre dialectologie et sociolinguistique: les voyelles finales dans le Vallo di Diano

The article shows how dialectology can benefit from concepts imported from sociolinguistics, and how, when carefully applied, these concepts can lead to a refined picture of linguistic dynamics. This will be illustrated by analyzing variation in final unstressed vowels in several dialects of Vallo di Diano (Salerno, Italy), whose speakers produce words with either centralized or full final vowels. Phonetic, etymological and geolinguistic evidence is used to show that these dialects are characterized by a highly conservative vowel system, and that final vowel variation can best be explained in terms of contact with a regional koiné variety, rather than with standard Italian.

Metatony in Abo (Bankon), A42

Since Meeussen (1967), there have been recurrent reports of “metatony”, a process by which a subset of verb forms ending with L tone utterance-finally, end with H tone if followed by an object. While Schadeberg (1986) and Hadermann (2005) speculate that the H is historically derived from the Proto-Bantu *H tone augment and relate metatony to the conjoint/disjoint distinction, we show that neither hypothesis accounts for the full range of facts in Abo (A42), a Cameroonian Bantu language closely related to Basaa. Avoiding arbitrary reference to specific TAM forms, we present a strictly phonological analysis based on distinct tonal representations. 1. What is metatony? Within traditional Bantu studies, the term metatony was introduced to characterize tonal alternations on the final vowel of the class 15 ku- infinitive:

Is Metrical Foot a Phonetic Object?

The assumption behind this pilot study is that metrical feet are not ‘groups of syllables’ or ‘interstress intervals’ but rather ‘groups of vowels’ extracted from the phonetic material contained between two stresses. We analysed the duration, pitch, intensity and acoustic energy of all vowels in isolated pronunciations of 72 initially stressed items (mono-, di- and trisyllables). The results reveal that pre-fortis clipping of the stressed vowel and final lengthening are interrelated, which suggests that stressed and unstressed final vowels are able to ‘negotiate’ their durations. Such ‘communication’ between the stressed vowels and the final unstressed ones is possible only if a mediating constituent (the foot) is postulated. Most importantly, we found no significant differences (p &lt; .05) between the total acoustic energy and the total vowel duration in words having a different number of syllables, which supports the assumption of foot-level isochrony in English. It was also observed that the significant increase in vowel duration in stressed CVC monosyllables co-occurs with a significantly greater pitch slope, which we interpret to be a tonally driven implementation of minimal foot binarity requirement.

Formation of the Actor's/Speaker's Formant: A Study Applying Spectrum Analysis and Computer Modeling

A strong peak between 3 and 4 kHz in the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) of speech has been found to be one correlate of a good male speaking voice, for example, among actors. The actor's or speaker's formant (resembling the singer's formant) can be established by certain vocal training. This study investigates the origin of the speaker's formant. The immediate effects of a vocal exercise series on speaking voice were studied in a Finnish male actor, who is an experienced teacher of the exercises. They consist of nasal vowel syllable strings and words containing nasals. Before and after a 30-minute exercising, the subject (1) read aloud at three loudness levels and (2) phonated the Finnish vowels at habitual level. Formant frequencies were estimated from spectra of the vowel samples. LTAS was made and equivalent sound level (L(eq)) was measured for the text samples. Formant frequencies were used as the input for a one-dimensional (1D) mathematical model. After the exercise, the peak at 3.5 kHz in the LTAS of the reading samples was stronger, although L(eq) was the same as before, suggesting a level-independent resonance change. Reading samples after exercising were evaluated to sound better in voice quality than before exercising. The strong peak at 3.5 kHz was present in all vowels, and it was mainly formed by clustering of F₄ and F₅. A 1D model-based optimization suggested that this kind of a formant cluster could be best established by simultaneously narrowing the epilaryngeal tube, widening the pharynx and narrowing the front of the oral cavity.

The effects of healthy aging on auditory processing in humans as indexed by transient brain responses

The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of aging on human cortical auditory processing of rising-intensity sinusoids and speech sounds. We also aimed to evaluate the suitability of a recently discovered transient brain response for applied research. In young and aged adults, magnetic fields produced by cortical activity elicited by a 570-Hz pure-tone and a speech sound (Finnish vowel /a/) were measured using MEG. The stimuli rose smoothly in intensity from an inaudible to an audible level over 750 ms. We used both the active (attended) and the passive recording condition. In the attended condition, behavioral reaction times were measured. The latency of the transient brain response was prolonged in the aged compared to the young and the accuracy of behavioral responses to sinusoids was diminished among the aged. In response amplitudes, no differences were found between the young and the aged. In both groups, spectral complexity of the stimuli enhanced response amplitudes. Aging seems to affect the temporal dynamics of cortical auditory processing. The transient brain response is sensitive both to spectral complexity and aging-related changes in the timing of cortical activation. The transient brain responses elicited by rising-intensity sounds could be useful in revealing differences in auditory cortical processing in applied research.