Phonological Properties Research Articles

Stimulus- and Person-Level Variables Influence Word Production and Response to Anomia Treatment for Individuals With Chronic Poststroke Aphasia.

The impact of stimulus-level psycholinguistic variables and person-level semantic and phonological processing skills on treatment outcomes in individuals with aphasia requires further examination to inform clinical decision making in treatment prescription and stimuli selection. This study investigated the influence of stimulus-level psycholinguistic properties and person-level semantic and phonological processing skills on word production accuracy and treatment response. This retrospective analysis included 35 individuals with chronic, poststroke aphasia, 30 of whom completed typicality-based semantic feature treatment. Mixed-effects logistic regression models were used to predict binary naming accuracy (a) at baseline and (b) over the course of treatment using stimulus-level psycholinguistic word properties and person-level semantic and phonological processing skills as predictors. In baseline naming, words with less complex lexical-semantic and phonological properties showed greater predicted accuracy. There was also an interaction at baseline between stimulus-level lexical-semantic properties and person-level semantic processing skills in predicting baseline naming accuracy. With treatment, words that were more complex from a lexical-semantic standpoint (vs. less complex) and less complex from a phonological standpoint (vs. more complex) improved more. Individuals with greater baseline semantic and phonological processing skills showed a greater treatment response. This study suggests that future clinical research and clinical work should consider semantic and phonological properties of words in selecting stimuli for semantically based treatment. Furthermore, future clinical research should continue to evaluate baseline individual semantic and phonological profiles as predictors of response to semantically based treatment. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21256341.

Comparative Reconstruction Probabilistically: The Role of Inventory and Phonotactics

I introduce a novel quantitative methodology for evaluating manual comparative reconstructions. This method is incumbent on the existence of a manual comparative reconstruction and, unlike previous quantitative methods, cannot give a result contradictory to the reconstruction. The primary goal for this framework is to reconcile traditional and quantitative methodologies and act as an objective and accessible platform for comparative reconstruction, thereby extending the scope of historical linguistics further into the past. A few theoretical corollaries of the framework are also presented. It is shown that the likelihood that a reconstruction is spurious is related to some of the phonological properties of the descendent language. This likelihood is inversely correlated with mean word-length and segmental inventory size. Additionally, most active phonological processes and cooccurrence restrictions in the language – such as phonotactic constraints, prosodic effects, segment harmony, and neutralization – all serve to increase the likelihood that a reconstruction to that language is spurious.

Grammatical tone mapping in Ekegusii

AbstractA major issue in Bantu morphophonology is how to get the right tones in the right ‘cells’ in the verb paradigm. In many Bantu languages, grammatical tones are assigned to different positions in the verb stem depending on inflectional features of tense, aspect, mood (TAM), polarity and clause type: The same TAM may assign different tones (and different segmental allomorphs) in the affirmative vs. negative and in main vs. relative clauses. Although such ‘melodic tones’ (Odden & Bickmore 2014) are typically restricted to the verb stem (root + suffixes), often also the domain of vowel harmony and other segmental phonology, both the presence and mapping of grammatical tones within the stem cannot be determined without reference to the prefixal inflectional marking of subject, negation, TAM and object which precede the stem. In this article, we discuss three cases in Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya, that require the stem-assigned grammatical tones to look ‘outward’ to morphological and phonological properties of such prefixes: (1) differential mapping according to whether the pre-stem tone-bearing unit is toneless, a derived H(igh) (from H-tone spreading), or underlyingly /H/ (Bickmore 1997, 1999); (2) presence of an object prefix in imperative and subjunctive forms and (3) initial/final tone agreement between the subject prefix and the final vowel of the verb (cf. Rolle & Bickmore (2022). We will show that Ekegusii provides extensive evidence that both the presence of grammatical Hs and their specific mapping, while targeting the stem (root + suffixes), must be ‘globally’ calculated on the basis of the entire morphosyntactic structure of the verb (including features exponed by prefixes).

The significance of the sound in poems "I`m Listening to Istanbul" by "Orkhan Vali" and "I`s Cairo" by "Sayed Hijab"

There are many Arab and Turkish poets who have talk about the cities of Cairo and Istanbul in their poems,The poems "I`m Listening to Istanbul" by Turkish poet Orkhan Vali Kanik and "It`s Cairo" by Egyptian poet Sayed Hijab are among the most important poems that talked about Istanbul and Cairo during the twentieth century. The phonemic aspect is one of the most prominent aspects of these two poems, and then the research deals with the phonetic characteristics of the poems and their role in expressing the feelings of each of two poems towards their cities by using Contrastive approach to shedding light on the significance of letters sounds, whether through using them throughout the text or in rhyming. It also deals with the phonological properties of words such as repetition, anagrams and its morphological construction , and phonological characteristics of sentence structure such as repetition, alliteration and mixing visual and auditory imagery.

THE ONOMATOPOEIA BLENDS: MORPHONOLOGICAL AND GRAPHIC OVERLAPPING

This paper analyses onomatopoeia blends with fusion of a phonological or graphical overlap of the SWs (e.g., bombastic). The phonological parallel of part or whole SWs increases the fortune of the blend. Producing a word that phonetically imitates the sound pronounces is known as onomatopoeia. Phonological properties and overlapping are highly relevant in coining onomatopoeia blends. Modern linguistic theories hold that relationships between sounds and meanings are subjective. However, growing evidence suggests that sounds and meanings can have systematic relationships, known as ‘sound symbolism’. Therefore, this study highlights the morphonological and graphic overlapping inspiration in the onomatopoeic blends found in journalism and advertising. This study aims to classify the types of morphonological and graphic overlapping onomatopoeia blends and explore its sound symbolism. This qualitative study used Mattiello’s (2013) and Hinton et al.’s (2006) frameworks to analyse 40 onomatopoeic blends according to morphonological and graphic overlapping and sound symbolism. Onomatopoeia is the interpretation and reproduction of a sound within the framework of a language. The findings mostly revealed phonological and graphic overlapping with imitative sound symbolism in onomatopoeia blends. The semantic effect is noticeable in an onomatopoeia because of the phonetic structure of words that identify typically imitative sounds. Phonological overlapping symbolically highlights the interrelatedness of the SW’s meanings in blending. The onomatopoeia blends effectively spread a message and attract attention to an idea or a product in advertising and journalism.Keywords: Blending, onomatopoeia, morphonological and graphic, overlapping, meanings

The role of phonology in Vata adjectival agreement

AbstractIn realizational theories of morphology, different opinions exist on the relationship between phonology and Vocabulary Insertion. On the one hand, there are separational theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), which assume that Vocabulary Insertion does not interact with the phonological component of the grammar. These theories predict that the properties of a language's regular phonology never play a role when vocabulary items (VIs) are inserted. The opposite view is held by integrational theories as, for instance, proposed in Wolf (2008). These theories assume that the general phonology of a language can influence Vocabulary Insertion. Based on adjectival agreement in the language Vata, I propose an integrational model that assumes that Vocabulary Insertion applies in an Optimality-Theoretic (Prince & Smolensky 1993) phonology, where regular phonological constraints are active. I propose that the phonology consists of two levels: one level where VIs are inserted and one level for regular phonology.

Phonological variation on Twitter: Evidence from letter repetition in three French dialects

AbstractWriting on social media often departs from prescriptive norms through the use of non-standard words, spellings and punctuation. Amongst these traits is the repetition of letters (e.g. <ouiiiii> for oui ‘yes’). In this study, we draw upon a corpus of over 65 million tweets from three dialects of French (Laurentian, Metropolitan and Midi) to test phonological motivations for the choice of repeated letter in a word with repetition. Using mixed-effects multinomial regression, we compare dialectal differences in whether repetition targets final consonants (silent or pronounced), word-final orthographic <e> corresponding to phonological schwa, and prosodically accented penults. We demonstrate that repetition covertly signals phonological properties. We conclude that prosody mediates morphological and phonological effects and that grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences vary between regions, thereby producing phonological patterns that writers likely did not intend to convey at the time of writing. We also propose that orthographic repetition on Twitter has two prosodic sources: the default pitch accent in French (shifted or not) and focus.

Phonetic and phonological properties of the advanced tongue root feature in African languages

The paper presents an overview of the ATR (advanced tongue root) feature, which is fairly widespread among the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages of the Macro-Sudan Belt. The phonetic section provides a description of the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the feature. The review of the articulatory basis of the feature is presented in a historical perspective, from the fi rst cineradiographic studies of the 1960s till the laryngoscopic studies of the recent years. The paper shows how the introduction of new methods shifted attention from the tongue root movement, which had been given primacy in production of the contrast, to aryepiglotto-epiglottal constriction and a synergistic system of laryngeal articulations. The paper provides a description of several acoustic measures that have been found to correlate with the ATR feature: the frequency of the fi rst formant, the fi rst formant bandwidth, the spectral center of gravity, the relative intensity of the fi rst to the second formant. Similarities and differences between ATR, height and tenseness, which have been largely discussed in the literature, are also described in the paper. The phonological section provides an overview of ATR harmony systems. The main attention is paid to the strong crosslinguistic tendency for [+ATR] to function as the dominant value in languages with ATR contrast among high vowels, but for [−ATR] to be dominant in languages in which ATR is only contrastive for non-high vowels. The paper describes diff erent manifestations of ATR dominance (assimilatory, allophonic, and coalescent dominance) among two major types of underlying vowel inventories.

A corpus-based study of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French and what it teaches us about its phonological status

What is commonly considered as an epenthetic vowel can actually refer to at least two different realities: phonological epenthesis or phonetic excrescence. French schwa, noted [ә], is a vowel alternating with zero and limited to unstressed syllables that can appear word-internally or word-finally. This paper presents an extensive description of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French in order to shed light on its nature: is it an intrusive vowel or a full epenthetic vowel? To that extent, three large corpora of French containing more than 110 hours of speech were used to establish the presence of word-final schwa as a function of sociolinguistics, orthography, phonotactics and phonetics. Our conclusions are that word-final schwa is impacted by speech style, gender, orthography, phonotactics (i.e., the number of adjacent consonants and their sonority profile), and the phonological properties of the codas. However, speech rate does not impact word-final schwa realization. The specific results lead us to suggest that word-final schwa in Standard French shares similarities with intrusive vowels but ultimately behaves like a legit epenthetic vowel.

Long-distance phonological processes as tier-based strictly local functions

Whether we analyze phonological processes using a system of rules or constraints, the resulting map from underlying representations to surface pronunciations can be characterized as a function. Viewing processes as mathematical objects in this way allows us to study properties of phonology that hold no matter how it is implemented. Work in this vein has found that a majority of phonological processes only consider information within a finite window, placing them in the highly restrictive class of Strictly Local (SL) functions (Chandlee 2014; Chandlee et al. 2014; 2015). Long-distance phonological processes, however, lie outside the capabilities of the SL functions since they consider information that can be arbitrarily distant. The more powerful class of subsequential functions has been offered as a potential characterization of long-distance phonology (Heinz & Lai 2013; Luo 2017; Payne 2017), but we argue that an intermediate class offers a more natural model. Specifically, by incorporating an autosegmental tier (e.g., Goldsmith 1976) into the structure of an SL function, the non-local information crucial for applying long- distance processes can be rendered local. In addition to assessing the typological coverage of these Tier-based Strictly Local functions (Burness & McMullin 2019; Hao & Andersson 2019; Hao & Bowers 2019), we show that they fail to generate two pathological behaviours (minimum distance requirements and modulo counting) that can be accomplished with a subsequential function. We therefore conclude that tier-based computation is a better characterization of long-distance phonology than subsequential computation.

Phonological restrictions on nominal pluralization in Sign Language of the Netherlands: evidence from corpus and elicited data

Abstract This study focuses on nominal pluralization in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). The aim is to offer a comprehensive description of nominal pluralization processes in the language, based on both corpus data and elicited data, taking into account potential phonological restrictions. The results reveal that NGT nouns can undergo several pluralization processes, the main ones being simple reduplication (i.e., repeating the noun sign at one location) and sideward reduplication (i.e., repeating the noun sign while moving the hand sideward). The choice of pluralization process depends on phonological properties of the base noun: (i) nouns that are body-anchored or involve a complex movement undergo simple reduplication; (ii) nouns articulated at the lateral side of the signing space undergo sideward reduplication; (iii) nouns articulated on the midsagittal plane can undergo both simple and sideward reduplication. Strikingly, the data show considerable variation, and all types of nouns can be zero-marked, that is, plural marking on the noun is not obligatory. The results further suggest that all nouns can undergo at least one type of reduplication. Thus, while phonological properties of the base noun influence the type of reduplication, they do not block reduplication altogether. Plural reduplication in NGT is therefore less constrained than has been reported for other sign languages, where certain noun types cannot undergo reduplication. This shows that reduplication – despite being iconically motivated – is subject to language-specific grammatical constraints.

Phonological restrictions on nominal pluralization in Sign Language of the Netherlands: evidence from corpus and elicited data

Abstract This study focuses on nominal pluralization in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). The aim is to offer a comprehensive description of nominal pluralization processes in the language, based on both corpus data and elicited data, taking into account potential phonological restrictions. The results reveal that NGT nouns can undergo several pluralization processes, the main ones being simple reduplication (i.e., repeating the noun sign at one location) and sideward reduplication (i.e., repeating the noun sign while moving the hand sideward). The choice of pluralization process depends on phonological properties of the base noun: (i) nouns that are body-anchored or involve a complex movement undergo simple reduplication; (ii) nouns articulated at the lateral side of the signing space undergo sideward reduplication; (iii) nouns articulated on the midsagittal plane can undergo both simple and sideward reduplication. Strikingly, the data show considerable variation, and all types of nouns can be zero-marked, that is, plural marking on the noun is not obligatory. The results further suggest that all nouns can undergo at least one type of reduplication. Thus, while phonological properties of the base noun influence the type of reduplication, they do not block reduplication altogether. Plural reduplication in NGT is therefore less constrained than has been reported for other sign languages, where certain noun types cannot undergo reduplication. This shows that reduplication – despite being iconically motivated – is subject to language-specific grammatical constraints.

The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation

Recent literature has highlighted the extent to which inflectional paradigms are organisedinto systems of implications allowing speakers to make full use of the inflection systemon the basis of exposure to only a few forms of each word. The present paper contributesto this line of research by investigating in detail the implicative structure of EuropeanPortuguese verbal paradigms. After outlining the computational methods we use to thateffect, we deploy these methods on a lexicon of about 5000 verbs, and show how the morphological and phonological properties of European Portuguese verbs lead to the observed patterns of predictability.

Contrastive Feature Typologies of Arabic Consonant Reflexes

Attempts to classify spoken Arabic dialects based on distinct reflexes of consonant phonemes are known to employ a mixture of parameters, which often conflate linguistic and non-linguistic facts. This article advances an alternative, theory-informed perspective of segmental typology, one that takes phonological properties as the object of investigation. Under this approach, various classificatory systems are legitimate; and I utilize a typological scheme within the framework of feature geometry. A minimalist model designed to account for segment-internal representations produces neat typologies of the Arabic consonants that vary across dialects, namely qāf,ǧīm,kāf, ḍād, the interdentals, the rhotic, and the pharyngeals. Cognates for each of these are analyzed in a typology based on a few monovalent contrastive features. A key benefit of the proposed typologies is that the featural compositions of the various cognates give grounds for their behavior, in terms of contrasts and phonological activity, and potentially in diachronic processes as well. At a more general level, property-based typology is a promising line of research that helps us understand and categorize purely linguistic facts across languages or language varieties.

The representation of variable tone sandhi patterns in Shanghai Wu

Disyllabic verb-noun (V-N) items in Shanghai Wu have variable surface tone patterns: They can undergo either a rightward extension tone sandhi, which extends the lexical tone of the first syllable over the entire word, or tonal reduction on the first syllable. The current study investigates how the phonological properties of these alternation processes as well as variation influence how Shanghai speakers represent and access such words. We conducted an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment on Shanghai V-N items that can undergo either tonal extension or tonal reduction with native Shanghai speakers. Each disyllabic target was preceded by monosyllabic primes with the canonical tone, the tonal-extension tone, the surface tone, or a tone unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the targets. Results showed both canonical and tonal-extension priming effects, but no surface priming effect. Moreover, although more familiar V-Ns were recognized with shorter reaction time, the priming effect did not interact with speakers’ familiarity ratings or sandhi preference ratings of the targets. These data are consistent with the interpretation that both the canonical and tonal-extension forms are represented in Shanghai speakers’ mental lexicon due to tone sandhi variation, but the representation does not seem to be modulated by the frequencies of the variants. Also, together with findings from auditory priming studies of other tone sandhi patterns, the current study suggests that certain phonological properties of an alternation, such as its locality and transparency, influence the representation of words undergoing the alternation; but whether the alternation is structure-preserving does not seem to impact the representation.

Neural Processing of Spectral and Durational Changes in Speech and Non-speech Stimuli: An MMN Study With Czech Adults.

Neural discrimination of auditory contrasts is usually studied via the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials (ERPs). In the processing of speech contrasts, the magnitude of MMN is determined by both the acoustic as well as the phonological distance between stimuli. Also, the MMN can be modulated by the order in which the stimuli are presented, thus indexing perceptual asymmetries in speech sound processing. Here we assessed the MMN elicited by two types of phonological contrasts, namely vowel quality and vowel length, assuming that both will elicit a comparably strong MMN as both are phonemic in the listeners’ native language (Czech) and perceptually salient. Furthermore, we tested whether these phonemic contrasts are processed asymmetrically, and whether the asymmetries are acoustically or linguistically conditioned. The MMN elicited by the spectral change between /a/ and /ε/ was comparable to the MMN elicited by the durational change between /ε/ and /ε:/, suggesting that both types of contrasts are perceptually important for Czech listeners. The spectral change in vowels yielded an asymmetrical pattern manifested by a larger MMN response to the change from /ε/ to /a/ than from /a/ to /ε/. The lack of such an asymmetry in the MMN to the same spectral change in comparable non-speech stimuli spoke against an acoustically-based explanation, indicating that it may instead have been the phonological properties of the vowels that triggered the asymmetry. The potential phonological origins of the asymmetry are discussed within the featurally underspecified lexicon (FUL) framework, and conclusions are drawn about the perceptual relevance of the place and height features for the Czech /ε/-/a/ contrast.

How, when and why can the mother-tongue language be forgotten? The case of international adoption

The present paper deals with the attrition of the first language. It presents a general overview of language attrition as a research field and discusses the main characteristics of the phenomenon by examining some typical lexical, grammatical, and phonological properties of attriters’ speech. Our attention is drawn here to a variety of factors, such as age, time spent in the L2 environment, frequency of first language use, language attitudes, and other aspects that have an impact on language attrition. The paper also reflects on and motivates the choice of the term ‘attrition’ in the Lithuanian academic use. The current empirical analysis focuses on an extreme case of first language attrition in the situation of international adoption of an early-teenager (~12 years old) Lithuanian girl adopted to Italy. The linguistic development of the girl was normal, and at the time of adoption she was regularly literate in Lithuanian L1. With the adoption, her language environment switched completely from Lithuanian to Italian. This case study is based on longitudinal observation and speech recordings mainly from the final stage of the observation period, i.e., 14 months after her departure from the country of origin. The paper examines Lithuanian utterances and other elements of the Lithuanian language in the girl’s communication. Her spontaneous speech is analysed mostly on the lexical and grammatical level, but some other language levels are also touched upon. The analysis shows a very advanced stage of first language attrition not only on the most evident – lexical – level, but also substantial changes on the grammatical level. The data shows that categories of tense, aspect, indefiniteness, case, and even gender, which differ in the two – Lithuanian and Italian – languages, have been impacted by the new dominant language. To conclude, even though the girl’s age and particularly positive attitudes towards the Lithuanian language were quite likely the most important factors for her maintaining some of the language one year later, the attrition of her L1 is still very advanced.

Rhythm-Speech Correlations in a Corpus of Senegalese Drum Language

In some African cultures, drumming is used for expressing linguistic meanings. Our research focuses on Senegalese musical traditions of encoding linguistic messages on the sabar drums. Senegalese drummers have the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. We consider rhythms and their linguistic correlates as being part of a Sabar drum language. The long-term goal of this investigation is to establish the linguistic properties of the Sabar drum language. To this end, this work relies on two kinds of research materials collected from Senegalese drummers: bàkks (classical sabar phrases, not improvised on the spot) and sabar improvisations including their translation to Wolof. We study the regularities between Wolof units and sabar rhythms in the collected data. We tested the hypothesis of a syllable-level correspondence between Sabar and Wolof, assuming that each sabar stroke represents a syllable or a number of syllables in Wolof, where the nature of the correspondence depends on the phonetic or phonological properties of a vowel in a syllable. The analysis has shown that different drum strokes are more commonly associated with different types of vowels (front, central or back; open, mid-open/mid-closed or closed vowels).

Phonetics and Phonology of Stop Consonants in the Guaymi Spoken in Costa Rica


 
 
 The present work consists of an analysis of the phonetic and phonological properties of the sequences /t-k/ and /b-d-ɡ/ from the Guaymi spoken in La Casona, Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The corpus was analyzed with Speech Analyzer and the Lisker and Abramson (1964) method was applied in order to obtain the values of the V.O.T. The results suggest that the sequence /t-k/ does not present systematic allophonic variations, while /b-d-g/ alternates with stop, fricative, and approximant allophones; neutralization among stop phonemes is not frequent. Lastly, the V.O.T. contributes to the differentiation between voiceless and voiced stops.
 
 

A Parallel Approach to Mobile Affixation in Huave

Huave exhibits "mobile affixation", whereby the placement of individual affixes varies depending on the phonological properties of affix and stem. Kim (2008, 2010) analyzed these facts within a cyclic cophonology approach through the interaction between alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince, 1993) and the phonological constraints *CC and DEP. Using the same core components, this paper develops an alternative, fully parallel analysis.In this approach, morphemes are unordered in the phonological input, every morpheme is indexed to its own (crucially gradient) alignment constraint, and output ordering is determined entirely through simultaneous constraint interaction. Notably, this analysis captures a previously unnoticed generalization about the stability of left/right order between affixes in the language.The main contribution of this new analysis is that it provides a principled distinction between mobile and immobile affixes: the order of affixes, as determined by the relative ranking of their alignment constraints, correlates with their ability to trigger epenthesis, as determined by their ranking relative to DEP. This follows from a parallel approach with a single language-wide ranking, but not from a cyclic cophonology account. Furthermore, this distinction can be tied directly to morphosyntactic structure via Zukoff's (2020) "Mirror Alignment Principle" and considerations of Base-Derivative faithfulness (Benua, 1997).