Phonetic Representation Research Articles

Neural representation of phonological wordform in temporal cortex.

While the neural bases of the earliest stages of speech categorization have been widely explored using neural decoding methods, there is still a lack of consensus on questions as basic as how wordforms are represented and in what way this word-level representation influences downstream processing in the brain. Isolating and localizing the neural representations of wordform is challenging because spoken words activate a variety of representations (e.g., segmental, semantic, articulatory) in addition to form-based representations. We addressed these challenges through a novel integrated neural decoding and effective connectivity design using region of interest (ROI)-based, source-reconstructed magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) data collected during a lexical decision task. To identify wordform representations, we trained classifiers on words and nonwords from different phonological neighborhoods and then tested the classifiers' ability to discriminate between untrained target words that overlapped phonologically with the trained items. Training with word neighbors supported significantly better decoding than training with nonword neighbors in the period immediately following target presentation. Decoding regions included mostly right hemisphere regions in the posterior temporal lobe implicated in phonetic and lexical representation. Additionally, neighbors that aligned with target word beginnings (critical for word recognition) supported decoding, but equivalent phonological overlap with word codas did not, suggesting lexical mediation. Effective connectivity analyses showed a rich pattern of interaction between ROIs that support decoding based on training with lexical neighbors, especially driven by right posterior middle temporal gyrus. Collectively, these results evidence functional representation of wordforms in temporal lobes isolated from phonemic or semantic representations.

Single-neuronal elements of speech production in humans

Humans are capable of generating extraordinarily diverse articulatory movement combinations to produce meaningful speech. This ability to orchestrate specific phonetic sequences, and their syllabification and inflection over subsecond timescales allows us to produce thousands of word sounds and is a core component of language1,2. The fundamental cellular units and constructs by which we plan and produce words during speech, however, remain largely unknown. Here, using acute ultrahigh-density Neuropixels recordings capable of sampling across the cortical column in humans, we discover neurons in the language-dominant prefrontal cortex that encoded detailed information about the phonetic arrangement and composition of planned words during the production of natural speech. These neurons represented the specific order and structure of articulatory events before utterance and reflected the segmentation of phonetic sequences into distinct syllables. They also accurately predicted the phonetic, syllabic and morphological components of upcoming words and showed a temporally ordered dynamic. Collectively, we show how these mixtures of cells are broadly organized along the cortical column and how their activity patterns transition from articulation planning to production. We also demonstrate how these cells reliably track the detailed composition of consonant and vowel sounds during perception and how they distinguish processes specifically related to speaking from those related to listening. Together, these findings reveal a remarkably structured organization and encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and demonstrate a cellular process that can support the production of speech.

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.

On the Chinese resistance to lexical borrowing: a writing-driven self-purification system

The Chinese language is known for its resistance to lexical borrowing. Transliterations can hardly be retained in this language that use pre-existing characters to simply transcribe the pronunciation of the source word in the donor language. This exclusion can be attributed to the ideographic nature of Chinese characters. Given the stable graphic-meaning correspondence, novel use of characters is expected to be consistent with their usage in previous literature, while the association between the graphic form and the phonetic form has always been loose, rendering it meaningless to use characters as a mere phonetic representation. Here writing is having an effect on the assimilation of loanwords, and more generally, the purist language ideology, which runs counter to the traditionally assumed derivative position of writing, thus shedding light on the implicit effect of writing on language ideology.

English-Arabic Phonetic Dataset construction

In the field of natural language processing, the effectiveness of a semantic similarity task is significantly influenced by the presence of an extensive corpus. While numerous monolingual corpora exist, predominantly in English, the availability of multilingual resources remains quite restricted. In this study, we present a semi- automated framework designed for generating a multilingual phonetic English- Arabic corpus, specifically tailored for application in multilingual phonetically and semantic similarity tasks. The proposed model consists of four phases: data gathering, preprocessing and translation, extraction IPA representation, and manual correction. Four datasets were used one of them was constructed from many sources. A manual correction was used at all the levels of the system to produce a golden standard dataset. The final dataset was in the form (English Word, English Phonetic, equivalent Arabic Word, and Arabic Phonetic). Also, a deep learning approach was used for extracting International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phonetic representation where the results for 13400 samples show that the Phonetic Error Rate (PER) and accuracy were 11.96% and 88.04 % respectively which are good results for producing IPA representation for unknown English and Arabic names.

Neural Representations of Non-native Speech Reflect Proficiency and Interference from Native Language Knowledge.

Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic-phonetic models in more proficient listeners.Significance Statement Behavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent.

Outline of the problem of developing the phonetic level of speech in older preschool children with logopathology

The scientific article presents the theoretical position of modern research on the content of the phonetic level of speech. Attention has been focused on the problem of studying the components of the phonetic level of speech in older preschool children with normotypical psychophysical development and speech disorders. The phonetic level of speech in children with logopathology was experimentally investigated and a comparative analysis was carried out with peers with normotypical psychophysical development. The purpose of the study is to study the current state of formation of the phonetic level of speech in older preschool children with speech pathology. The task of the research: scientific and theoretical substantiation of scientific positions regarding the development of the phonemic level of speech in children with normotypical psychophysical development and outlining the features of its development in children with logopathology; definition of tasks and evaluation criteria for studying the phonemic level of speech; carrying out a comparative analysis of the results of the study of the state of formation on the development of the phonemic level of speech in children of older preschool age with normotypical psychophysical development and with logopathology. The methods of research are tasks aimed at researching the components of the phonetic level of speech, namely phonetic perception (the ability to differentiate phonemes that are similar in sound, distinguish a sound from a group of sounds, determine the sound in a word), phonetic analysis (the ability to determine the first and last sounds in a word, as well as the number of sounds in a word) and phonetic representation (the ability to correlate sounds with the name of an object) in older preschool children with normotypical psychophysical development and speech disorders. The results of the ascertainment experiment indicate that there are significant differences in the formation of the phonemic level of speech between the groups of the studied older preschool children with logopathology and those with normotypical psychophysical development. Phonemic processes in preschoolers with logopathology, as compared with normotypical indicators, develop with a delay, which leads to a number of errors: during phonemic perception, children do not recognize close-sounding sounds; do not know how to distinguish a sound from a group of sounds or in a word; during phonetic analysis – they incorrectly detect the first and last sounds in a word (name the first syllable or part of a word), make a mistake in determining the number of sounds in a word; during phonemic representation - cannot find the sound in the name of the object.

A Phonological Study of Consonants and Vowels Phonemic Merger in Hausa

This paper examined a phonological study of consonants and vowels phonemic merger in Hausa. The main objective of this research is to examine how phonological and morphological rules trigger phonemic merger of certain consonants and vowels phonemes in particular phonetic environments of a word as phonetic and phonemic entity, on the assumption that, phonological and morphological rules relate an underlying structure to its phonetic representation. The study employed generative phonological framework in the analysis of the data so that we can establish the set of rules that describe the changes of the underlying structure when they occur in speech. Also, for the data collection an ethnographic communication method is adopted. The findings of the research discovered three phonological processes that motivate consonants and vowels phonemic merger in Hausa. The identified phonological processes are: palatalization, rhotacization and deletion motivating phonemic merger. In addition, it is noted that phonemic merger is a rule-governed process because, we have clearly seen how a series of cumulative Hausa phonological and morphological rules operate on the underlying forms, and transform them into surface forms in realizing a phonemic merger in Hausa.

Phonotactic Probabilities and Sub-syllabic Segmentation in Language Learning

High phonotactic probabilities are known to exert a facilitative effect on word learning in children and adults in their first language. The present study was designed to investigate the role of phonotactic probabilities when learning a foreign language. Focusing on Austrian and Korean learners of English, we investigated two hypotheses related to phonotactic frequency effects: (1) High-frequency segments have more deeply entrenched phonetic representations, with more automatized pronunciation patterns, rendering phonetic learning of homophonous segments more difficult; (2) High-frequency segments are associated with higher phonetic variability in the first language, which can facilitate phonetic learning in a foreign language. Additionally, the locus of phoneme/ bigram frequency effects was analyzed in relation to left-branching and right-branching syllable structure in German and Korean. We found that proximity to English voice-onset time is correlated with phoneme and bigram frequencies in the first language, but results varied by learner group. Sub-syllabic segmentation of the first language was also shown to be an influential factor. Our study is grounded in research on frequency effects and combines its central premise with phonetic learning in a foreign language. The results show a tight relationship between first language statistical probabilities and phonetic learning in a foreign language.

Modeling Bilingualism as a Dynamic Phenomenon in Healthy and Neurologically Affected Speakers Across the Lifespan: A Commentary on "Computational Modeling of Bilingual Language Learning: Current Models and Future Directions".

Modeling Bilingualism as a Dynamic Phenomenon in Healthy and Neurologically Affected Speakers Across the Lifespan: A Commentary on "Computational Modeling of Bilingual Language Learning: Current Models and Future Directions".

Pronunciation Dictionary-Free Multilingual Speech Synthesis Using Learned Phonetic Representations

Pronunciation Dictionary-Free Multilingual Speech Synthesis Using Learned Phonetic Representations

Weighted entropic associative memory and phonetic learning

The Entropic Associative Memory (EAM) holds declarative but distributed representations of remembered objects. These are characterized as functions from features to discrete values in an abstract amodal space. Memory objects are registered or remembered through a declarative operation; memory recognition is defined as a logical test and cues of objects not contained in the memory are rejected directly without search; and memory retrieval is a constructive operation. In its original formulation, the content of basic memory units or cells was either on or off, hence all stored objects had the same weight or strength. In the present weighted version (W-EAM) we introduce a basic learning mechanism to the effect that the values of the cells used in the representation of an object are reinforced by the memory register operation. As memory cells are shared by different representations, the corresponding associations are reinforced too. The memory system supports a second form of learning: the distributed representation generalizes and renders a large set of potential or latent units that can used for recognizing novel inputs, which can in turn be used for improving the performance of both the deep neural networks used for modelling perception and action, and of the memory operations. This process can be performed recurrently in open-ended fashion and can be used in long term learning. An experiment in the phonetic domain using the Mexican Spanish DIMEx100 Corpus was carried out. This corpus was collected in a controlled noise-free environment, and was transcribed manually by human trained phoneticians, but consists of a relatively small number of utterances. DIMEx100 was used to produced the initial state of the perceptual and motor modules, and for testing the performance of the memory system at such state. Then the incremental learning cycle was modelled using the Spanish CIEMPIESS Corpus, consisting of a very large number of noisy untagged speech utterances collected from radio and TV. The results support the viability of the Weighted Entropic Associative Memory for modelling cognitive processes, such as phonetic representation and learning, for the construction of applications, such as speech recognition and synthesis, and as a computational model of natural memory.

Homophone discrimination based on prior exposure

This article presents three studies testing the potential role of word-specific acoustic details in perception, based on how several factors impact listeners’ accuracy in identifying homophones. Experiment 1 tests how prior exposure to particular homophones said by the same talker impacts identifications; listeners could discriminate between homophone mates with above chance accuracy after exposure to disambiguated tokens of these words produced by the talker, but not when prior exposure did not include the test words. Experiment 2 tests whether having the same talker in exposure and testing is crucial; accuracy is above chance even when the prior exposure to the homophone mates was from a different talker. Experiment 3 tests whether accuracy in homophone identification might be driven by broad associations between meaning and acoustic form rather than the details of particular words; there is no difference between exposure to the particular homophone mates and exposure to semantically similar words. Just having strong positive or negative emotional valence seems to result in higher accuracy for how homophone mates are identified. These results suggest that listeners can make use of semantically-driven acoustic differences between homophone mates when recent exposure makes these details salient or when the form-meaning associations are already strong. This link to acoustic details can be explained via associations with broad aspects of meaning, rather than depending on word-specific phonetic representations.

Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in 18–26-month-olds’ representations of how words sound

By around 12 months, infants have well-specified phonetic representations for the nouns they understand, for instance looking less at a car upon hearing ‘cur’ than ‘car’ (Swingley and Aslin, 2002). Here we test whether such high-fidelity representations extend to irregular nouns, and regular and irregular verbs. A corpus analysis confirms the intuition that irregular verbs are far more common than irregular nouns in speech to young children. Two eyetracking experiments then test whether toddlers are sensitive to mispronunciation in regular and irregular nouns (Experiment 1) and verbs (Experiment 2). For nouns, we find a mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in 18-month-olds. For verbs, in Experiment 2a, we find only a regularity effect and no mispronunciation effect in 18-month-olds, though toddlers’ poor comprehension overall limits interpretation. Finally, in Experiment 2b we find a mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in 26-month-olds. The interlocking roles of lexical class and regularity for wordform representations and early word learning are discussed.

Imagined speech can be decoded from low- and cross-frequency intracranial EEG features

Reconstructing intended speech from neural activity using brain-computer interfaces holds great promises for people with severe speech production deficits. While decoding overt speech has progressed, decoding imagined speech has met limited success, mainly because the associated neural signals are weak and variable compared to overt speech, hence difficult to decode by learning algorithms. We obtained three electrocorticography datasets from 13 patients, with electrodes implanted for epilepsy evaluation, who performed overt and imagined speech production tasks. Based on recent theories of speech neural processing, we extracted consistent and specific neural features usable for future brain computer interfaces, and assessed their performance to discriminate speech items in articulatory, phonetic, and vocalic representation spaces. While high-frequency activity provided the best signal for overt speech, both low- and higher-frequency power and local cross-frequency contributed to imagined speech decoding, in particular in phonetic and vocalic, i.e. perceptual, spaces. These findings show that low-frequency power and cross-frequency dynamics contain key information for imagined speech decoding.

أسماء السیف فی العربیَّة: دراسة لغویَّة

الملخص عنوان البحث (( أسماء السيف في العربية: دراسة لغوية) يهدف إلى دراسة أسماء السيف التي ذکرها اللغويون وتجاوز عددها (70) اسما، والکشف عن الظواهر اللغوية التي تمثلت في الظواهر الصوتية، مثل: القلب المکاني، والإبدال، والمخالفة الصوتية. وظواهر صرفية، مثل: الأوزان الصرفية التي کان أغلب اشتقاقها من الثلاثي الصحيح والمعتل، ثم أوزان الرباعي من الصحيح السالم، والمعرب. کما اشتملت الدراسة على ظواهر دلالية تتمثل في الدلالات المتقاربة، والدلالات المتقابلة، والتضاد، والمشترک اللفظي، ومظاهر التطور الدلالي کتخصيص الدلالة، وتعميمها، وتغيير الدلالة لعلاقة المشابهة، ولغير المشابهة؛ مما يفسر ظاهرة تعدد الأسماء للشيء الواحد التي تعد رافدا مهما في إثراء العربية. Abstract This study (titled Names for ‘Sword’ in Arabic: A Linguistic Study) aims to explore the names of the sword linguists mentioned, exceeding (70) names, and to explore the linguistic aspects that were represented in phonetic representations, such as: metathesis, substitution, and assimilation; morphological phenomena, such as: morphological analogy, most of which were derived from the three-letter-stem verb, with or without vowels and morphological analogy of nominative and accusative cases from the four-letter- stem verb. The study also included semantic representations displayed in hyponyms, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and manifestations of semantic development such as specific connotation, general connotation, and changing connotation for similarity and non-similarity relationships. All of these phonemic, morphological and semantic aspects account for the phenomenon of multiple names for the same thing, which is an important source enriching the Arabic Language.

Medial /nt/ Realizations in English: A Constraint-based Account

This study provides an alternative analysis of word-medial /nt/ realizations in English within a constraint-based theory. First of all, we review Chung’s (2007, 2016) analyses. Chung (2007) tries to present a constraint-based account for the medial /nt/ realizations, and then Chung (2016) proposes the superfoot notion in analyzing English words like cóntemplàte. The superfoot of the word, however, does not occur after an unstressed syllable unlike that of lòllapalóoza, nor does it occur word-initially unlike potáto. In addition, his phonetic representations of /t/ in /nt/ sequences tend to be analyzed inconsistently in certain examples like cón[th]emplàte, cón[t]est, and cén[t]ral. With regard to aspiration, in particular, voiceless stops are usually assumed to be aspirated when a voice onset time (VOT) value is more than 40 ms. The segment [t] in cón[t]emplàte and cón[t]est cannot be deleted since it occurs in the morpheme-initial position. Based on this, we propose a new constraint Max-+C-IO. And thus, some phonetic realizations of the word-medial /nt/ can be treated without using any superfoot.

Language and Learner Specific Influences on the Emergence of Consonantal Place and Manner Features.

This article focuses on the emergence of consonantal place and manner feature categories in the speech of first language learners. Starting with an overview of current representational approaches to phonology, we take the position that only models that allow for the emergence of phonological categories at all levels of phonological representation (from sub-segmental properties of speech sounds all the way to word forms represented within the child’s lexicon) can account for the data. We begin with a cross-linguistic survey of the acquisition of rhotic consonants. We show that the types of substitutions affecting different rhotics cross-linguistically can be predicted from two main observations: the phonetic characteristics of these rhotics and the larger system of categories displayed by each language. We then turn to a peculiar pattern of labial substitution for coronal continuants in the speech of a German learner. Building on previous literature on the topic, we attribute the emergence of this pattern to distributional properties of the child’s developing lexicon. Together, these observations suggest that our understanding of phonological emergence must involve a consideration of multiple, potentially interacting levels of phonetic and phonological representation.

Neutralization in English phonology

In English phonology, neutralization can be considered a process which incorporates a phonemic distinction‟s elimination in a complete context of phonology. The classic example of neutralization is the neutralization of a word-final voicing contrast. If there is phonetically complete neutralization occurs, then there should be phonetically identical two surface forms. In the present study, the main aim is focusing on phonological neutralization while considering the role of phonetic and phonological representations in the perception and production of human speech. The study finds out that there is neutralization, but not always all word-final voice contrast can be neutralized (despite the devoicing rule‟s operation). Moreover, the study finds out that all the rules of phonology can be applied in such a way that where neutralization can be seen and allowing underlying distinctions since, neutralized word can to be preserved or recovered.

Å knyte til struktur og variasjon i lydendring

“Structured heterogeneity”, a founding concept of variationist sociolinguistics, puts focus on the ordered social differentiation in language. We extend the notion of structured heterogeneity to formal phonological structure, i.e., representations based on contrasts, with implications for phonetic implementation. Phonology establishes parameters for what varies and how. Patterns of stability and variability with respect to a given feature’s relationship to representations allow us to ground variationist analysis in a framework that makes predictions about potential sound changes: more structure correlates to more stability; less structure corresponds to more variability. However, even though all change requires variability, not all variability leads to change. Two case studies illustrate this asymmetry, keeping a focus on phonetic change with phonological stability. First, Germanic rhotics (r-sounds) from prehistory to the present day are minimally specified. They show tremendous phonetic variability and change but phonological stability. Second, laryngeal contrasts (voicing or aspiration) vary and change in language contact. We track the accumulation of phonetic change in unspecified members of pairs of the type spelled <s> ≠ <z>, etc. This analysis makes predictions about the regularity of sound change, situating regularity in phonology and irregularity in phonetics and the lexicon. Structured heterogeneity involves the variation inherent within the system for various levels of phonetic and phonological representation. Phonological change, then, is about acquiring or learning different abstract representations based on heterogeneous and variable input.