Phonological Space Research Articles

Searching for common phonological space: /s/-stop clusters in L1 Polish and L2 English

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant–stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study compared ST productions by L1 Polish speakers of second language (L2) English across two levels of proficiency, speaking in both L1 and L2. Rather than shortening post-/s/ VOT, as is common in L1 English, speakers from both proficiency groups exhibited longer VOT in their L2 than in their L1. These results are consistent with the claim that Polish learners of English mistakenly apply the long VOT of L2 English singleton fortis stops in the post-/s/ position. A phonological interpretation of the results within the Onset Prominence framework is provided.

A Self-Supervised Model for Language Identification Integrating Phonological Knowledge

In this paper, a self-supervised learning pre-trained model is proposed and successfully applied in language identification task (LID). A Transformer encoder is employed and multi-task strategy is used to train the self-supervised model: the first task is to reconstruct the masking spans of input frames and the second task is a supervision task where the phoneme and phonological labels are used with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. By using this multi-task learning loss, the model is expected to capture high-level speech representation in phonological space. Meanwhile, an adaptive loss is also applied for multi-task learning to balance the weight between different tasks. After the pretraining stage, the self-supervised model is used for xvector systems. Our LID experiments are carried out on the oriental language recognition (OLR) challenge data corpus and 1 s, 3 s, Full-length test sets are selected. Experimental results show that on 1 s test set, feature extraction model approach can get best performance and in 3 s, Full-length test, the fine-tuning approach can reach the best performance. Furthermore, our results prove that the multi-task training strategy is effective and the proposed model can get the best performance.

Phonetic drift reveals interconnected phonological representations in simultaneous bilinguals: A case study of English and Czech stop consonants

Purpose: The interconnectedness of phonological categories between the two languages of early bilinguals has previously been explored using single-probe speech production and perception data. Our goal was to tap into bilingual phonological representations in another way, namely via monitoring instances of phonetic drift due to changes in language exposure. Design: We report a case study of two teenage English–Czech simultaneous bilinguals who live in Canada and spend summers in Czechia (Czech Republic). Voice onset time (VOT) of word-initial voiced and voiceless stops was measured upon the bilinguals’ arrival to and before their departure from a two-month stay in Czechia. Data and Analysis: Each bilingual read the same set of 71 Czech and 58 English stop-initial target words (and additional fillers) at each time of measurement. The measured VOT values were submitted to linear mixed effects models, assessing the effects of target language, measurement time, and underlying voicing. Findings/Conclusions: After the immersion in a Czech-speaking environment, for both speakers the count of voiced stops realized as prevoiced (i.e., having negative VOT) increased and the measured VOT of voiced stops (appearing different for English and Czech initially) drifted towards more negative (more Czech-like) values in both languages, while no change was detected for the voiceless stops of either English (aspirated) or Czech (unaspirated). The results suggest that the bilinguals maintain three-way VOT distinctions, differentiating voiceless aspirated (English), voiceless unaspirated (Czech), and voiced (English–Czech) stops, with connected bilingual representations of the voiced categories. Originality: Data on phonetic drift in simultaneous bilinguals proficient in their two languages have not previously been published. Significance/Implications: We show that observing phonetic shifts due to changes in the ambient linguistic environment can be revealing about the organization of phonological space in simultaneous bilinguals.

Discrimination of L2 Greek vowel contrasts: Evidence from learners with Arabic L1 background

The present study investigates the assimilation of the Cypriot Greek (CGR) vowels to the phonological categories of Egyptian Arabic (EA) as well as the discrimination of 2 stressed and 2 unstressed Cypriot Greek vowel contrasts by native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. It also intends to test the discriminability of the assimilation types according to the predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). 15 adult female immigrants, who permanently live in Cyprus for 4–5 years and were taught Greek in formal educational settings, completed a task for the assimilation of the second language (L2) vowels to the phonological space of their native language; followed by an AXB test for the detection of the discrimination accuracy over second language vowel contrasts. The discrimination scores of the second language learners were compared with the ones of the native speakers of Cypriot Greek, who constituted the control group. The results indicated a Category Goodness (CG) difference assimilation type for 3 of the vowel contrasts (stressed /i/-/e/, stressed /o/-/u/ and unstressed /o/-/u/) and a Two Category (TC) assimilation for one of the contrasts (unstressed /i/-/e/) as a consequence of the effect of their native language. A moderate discrimination for the contrasts which reported a Category Goodness difference assimilation type was observed while the Two Category assimilation type reported an excellent discrimination by the second language learners. The results agree with the Perceptual Assimilation Model's assumptions about the predictions of the aforementioned assimilation types, also showing a success of the model in the prediction of the perception patterns of experienced second language learners. Finally, the role of stress on the perception of second language contrasts was important since the stressed contrast /i/-/e/ was discriminated in a different manner in comparison to the corresponding unstressed one.

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant- Than Adult-Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus-Based Investigation.

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.

Cross-linguistic vowel variation in trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German.

The present study compares the acoustic realization of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German vowels by trilingual speakers in the Saterland. The Saterland is a rural municipality in northwestern Germany. It offers the unique opportunity to study trilingualism with languages that differ both by their vowel inventories and by external factors, such as their social status and the autonomy of their speech communities. The objective of the study was to examine whether the trilingual speakers differ in their acoustic realizations of vowel categories shared by the three languages and whether those differences can be interpreted as effects of either the differences in the vowel systems or of external factors. Monophthongs produced in a /hVt/ frame revealed that High German vowels show the most divergent realizations in terms of vowel duration and formant frequencies, whereas Saterland Frisian and Low German vowels show small differences. These findings suggest that vowels of different languages are likely to share the same phonological space when the speech communities largely overlap, as is the case with Saterland Frisian and Low German, but may resist convergence if at least one language is shared with a larger, monolingual speech community, as is the case with High German.

Exploring the Bilingual Phonological Space: Early Bilinguals' Discrimination of Coronal Stop Contrasts.

It is well known that the way monolingual listeners discriminate speech sounds is strongly influenced by their native (L1) sound system. Moreover, such perceptual constraints are not limited to monolinguals: multiple studies have found evidence of language-specificity in bilingual speech perception. However, the question of whether bilinguals have simultaneous access to both of their phonologies during non-native contrast discrimination has not been systematically examined. Namely, very few studies of bilinguals have specifically examined cases where a non-native contrast pair straddles the boundary between two sound systems, with one sound corresponding to a sound in the L1, and the other to a sound in the second language (L2), but with neither the L1 nor the L2 containing both. The current study aimed to do so by comparing the ability of early bilinguals to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts consisting of sounds that exist in either their L1 or L2, but not in both. A forced-choice perception task compared two listener groups-Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals-on their perception of Nepali dental-alveolar stop contrasts. Results showed that despite displaying some sensitivity to phonetic differences within each contrast pair, the bilingual group was unable to discriminate such "cross-language contrasts" significantly better than the monolingual English control group.

L2 immersion causes non-native-like L1 pronunciation in German attriters

According to Flege׳s Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual׳s languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters in Anglophone North America (i.e., long-term emigrants in L2 immersion). These speakers were compared to a control group of monolingual German L1 speakers in two analyses: First, L1 speech samples of both groups were rated for native-likeness. Attriters sounded less native-like to raters, with 40% of the attriters rated below the monolingual range. Native-likeness was negatively associated with length of residence abroad and positively associated with L1 use. Second, formant analyses on four speech sounds of German—/aː/, /ɛ/, /ɔ/ and /l/—were conducted for attriters and controls. For these analyses, two attriter subgroups were formed: one with speakers who sounded native-like to raters and one with speakers who did not. It was hypothesised that the formants in both groups would shift in the direction of similar L2 speech sounds and that the shift would be stronger in non-native-like attriters. The first hypothesis was partly confirmed: At least one attriter group differed from the control group on one formant of /aː/ and /l/. These differences were consistent with predictions based on the L2. The second hypothesis was not confirmed: There was no evidence that the formants of the non-native-like attriters deviated more strongly from the monolingual baseline than those of the native-like attriters. Additionally, the formant values and the ratings were found to be only weakly associated, suggesting a different source of the perceptibly non-native-like pronunciation in some attriters.

Language context elicits native-like stop voicing in early bilinguals’ productions in both L1 and L2

The way that bilinguals produce phones in each of their languages provides a window into the nature of the bilingual phonological space. For stop consonants, if early sequential bilinguals, whose languages differ in voice onset time (VOT) distinctions, produce native-like VOTs in each of their languages, it would imply that they have developed separate first and second language phones, that is, language-specific phonetic realisations for stop-voicing distinctions. Given the ambiguous phonological status of Greek voiced stops, which has been debated but not investigated experimentally, Greek-English bilinguals can offer a unique perspective on this issue. We first recorded the speech of Greek and Australian-English monolinguals to observe native VOTs in each language for /p, t, b, d/ in word-initial and word-medial (post-vocalic and post-nasal) positions. We then recorded fluent, early Greek–Australian-English bilinguals in either a Greek or English language context; all communication occurred in only one language. The bilinguals in the Greek context were indistinguishable from the Greek monolinguals, whereas the bilinguals in the English context matched the VOTs of the Australian-English monolinguals in initial position, but showed some modest differences from them in the phonetically more complex medial positions. We interpret these results as evidence that bilingual speakers possess phonetic categories for voiced versus voiceless stops that are specific to each language, but are influenced by positional context differently in their second than in their first language.

Physiological Indices of Bilingualism: Oral–Motor Coordination and Speech Rate in Bengali–English Speakers

To examine how age of immersion and proficiency in a 2nd language influence speech movement variability and speaking rate in both a 1st language and a 2nd language. A group of 21 Bengali-English bilingual speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded. For all 21 speakers, lip movement variability was assessed based on productions of Bengali (L1; 1st language) and English (L2; 2nd language) sentences. For analyses related to the influence of L2 proficiency on speech production processes, participants were sorted into low- (n = 7) and high-proficiency (n = 7) groups. Lip movement variability and speech rate were evaluated for both of these groups across L1 and L2 sentences. Surprisingly, adult bilingual speakers produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2. When groups were sorted according to proficiency, highly proficient speakers were marginally more variable in their L1. In addition, there were some phoneme-specific effects, most markedly that segments not shared by both languages were treated differently in production. Consistent with previous studies, movement durations were longer for less proficient speakers in both L1 and L2. In contrast to those of child learners, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers show a high degree of consistency. Such lack of variability presumably contributes to protracted difficulties with acquiring nativelike pronunciation in L2. The proficiency results suggest bidirectional interactions across L1 and L2, which is consistent with hypotheses regarding interference and the sharing of phonological space. A slower speech rate in less proficient speakers implies that there are increased task demands on speech production processes.

Long mid vowels in Attic-Ionic and Cretan

§1. Common Greek inherited from proto-Indo-European a simple five vowel system as shown in (1), with one mid vowel on each of the front and back axes. Only the long vowel system is shown here; the short vowel system had the same structure.The inherited system was inherently stable: there was balance between the short and long vowel systems and between the front and back axes, and with only one mid vowel on each axis, there was no problem of overcrowding. The individual phonemes were, so far as we can tell, optimally distributed in the available phonological space. (The diagram shows the back axis as being shorter than the front, since anatomical constraints mean there is less articulatory space at the back of the mouth; see Laver (1994)272–3).

*t to k: An Austronesian Sound Change Revisited

Although the change of *t to k in Hawaiian has been known and commented on for over 150 years, the widespread driftlike character of this development within Austronesian as a whole has generally gone unappreciated. This paper examines 20 historically independent instances of a *t > k change in at least 43 languages. Twelve of these changes are confined to Oceanic languages, seven to languages of eastern Indonesia, and one to western Indonesia. Almost without exception, the change *t > k has followed the loss of *k. In four languages *t > k took place only word-finally, and in two others it appears to be dissimilatory. Both structural and perceptual motivations for the change are considered, and it is concluded that *t > k usually begins as free variation within an enlarged phonological space created by the loss of *k. A few instances are difficult to reconcile with this explanation, and continue to present a challenge to linguistic theory.

The scope of linguistic generalizations: evidence from Hebrew word formation

Does the productive use of language stem from the manipulation of mental variables (e.g. “noun”, “any consonant”)? If linguistic constraints appeal to variables, rather than instances (e.g. “ dog”, “ m”), then they should generalize to any representable novel instance, including instances that fall beyond the phonological space of a language. We test this prediction by investigating a constraint on the structure of Hebrew roots. Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates (e.g. ss) in its roots, but it strictly constraints their location: geminates are frequent at the end of the root (e.g. mss), but rare at its beginning (e.g. ssm). Symbolic accounts capture the ban on root-initial geminates as *XXY, where X and Y are variables that stand for any two distinct consonants. If the constraint on root structure appeals to the identity of abstract variables, then speakers should be able to extend it to root geminates with foreign phonemes, including phonemes with foreign feature values. We present findings from three experiments supporting this prediction. These results suggest that a complete account of linguistic processing must incorporate mechanisms for generalization outside the representational space of trained items. Mentally-represented variables would allow speakers to make such generalizations.

A re-evaluation of the phonological similarity effect in adults' short-term memory of words and nonwords

The phonological similarity effect (PSE) was studied in two tasks of serial recall, in one task of serial recognition and one item identification task. PSE occurred only in the former three tasks involving memory of order when study items were words and nonwords with an associative connectedness to long-term memory. Nonwords that, according to a reaction time assessment of associative value, were less well connected to long-term memory mechanisms, were not sensitive to phonological similarity. These results are discussed in relation to contemporary models of short-term memory that explain the PSE as a result of confusions of items that are similarly encoded in a phonological layer. This layer is identified as a higher-level phonological space that is accessed by words and nonwords of high associative value and not by nonwords of low associative value.

Default nominal inflection in Hebrew: evidence for mental variables

According to the `word/rule' account, regular inflection is computed by a default, symbolic process, whereas irregular inflection is achieved by associative memory. Conversely, pattern-associator accounts attribute both regular and irregular inflection to an associative process. The acquisition of the default is ascribed to the asymmetry in the distribution of regular and irregular tokens. Irregular tokens tend to form tight, well-defined phonological clusters (e.g. sing-sang, ring-rang), whereas regular forms are diffusely distributed throughout the phonological space. This distributional asymmetry is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of a regular default (Hare, M., Elman, J., Daugherty, K., 1995. Default generalization in connectionist networks. Language and Cognitive Processes 10, 601–630; Plunkett, K., Nakisa, C., 1997. A connectionist model of Arabic plural system. Language and Cognitive Processes 12, 807–836). Hebrew nominal inflection challenges this account. We demonstrate that Hebrew speakers use the regular masculine inflection as a default despite the overlap in the distribution of regular and irregular Hebrew masculine nouns. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that regular inflection is productively applied to novel nouns regardless of their similarity to existing regular nouns. In contrast, the inflection of irregular sounding nouns is strongly sensitive to their similarity to stored irregular tokens. Experiment 2 establishes the generality of the regular default for novel words that are phonologically idiosyncratic. Experiment 3 demonstrates that Hebrew speakers assign the default regular inflection to borrowings and names that are identical to existing irregular nouns. The existence of default inflection in Hebrew is incompatible with the distributional asymmetry hypothesis. Our findings also lend no support for a type-frequency account. The convergence of the circumstances triggering default inflection in Hebrew, German and English suggests that the capacity for default inflection may be general.

Sound Change, Phonological Space, and the IPA

Sound Change, Phonological Space, and the IPA

Phonological planes and spaces A quantitative study on five corpora

Abstract We describe a statistical methodology that provides a quantitative definition of the concept of phonological space that has been used for a long time as a purely qualitative description of languages. We apply this description to five corpora : four of French language, and one of Polish language. We obtain cartesian planes where the speakers are represented as points. We show that we can discriminate the five corpora. We end by pointing to applications to the learning and destruction of phonological capabilities.

Phonological space in the speech of the hearing impaired

The vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ form the extreme points of vowel triangle in Kannada language. First and second formant frequencies of these vowels were measured to determine the phonological space in the speech of the 30 deaf subjects and 30 normally hearing subjects. The phonological space was found to be reduced in the speech of the hearing-impaired subjects, and the reduction was primarily due to the lowering of the second formant of the vowel /i/. Therapeutic implications have been drawn.

Phonological Space and System Simplification: Coronal Spirants and Affricates in Sorbian and Other West Slavic Languages

O. One of the few Sorbian innovations in the area of phonology is the treatment of *r and *r' in the environment after voiceless stops, i. e., ρ t k. In that environment, r and r' changed into a spirant or affricate at some point in the historical development of the two Sorbian languages. The assibilation of r and r' is reminiscent of a similar change in Czech and Polish; however, chronology, conditions, and results of assibilation in these two languages are sufficiently different from that in Sorbian to warrant the assumption of at least partially distinct developments. The present article will (1) review briefly the literature dealing with assibilation in Sorbian (section 1 .); (2) examine in more detail the chronology of assibilation in Sorbian and the relationship of this process with assibilation in Czech and Polish (section 2.); and (3) describe the structural consequences of assibilation in the Sorbian dialects (section 3.). The goal of our investigation is to show that while the assimilatory change of r after/? / k is an internal Sorbian development not shared with other Northwest Slavic languages, the assibilation of the resulting voiceless r in Sorbian is part of a general tendency towards the assibilation of alveodental stops in a large area of West Slavic. The contemporary assibilized reflexes of r, referred to henceforth as f, in various environments in LS, US, P, and Cz are given in Table I below. For the sake of comparison, the CS and R forms are also included

日本語１字音節の類似性 ＭＤＳによる音韻的空間の表現とその心理学的解釈

The purpose of this study was to represent the phonological space of Japanese phonemes by means of multidimensional scaling and to identify each dimension not only linguistically but also psychologically. Ten subjects (graduate or undergraduate students) were required to read aloud each pair of katakana (a certain type of Japanese phonemic letters), and to rate the auditory similarity between the two items. The similarity responses were analyzed by ALSCAL, and the 3-dimensional-configuration was interpreted mainly on the basis of the rating scores on 20 semantic differential scales. The results revealed that Dimension 1, which correlated with several SD scales, separated seion and dakuon contrastively. On the other hand, Dimension 2, which didn't have significant correlations with any pair-of-adjectives scales, divided bilabials from other sounds, suggesting that this particular articulation might have some psychological reality affecting the auditory images of speech sounds. Furthermore, Dimension 3, which was not amenable to simple phonetic interpretations, proved to be a dimension reflecting psychological factors such as activity and tension.