Phonemic Inventory Research Articles

Revisiting the population vs phoneme-inventory correlation

Relationships between phonological systems and extralinguistic factors is controversial. Using a sample of 961 phoneme inventories from the PHOIBLE database, genetic and speaker population data from Ethnologue and WALS, and a hierarchical linear model that accounts for genetic relatedness at family and genus levels, we show that speaker population accounts for little to no variation in most aspects of the phonological system (number of phonemes, vowels, obstruents, etc). We argue that spurious correlations in previous studies resulted from failure to control for language relatedness, samples skewed by small size or over-representation of certain families, and/or case-based reasoning lacking statistical rigor.

Does a stop bias exist in infant consonant manner-of-articulation perception?

Phoneme inventories are biased favoring stop over fricative consonants. A similar bias is evident in acquisition. For example, an asymmetrical pattern was observed when infant word learning was assessed using the switch task with stop-initial and fricative-initial minimal pair CVC nonsense syllables (Altvater-Mackensen & Fikkert, 2010). In this task, Dutch-learning fourteen-month-olds noticed a fricative to stop change but failed to detect a stop to fricative change. These findings were interpreted in terms of phonological representations emerging in early lexical development. In this study, we tested English and French infants aged 4-5 months to determine whether they show a perceptual bias favoring stop manner. We presented CVC nonsense syllables - /bas/ and /vas/- in a preference task using the look-to-listen procedure. The /b-v/ contrast is phonemic in English and French. Infants listened significantly longer to /bas/ than to /vas/ trials (p = .004). This perceptual preference cannot be explained in terms of phonological representations in young infants who are not yet producing stops or fricatives and have almost no receptive vocabulary. We will discuss this phonetic bias in light of adult data showing similar perceptual asymmetries and consider the implications for the development of infant speech processing and early word learning.

The effects of jaw surgery on bilingual speech

Surgery designed to correct misalignments of the jaw may lead to changes in the fine phonetic detail of speech segments. In some cases, these changes are unstable, with the acoustic parameters of post-surgical speech gradually reverting toward pre-surgical values, even when this causes speech to become less perceptually or acoustically “normal” (Lee et al, 2002; Niemi et al, 2006). This process might be driven primarily by tactile feedback, which could have differential effects on consonants and vowels, since consonants involve greater contact between articulators; alternatively, it might be driven primarily by auditory feedback, which might be expected to affect consonants and vowels to a similar degree. Previous studies have examined only vowels or consonants in isolation, and they have examined only a single language at a time. Here, a case study of a Korean-English bilingual's speech over the course of a year before and after surgery is presented. The subject's entire phoneme inventory in both languages is examined in order to determine the effects of surgery on different segment types and to determine to what extent the effects are language-specific.

To What Extent do we Hear Phonemic Contrasts in a Non-native Regional Variety? Tracking the Dynamics of Perceptual Processing with EEG

This combined ERP and behavioral experiment explores the dynamics of processing during the discrimination of vowels in a non-native regional variety. Southern listeners were presented with three word forms, two of which are encountered in both Standard and Southern French ([kot] and [kut]), whereas the third one exists in Standard but not Southern French ([kot]). EEG recordings suggest that all of the word pairs were discriminated by the listeners, although discrimination arose about 100ms later for the pairs which included the non-native word form than for those which contained word forms common to both French varieties. Behavioral data provide evidence that vowel discrimination is sensitive to the influence of the listeners' native phonemic inventory at a late decisional stage of processing.

Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution

Recent genetic studies attribute the negative correlation between population genetic diversity and distance from Africa to a serial founder effects (SFE) evolutionary process. A recent linguistic study concluded that a similar decay in phoneme inventories in human languages was also the product of the SFE process. However, the SFE process makes additional predictions for patterns of neutral genetic diversity, both within and between groups, that have not yet been tested on phonemic data. In this study, we describe these predictions and test them on linguistic and genetic samples. The linguistic sample consists of 725 widespread languages, which together contain 908 distinct phonemes. The genetic sample consists of 614 autosomal microsatellite loci in 100 widespread populations. All aspects of the genetic pattern are consistent with the predictions of SFE. In contrast, most of the predictions of SFE are violated for the phonemic data. We show that phoneme inventories provide information about recent contacts between languages. However, because phonemes change rapidly, they cannot provide information about more ancient evolutionary processes.

Phonetic explanations for the infrequency of voiced sibilant affricates across languages

AbstractThis paper shows that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency for voiced sibilant affricates to be infrequent or missing altogether. Phonological processes examined in the paper illustrate that (1) voiceless stops undergo affrication more readily than voiced ones, and (2) voiced affricates deaffricate more commonly than voiceless ones, thereby contributing to the asymmetry in frequency between voiced vs. voiceless affricates.Phonetic properties of the sounds may explain these patterns. Affricates in general require complex control over supralaryngeal apertures, and they appear to have long durations in many languages. Long duration and complete oral closure at the beginning of affricates contribute to a buildup of intraoral pressure which impedes phonation. An aerodynamic experiment of obstruents, including affricates, was carried out for Polish and German, languages which differ in their realization of the stop voicing contrast (viz., voicing vs. aspiration). Voiced affricates in Polish had significantly longer voicing than in German; in medial position, they also had shorter durations and lower peak pressure values. We suggest that languages having voiced affricates in their phoneme inventory may tend to limit duration and intraoral pressure buildup in these sounds to allow vocal-fold vibration to continue.

SYSTEM AND METHOD OF USING ACOUSTIC MODELS FOR AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION WHICH DISTINGUISH PRE− AND POST−VOCALIC CONSONANTS

Disclosed are systems, methods and computer readable media for training acoustic models for an automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) system. The method includes receiving a speech signal, defining at least one syllable boundary position in the received speech signal, based on the at least one syllable boundary position, generating for each consonant in a consonant phoneme inventory a pre-vocalic position label and a post-vocalic position label to expand the consonant phoneme inventory, reformulating a lexicon to reflect an expanded consonant phoneme inventory, and training a language model for an automated speech recognition (ASR) system based on the reformulated lexicon.

Contact-Induced Change in Southern Bougainville

1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 ABERRANT AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES OF MELANESIA. The Austronesian languages of the Melanesian region have long been viewed as different iiom those of Micronesia and Polynesia in ways that raise questions regarding their historical development. Grace (1981, 1992, 1996) describes this difference as a continuum from more to more exemplary languages, noting the presence of many more aberrant Austronesian languages in Melanesia than in the other two regions of Oceania. By aberrant, Grace (1992, 1996) means a language with which the application of the Comparative Method of historical linguistics yields results that are complex and difficult to interpret. (For discussion of the comparative method, see Rankin 2003 and Harrison 2003.) Grace lists four ways in which languages can be aberrant: (i) they show relatively few cognates with other Austronesian languages; (ii) they are structurally atypical of the Austronesian languages of their subgroup (for example, Oceanic); (iii) they have large phoneme inventories and phonetic features that are atypical of Austronesian languages; and/or (iv) they do not show unambiguous regular sound correspondences, but rather often display multiple sets of contrasting correspondences. Languages with one or more of these features raise the question of what kinds of historical explanations account for their atypical nature. There is continuing debate regarding the histories of these languages in Melanesia (see Pawley 2006). (1) Ross (1988) demonstrated that the application of the Comparative Method to the Austronesian languages of northwestern Melanesia, namely Papua New Guinea and the northwestern Solomon Islands, does in fact yield regular sound correspondences and patterns of shared innovations that indicate phylogenetic relationships among the languages of the region. However, Ross (1988) also notes that these languages are characterized by a high degree of linguistic diversity or, in Grace's (1981) terms, are aberrant with respect to features (i) and (ii). For example, in terms of lexicon, languages of the Northwest Solomonic (henceforth NWS) subgroup are among the most innovative within the Austronesian family. That is, these languages retain proportionally fewer Austronesian etyma than other languages in the family (see Blust 2000, Pawley 2009, Ross 2010). Also, certain languages within this subgroup, in particular the Mono-Uruavan ones, show highly atypical grammatical structures in comparison with other Austronesian languages of the region. There is agreement in the literature that in this northwest region of Melanesia the linguistic diversity reflects histories of contact-induced change, resulting from widespread bilingualism among speakers of Austronesian and Papuan languages (Lynch 1981, Ross 1988, Pawley 2006). Thurston (1982, 1987, 1994) and Ross (1996, 2008) investigate the atypical or aberrant grammatical structures in Austronesian Lusi (West New Britain, Papua New Guinea) and Takia (Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea), respectively. They show that these structures are similar to ones found in neighboring Papuan languages, and that they reflect contact-induced change. Comparable aberrant structures in other Austronesian languages of northwestern Melanesia, including the three Mono-Uruavan languages of the southern Bougainville region, have been presumed to reflect similar processes of contact-induced change. 1.2 LANGUAGES OF THE SOUTHERN BOUGAINVILLE REGION. All of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia east of about 138[degrees] East are part of the large Oceanic branch of the family (see Lynch, Ross, and Crowley 2002). The Oceanic languages of Bougainville, Buka, and Nissan islands in Papua New Guinea, and of the Shortland Islands, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, (2) and New Georgia in the Solomon Islands form the NWS subgroup within Oceanic (Ross 1988). Within NWS, it is the Mono-Uruavan subgroup (Ross 1988) comprising three languages--Mono, Uruava and Torau--that display highly atypical grammatical structures. …

Dempwolff Reinvented: A Review of Wolff (2010)

This ambitious study, the result of over forty years of intermittent labor, essentially attempts to restart Austronesian comparative linguistics from the ground up. It rejects several key distinctions made by Dempwolff and accepted by virtually all subsequent scholars, and proposes a number of modifications to the phoneme inventory and word structure that reportedly are motivated at least in part by the author’s belief that Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan are branches of a larger language phylum. The body of the work contains sketches of the historical phonology of 37 languages reaching from Taiwan to Polynesia. These vary greatly in quality, accuracy, and relevance. The book concludes with a glossary of around 1,760 reconstructions, about 95 percent of which are drawn from Dempwolff or from Blust and Trussel’s more recent Austronesian Comparative Dictionary .

Comparing Vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: Citation Speech Data

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words relative to their English cognates, by comparing picture-prompted citation speech from five young Gurindji Kriol speaking women and four young Australian English speaking women from Katherine, the nearest town. The results indicate systematic differences in vowel pronunciation and vowel variability between Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English, in monophthongs and diphthongs. We also consider the vowel variation in these tokens in the context of the likely vowel phoneme inventory in Gurindji Kriol, or the extent of permitted within-category variation in the languages.

Perception and production of English fricative sounds by advanced Korean EFL learners

This study explored the perception and production of English voiceless fricatives among advanced Korean EFL learners by conducting on-line experiments. Thirty two college students who had overall high English proficiency participated in the experiments and nonce words beginning with one of the voiceless fricatives /f/, /?/, /s/, and /?/ were used in the experiments. In particular, 48 pairs of English nonce words, 24 identical (e.g., findert-findert, thomber-thomber) and non-identical pairs (e.g., findert-thindert, thomber-fomber) each, were employed in the perception test and the same 24 nonce words (e.g., findert, thimbert, simbert, shipkin; fomber, thombul, sombul, sholtem) were used in the production test. The results showed the precedence of perception over production but no correlation between them, indicating that the learners’ perceptual deficiency of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their production defect of those sounds or vice versa. Importantly, the results from the perception test revealed that the participants had a great difficulty with the /f/-/?/ contrast, as opposed to the /s/-/?/ contrast. The participants’ ability to contrast between /?/ and /s/ was relatively good, unlike findings of previous studies (Joh and Lee 2001). As for production, the participants had most difficulty with the interdental fricative / / followed by /f/, but they did not have much difficulty with /s/ or /?/. Even though the results of the production test are overall consistent with those of the perception test, some discrepancy was found especially in the perception and production of /f/ and /?/. Further, replacement patterns in production were analyzed in terms of phonetic and/or articulatory properties of the target sounds and the L1 phonemic inventory. Some implications for the teaching of fricative sounds were also drawn.

An ontology for accessing transcription systems

This paper presents the Ontology for Accessing Transcription Systems (OATS), a knowledge base that supports interoperation over disparate transcription systems and practical orthographies. The knowledge base includes an ontological description of writing systems and relations for mapping transcription system segments to an interlingua pivot, the IPA. It includes orthographic and phonemic inventories from 203 African languages. OATS is motivated by the desire to query data in the knowledge base via IPA or native orthography, and for error checking of digitized data and conversion between transcription systems. The model in this paper implements these goals.

When alphabets collide: Alphabetic first-language speakers’ approach to speech production in an alphabetic second language

This study analysed the extent to which literate native speakers of a language with a phonemic alphabetic orthography rely on their first language (L1) orthography during second language (L2) speech production of a language that has a morphophonemic alphabetic orthography. The production of the English flapping rule by 15 adult native speakers of Spanish (NSS) was analysed. Flap production should not be problematic for NSS learning English as L2, since the flap [ ] exists in the Spanish phonemic inventory and it has similar acoustic, articluatory, and distributional properties in English and Spanish. However, this study hypothesizes that access to the flap is blocked by NSS participants’ lack of phonological awareness in English, which is brought about by the participants’ reliance on the Spanish orthographic system, since the graphs used to represent the English flap intervocalically have either different surface realizations in Spanish (such as <t> and <d>) or have no equivalents in the Spanish orthographic system (such as <tt> and <dd>). It was found that NSS relied on the Spanish orthographic system at a statistically significant level, despite both languages having alphabetic orthographies and sharing the same visual code. Less reliance on L1 orthography was observed in frequent L2 lexical items, demonstrating that negative effects of L1 orthography are inversely correlated to familiarity with L2 lexical items and that frequent lexical items promote L2 phonological awareness.

An EPG Study of Palatal Consonants in Two Australian Languages

This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Australian languages, Arrernte and Warlpiri. (Alveo-)palatal consonants are phonemic for stop, lateral and nasal manners of articulation in both languages, and are laminal articulations. However, in Arrernte, these lamino-(alveo-)palatals contrast with lamino-dental consonants for all three manners of articulation (i.e., it is a double-laminal language), whereas in Warlpiri this laminal contrast does not exist (i.e., it is a single-laminal language). Data are analyzed according to manner of articulation, vowel context and phrase position. Results suggest that in the double-laminal languageArrernte,the (alveo-)palatal articulation is further back than in the single-laminal language Warlpiri, presumably due to the presence of the lamino-dental in theArrernte phoneme inventory. The lateral has the least contact in the back regions of the palate for both languages, but there is no significant difference in contact pattern between the stop and the nasal. However, results tentatively suggest that the nasal (alveo-)palatal is the most likely to show effects of prosodic or vocalic context, and it is suggested that this is due to the less strict airflow requirements for the nasal than for the stop or the lateral.

Vowel Substitution: A Comparative Study of English Loans in Punjabi and Urdu

The present paper examines the adaptation of English loanwords in Punjabi and Urdu particularly substitution of vowels. It is a comparative study of vowel substitution in Punjabi and Urdu which concludes that both recipient languages reshape English vowels to the closest available vowels in their phonemic inventories. For the purpose of determining the substitution of vowels, two corpora have been used: questionnaire-based corpus of English loanwords in Punjabi and Urdu (Hussain, 2011), and spoken corpus based on Punjabi dramas, films, and real life conversations (Mahmood et al., 2011). English monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs that are selected for analysis are /ɒ/, /ɔ:/, /ɜ:/, /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /əʊ/, /aɪə/. The paper elucidates that vowel substitution is a patterned and systematic phenomenon in Punjabi and Urdu loanword phonology, on the basis of these patterns substitution of English loanwords containing monophthongs and diphthongs that are yet to be borrowed is possible.

Phonological development in children learning Finnish: A review

The language to which children are exposed has been shown to have a direct effect on their early phonological development. Despite a growing body of data from cross-linguistic studies and studies on phonological development in various language environments, English still often serves as a benchmark for comparative studies. This article reviews general trends in phonological development and compares them with the latest studies on children acquiring Finnish. The main goal is to explore the course and timing of the development in children acquiring Finnish by bringing together recent research from phonemic inventories and phonotactics, including word length acquisition. Key developmental steps of phonological development are identified and directions for future research are recommended.

Typology of creole phonology

This paper reports on the analysis of a typological database of creole phoneme inventories and surface syllables. The sample encompasses a balanced set of creole languages lexified by Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The results of the analysis demonstrate that most creole languages exhibit between twenty and thirty-seven contrastive segments, between five and seven phonemic vowel qualities, and between two and three stop series. No creoles show only CV, and many display CCVC surface syllables. These features are quite unremarkable in comparison with non-creole languages around the world, but they represent significant evidence against claims that the structure of creole languages is especially simple. Instead, creole languages cluster in the typological middle.

Outlines of Bengali Phonology in the light of Generative Phonotactic

According to the theory of G(enerative) P(honotactic) (elaborated in Singh 1984, 1990), a phonemic inventory and a list of the W(ell)-F(ormedness) C(onditions) in addition to three hierarchically arranged strategies (Assimilation/ Substitution > Epenthesis > Deletion) to repair the sequences that violate these WFCs represent the essentials of a phonological description. For instance, the phonology of Panjabi, Chittagonian and Walpiri has, each, a WFC which bans the cluster /sk/ in onset. If these languages must adapt the English loan word school, then, Panjabi and Chittagonian repair it with epenthesis. In Walpiri, the word becomes /kul/ through deletion because no syllable begins with a vowel in this language, and its phonemic inventory lacks fricatives (/f/, /s/, /z/, etc.). The present is an exhaustive account of the phonology of Bengali in the light of GP. Keywords: Well-formedness conditions; Epenthesis; Deletion; Substitution; Mechanism of repairDOI: 10.3329/dujl.v2i4.6901Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics Vol.2(4) August 2009 pp.93-114

A contrastive analysis of English and Bangla phonemics

Contrastive phonemics is the field of study in which different phonemic systems are laid side by side to find out similarities and dissimilarities between the phonemes of the languages concerned. Every language has its own phonemic system, which holds unique as well as common features. A language shares some phonemes with other languages, but no two languages have the same phonemic inventory. This article makes a contrastive analysis of the phonemic systems of English and Bangla. The aspects of similarities as well as dissimilarities between the two have been explored in detail. It brings into focus the inventory of phonemes of the two languages along with relevant phonetic and phonological characteristics. The vowel and consonant phonemes of the two languages have been compared with sufficient examples, making it clear where and how they are identical and different. Key words: contrastive; Bangla; English; phonemicsDOI: 10.3329/dujl.v2i4.6898Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics Vol.2(4) August 2009 pp.19-42

Social structure and phoneme inventories

Social structure and phoneme inventories