Syllable Onset Research Articles

Convergent neural signatures of speech prediction error are a biological marker for spoken word recognition

We use MEG and fMRI to determine how predictions are combined with speech input in superior temporal cortex. We compare neural responses to words in which first syllables strongly or weakly predict second syllables (e.g., “bingo”, “snigger” versus “tango”, “meagre”). We further compare neural responses to the same second syllables when predictions mismatch with input during pseudoword perception (e.g., “snigo” and “meago”). Neural representations of second syllables are suppressed by strong predictions when predictions match sensory input but show the opposite effect when predictions mismatch. Computational simulations show that this interaction is consistent with prediction error but not alternative (sharpened signal) computations. Neural signatures of prediction error are observed 200 ms after second syllable onset and in early auditory regions (bilateral Heschl’s gyrus and STG). These findings demonstrate prediction error computations during the identification of familiar spoken words and perception of unfamiliar pseudowords.

Syllabification in Optimality Theory

This paper examined syllabification in the Sokoto dialect of Fulfulde within the framework of Optimality Theory. The theory employed constraint-based rather than rule-based notations in the analysis of the grammar of languages. This study focused on the Sokoto dialect of Fulfulde in view of the number of dialects of the language spoken across West Africa. Using field-based data, the analysis revealed the salient syllabification requirements of Fulfulde. Findings showed that the syllables of the Sokoto dialect of Fulfulde require onsets and nuclei as obligatory elements. Syllable onsets in the dialect are maximally composed of a single consonant as complex onsets are prohibited. Codas are optional and may be simple or complex. A restriction placed on coda consonants is that except half of geminates, only sonorants are allowed, although in word-final positions, [ŋ], a sonorant, is not attested. These outcomes demonstrated the extent of conformity of Sokoto Fulfulde syllables with the markedness constraints governing syllable structure and the Syllable Contact Law. Further findings indicated that although syllabification in languages is grounded in the sonority of segments vis-à-vis the restrictions that languages place on phoneme combinations, the sonority scale, as presently designed does not adequately handle syllabification in this dialect; calling for an all-inclusive sonority scale.

The interaction of affix size, type and shape: a cross-linguistic study

Abstract This study explores the phonological structure of affixes based on different parameters. We begin by investigating the common but insufficiently supported claim that affixes tend to be monosyllabic, and we then take up the ideas that prefixes and suffixes differ in terms of size and in their proclivity for allomorphy. Our database consists of affix lists of 25 unrelated languages, which come from all six geographical macro-areas and yield a total of 1,454 affixes (403 prefixes, 1,051 suffixes). The results show that both prefixes and suffixes are most often monosyllabic, but prefixes are still significantly shorter than suffixes in terms of segments and syllables. There is no significant difference in terms of allomorphy. We argue that the monosyllabic tendency emerges as an artifact, given that a monosyllabic affix is long enough to be perceived, short enough to be economical, and compatible even with simple syllable structures. Meanwhile, prefixes are shorter than suffixes because they pose a challenge for comprehension and because syllable onsets in many languages allow more complexity than codas. The overall insight is that syllables are a prominent domain in morphology as well as phonology, even though various factors may undermine the overlap of affixes and syllables.

Temporal Coordination of Articulatory Gestures in Nonnative Onset Clusters: Evidence From American English Speakers Using Electromagnetic Articulography.

Research in cross-language speech production indicates that, although the production of nonnative consonant clusters is often difficult, speakers of American English can produce some nonnative clusters (e.g., /fn/) with high accuracy. This ease of production for select nonnative clusters may occur due to similarity of phonetic structure with native clusters (e.g., nonnative /fn/ and native /sm/ are both fricative-nasal sequences). The current study tested this hypothesis by examining the extent of transfer of articulatory coordination from phonetically similar native onset clusters (i.e., /fl/, /sm/) to nonnative /fn/ clusters. Using electromagnetic articulography, lip, tongue, and jaw movements were recorded in nine participants during the production of 22 nonwords (eight tokens per nonword) containing the native and nonnative clusters in different carrier phrases. We examined the temporal lags between each consonantal gesture in a cluster and the flanking vowel gesture, which were compared to the matched singleton conditions. Analyses revealed that, as in native speech, when the syllable onset became more complex (i.e., CV ➔ CCV [C as consonant, V as vowel]), there was an increase in lag (less temporal overlap) between the leftmost consonantal gesture and the vocalic gesture, whereas there was a decrease in lag (more temporal overlap) between the rightmost consonant and the vocalic gesture (i.e., C-center timing). However, the segmental makeup of the cluster and type of carrier phrase used were also found to influence this change in temporal organization, raising new questions for future research. By and large, the findings are in agreement with the idea that the temporal coordination of articulator movements may be transferred from native clusters to phonetically similar nonnative clusters. However, kinematic measures of a broader range of nonnative clusters in different contexts are needed to fully explore this position.

SSTE: Syllable-Specific Temporal Encoding to FORCE-learn audio sequences with an associative memory approach

The circuitry and pathways in the brains of humans and other species have long inspired researchers and system designers to develop accurate and efficient systems capable of solving real-world problems and responding in real-time. We propose the Syllable-Specific Temporal Encoding (SSTE) to learn vocal sequences in a reservoir of Izhikevich neurons, by forming associations between exclusive input activities and their corresponding syllables in the sequence. Our model converts the audio signals to cochleograms using the CAR-FAC model to simulate a brain-like auditory learning and memorization process. The reservoir is trained using a hardware-friendly approach to FORCE learning. Reservoir computing could yield associative memory dynamics with far less computational complexity compared to RNNs. The SSTE-based learning enables competent accuracy and stable recall of spatiotemporal sequences with fewer reservoir inputs compared with existing encodings in the literature for similar purpose, offering resource savings. The encoding points to syllable onsets and allows recalling from a desired point in the sequence, making it particularly suitable for recalling subsets of long vocal sequences. The SSTE demonstrates the capability of learning new signals without forgetting previously memorized sequences and displays robustness against occasional noise, a characteristic of real-world scenarios. The components of this model are configured to improve resource consumption and computational intensity, addressing some of the cost-efficiency issues that might arise in future implementations aiming for compactness and real-time, low-power operation. Overall, this model proposes a brain-inspired pattern generation network for vocal sequences that can be extended with other bio-inspired computations to explore their potentials for brain-like auditory perception. Future designs could inspire from this model to implement embedded devices that learn vocal sequences and recall them as needed in real-time. Such systems could acquire language and speech, operate as artificial assistants, and transcribe text to speech, in the presence of natural noise and corruption on audio data.

Full Transfer and Segmental Emergence in the L2 Acquisition of Phonology: A Case Study

In this paper, we discuss a child Kazakh speaker’s acquisition of English as her second language. In particular, we focus on this child’s development of the English segments |f, v, θ, ð, ɹ, ʃ, ʧ|, which are not part of the Kazakh phonological inventory of consonants. We begin with a longitudinal description of the patterns that the child displayed through her acquisition of each of these segments. The data reveal patterns that range from extremely rapid to rather slow and progressive acquisition. The data also reveal patterns that were unexpected at first, for example, the slow development of |ʧ| in syllable onsets, an affricate that occurs as a contextual allophone in syllable onsets in Kazakh. We analyze these patterns through the Phonological Interference hypothesis, which was recently extended into the Feature Redistribution and Recombination hypothesis. These models predict the transfer into the L2 of all of the relevant phonological features present within the learner’s first language and their recombination to represent segments present in the L2. We also discuss contexts where feature-based approaches to L2 acquisition fail to capture the full range of observations. In all such contexts, we show that the facts are modulated by phonetic characteristics of the speech sounds present in either the child’s L1 or her L2.

Testing an acoustic model of the P-center in English and Japanese.

The notion of the "perceptual center" or the "P-center" has been put forward to account for the repeated finding that acoustic and perceived syllable onsets do not necessarily coincide, at least in the perception of simple monosyllables or disyllables. The magnitude of the discrepancy between acoustics and perception-the location of the P-center in the speech signal- has proven difficult to estimate, though acoustic models of the effect do exist. The present study asks if the P-center effect can be documented in natural connected speech of English and Japanese and examines if an acoustic model that defines the P-center as the moment of the fastest energy change in a syllabic amplitude envelope adequately reflects the P-center in the two languages. A sensorimotor synchronization paradigm was deployed to address the research questions. The results provide evidence for the existence of the P-center effect in speech of both languages while the acoustic P-center model is found to be less applicable to Japanese. Sensorimotor synchronization patterns further suggest that the P-center may reflect perceptual anticipation of a vowel onset.

Segmental and Syllabic Articulations: A Descriptive Approach.

This article reports on jaw articulation, in connection with the segmental articulations of tongue tip and lips. The jaw is considered a syllable articulator as it opens and closes for each syllable, and the amount of jaw opening is related to syllable strength, given the same phonemic vowel. Here, we investigate the syllabic and the segmental articulations relationships to the acoustic segments. We analyze electromagnetic articulography data of 18 Southern Swedish speakers by testing hypotheses based on the Descriptive Approach to Segmental Articulations. In this approach, articulatory movements are divided into fast intervals and steady states, and the crucial ("primary") articulators' deceleration and acceleration peaks align with the acoustic segment boundaries. Previous findings on the lips and the tongue tip are confirmed. New results are the jaw as noncrucial ("nonprimary") does not align with the acoustic segment boundaries: Its steady states are shorter than consonant and vowel segments. Moreover, place of articulation of the coda affects the jaw cycle, while syllable type only affects jaw closing. No such effects are found on the edges of the jaw cycle, instead only gender affects jaw deceleration at syllable onset. The jaw is not crucial for the timing of the acoustic segment boundaries; also, syllable borders seem to not be affected by place of segmental articulation. The results strengthen the view of the jaw as syllable articulator providing a frame and the other articulators (e.g., lips and tongue tip) as the segmental articulators providing the content.

The effect of native language and bilingualism on multimodal perception in speech: A study of audio-aerotactile integrationa).

Previous studies of speech perception revealed that tactile sensation can be integrated into the perception of stop consonants. It remains uncertain whether such multisensory integration can be shaped by linguistic experience, such as the listener's native language(s). This study investigates audio-aerotactile integration in phoneme perception for English and French monolinguals as well as English-French bilingual listeners. Six step voice onset time continua of alveolar (/da/-/ta/) and labial (/ba/-/pa/) stops constructed from both English and French end points were presented to listeners who performed a forced-choice identification task. Air puffs were synchronized to syllable onset and randomly applied to the back of the hand. Results show that stimuli with an air puff elicited more "voiceless" responses for the /da/-/ta/ continuum by both English and French listeners. This suggests that audio-aerotactile integration can occur even though the French listeners did not have an aspiration/non-aspiration contrast in their native language. Furthermore, bilingual speakers showed larger air puff effects compared to monolinguals in both languages, perhaps due to bilinguals' heightened receptiveness to multimodal information in speech.

Amplitude envelope onset characteristics modulate phase locking for speech auditory-motor synchronization.

The spontaneous speech-to-speech synchronization (SSS) test has been shown to be an effective behavioral method to estimate cortical speech auditory-motor coupling strength through phase-locking value (PLV) between auditory input and motor output. This study further investigated how amplitude envelope onset variations of the auditory speech signal may influence the speech auditory-motor synchronization. Sixty Mandarin-speaking adults listened to a stream of randomly presented syllables at an increasing speed while concurrently whispering in synchrony with the rhythm of the auditory stimuli whose onset consistency was manipulated, consisting of aspirated, unaspirated, and mixed conditions. The participants' PLVs for the three conditions in the SSS test were derived and compared. Results showed that syllable rise time affected the speech auditory-motor synchronization in a bifurcated fashion. Specifically, PLVs were significantly higher in the temporally more consistent conditions (aspirated or unaspirated) than those in the less consistent condition (mixed) for high synchronizers. In contrast, low synchronizers tended to be immune to the onset consistency. Overall, these results validated how syllable onset consistency in the rise time of amplitude envelope may modulate the strength of speech auditory-motor coupling. This study supports the application of the SSS test to examine individual differences in the integration of perception and production systems, which has implications for those with speech and language disorders that have difficulty with processing speech onset characteristics such as rise time.

The role of vowel and consonant onsets in neural tracking of natural speech

Objective. To investigate how the auditory system processes natural speech, models have been created to relate the electroencephalography (EEG) signal of a person listening to speech to various representations of the speech. Mainly the speech envelope has been used, but also phonetic representations. We investigated to which degree of granularity phonetic representations can be related to the EEG signal. Approach. We used recorded EEG signals from 105 subjects while they listened to fairy tale stories. We utilized speech representations, including onset of any phone, vowel–consonant onsets, broad phonetic class (BPC) onsets, and narrow phonetic class onsets, and related them to EEG using forward modeling and match–mismatch tasks. In forward modeling, we used a linear model to predict EEG from speech representations. In the match–mismatch task, we trained a long short term memory based model to determine which of two candidate speech segments matches with a given EEG segment. Main results. Our results show that vowel–consonant onsets outperform onsets of any phone in both tasks, which suggests that neural tracking of the vowel vs. consonant exists in the EEG to some degree. We also observed that vowel (syllable nucleus) onsets exhibit a more consistent representation in EEG compared to syllable onsets. Significance. Finally, our findings suggest that neural tracking previously thought to be associated with BPCs might actually originate from vowel–consonant onsets rather than the differentiation between different phonetic classes.

Production and perception of stop voicing in Central Australian Aboriginal English: A cross-generational study

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a series of studies investigating the production and perception of stop voicing contrasts in speakers of Central Australian Aboriginal English (CAAE; Alice Springs, Australia). Study 1 investigated Voice Onset Time (VOT) and Constriction Duration (CD) in stop consonants in naturalistic adult speech, and the speakers produced a VOT-based voicing distinction in word-initial stops, while medial voiceless stops differ from voiced stops in having both longer VOTs and longer CDs, at least for the syllable onset position. Study 2 investigated the implementation of stop voicing contrasts (VOT and CD) in a cohort of child CAAE speakers, and the results are consistent with the adult CAAE data, suggesting predictable intergenerational transmission. Finally, Study 3 tested child speakers’ perception of stop voicing contrasts using a mispronunciation detection task, where the participants demonstrated above-chance performance for the voicing distinction across all places of articulation. Together, the findings suggest that CAAE has phonemic stop voicing distinctions, like Mainstream Australian English, and that CAAE medial stops are jointly cued by both VOT and CD, a feature shared with the contact language, Kriol.

An Analysis of Phonological Nativisation of English Loanwords in Olunyole: An Optimality Theoretic Approach

This study aims to explain how Olunyole nativises English loanwords into its phonological system. The specific objectives are to describe the phonological strategies involved in the nativisation of English loanwords in Olunyole, and to provide an Optimality theoretic account of the phonological strategies involved in the nativization of English loanwords in Olunyole. The study is anchored within the Optimality theoretic framework (OT). OT is a constraints-based approach which argues for competition between inputs that are parsed through universal and language specific constraints to arrive at a well-formed output in a language. A corpus of 170 English loanwords in Olunyole forms the basis of analysis in this study. This data was collected from native speakers of Olunyole in Luanda Township and Wamasiolo sub-location in Luanda Sub-County-Kenya. Data was collected using Semi-Structured Interviews, Note Taking, and Audio Recording. The findings of this study show that English loanwords are fully nativized into Olunyole grammar through four main ways. First, English sounds that lack a counterpart in the Olunyole sound system are replaced by native Olunyole sounds through substitution. Secondly, vowel epenthesis is used to resolve the incidence of syllable codas in English loanwords. Additionally, consonant clusters in syllable onsets are banned, and such occurrence is resolved through vowel epenthesis. Finally, phonotactic gaps native to Olunyole are maintained in loanwords through segment preservation strategies. The findings of this study show that that Olunyole grammar heavily constrains the nativization of English loanwords. The implications of this study from the analysis of data indicate that the nativisation process in Olunyole is motivated by the phonological system of Olunyole and thus peculiar to Olunyole language, and has little to do with the internally motivated phonological rules of the source language, in this case, English.

Acoustics of stress and weight in Central Alaskan Yup’ik

In Central Alaskan Yup’ik, syllables with long vowels are always stressed, light syllables alternate stress, but only certain closed syllables are stressed. The acoustic correlates of stress, however, have only been the subject of one small-scale preliminary study so far. Moreover, there are divergent accounts of how phonological phenomena such as gemination and syllable closure affect weight. This article presents an acoustic investigation of gemination, stress, and phonemic length. Six Yup’ik recordings were annotated, resulting in a dataset of 2,602 syllable onsets and 2,282 vowels, which were then modelled using linear mixed-effects models. The first part of the study, examining the distribution of gemination as a metrical-adjacent phenomenon, revealed that singleton onsets were shorter than geminated onsets both within feet and across foot boundaries. The main study showed that stressed vowels were longer, louder, and, for short vowels only, higher in f0 than unstressed vowels, while long vowels were longer, louder, and featured greater f0 falls than short vowels. These results corroborate the literature that asserts that long, short unstressed, and short stressed vowels are all produced distinctively, and moreover, that vowel duration is affected by iambic lengthening and syllable closure. The identification of stress correlates and other metrical behaviors examined here set the stage for future prosodic work on Yup’ik.

Repair and Drift in Austronesian Languages: Avoidance of Dissimilar Labials as the Onsets of Successive Syllables

Abstract: From the time of their earliest reconstructable ancestor, Austronesian languages have avoided morphemes that allow dissimilar labials as the onsets of successive syllables. What is of interest to phonologists is that this inherited morpheme structure constraint continues to hold on the word level in many (but not all) daughter languages. As a result of the extension of phonotactic restrictions from the level of the morpheme to the level of the word, lexical bases that are affixed in ways that violate this constraint show various repairs aimed at removing a marked sequence, most commonly one in which a labial-initial base drops the initial syllable when infixed with -um -. The range of attested repair options is surveyed in relation to claims made in earlier analyses, additional support is given for previously-recognized repairs, and two new functionally-equivalent avoidance strategies are described. Finally, although the most common repair option (pseudo nasal substitution) may be inherited from Proto-Austronesian, other structurally-distinct but functionally-equivalent repairs apparently constitute a drift, namely a product of the continued operation of inherited structural pressures after language separation, a type of change that can be viewed as the diachronic counterpart of a synchronic conspiracy.

Acoustic correlates of oral and glottal stops in Tahitian

The Eastern Polynesian language Tahitian spoken in French Polynesia, is described as having a simple phonological inventory with a single stop series: /p, t, ʔ/. Little is known about the acoustic properties of these consonants compared to well-resourced languages. Five female speakers of Tahitian produced multiple repetitions of tokens that varied in terms of stress location and prosodic phrase position. Acoustic analyses of stop duration and VOT, as well as voicing measures including voicing fraction and strength of excitation were conducted. As predicted, oral stops were significantly longer than glottal stops by 63 ms in word medial contexts with no effect of stress. VOT values were on average 21–26 ms (with /t/ marginally longer than /p/) confirming these are short lag stops (Cho and Ladefoged, 1999). Stress was marginally significant with shorter VOT values in stressed syllable onsets with no affect of prosodic position, unlike Hawaiian (Davidson and Parker Jones, 2022). Like Hawaiian, however, (Davidson, 2021), the glottal stop in Tahitian has gradient realizations although the majority are realised with full glottal closure with low voicing fraction and strength of excitation values. There are also clear effects of greater coarticulation in unstressed versus stressed syllables suggesting localised hyperarticulation in the latter context.

Investigation on the realization of the phoneme /r/ in the unstressed word final syllable onset in modern German spontaneous speech

Investigation on the realization of the phoneme /r/ in the unstressed word final syllable onset in modern German spontaneous speech

Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon

The beginnings of words are, in some informal sense, special. This intuition is widely shared, for example, when playing word games. Less apparent is whether the intuition is substantiated empirically and what the underlying organizational principle(s) might be. Here, we answer this seemingly simple question in a quantitatively clear way. Based on arguments about the interplay between lexical storage and speech processing, we examine whether the distribution of information among different speech sounds of words is governed by a critical computational unit for online speech perception and production: syllables. By analyzing lexical databases of twelve languages, we demonstrate that there is a compelling asymmetry between syllable beginnings (onsets) versus ends (codas) in their involvement in distinguishing words stored in the lexicon. In particular, we show that the functional advantage of syllable onset reflects an asymmetrical distribution of lexical informativeness within the syllable unit but not an effect of a global decay of informativeness from the beginning to the end of a word. The converging finding across languages from a range of typological families supports the conjecture that the syllable unit, while being a critical primitive for both speech perception and production, is also a key organizational constraint for lexical storage.

Temporal Coordination and Markedness in Moenat Ladin Consonant Clusters

In this paper we examine the phonotactics of consonant clusters in Moenat Ladin in terms of their markedness and temporal coordination. Moenat Ladin word-initial clusters include sibilant-stop (SC), stop-/r/ (Cr), stop-/l/ (Cl), and sibilant-stop-/r/ (SCr). However, despite SC and Cl sequences being well-formed in Moenat, sibilant-stop-/l/ (SCl) clusters are almost entirely unattested. We hypothesize that the rarity of SCl clusters owes to a cumulative markedness effect that arises from the combination of marked structures involved in SC and Cl sequences. Our investigation centers chiefly on the status of word-initial SC sequences in Moenat Ladin, for which we hypothesize that the sibilant is organized external to the syllable onset. This hypothesis is supported by an acoustic study of temporal coordination of Moenat, employing the methodology of Ruthan et al. (2019) and Durvasula et al. (2021). We propose a formal account in Harmonic Grammar (Legendre et al. 1990) such that SCl clusters exceed a markedness threshold in contrast to permissible clusters. In this account we employ a model of phonotactics in which a phonotactically non-permissible cluster is modeled as selection of the null parse (e.g. Albright 2008, 2012, Breiss & Albright 2022).

Thalamus drives vocal onsets in the zebra finch courtship song.

While motor cortical circuits contain information related to specific movement parameters1, long-range inputs also have a critical role in action execution2,3. Thalamic projections can shape premotor activity2-6 and have been suggested7 to mediate the selection of short, stereotyped actions comprising more complex behaviours8. However, the mechanisms by which thalamus interacts with motor cortical circuits to execute such movement sequences remain unknown. Here we find that thalamic drive engages a specific subpopulation of premotor neurons within the zebra finch song nucleus HVC (proper name) and that these inputs are critical for the progression between vocal motor elements (that is, 'syllables'). In vivo two-photon imaging of thalamic axons in HVC showed robust song-related activity, and online perturbations of thalamic function caused song to be truncated at syllable boundaries. We used thalamic stimulation to identify a sparse set of thalamically driven neurons within HVC, representing ~15% of the premotor neurons within that network. Unexpectedly, this population of putative thalamorecipient neurons is robustly active immediately preceding syllable onset, leading to the possibility that thalamic input can initiate individual song components through selectively targeting these 'starter cells'. Our findings highlight the motor thalamus as a director of cortical dynamics in the context of an ethologically relevant behavioural sequence.