Lexical Confusion Research Articles

Phonotactic transposition in light of the modern linguistic lesson (Central Sudanese dialect as a model)

This study aims to trace the phenomenon of phonotactic transposition in the dialect of Central Sudan in light of the modern linguistic lesson. The rules this dialect has followed were explored by identifying the letters affected by transposition and the reasons behind it. The relationship of this transposition to that in classic Arabic dialect was considered in order to document the phonemic phenomena therein and to identify their origins and link them to the mother tongue from which they emanate. The researchers have collected vocabularies in which transposition took place from the dialect spoken in Central Sudan to describe and analyze them to specify the type of transposition used. The research used the descriptive historical analytical method to serve its purposes. This study will contribute to providing an approximate view for those interested in oriental linguistic studies and developing educational curricula that overcome obstacles arising from the existence of such a phenomenon and the lexical confusion that may result from it.

Dynamischer Gebrauch von Paronymen in allgemein-, fach-, wissenschafts- und bildungssprachlicher Kommunikation

AbstractThis paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such asMethode/Methodologie/Methodikandunehelich/nichtehelich/außerehelichdepending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.

Pre-nasal short-a in Northern California: Merged in formant space with /ɛ/, but distinct in duration and degree of nasal coarticulation

Short-a, or /æ/, production varies substantially across American English dialects and is noted to be useful in describing regional pronunciation differences. The current study examines the production and perception of /æ/ in California English, which raises in words with a final nasal coda (both velar and non-velar nasals). We explore both the acoustic characteristics of this potential merger with /ɛ/, along with lexical confusability between words with /æ/ and /ɛ/ in prenasal position. Productions of 32 native California speakers reveal that the formant space of prenasal /æ/ indeed overlaps with /ɛ/. However, these vowels have reliably different patterns of two secondary acoustic features: duration and nasal coarticulation. /æ/ is produced with both a longer duration and a greater degree of nasal coarticulation than /ɛ/. Results from a lexical identification task presenting unaltered, as well as duration-neutralized, items to 50 listeners reveal that these vowels are not confusable despite considerable formant overlap. Furthermore, modeling results indicate that greater differences in nasalization between prenasal /æ/-/ɛ/ pairs lead to more accurate identification. Overall, the results from this study indicate that these secondary features help maintain the perceptual distinctiveness of /æ/-/ɛ/ words where formant merger has taken place.

Training-related changes of brain activation for speech production in healthy speakers – a longitudinal fMRI study to mimic aphasia therapy

ABSTRACTBackground: Re-learning of lexical entries is fundamental to rehabilitation of the common word finding deficits in language disorders after brain damage. Previous studies examined and compared neural correlates of speech production and word learning in aphasic and healthy speakers, but longitudinal control studies were rarely set out to mimic the lexical confusion and therapeutic remediation in aphasia.Aims: Thus, we aimed to examine functional brain organisation before (familiar word naming), during (learning phase) and after (consolidation phase) standardised training of speech production modulated by aphasia therapy.Methods & Procedures: During the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurement, participants were asked to name pictures using familiar words; during learning and in the consolidation phase, they were asked to name pictures using newly acquired pseudowords. To examine differential involvement of brain areas dependent on learning and consolidation success, we followed up activations for finally correctly learned (CoL) items between fMRI measurements, and compared activation during naming of CoL versus finally not learned (NoL) items at each measurement.Outcomes & Results: Naming accuracy of participants improved significantly. Although performance increase until the second fMRI measurement was minor, brain activation was present for CoL in comparison to NoL items in right hemisphere homologues of fronto-temporal language-related areas in this phase. Comparing learning with consolidation phases for pseudowords, naming CoL items was accompanied by activation in areas related to monitoring and selection between multiple lexical competitors, and in the right posterior middle temporal gyrus. Conversely, activation specific to the consolidation phase, and also to CoL items in that phase, consisted of a widely distributed network involving areas associated with motor, language and consolidation processes. Activation in right supramarginal and left superior temporal gyrus was related to individual learning success.Conclusions: We were able to demonstrate phase- and performance-dependent activation differences in various areas of the speech production network, which were in part correlated with learning success. The observed similarities to therapy-induced activation changes in aphasia reveal that the novel paradigm is useful in mimicking therapy and may uncover compensatory mechanisms specific to aphasia.

Translating <i>“natural selection”</i> in Japanese: from <i>“shizen tōta”</i> to <i>“shizen sentaku”</i>, and back?

This paper focuses on terminological issues related to the translation of Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” in Japanese. We analyze the historical fate of the different phrases used as translations, from the first attempts in the late 1870s until recent times. Our first finding is that the first part of the Japanese translations never changed during the period considered: “natural” was constantly rendered by “shizen”. By contrast, the Japanese terms for “selection” have dramatically changed over time. We identify some major breaks in the history of Japanese translations for “natural selection”. From the end of the 1870s to the early 1880s, several translations were suggested in books and periodicals: “shizen kanbatsu”, “shizen tōta”, “tensen”. Katō Hiroyuki adopted “shizen tōta” in 1882 and he undeniably played an important role in spreading this phrase as the standard translation for “natural selection”. The most common Japanese translation of the Origin during the first half of the 20th century (by Oka Asajirō in 1905) also used “shizen tōta”. Adramatic shift occurred after WWII, from “tōta” to “sentaku”. While a linear interpretation could suggest a move from a “bad” translation to a better one, a closer analysis leads to more challenging insights. Especially we stress the role of the kanji restriction policy, which specified which kanji should be taught in schools and thus should be used in textbooks: “tōta” was not included in the list, which may have led to the good fortune of “sentaku” in the 1950–1960s. We think the hypothesis of the influence of Chinese translations is not a plausible one. As to conceptual differences between “shizen tōta” and “sentaku”, they remain unconvincing as both terms could be interpreted as a positive or negative process: there is no clear reason to prefer one term over the other from the strict point of view of their meanings or etymology. Then, turning to the way terms are used, we compare translations of natural selection with translations of artificial or sexual selection. First we turn to the field of thremmatology (breeders): there, “tōta” (sometimes spelled in hiragana instead of kanji) often bore the meaning of culling; since 1917, breeders often used “sentaku” as a translation for “selection”. However, quite surprisingly, breeders used two different terms for selection as a practice (“senbatsu”), and “selection” as in “natural selection” (“shizen sentaku”). Finally, we compare possible translations for “sexual selection” and “matechoice”: here again, there are some good reasons to favour “tōta” over “sentaku” to avoid lexical confusion.

Lexical neighborhoods and phonological confusability in cross-dialect word recognition in noise

AbstractLexical neighborhood density is a well-known factor affecting phonological categorization in spoken word recognition. The current study examined the interaction between lexical neighborhood density and dialect variation in spoken word recognition in noise. The stimulus materials were real English words produced in two regional American English dialects. To manipulate lexical neighborhood density, target words were selected so that predicted phonological confusions across dialects resulted in real English words in the word-competitor condition and did not result in real English words in the nonword-competitor condition. Word and vowel recognition performance were more accurate in the nonword-competitor condition than the word-competitor condition for both talker dialects. An examination of the responses to specific vowels revealed the role of dialect variation in eliciting this effect. When the predicted phonological confusions were real lexical neighbors, listeners could respond with either the target word or the confusable minimal pair, and were more likely than expected to produce a minimal pair differing from the target by one vowel. When the predicted phonological confusions were not real words, however, the listeners exhibited less lexical competition and responded with the target word or a minimal pair differing by one consonant.

Modelling pronunciation variation with single-path and multi-path syllable models: Issues to consider

In this paper, we construct context-independent single-path and multi-path syllable models aimed at improved pronunciation variation modelling. We use phonetic transcriptions to define the topologies of the syllable models and to initialise the model parameters, and the Baum–Welch algorithm for the re-estimation of the model parameters. We hypothesise that the richer topology of multi-path syllable models would be better at accounting for pronunciation variation than context-dependent phone models that can only account for the effects of the left and right neighbours, or single-path syllable models whose power of modelling segmental variation would seem to be limited. However, both context-dependent phone models and single-path syllable models outperform multi-path syllable models on a large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition task. Careful analyses of the errors made by the recognisers with single-path and multi-path syllable models show that the most important factors affecting the speech recognition performance are syllable context and lexical confusability. In addition, the speech recognition results suggest that the benefits of the greater acoustic modelling accuracy of the multi-path syllable models can only be reaped if the information about the syllable-level pronunciation variation can be linked with the word-level information in the language model.

Lexical confusability and nasal coarticulation in French

Previous research has revealed a relationship between lexical confusability and degree of coarticulation [Brown (2001); Scarborough (2004)]. In particular, English speakers produce confusable, or ‘‘hard’’ words with more nasal and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than less confusable, ‘‘easy’’ ones. Thus, it has been suggested that speakers produce additional coarticulation in order to increase the intelligibility of ‘‘hard’’ words. Here, the relation between nasal coarticulation and lexical confusability is investigated for French, a language in which vowel nasality is phonemically contrastive (at least for a subset of vowels) and might constrain such a lexical effect. Acoustic measures of nasality show that ‘‘hard’’ words (those with low usage frequencies and many frequent, phonologically similar neighbors) exhibit more nasal coarticulation than ‘‘easy’’ ones (those with high frequencies and few, low-frequency neighbors) in French as well. Interestingly, however, the effect emerges only for words containing vowels that can exhibit phonemic oral-nasal contrasts (oral vowels with nasal counterparts). Thus, where the use of nasality in phonological contrast is constrained, coarticulatory nasality is constrained, too. But the existence of phonological contrast does not itself constrain the lexical confusability effect: increased coarticulatory nasality contributes to lexically motivated phonetic enhancement in French, while even more nasality provides the basis for phonemic contrast.

Early lexical development in a self-organizing neural network

In this paper we present a self-organizing neural network model of early lexical development called DevLex. The network consists of two self-organizing maps (a growing semantic map and a growing phonological map) that are connected via associative links trained by Hebbian learning. The model captures a number of important phenomena that occur in early lexical acquisition by children, as it allows for the representation of a dynamically changing linguistic environment in language learning. In our simulations, DevLex develops topographically organized representations for linguistic categories over time, models lexical confusion as a function of word density and semantic similarity, and shows age-of-acquisition effects in the course of learning a growing lexicon. These results match up with patterns from empirical research on lexical development, and have significant implications for models of language acquisition based on self-organizing neural networks.

The specificity of lexical confusability effects on coarticulation

Brown (2001) demonstrated that speakers adjust their production of coarticulation to accommodate potential lexical confusability (the possibility of one word being misheard as another), and that listeners’ lexical recognition is facilitated by such adjustments. Speakers produced confusable, ‘‘hard’’ words (those with low-usage frequencies and many frequent, phonologically similar neighbors) with significantly more coarticulation than less confusable, ‘‘easy’’ ones (with high frequencies and few, low-frequency neighbors). The current study investigates whether these adjustments are general, applying to any potentially confusable words, or whether the adjustments are sublexical, sensitive to the particular neighbors a given word has. A frequency-balanced set of ‘‘easy’’ and ‘‘hard’’ words containing a vowel+nasal consonant sequence has been found such that half are confusable by the nasal and half are not. Six speakers read these words twice in carrier sentences. The degree of nasal coarticulation during the vowel is measured acoustically. From this it will be seen whether the coarticulatory cues to a segment are more enhanced (i.e., there is more coarticulation) in words confusable by that segment than in words with no neighbors differing by that segment. Preliminary results suggest that coarticulatory adjustments in response to lexical confusability are made at the word level rather than sublexically.

Lexical Confusability and Degree of Coarticulation

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)

Does difficulty perceiving American English /r/ and /l/ affect Japanese listeners’ lexical confusion of these phonemes?

Phonetic environment has proven to be one of the most important factors affecting non-native English speakers’ perception of American English /r/ and /l/ [e.g., Lively et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 2076–2087 (1994)]. In the present study native Japanese speakers’ lexical confusion of English /r/ and /l/ are examined through a word translation experiment which employed pairs of English words minimally contrasting /r/ and /l/ in various word positions. Results indicate that English words in which the /r/ or /l/ is located in a perceptually difficult to identify position (e.g., initial consonant cluster: ‘‘branch’’ versus ‘‘blanch’’) are more likely to be mistranslated than those in which the phoneme is located in an easy to identify position (e.g., final singleton: ‘‘compare’’ versus ‘‘compel’’). This finding suggests that errors in phoneme perception and lexical confusion might be related. Pedagogical implications for second language learning will be discussed with respect to results from both learning and retention experiments. [Work supported by TAO, Japan.]

Sentence Recognition Materials Based on Frequency of Word Use and Lexical Confusability

The sentence stimuli developed in this project combined aspects from several traditional approaches to speech audiometry. Sentences varied with respect to frequency of word use and phonetic confusability. Familiar consonant-vowel-consonant words, nouns and modifiers, were used to form 500 sentences of seven to nine syllables. Based on concepts from the Neighborhood Activation Model for spoken word recognition, each sentence contained three key words that were all characterized as high- or low-use frequency and high or low lexical confusability. Use frequency was determined by published indices of word use, and lexical confusability was defined by a metric based on the number of other words that were similar to a given word using a single phoneme substitution algorithm. Thirty-two subjects with normal hearing were randomly assigned to one of seven presentation levels in quiet, and an additional 32 listeners were randomly assigned to a fixed-level noise background at one of six signal-to-noise ratios. The results indicated that in both quiet and noise listening conditions, high-use words were more intelligible than low-use words, and there was an advantage for phonetically unique words; the position of the key word in the sentence was also a significant factor. These data formed the basis for a sequence of experiments that isolated significant nonacoustic sources of variation in spoken word recognition.

Public and Private Art Education in France, 1648–1793 by Reed Benhamou

technologyand culture Book Reviews 901 fourteen-volume Raccolta de documenti, all ofwhich were published in the last century. Donald H. Keith Dr. Keith is president of Ships of Discovery, a nautical research institution based in the Corpus Christi Museum ofScience and History. He has published extensively on the results of archaeological surveys, excavations, and conservation techniques used to analyze early Spanish shipwreck sites in the circum-Caribbean area, including the earliest European shipwreck discovered in the Americas and most of those cited in the book under review. Public and Private Art Education in France, 1648—1793. By Reed Benhamou . Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993. Pp. 183; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography. £50.00 (paper). This work in the monograph series of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century has little that is of direct interest to most historians of technology. It is interesting, however, for those who acceptjohn U. Nef’s argument that modern industrialism has hitherto displaced the “quali­ tative” aspect that had predominated in earlier pre-Reformation times and economies with the “quantitative.” Nef argued that in Old Regime France a significant proportion of technical and economic activities were considered to be works of art, whether produced by the traditional guilds or many of the state manufactories such as the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Sèvres porcelain works. The lexical confusion between “artisan” and “artist” was only resolved on the eve of the Revolution, which would prolong this confusion for a few more years in some contexts. Reed Benhamou’s chronological limits are the foundation and the abolition of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, one of the two royal learned academies (the other being the Academy ofArchitec­ ture) where teaching as well as discussion was cultivated. In addition to studying the activity of the academy, she looks at other schools set up by private and public enterprise in Paris and the provinces. For the historian of technology, the most interesting one is the Ecole royale gratuite de dessin, as its name implies, a drawing school that accepted students for free. Set up at the personal initiative of JeanJacques Bachelier, member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, this institution depended on the contributions of private benefactors. After a number of transformations in the 19th century, it eventually (in 1877) became today’s École nationale des arts décoratifs. In this popular drawing school run with the discipline ofa factory, a number ofdaily shifts of 125 students were taught geometry and architectural drawing, drawing of figures and animals, and drawing of flowers. With its emphasis on drawing as an applied rather than a fine art, the Parisian school greatly influenced similar schools in the French provinces. A more detailed 902 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE history of this institution (unfortunately not translated into English) has been written by Arthur Birembaut (in René Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIII’ siècle), but the author presents a number ofinteresting general conclusions regarding the teaching ofart in such contexts. She argues that, unlike the academy, interested in stressing the “fine” in fine arts, the free schools of drawing, supported by the middle classes and businessmen, saw art as a practical and economically useful activity. Frederick B. Artz claimed that the importance of drawing in industry was exaggerated, and other authors have attributed the popularity of drawing in the 18th century to the influence of sensationalist philoso­ phy. But the author thinks that drawing was genuinely perceived as something like the computer literacy of our own time—a necessary base for most other technical and economic activities. Not only did it have economic value by improving the quality of work in a wide variety of trades and industries, as well as educating a more highly skilled workforce that would be better capable of earning more, but it also had a useful social function. Unemployed youths would not only be kept out of mischief temporarily by art education, but the kind of education they received—practical and concrete—would be utilitarian, limited, and socially benign, unlike the abstract reasoning acquired in colleges that could...