Phonological Units Research Articles

Causes and effects of misreported syllable structures

Abstract This commentary paper offers a discussion on the methodological, epistemological, and theoretical issues concerning the status of the syllable and mora, as well as the problems raised by their (mis)characterization. It first addresses some methodological biases that occur in the description and analysis of the phonological units of languages, the problem of the reliability of speaker intuitions, with an example taken from French verlan, as well as the influence of writing on phonological representations. Second, building on the Budai Rukai example and on one other case of misanalyzed syllable structure, that of Tokyo Japanese, it questions the status of the syllable as an indispensable, universal unit. In order to avoid some of the problems that stem from the mischaracterization of the syllable, it is proposed that the notion of prosodeme, instead of that of syllable, should be used as a pretheoretical notion when attempting to identify the basic prosodic unit of a language.

METHODOLOGICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF PHONOLOGICAL CHANGES IN WORDS IN SMALL WORKS

The article examines the methodological possibilities of the phonographic tools used in the comics, stories and feuilletons of the great writer Abdulla Qadiri. The expression of denotative and connotative meanings by means of phonological units, their semantic-stylistic features, the importance of expressiveness in the language of small works is highlighted.

Phonological recovery during Chinese sentence reading: effects of rime and tone

ABSTRACT The present study tested the activation of different phonological units of Chinese characters during silent sentence reading. Fifty-five participants were tested in an eye-tracking experiment. A highly predictable target character in each experimental sentence was replaced by four types of substitutes (i.e. no-violation, tone-violation, rime-violation, and double-violation). The participants exhibited a shorter total reading time in the no-violation and tone-violation conditions than in the double-violation baseline condition, whereas the rime-violation condition did not differ from the baseline. Moreover, the participants did not benefit from tonal information in addition to syllable-level phonological overlap. Our findings are consistent with a notion of late phonological activation in Chinese, and therefore suggest a direct route of lexical activation bypassing phonological mediation during visual word recognition.

Phonological Awareness of English among Saudi Learners: An Examination of the Role of Lexical Status and Intra-syllabic Phonological Unit

This study explores phonological awareness ability in the second language. Although some studies have examined L2 phonological awareness, most of these studies have not provided sufficient details on the type of stimulus items employed in these studies nor considered the possible effect of some linguistic factors on the results. Thus, the study aims to explore the impact of the lexical status of the item on phonological awareness in L2. In addition, the study examines the preferred intra-syllabic phonological unit in L2 among Saudi university students. Specifically, the study examines the effect of the lexical status (word vs non-word) and the intra-syllabic phonological unit (onset-rime vs. body-coda) on the phonological awareness of English. The participants were 48 university students majoring in English language. Two phonological awareness tasks were administered to test phonological awareness at the intra-syllabic and phonotactic levels. The tasks were an intra-syllabic segmentation task and a lexical decision task. The results showed significant effects of both linguistic factors on the participants’ L2 phonological awareness. The lexical status of the test item had a significant effect on the participants’ performance in the task. The participants performed significantly better in identifying real-words than non-words, which reflects an advanced phonotactic awareness. Finally, the results revealed that the body-coda unit is the preferred intra-syllabic structure for Saudi learners. Therefore, the study provides evidence that the onset-rime hypothesis is not universal and is at least not applicable to Saudi Arabic speakers. The study offers theoretical and practical implications for the acquisition and teaching of L2.

Loss of unreleased final stops among Mandarin-Min bilinguals: Structural convergence of languages in contact

The two languages of a bilingual speaker are interconnected and mutually influence linguistic forms and structures. This study presents a case in which two languages in contact exhibit phonotactic asymmetries but converge on abstract phonological units by bilingual speakers. The specific case examined here concerns the change-in-progress of unreleased final stops among young Mandarin-Min bilingual speakers in Taiwan. Phonotactically, obstruent finals are illegal in Taiwan Mandarin, whereas Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), a local substratum language, allows obligatorily unreleased final stops. In the discrimination of stimuli modeled after TSM, bilingual listeners were consistently outperformed by Korean listeners, a non-native reference group without restrictions against obstruent finals. A follow-up production study revealed that final stops produced by the bilingual speakers were prone to deletion accompanied by vowel lengthening, similar to a long vowel in an open syllable, as well as frequent substitution. Furthermore, strong correlations were found between bilingual speakers’ perception and production accuracy, indicating a bidirectional co-evolution between perception and production during language development. Taken together, the results suggest that a loss of unreleased final stops is underway in TSM through the structural convergence of two interacting phonological systems within bilingual individuals.

Quantitative, not qualitative, differences in word classification errors as a function of language dominance.

This paper reports the results of a Cantonese word categorization task that maximized lexical competition. Cantonese-English early bilinguals were presented with a Cantonese word, followed by four images depicting the target word and a tone, rhyme, and onset competitor. English-dominant listeners made more errors than Cantonese-dominant listeners, but the proportions of error types were equivalent across language dominance profiles. Cantonese listeners' error patterns suggest a hierarchy of phonological units with respect to what most robustly differentiates lexical items, corroborating previous research.

Lateralization and Time-Course of Cortical Phonological Representations during Syllable Production.

Spoken language contains information at a broad range of timescales, from phonetic distinctions on the order of milliseconds to semantic contexts which shift over seconds to minutes. It is not well understood how the brain's speech production systems combine features at these timescales into a coherent vocal output. We investigated the spatial and temporal representations in cerebral cortex of three phonological units with different durations: consonants, vowels, and syllables. Electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings were obtained from five participants while speaking single syllables. We developed a novel clustering and Kalman filter-based trend analysis procedure to sort electrodes into temporal response profiles. A linear discriminant classifier was used to determine how strongly each electrode's response encoded phonological features. We found distinct time-courses of encoding phonological units depending on their duration: consonants were represented more during speech preparation, vowels were represented evenly throughout trials, and syllables during production. Locations of strongly speech-encoding electrodes (the top 30% of electrodes) likewise depended on phonological element duration, with consonant-encoding electrodes left-lateralized, vowel-encoding hemispherically balanced, and syllable-encoding right-lateralized. The lateralization of speech-encoding electrodes depended on onset time, with electrodes active before or after speech production favoring left hemisphere and those active during speech favoring the right. Single-electrode speech classification revealed cortical areas with preferential encoding of particular phonemic elements, including consonant encoding in the left precentral and postcentral gyri and syllable encoding in the right middle frontal gyrus. Our findings support neurolinguistic theories of left hemisphere specialization for processing short-timescale linguistic units and right hemisphere processing of longer-duration units.

Duration Patterns of Chinese Syllables in Commercial and Social Oral Advertisements

Information structure of an utterance is one of the key factors determining phonological unit realization patterns including the duration which is manifested differently in males and females. This article examines the influence of information load and gender on the Chinese syllable duration in commercial and social advertising discourse. The material was taken from the texts of commercial and social oral advertising produced by 6 professional speakers (3 males, 3 females). The measurements were performed in Praat on the syllables with identical phonemics and the same lexical tones occurring both on informative (previously classified as such by a minimum of 6 out of 10 listeners) and uninformative (the remaining) utterance parts. The results show that duration is one of the most important markers of a syllable information load. In both commercial and social advertisements, in over 50 % of cases informative syllables’ duration was longer than that of uninformative ones. The difference was not large but rather consistent. It means that not only duration is involved in manifesting the utterance information structure but other prosodic parameters as well. Another finding was gender difference: 1) on the whole, syllables in female speech have longer duration than in male; 2) males use the duration technique more effectively than females: the contrast between loaded and unloaded syllables is higher

The role of rhythm in science-animated videos: construing entities and bridging across different semiotic modes

Recent decades have witnessed the increasing popularity of animation used for science education. However, the affordances of animation are still yet to be described in a comprehensive manner. Working on a corpus of online science animated videos, this article firstly proposes a visual rhythm system for animation, and then examines the convergence and divergence of the rhythm in animation and language at different levels of analysis. The author found that different visual rhythms in animation function to construe different quantities and properties of entities. In terms of the intermodal relations between animation and language, at shorter wavelengths, animation can be in sync with the rhythm in language, with different ‘beats’ in animation converging with different phonological units in language; at longer wavelengths, the larger rhythmic pattern of animation can function to scaffold the generic structure of language. This article enriches the systematic description of the meaning-making potential of animation, which also informs empirical studies focusing on the effectiveness of animation used for science education.

Syllable or phoneme? A mouse-tracking investigation of phonological units in Mandarin Chinese and English spoken word recognition.

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word production, although spoken word recognition is a fundamental language skill of human beings, it is unknown whether a Chinese-English bilingual listener can adjust the phonological unit sizes depending on the language used. Using four mouse-tracking spoken word recognition experiments, participants listened to spoken words (either presented in English or Chinese) while viewing a display of two written words. In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilinguals experienced a larger phonological competition in the CV condition than the control condition, indicating that they recruited syllables when listening to Chinese monosyllabic words. Experiment 2 extended the results of Experiment 1 with a set of Chinese disyllabic words and further revealed the temporal distribution of syllable overlap of a spoken word constrains phonological competition. In Experiment 3, Chinese-English bilinguals exhibited a greater phonological competition in both CV and C conditions that mirrored those reported with English monolinguals in Experiment 4. Our results across experiments demonstrated that Chinese-English bilinguals employed both phonemes and syllables to recognize English spoken words but exclusively relied on syllables to recognize Chinese words, suggesting that there is flexibility in selecting phonological units when recognizing spoken words in the two languages. Implications for models of monolingual and bilingual spoken recognition are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Poetic structure and structure of love : A PHONOLOGICAL APPROACH TO A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

This study proceeds on the hypothesis that the sound patterns of apoem contribute a great deal to build the poet's world — view .The study isan attempt to investigate the texture of sound in Shakespeare's sonnet (55), " Not marble , nor gilded monuments " . The sonnet will be approachedas a phonological unit of meaning. The study falls into three parts . Part Iintroduces the key concepts of modern phonetics and phonology . Attentionis drawn to the phonological aspect of the verse structure by showing the "stress-producing pulses " and the " syllable — producing pulses" whicheither of the processes exists in nearly all human languages . Part II dealswith the phonological mechanisms which create the poem as an aestheticform . Of these mechanisms are the widely known sound devices such as , "rhythm", " rhyme " , " alliteration " , " onomatopoeia " and so on . Theseterms will be looked at from a _ phonological perspective.Shakespeare's sonnet will be investigated in terms of Cummings andSimmons's " Systemic Description "in its phonological aspect . Theanalytic mode will show how the language operates to produce the poem asa linguistic and aesthetic form.

The emergence of bifurcated structure in children's language.

Human language is unique among animal communication systems, in part because of its dual patterning in which meaningless phonological units combine to form meaningful words (phonological structure) and words combine to form sentences (lexicosyntactic structure). Although dual patterning is well recognized, its emergence in language development has been scarcely investigated. Chief among questions still unanswered is the extent to which development of these separate structures is independent or interdependent, and what supports acquisition of each level of structure. We explored these questions by examining growth of lexicosyntactic and phonological structure in children with normal hearing (n = 49) and children with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (n = 56). Multiple measures of each kind of structure were collected at 2-year intervals (kindergarten through eighth grade), and used to construct latent scores for each type of structure. Growth curve analysis assessed (a) the relative independence of development for each level of structure; (b) interactions between these two levels of structure in real-time language processing; and (c) contributions to growth of each level of structure made by auditory input, socioeconomic status (as proxy for linguistic experience), and speech motor control. Findings suggested that phonological and lexicosyntactic structure develop largely independently. Auditory input, socioeconomic status, and speech motor control help shape these language structures, with the last two factors exerting stronger effects for children with cochlear implants. Only for children with cochlear implants were interdependencies in real-time processing observed, reflecting compensatory mechanisms likely present to help them handle the disproportionately large phonological deficit they exhibit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Before Learning the Code: A Commentary on Sargiani, Ehri, and Maluf (RRQ, 2022)

AbstractIn this commentary, we argue the importance of the period before learning the alphabetic code and develop a new theoretical framework for the cognitive processes involved at the very beginning of learning to read. According to our theory, prereaders begin to learn to read by associating letter clusters with concrete phonological units such as syllables, a process we refer to as “building the syllabic bridge” (Doignon‐Camus & Zagar, 2014). This procedure may trigger statistical learning to extract regularities of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. We assume that statistical learning facilitates access to phonemic awareness and then the acquisition of the alphabetic code. Our arguments are partly based on the comparison between the studies conducted by Vazeux et al. (2020) and Sargiani et al. (2022), whose results might have seemed contradictory at first sight. Finally, we suggest pedagogical implications and some perspectives for future research.

Markedness-Based Analysis of Englyn Meter

This research aims to examine the Englyn meter in the poetry of Celtic language (Medieval Welsh) that requires the poetic texts to conform to an abstract prosodic template. This counting meter regulates the phonological constituency on the same metric level of the prosodic hierarchy rather than on the metrical hierarchy in verse (the line). In the main types of Englyn meters, Englyn milwr and Englyn penfyr, phonological units of each line are constrained with a certain number of syllables and rhyme with the final syllable of most lines. This research offers a markedness-based analysis that generates the well-formedness meter of Celtic language Welsh poetry. The Optimality Theoretical analysis derives the constraint on the phonological constituency over a certain metric level of the prosodic hierarchy (the line) with markedness constraints. Further coping constraints that are normally used for reduplication are needed to account for the rhyme of the final syllable in Englyn meter. The analysis offered supports the Development hypothesis, which is fundamental to generative metrics indicating that meter is evidently related to general language phonology. These results could help analyse other counting meters with restricted phonological constituency.

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish.

The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also read aloud (CDS vs. adult-directed speech [ADS]). We compared CDS and ADS speech productions using a spectrotemporal model (Leong & Goswami, 2015), obtaining three temporal metrics: (a) distribution of modulation energy, (b) temporal regularity of stressed syllables, and (c) syllable rate. CDS was characterized by (a) significantly greater modulation energy in the lower frequencies (0.5-4 Hz), (b) more regular rhythmic occurrence of stressed syllables, and (c) a slower syllable rate than ADS, across both spontaneous and read conditions. CDS is characterized by a robust local temporal organization (i.e., within utterances) with amplitude modulation bands aligning with delta and theta electrophysiological frequency bands, respectively, showing greater phase synchronization than in ADS, facilitating parsing of stress units and syllables. These temporal regularities, together with the slower rate of production of CDS, might support the automatic extraction of phonological units in speech and hence support the phonological development of children. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21210893.

Phonological contrasts are maintained despite neutralization: an intracranial EEG study

The existence of language-specific abstract sound-structure units (such as the phoneme) is largely uncontroversial in phonology. However, whether the brain performs abstractions comparable to those assumed in phonology has been difficult to ascertain. Using intracranial electroencephalography (EEG) recorded during a passive listening task, this study investigates the representation of phonological units in the brain and the relationship between those units, auditory sensory input, and higher levels of language organization, namely morphology. Leveraging the phonological neutralization of coronal stops to tap in English, this study provides evidence of a dissociation between acoustic similarity and phonemic identity in the neural response to speech. Moreover, leveraging morphophonological alternations of the regular plural and past tense, this study further demonstrates early (<500ms) evidence of dissociation between phonological form and morphological exponence. Together these results highlight the central nature of language-specific knowledge in sublexical language processing and improve our understanding of the ways language-specific knowledge structures and organizes speech perception in the brain.

Language generality in phonological encoding: Moving beyond Indo‐European languages

AbstractTheories of phonological encoding are centred on the selection and activation of phonological segments, and how these segments are organised in word and syllable structures in online processes of speech planning. The focus on segments, however, is due to an over‐weighting of evidence from Indo‐European languages, because languages outside this family exhibit strikingly different behaviour and require the processing of additional phonological structures. We review evidence from speech error patterns, priming and form encoding studies, and re‐syllabification in several non‐Indo‐European languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese. We argue that these languages deepen our understanding of the nature of phonological encoding because they require recognising language‐particular differences in: the first selectable (proximate) units of phonological encoding, the phonological units processed as word beginnings, the dynamics of syllable emergence during encoding, and the varied manifestations of re‐syllabification. A satisfactory and general account of phonological encoding must incorporate these rich phenomena.

LINGVO-POETIC ICONICITY IN LITERARY PROSE

The paper considers the role of lingvo-poetic iconicity in providing the imagery of literary prose, in particular the symbolic novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Given the nature of the phenomenon under study, the cognitive linguistics and poetics principles of analysis, including the existing classification of poetic iconicity, were chosen as the methodological background of the research. The primary iconicity, which consists in the mental association of words with a number of other words that contain a certain phone or phonological unit, is embodied in the text under analysis as the metonymic abbreviation of the initial letter "A". Iconic phonaesthesia, secondary associative iconicity, which is motivated by the links between forms, each expressing a certain meaning, consists in the co-sensation of a particular color that arises by the letter "A" perception. In the studied text lingvo-poetic iconicity, represented at the phonological and morphological levels, serves as one of the basic mechanisms for providing imagery.

Supplemental Material for Syllable or Phoneme? A Mouse-Tracking Investigation of Phonological Units in Mandarin Chinese and English Spoken Word Recognition

Supplemental Material for Syllable or Phoneme? A Mouse-Tracking Investigation of Phonological Units in Mandarin Chinese and English Spoken Word Recognition

How Do Dongba Glyphs Transcribe IPA? Analysis of a Note by a Ruke Dongba Priest Learning IPA

Dongba script is one of the very few pictographic writing systems still surviving in the world. The script evolved over time, and this is reflected by the correspondence between its written symbols and the related spoken language. During my fieldwork, I witnessed occasionally when Dongba glyphs have been analysed to write down IPA symbols based on Latin alphabet. This is an innovative application of Dongba pictographs, through the use of traditional scriptures and vernacular documents. This study provides insights into processes of adaptation in situations of contact between the Dongba pictographic writing system and the International Phonetic Alphabet and aims to shed light on structural issues pertaining to the phonological units of the Naxi language. According to the present research, Dongba glyphs can identify initials quite efficiently, yet they are not efficient in distinguishing rhymes and tones. At the same time, a phonemic chart written in Dongba glyphs shows to be a valuable tool to double-check the phonemic system. Moreover, some sound changes of Ruke Naxi are attested and assessed in this note.