Mid Vowels Research Articles

The status of /w/ in Old High German

Abstract Old High German (OHG) differs from many other languages in that [w] does not stand in complementary distribution with [u], but rather it exhibits alternations with [o]. For example, the [o] in adjectives like gël[o] ‘yellow.nom.sg’ alternates with [w] in corresponding inflected forms (e.g. gël[w]es ‘yellow.gen.sg’). Based on extant data, we make three claims about OHG [w]. First, we use several analytical lenses – from phonotactics and etymology to sound patterning and feature composition – to argue that /w/ was an underlying consonant. This is surprising from the point of view of phonology since glides like [w] are usually assumed to be allophones of vowels. Second, we propose that OHG /w/ had the same height features as mid vowels. This accounts for the fact that /w/ neutralizes to [o] (and not [u]) in word-final position and also derives independent support from other OHG processes (namely primary umlaut). Finally, we show how the OHG data intersect with literature on the typology of glides and fail to fit naturally within that typology. Our findings place OHG glides into a seemingly unique category, the analysis of which not only broadens our understanding of OHG phonology, but also typological possibilities involved with derived and underlying glides.

Data-Driven Analysis of European Portuguese Nasal Vowel Dynamics in Bilabial Contexts

European Portuguese (EP) is characterized by a large number of nasals encompassing five phonemic nasal vowels. One notable characteristic of these sounds is their dynamic nature, involving both oral and nasal gestures, which makes their study and characterization challenging. The study of nasal vowels, in particular, has been addressed using a wide range of technologies: early descriptions were based on acoustics and nasalance, later expanded with articulatory data obtained from EMA and real-time magnetic resonance (RT-MRI). While providing important results, these studies were limited by the discrete nature of the EMA-pellets, providing only a small grasp of the vocal tract; by the small time resolution of the MRI data; and by the small number of speakers. To tackle these limitations, and to take advantage of recent advances in RT-MRI allowing 50 fps, novel articulatory data has been acquired for 11 EP speakers. The work presented here explores the capabilities of recently proposed data-driven approaches to model articulatory data extracted from RT-MRI to assess their suitability for investigating the dynamic characteristics of nasal vowels. To this end, we explore vocal tract configurations over time, along with the coordination of velum and lip aperture in oral and nasal bilabial contexts for nasal vowels and oral congeners. Overall, the results show that both generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) and functional linear mixed models (FLMMs) provide an elegant approach to tackle the data from multiple speakers. More specifically, we found oro-pharyngeal differences in the tongue configurations for low and mid nasal vowels: vowel track aperture was larger in the pharyngeal and smaller in the palatal region for the three non-high nasal vowels, providing evidence of a raised and more advanced tongue position of the nasal vowels. Even though this work is aimed at exploring the applicability of the methods, the outcomes already highlight interesting data for the dynamic characterization of EP nasal vowels.

Similarity on Tagalog Vowel Alternation: A Weighted Constraint Analysis

This paper proposes that the degree of similarity in terms of vowel identity contributes to the irregularity in Tagalog mid vowel alternation. Findings suggest that both faithfulness constraint (Ident-BR [V]) and markedness constraints (Uniform-V [high] & Uniform-V [round]) based on the Kaun’s (1995) Uniformity Hypothesis dictates this similarity based on various degree. Based on these constraints, an initial grammar was created using simulation phases adapted from Boersma and Hayes (2001), as well as distribution information from native speakers

Vocalic contrasts in Hnaring Lutuv

Lutuv, sometimes called Lautu, is an under-documented Chin language from the Tibeto–Burman language family spoken in Chin State in Western Burma by approximately 15 000 people (Eberhard et al., 2021, citing 2005 data that do not account for current military violence and displacement). Lutuv is also spoken in diaspora communities worldwide, including by about 1000 people in the Chin refugee community of Indianapolis (community estimate). Ongoing fieldwork with the Hnaring variety has revealed that, compared to related languages, Lutuv has undergone radical syllable structure simplification and attendant vowel inventory expansion. In addition to the low vowel /a/ and mid vowels /e ə ɔ/, Lutuv contains six to ten high vowels. These tentatively include four diphthongal vowels (/ie yə uɔ Ɯə) as well as six monophthongs /i y ɨ ʉ Ɯ u/. We explore the distribution of the vowels via a combination of acoustic and comparative data in an effort to better understand the articulatory and featural specifications thereof, with special attention paid to the high vowels. If all of these monophthongs truly are high, it would represent a startlingly large and typologically uncommon high vowel inventory.

A Real-Time Trend Study of the Southern Vowel Shift in Kentuckiana

This article examines both the front and back shifts of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in a rural Kentuckiana (south-central Indiana) community through 50 years of real time, from the middle of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Euclidean distance measurements between the pair of high front vowels /i/ and /I/ and between the pair of mid front vowels /e/ and /ε/ are subjected to analyses of variance (ANOVAs). The mid front vowels are found to be involved in the SVS and increasingly so through real time; the high front vowels, in contrast, not only are not participating in the SVS but have exhibited movements in non-SVS directions. Fronting of the back vowels is analyzed through linear mixed-effects regression analyses. Except for /℧/, which remains stable over time in this community, the other back vowels, /u/, /o/, and the nucleus of the /a℧/ diphthong all show real-time changes that are consistent with the SVS. Some of the real-time developments are at odds with profiles of change through apparent time, which underscores the value of real-time data when and where it is available.

Perception of Fortis and Lenis Stops of English in Word-Initial Position in Terms of VOT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between the responses of native Korean and English listeners to voice onset time (VOT) cues when distinguishing word-initial fortis and lenis stops in English. Additionally, this study examined the effects of the place of articulation and the height and backness of the following vowels. The first finding of the study is that the native Korean listeners needed a longer VOT to differentiate fortis from lenis stops. Second, the VOT boundary was the lowest for bilabial stops, while there was no statistically significant difference between alveolar and velar stops. Third, the boundary was found to be the highest for high vowels, the second highest for mid vowels, and lowest for low vowels. Finally, the boundary of high vowels was formed at a greater value than that of low vowels.

표준 중국어 모음 체계의 음운학적 고찰

This study is about the Mandarin phonological vowel inventory. There are different opinions on how many vowels exist in Mandarin, since their standards are different according to approaches. All the surface representations are treated in phonetic approach, while phonological approach considers underlying representations as phonemes. This study focuses on the underlying representations of Mandarin vowel system, and is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction, and Chapter 2 is literature review. Researchers usually show 22 Mandarin consonants, but their suggestions on the number of Mandarin vowels are various. They show as few as 5 vowels and as many as 14 vowels. Usually researchers, who analyze with phonetic approach, suggest more vowels, while researchers, using phonological perspective, suggest fewer vowels. In Chapter 3, in order to state Mandarin speakers’ intuition, this study conducted a survey, which asked Mandarin speakers’ self-cognition on the several tricky vowels. Based on the results of the survey, this study suggests 8 Mandarin vowel phonemes such as /i/, /y/, /e/, /ɨ/, /a/, /u/, /ɤ/ and /o/ in Chapter 4. High mid vowel /ɨ/ appears as [ɿ], when it comes with [ts, tsʰ, s] in a syllable, and appears as [ʅ], when it comes with [tʂ, tʂʰ, ʂ]. Mid front vowel /e/ is realized as [ɛ] behind medial vowels, and mid back vowel /ɤ/ is realized as [ə] before nasal consonants. Low vowel /a/ has [+back] before [u] and [ŋ], which has [+back]. Thus, this study shows 12 Mandarin vowels such as [i], [y], [e], [ɛ], [ɿ], [ʅ], [ə], [a], [ɑ], [u], [ɤ], and [o] as surface representations, and also provides rational analyses on the allophones with phonological rules. Lastly, Chapter 5 is the conclusion.

Perception of Portuguese Mid Vowels by Heritage Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract The main goal of this study is to investigate the perception of Portuguese mid-vowel contrasts (/ɛ/-/e/ and /ɔ/-/o/) by heritage speakers (HS s) of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) who grew up in the United States. This study shows, for instance, an asymmetry in categorization as a function of degree of language dominance for mid-back vowel contrast, but not for mid-front vowel contrast.

The Historical Reconstruction of Greater Tzeltalan (Mayan) Vowel Assimilation and Vowel Raising Patterns

AbstractThis paper examines the phenomenon of vowel assimilation at a distance in di‐ and trisyllabic roots and stems in the Greater Tzeltalan languages of the Mayan language family. The study focuses on changes undergone in disyllabic and trisyllabic roots and stems, characterized by either anticipatory or perseverative vowel assimilation, and discusses the historical scenarios relevant to their reconstruction to the various relevant stages (Proto‐Greater Tzeltalan, Proto‐Ch’olan, Proto‐Tzeltalan), as well as likely cases of diffusion between Ch’olan into Tzeltalan. In addition, the paper also considers the question of vowel raising in Ch’olan, i.e. the so‐called *oo > u and *ee > i shifts, identified by Kaufman and Norman and reexamined by Brown and Wichmann. We posit a series of phonetic blocking conditions, and we argue that most cases can be accounted for as examples of suffix‐controlled vowel assimilation. It is also shown that the presence of certain typical suffixes with low or mid vowels can account for the etyma that did not experience the shifts.

Contrast and Conflict in Dutch Vowels.

The nature of phonological representations has been extensively studied in phonology and psycholinguistics. While full specification is still the norm in psycholinguistic research, underspecified representations may better account for perceptual asymmetries. In this paper, we report on a mismatch negativity (MMN) study with Dutch listeners who took part in a passive oddball paradigm to investigate when the brain notices the difference between expected and observed vowels. In particular, we tested neural discrimination (indicating perceptual discrimination) of the tense mid vowel pairs /o/-/ø/ (place contrast), /e/-/ø/ (labiality or rounding contrast), and /e/-/o/ (place and labiality contrast). Our results show (a) a perceptual asymmetry for place in the /o/-/ø/ contrast, supporting underspecification of [CORONAL] and replicating earlier results for German, and (b) a perceptual asymmetry for labiality for the /e/-/ø/ contrast, which was not reported in the German study. A labial deviant [ø] (standard /e/) yielded a larger MMN than a deviant [e] (standard /ø/). No asymmetry was found for the two-feature contrast. This study partly replicates a similar MMN study on German vowels, and partly presents new findings indicating cross-linguistic differences. Although the vowel inventory of Dutch and German is to a large extent comparable, their (morpho)phonological systems are different, which is reflected in processing.

Vowel fronting, raising, and backing in Luzon and north-central Sulawesi

This article presents an overview of four shifts – low vowel fronting, low vowel backing, back vowel fronting, and mid vowel raising – found in a number of languages on or near the Pacific coast of Luzon in the Philippines and in north-central Sulawesi in Indonesia. A more extensive illustration of low vowel fronting is given for Umiray Dumaget than has previously been made available, and a second, sporadic correspondence in Umiray Dumaget is shown to be only irregular and unconditioned. Interactions with Philippine-type morphology are also shown to result in synchronically productive alternations in Umiray Dumaget and several of the Mongondow-Gorontalo languages.

Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress.

The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.

Neural Representation of the English Vowel Feature [High]: Evidence From /ε/ vs. /ɪ/.

Many studies have observed modulation of the amplitude of the neural index mismatch negativity (MMN) related to which member of a phoneme contrast [phoneme A, phoneme B] serves as the frequent (standard) and which serves as the infrequent (deviant) stimulus (i.e., AAAB vs. BBBA) in an oddball paradigm. Explanations for this amplitude modulation range from acoustic to linguistic factors. We tested whether exchanging the role of the mid vowel /ε/ vs. high vowel /ɪ/ of English modulated MMN amplitude and whether the pattern of modulation was compatible with an underspecification account, in which the underspecified height values are [−high] and [−low]. MMN was larger for /ε/ as the deviant, but only when compared across conditions to itself as the standard. For the within-condition comparison, MMN was larger to /ɪ/ deviant minus /ε/ standard than to the reverse. A condition order effect was also observed. MMN amplitude was smaller to the deviant stimulus if it had previously served as the standard. In addition, the amplitudes of late discriminative negativity (LDN) showed similar asymmetry. LDN was larger for deviant /ε/ than deviant /ɪ/ when compared to themselves as the standard. These findings were compatible with an underspecification account, but also with other accounts, such as the Natural Referent Vowel model and a prototype model; we also suggest that non-linguistic factors need to be carefully considered as additional sources of speech processing asymmetries.

Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels

The disproportionate number of studies in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands observing Spanish contact effects in Catalan production, rather than Catalan contact effects in Spanish production, is an oversight of bidirectionality and the probabilistic nature of social factors in situations of language contact. Accordingly, the present study analyzes both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate whether Catalan contact effects occur in Spanish via a process of dissimilation, and whether such effects are strengthened in younger speakers due to the relatively recent implementation of Catalan linguistic policy in the educational and public spheres. The results are suggestive of dissimilation, where phonetic distinctions are maintained between Spanish /e/ and the two Catalan mid front vowels across both F1 and F2. Additionally, analyses of variance across F1 and F2 reveal that Spanish /e/ productions across F1 are more diffuse in younger speakers and Catalan mid front vowels across F2 are less diffuse, providing evidence of reciprocity in contact effects. These results underscore the bidirectional nature of language contact and advocate for the use of variance of F1 and F2 as a metric of phonological contact effects.

Acoustic characteristics and placement within vowel space of full schwa in the world’s languages: A survey

Data from about one hundred languages reveal that, in spite of resulting typically from articulatory reduction of peripheral vowels in unstressed position, full schwa may also occur in stressed position in stress languages and in unreduced syllables in languages lacking stress. Formant frequency data reveal that this vowel is mid central, though somewhat shifted to the mid back unrounded area (particularly if long and placed in open syllables and at the edges of words), and exhibits a higher or lower realization depending on the number of mid vowels in the vowel system. In spite of occurring in stressed position, full schwa resembles unstressed schwa in being very short, highly variable and possibly low intensity, which accounts for why it is prone to occur in closed syllables and longer words, and may receive stress only if the remaining vowel nuclei in the word are central and/or short peripheral. Moreover, variability in the F1 and F2 dimensions increases with the number of peripheral mid vowels, which appears to obey symmetry and dispersion principles of vowel space organization.

Acoustic evidence for affix classes: A case study of Brazilian Portuguese

In languages that assign stress differently according to morphological structure, affixes often fall into different categories. In Brazilian Portuguese, normal suffix words have one stress (Base: [kaˈfɛ] ‘coffee’; suffixed: [kafe-ˈtejɾa] ‘coffee pot’). Special suffix words are claimed to have two stresses, one of which falls in the same location as in the independent base ([ka ˌfɛ-ˈzĩɲu] ‘coffee-DIM’). The special suffixes include diminutive -(z)inho, superlative -íssimo, and adverbial -mente. This paper reports on a production study showing that stress maintenance on the base of special suffix words is acoustically present through longer duration and marginally higher intensity, and through maintenance of vowel height for mid vowels. Phonologically, the special suffixes are often analyzed as attaching to an independent prosodic word base (e.g.Collischonn 1994; Moreno 1997; Vigário 2003; Guzzo 2018). I cast the analysis in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993): the phonological differences between special and normal suffixes are due to morphosyntactic differences. Under this analysis, differences between special and normal suffixes are principled rather than arbitrary. Morphological and prosodic structure are both necessary, and prosodic structure mediates between morphology and phonological processes.

Alinha-PB: A Phonetic Aligner for Brazilian Portuguese

Phonetic alignment is the task of finding the limits of phones and higher units in an audio file. This has been reliably done in many languages such as English, French and German, but, so far, no available Brazilian Portuguese aligner had a performance comparable with the ones used for these other languages. Thus, the main goal of this work was to implement a useful tool for forced alignment for Brazilian Portuguese. The implementation was done in two steps, the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and the alignment itself. The Converter is responsible for receiving the input transcription in graphemes and converting it to its equivalent in phonemes and allophones, and was implemented using computational rules derived from the analysis of regular grapheme-phoneme relations in Brazilian Portuguese and an exception dictionary, for words to which no regular rules could be applied. The Aligner was responsible for aligning the phonemes/allophones of the previous module to the corresponding acoustic intervals of the audio file, called "phones". This module was implemented using hidden Markov models. Results for the Converter have an accuracy of over 99%, where the main mistakes involved mid vowels /e/ and /ɛ/ and /o/ and /ɔ/. As for the Aligner, the best model has 87% of the alignments with errors below 25 ms.

Spanish mid vowels as sociolinguistic variables in Galicia

Abstract This paper analyzes the acoustic properties of Spanish stressed mid vowels from a corpus of over 2,800 tokens produced by Galician-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. Following principles of bilingual speech production theory, we explore whether these vowels present lexically conditioned open variants [ɛ] and [ɔ] not present in monolingual Spanish. In combination with linguistic factors, we also examine whether bilingual mid-vowel production in our corpus is related to social variables. Assuming a linguistic repertoires perspective that links variation to identity performance, we argue that Spanish /e/ and /o/ are sociolinguistic variables in Galicia and that the distribution of their variants can be exploited to perform social meaning.

The acoustic behavior of pretonic mid vowels in complex words of BP

O presente estudo pretende investigar um dos correlatos acústicos do acento primário no português brasileiro – a saber, a qualidade vocálica – em vogais médias iniciais de palavras complexas por sufixos legítimos e sufixos composicionais. Partimos da ideia de que afixos legítimos são prosodicamente integrados à base, enquanto afixos composicionais podem ser considerados palavras prosódicas independentes. Por serem palavras prosódicas e portarem um acento primário, hipotetizamos que as vogais da base sejam pronunciadas de forma plena, como vogais tônicas; vogais de palavras derivadas por afixos legítimos, por serem átonas, podem apresentar uma realização mais centralizada no trapézio vocálico. A fim de verificar se a classificação dos afixos em dois grupos distintos, proposta com base morfofonológica, pode ser sustentada por características acústicas, coletamos dados de fala de 5 informantes do sexo masculino da região Sul. Os informantes proferiram as palavras-alvo com vogais médias na frase-veículo “Diga X pra mim” e foram analisados os parâmetros acústicos F1 (referente à altura da língua) e F2 (referente ao avanço/recuo da língua) das vogais iniciais. Os resultados gerais confirmam parcialmente nossa hipótese e mostram que, quando a vogal pretônica apresenta distanciamento em relação aos valores da tônica, geralmente trata-se de uma vogal de formação legítima.

Nasal coda neutralization in Shanghai Mandarin: Articulatory and perceptual evidence

Shanghai Mandarin is reported to neutralize /n/ and /ŋ/ after non-low vowels, a change also reported for other varieties of Chinese. However, the place of articulation of the resulting nasal is unclear. We used production and perception experiments to determine the contexts which condition neutralization and the place of articulation of the resulting nasal. Analysis of ultrasound data using a dimensionality reduction technique revealed that neutralization in production was dependent on the height of the preceding vowel: The highest vowel /i/ conditioned a consistent, non-structure-preserving neutralization to a fronted velar or palatal nasal; the mid vowel /ə/ conditioned an inconsistent, structure-preserving neutralization to [n]; and no neutralization occurred after the low vowel /a/. In contrast, Standard Mandarin controls produced the contrast in all vowel contexts. A follow-up perception experiment confirmed that, consistent with complete neutralization, Shanghai Mandarin listeners failed to distinguish alveolar and velar nasals following /i/. More surprisingly, so did Standard Mandarin listeners, suggesting a near merger of the nasal codas following /i/ in Standard Mandarin. Our results provide support for a role for substantive factors in neutralization-driven sound changes.