Grammar Of Perception Research Articles

Revisiting phonotactic repairs in Cantonese loanword phonology: it’s all about sC

Different factors have been claimed to affect the choice of repair on English words with ill-formed Cantonese phonotactics in Cantonese loanword phonology. The first half of this paper presents experimental evidence showing that variation is observed only when repairing different onset cluster types: there is vowel epenthesis for s + consonant (sC) clusters but deletion of the second consonant for other (OR) clusters. I propose that the Syllable Mapping Grammar (SMG), the syllable structure mapping component of the perception grammar, drives such variation: Cantonese speakers assign different phonological representations based on cluster well-formedness. When they perceive words with an sC cluster, their SMG assigns [s] as syllabic. A full OT grammar is also provided. I present evidence for the knowledge of cluster well-formedness from speakers of languages like Cantonese where complex onsets are absent. Potential sources of such knowledge and other alternatives to my proposal are also discussed.

Je ll’ai vu: Perception-driven allomorphic optimization of Frenchl’

AbstractThis article aims to explain the optional gemination in the elided form of the French 3rdp. object pronounsleandla, i.e. before vowel, as in [ʒəllɛvy] forje l’ai vu(e)‘I saw him/her/it’. This geminate, which cannot be accounted for in purely phonological terms, is shown to follow from a boundary shift within the morphological sequence /il+lə/la+V/, providing the 3rdp. object pronouns with a new geminate allomorph before vowel; thereby, /ll/ can spread to the entire paradigm. It is argued (a) that the resulting allomorphy is the strategy found by speakers to eliminate the irregular allomorphy of the 3rdp. subject pronounilbefore consonant; (b) that a perception grammar is needed to capture the reasons for the new allomorphy.

Spanish ‘depalatalization’: the synchronic, diachronic and perception perspectives

Spanish has a restriction on palatal nasals and laterals in the coda causing them to be realized as dental/alveolar coronals. In the onset position, the palatal point of articulation is retained, bello ‘beautiful-masc.’, beldad ‘beauty’; doña ‘Madam’, don ‘Mister’. Alternations such as these led phonologists to propose a rule of depalatalization that turns an underlying palatal nasal/lateral into a coronal (Contreras 1977; Harris 1983). Pensado (1997) and Harris (1999) later tried to debunk this rule, the former on psycholinguistic grounds, and the latter on the basis of the word structure of Spanish (palatals are always followed by –e). More recently, within an optimality-theoretic framework and through loan word evidence, Lloret and Mascaró (2006) argue again in favor of an active process of depalatalization in Modern Spanish. Taking Lloret and Mascaró as its point of departure, this paper expands the discussion on depalatalization to consider diachronic data and the role of the underlying representation and the perception grammar. Historical data supports depalatalization as an active phenomenon in Old and Medieval Spanish; yet the morphophonological alternations cannot be considered active/productive synchronically. Unlike previous serial models of phonology, an OT framework allows for the incorporation of diachronic data into the analysis, thus explaining how the current situation came about and shedding light on synchronic alternations. OT also provides a formalization of the role of the underlying representation in the diachronic change and in synchronic loanword evidence, thus providing support for depalatalization as an active phonotactic restriction.

Perception as Intentionality and Reality: A Contribution to the Grammar of Perception

Perception as Intentionality and Reality: A Contribution to the Grammar of Perception

Perceptual Cues to Lexical Tone in Burmese

Lexical tone in Modern Burmese is a complex contrast where systematic differences in intensity, duration, phonation type, and vowel quality operate alongside pitch distinctions. Prior phonetic studies have confirmed that speakers produce distinct values for each of these phonetic qualities with each tone (Thein Tun 1982, Watkins 2005, Gruber 2010). This study asked twelve native speakers of Burmese to identify resynthesized single syllable stimuli as bearing one of the four tones in a forced-choice test. Results indicate that Burmese listeners necessarily use all three properties examined (duration, pitch, and phonation type) in their perception grammar.

Vowel emphatic reduplication in Jeju Korean

It is argued that the emphatic reduplication of Jeiu Korean is a case of cooperation of universal grammar of perception and localized grammar of production. While the general shape of emphatic forms is made through maximizing the perceptual distance such as Maximize Distance of Formants, the specific arrangement of the perceptual principles is applied by phonotactic grammars which are realized as raising and fronting in vowels. This process of negotiation between two grammars is a motivation of the emphatic reduplication.

Formalizing creole sound change

This article examines sound change in French Lexifier Creoles and the neutralization of contrast involving the feature [round]; secondary concerns include the nature of diachronically related inputs, base richness and decreolization. Phonological restructuring is described in an Optimality Theoretic grammar distinguishing between perceptual, declarative and procedural strata. Base richness holds only at the declarative stratum, as input to the perceptual and procedural strata are constrained by experience and feature licensing, respectively. Explanation of phonological restructuring centers on the perception grammar, where constraints refer to the parsing of experiential input. In the incipient creole, neutralization of contrast predicated by [round] is initially attributed to substrate grammatical transfer, reflecting first language attenuation. The possibility of creole-specific learning or attenuation to second language contrasts is also addressed and shown to lead to distinct output scenarios, depending upon the reranking of constraints under each stratum. Crucially, reranking at either the declarative or procedural strata is dependent upon learning at the perceptual stratum; rankings that do not mirror those of either the lexifier or substrate lead to output variability, the frequency of which is hypothesized to frame the eventual stabilization of representations.

An acoustic functional grammar of English intonation

There has been a resurgence in recent years of linguistic models that directly embed exact physical and acoustic data right into the formalism. This work attempts to show that many aspects of speech perception and production can only be understood when the acoustic input is fully considered. In the case of speech perception, if there are abstractions, they are abstractions over acoustic input, not based on a priori phonological categories. The current paper extends this work into English intonation. The functional phonology of Paul Boersma, which incorporates exact frequency values into an optimality theoretic perception grammar, is extended to explain several basic facts about English intonation, including the derivation of categorical high and low tones from the acoustic signal, the relation of tones to hierarchically adjacent tones, and the affectual aspects of classically paralinguistic intonation. The primary advantage of this approach is that it allows a single model to handle both linguistic and paralinguistic intonation structure, a merger which is only possible due to the use of physical acoustic data in the model.

SPEECH PERCEPTION IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: A SUGGESTED MODEL

In recent work on second language acquisition, reference has been made to the learner's second language “production grammar” and “perception grammar,” since decoding skills seem to be acquired before encoding skills. However, the postulation of two basically separate grammars for any language can pose problems. A model of speech perception and production is suggested here which attempts to account for different rates of acquisition of perceptual and productive skill in the second language, without assuming the existence of two separate second language grammars. In Neisser's model of speech perception, Stage One could correspond to a “perception grammar”; however, it cannot be strictly called a “grammar.” In Stage Two the second language grammar used in decoding the utterance is the same as that used in production of the second language utterance. The discrepancy between perception and production in second language acquisition can be accounted for by assuming the existence of a preliminary stage of speech perception, in which decoding is not based upon syntactic rules, but upon a feature analysis and hypothesis formation. Some principles which may be used in analyzing the utterance in this preliminary stage are discussed and related to some research findings in second language acquisition.