Phonological Variants Research Articles

Influence of Hindi Cartoons on the Language Development of Pakistani Urdu/English Schoolchildren

Not surprisingly, children expand their linguistic repertoire with the maturation of their cognition and their daily activities such as watching cartoons influence their language development. Many if not all parents fear that the Hindi cartoons are contaminating the linguistic repertoire of their children. Eventually, Pakistan Media Electronic Regularity Authority has banned Hindi dubbed cartoons. However, it is quite paradoxical that they always wish to improve the English language skills of their children but they have negative grounding towards the Hindi language. With this background in minds, the present study was carried out to examine the influence of some popular Hindi cartoons (such as Doraemon, Motu Patlu, and Chota Bheem) on the phonological development of children from middle and upper-middle class schools located in Lahore. By taking the Labovian apparent hypothesis as a theoretical lens, a sample of 84 Urdu/English bilinguals of different age groups was selected to investigate a prevalence of most commonly occurring phonological variants (such as /kʰ/ for /x/, /g/ for /ɣ/, / d ʒ/ for /z/, and /f/ for /pʰ/) in their speech. The study revealed that the influence of the Hindi phonology remained temporary on the language development of the participants. They were open to the usage of Hindi phonemes unless they developed alternatives phonological system in their first language (Urdu) and second and the most prestigious language (English). The participants who were around 10 years of age were found relatively less prone to using the Hindi phones. We may not rule out completely whether or not the above-mentioned phonological variants were part of their linguistic repertoire when they reached to puberty. It was observed, on the other hand, that some low-level phonological variations recycled invariably in the speech of the participants. Hence, the study suggests investigating these variations beyond this age bracket. The study takes a diametrically opposite stance and suggests an exposure to multilingual vocabulary as a correlate of cognitive development during the early childhood education.

Root Variation vs. Root Extension – a Putative -i-Infix?

Many PIE roots containing have semantically adjacent counterparts without it. A close examination of these pairs suggests that the appearance of -i- is neihter incidental, nor does it arise from phonological constraints, but reveals an early stem-building process. In the following article I discuss the collected material, comprising 77 i-containing roots (plain phonological variants uncounted) opposed to their non-infixed counterparts (including secondary root variants), either of the same meaning, or showing contextual semantic narrowing. I further attempt to integrate the process of the presumably morphological intrusion of -i- into the root in a plausible morpho-semantic context in PIE. Some opaque cases left apart, at least two separate functions of i-infixation come to light. Firstly, it is found in intransitives or frequently clear states/inchoatives as opposed to non-infixed transitives or factitives, and it shows striking affinity both in the semantic operations and the lexical material to Caland networks; in other cases, it could have been linked to the hic-et-nunc -i-, which had left traces at different slots in the morphological system of PIE.

A student of Jewish languages reads Michał Németh’s Unknown Lutsk Karaim Letters in Hebrew Script (19th–20th Centuries). A Critical Edition

The Karaite language has justifiedly attracted the attention of Turkologists though it should also be of interest to students of Jewish languages (= the languages of Rabbanite and Karaite Jews); and what students of Jewish languages have to say about it should interest Turkologists, just as what the latter have to say should interest the former.
 By looking at Karaite (as exemplified in Michał Németh’s Unknown Lutsk Karaim Letters in Hebrew Script (19th–20th Centuries): A Critical Edition)from the viewpoint of other Jewish languages, researchers can:
 
 Add new questions to the agenda of Karaite research. For example, the existence of an idiosyncratic type of periphrastic verb in at least Karaite, Judezmo, Yidish, and Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazic English prompts the question of what the genetic relationships between the tokens of that type are.
 Reopens old questions. For example, the derivation proposed for Karaite כניסא '[Karaite (and/or Rabbanite?)] synagog', with phonological variants, according to which the word comes from Arabic. The author proposes a different etymology (possibly not original with him) , involving only Jewish languages (a more appropriate derivation for a Karaite word having that meaning), which takes the Karaite word back to Hebrew and/or to Jewish Aramaic.

‘Proper’ pro-nun-ʃha-ʃhun1 in Eighteenth-Century English: ECEP as a New Tool for the Study of Historical Phonology and Dialectology

English historical linguists have often complained about the scholarly neglect of the phonology of the Late Modern English period; yet, the value of pronouncing dictionaries as rich and reliable evidence has been demonstrated (Beal, J. C., 1999, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of the English Language (1775). Oxford: Clarendon Press; Jones, C., 2006, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). This article presents a new electronic, searchable database of ‘Eighteenth-Century English Phonology’ (ECEP) which aims to facilitate research on the social, regional, and lexical distribution of phonological variants in 18th-century English, as documented in contemporary pronouncing dictionaries. Taking Wells’ (1982, Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) lexical sets for the vowel system of present-day varieties of English as its reference, the database provides unicode IPA transcriptions for the relevant segment of each word given as an example of lexical (sub)set in his account of standard lexical sets, to which we have added some complementary consonant sets. These will be of use for comparative studies with 19th-century and present-day English. First, we describe the methodology and contents of ECEP: primary source selection, data input and annotation, the web-based interface. Second, we report on two case studies that demonstrate the value of evidence that can be systematically extracted from ECEP for the analysis of segmental and suprasegmental phonology; these are variations in the pronunciation of ‘wh’ in the set whale (/hw/∼/w/∼/h/), and the palatalization of alveolar consonants before /uː/. Thus, this article will demonstrate the viability of ECEP for historical phonology, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, and will help to promote the use of databases as key resources in historical linguistics.

Acculturation of Knowledge through Sustainable Language Engineering for National Development: The Case of Igbo

The aim of this study is to find out the possible ways of domesticating knowledge gained through western education by the Igbo through sustainable language development. It also aims to make the knowledge accessible in the Igbo language for empowerment at the grassroots and ultimately for societal and national development. The need for this work is born out of the observation that the Igbo, as well as other tribes in Nigeria are rich with internationally acclaimed learned personalities. These personalities have distinguished themselves in various fields of human endeavor. Also, these achievements are made in foreign languages. Subsequently, these achievements have led to an increase in the relevance of such languages to the relegation of the scholars’ own mother tongues and invariably their own people. By using the descriptive and inferential methods, the paper presents some neologism processes which non linguists can apply in their various academic fields. Also, they can come up with terminologies in the Igbo language for presenting relevant academic materials for use in teaching and learning the Igbo language. The use of these terminologies could be formal or informal as the need arises. Thus, these processes include extra-language borrowing, loan translations, intra-language borrowing, and specialization of dialectal phonological variants. Previously, metalanguage development efforts by governments had bypassed these professionals. Also, they have focused on developing the terminologies through linguists and selected professionals alone. This has resulted to the terminologies not being accessible to the intended end users. Among other things, this paper suggests that the call for the acculturation of knowledge and the processes of embarking on it should be made public in all institutions of higher education. This is carried out in the Igbo culture area and later extended to the Igbo in diaspora. However, the co-ordination of the process of the formalization of the terminologies should be left in the hands of the Igbo Studies Association (ISA). This official regulating body ensures the maintenance of professional standards and uniformity of usage.

Las Realizaciones Fonéticas de la Letra y en el Acento del Inglés Nigeriano Estándar y sus Implicaciones para la Enseñanza y Aprendizaje del Inglés como Segunda Lengua

Este artículo examina las realizaciones fonéticas de la letra <Ii> y <Yy> en el acento del inglés nigeriano estándar como segunda lengua. Esta revisión se basa en el concepto de intraferencia. Los ejemplos fueron recopilados desde el 2005 al 2013 en una encuesta nacional a través de la aplicación de entrevistas,observación participativa, y el registro de discursos espontáneos. Se utilizó el método de análisis ecléctico: análisis textual cualitativo, descripción y presentación estadística de los datos. Los datos ordinales son presentados en tablas de frecuencia, porcentaje, gráficos y los textos lingüísticos son descritos,explicados y comparados con variantes de pronunciación recibida, RP. El estudio estableció que la población nigeriana educada reorganiza las variadas realizaciones de las letras <Ii> y <Yy> de acuerdo a la pronunciación recibida RP del inglés británico de manera indiscriminada para pronunciar palabras en las que aparecen palabras en la manera en que RP y otros acentos nativosde inglés podrían no ser pronunciados por ellos, de esa manera produciendo variantes fonológicas. Dado que las variantes provienen de la inconsciente redistribución subyacente de las realizaciones fonéticas de las letras y desde que se institucionalizaron en ENE, el artículo propone que pueden ser considerados como variaciones que caracterizan ESL y (ENEA).

Perception of phonological variants by non-native listeners

Recent research has demonstrated that listeners process carefully pronounced words (canonical forms) more quickly and accurately than casually produced words (non-canonical, reduced forms), despite the fact that casually produced word forms are more frequent in everyday language use. To date, research on the perception of phonological variants that are typical of casually produced speech has focused, with a few exceptions, on monolingual listeners. The current research examined non-native English speakers' processing of canonical and non-canonical word-forms in an attempt to more fully understand how non-native speakers of English cope with phonological variants in American English. Monolingual American English speakers and non-native American English speakers completed a cross-modal identity priming task with canonical, non-canonical, and unrelated auditory primes and visual targets. Overall, the non-native speakers were significantly slower than native speakers at recognizing both canonical and non-cano...

/kwo/ and /y/ in Taiwan Mandarin: Social Factors and Phonetic Variation

This article studies three phonological variants of /kwo y/ and the acoustic properties of /o/ and /y/ in 1,159 Taiwan Mandarin face-to-face interviews from social perspectives. Language shift from Southern Min and Hakka towards Taiwan Mandarin, leading to dialect loss, is updated by quantitative evidence derived from a series of sociolinguistic analyses. Social factors including gender, age group, educational level, internet use, and childhood residence significantly correlate with the use of three /kwo y/ variants: the standard form, /w_o/ merger, and /y/ delabialization. The latter two variants are typical Southern Min-accented Mandarin pronunciation. However, results of acoustic analysis of /o/ and /y/ suggest that the influences of Southern Min are significant only in the group with the largest Southern Min exposure. That is, for Taiwan Mandarin in its current form, dialect mixing is progressing due to intensive contact with Southern Min. But it is not a stabilized end form of change, yet.

Stylistic and discursive functions of French negative particlenein an educational context

This study examines use/non‐use of negative particleneby students and teachers in the high schools of four Ontario Francophone communities. The students were recorded in semi‐directed interviews and in the classroom. The teachers recorded themselves in the classroom. In the interviews,neuse is marginal and its non‐use ubiquitous and not influenced by social class, gender or topic formality. Overall, students do not usenesignificantly more in the classroom than in the interviews. These findings do not support the hypothesis in some studies thatneuse is a hyper‐stylistic variant, which hinged on the prescription ofneuse in writing. In the classroom, however, teachers display markedly different levels ofneuse/non‐use according to subject taught, speaker age, and addressee/discourse functions performed. Thus, there is some evidence thatneuse/non‐use is not entirely devoid of stylistic markedness, at least for teachers in the formal setting of the classroom. Finally, an examination ofneuse/non‐use co‐occurring with two phonological variants of post‐verbal negatorplusreveals findings that are germane to the debate concerning the possibility of analysing stylistic variation in spoken French as a form of diglossic code‐switching.

The Acquisition of an Egyptian Phonological Variant by U.S. Students in Cairo

AbstractThis study investigated the acquisition of an Egyptian phonological variant by student participants in a study abroad program at The American University in Cairo. Participants completed pre‐ and post–study abroad Simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (SOPIs). The SOPI data showed a move toward an Egyptian realization of the phonological variable on the part of most participants. Furthermore, extralinguistic factors such as participant gender and status as a heritage speaker were likewise shown to influence variant choice, while factors such as length of stay abroad and word position of the target token were not shown to have a significant effect on target item realization. In contrast to other studies investigating the acquisition of target language sociolinguistic norms in the form of phonological variables in Spanish, this study found an extremely high rate of learner adoption of an Egyptian realization of this variable among learners of Arabic in Cairo.

Rate and Phonological Variation in Preschool Children: Effects of Modeling and Directed Influence

To explore the effect of modeling and explicit elicitation of slow and accurately produced speech in typically developing preschool children. Optional phonological reductions (e.g., deleted final stops) and changes in speech rate were examined in response to an adult conversational speaker's speech style. Forty 3- and 4-year-olds (20 each) were tested in 3 tasks: (a) immediate repetition of a model, (b) spontaneous speech, and (c) directed speech style (cueing to correct "sloppy" speech). In Task 1, half of each group heard fast and hypoarticulated versus slow and hyperarticulated speech for a between-group response-to-model comparison. Tasks 2 and 3 were compared within subjects. Task 1 demonstrated that both age groups aligned with the speaker's rate and phonological variants usage when repeating a model. Tasks 2 and 3 revealed that 4-year-olds varied phonological reduction patterns according to the task demands, whereas 3-year-olds maintained consistent patterns of usage. In addition, neither group successfully realigned with the rapid speech rate in Task 3. These results contribute to an evidence base supporting the practice of modeling slow and clear speech to children with various production disorders. Further research is needed to explore the cognitive-linguistic processes underlying alignment before findings are applied to clinical populations.

The implication of spelling and frequency in the recognition of phonological variants: evidence from pre-readers and readers

Hearing a reduced variant of a word seems to delay access to the representation of this word. One hypothesis explaining the precedence of full variants over reduced ones is that they correspond to the orthographic form of the word. In this study, we examined the role of orthography on the processing of variants resulting from schwa deletion in French. In a word-monitoring experiment, we compared the performance of pre-readers and readers on two word types. For words whose schwa variants are more frequent and correspond to the words' spelling, schwa variants were recognised with shorter reaction times by both pre-readers and readers. For words whose schwa variants are less frequent but correspond to the words' spelling, non-schwa variants were recognised faster than schwa variants by pre-readers, whereas there was no difference between the two variants for readers. Taken together these results suggest that the recognition of phonological variants changes when children learn to read, highlighting the crucial role of spelling in the processing of phonological variation.

Phonological variant recognition: representations and rules.

The current research explores the role of lexical representations and processing in the recognition of phonological variants. Two alternative approaches for variant recognition are considered: a representational approach that posits frequency-graded lexical representations for variant forms and inferential processes that mediate between the spoken variant and the lexical representation. In a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and in a phoneme identification task (Experiment 2) using real words, low-frequency variants, but not high-frequency variants, show improved recognition rates following additional experience with the variants. This knowledge generalized to novel variant forms. Experiment 3 replicated these results using an artificial lexicon and showed that recognition of low-frequency variants was influenced by similarity to a high-frequency variant form. Similarity to a high-frequency variant alone, however, was insufficient to explain recognition of the infrequent variants (Experiments 4 and 5). The results support a hybrid account of variant recognition that relies on both multiple frequency-graded representations and inference processes.

A written word is worth a thousand spoken words: The influence of spelling on spoken-word production

The present study investigated the role of spelling in phonological variant processing. Participants learned the auditory forms of potential reduced variants of novel French words (e.g., /plur/) and their associations with pictures of novel objects over 4days. After the fourth day of training, the spelling of each novel word was presented once. Half the words were spelled with an orthographic representation of the schwa (i.e., “e”), half were not. In the subsequent naming tasks, participants produced more schwa variants for novel words whose spelling contained an “e”. In addition, reduced variants with an “e” in spelling and an onset cluster attested word-internally in non-schwa words were produced with longer latencies than the same items whose spelling did not contain an “e”. Finally, in a recognition task where participants had to decide whether a given spoken item was part of the experimental stimuli trained the previous days, participants were more likely to say yes to a schwa variant when the spelling for the given word corresponded to this variant. These results show that a single exposure to spelling following extensive phonological learning can change the way speakers and listeners store and process words with phonological variants both in production and recognition tasks.

Rezenz als Faktor phonologischer Variation

This article focuses on recency as an endogenous factor for phonological variation and change. Recency means that a speaker having the choice between two phonological variants (often a dialect variant vs. a standard variant) tends to utter that variant which is identical to the antecedent, especially if the time span between the two is short. In order to prove the existence of recency effects a statistical analysis of a large corpus of spontaneous speech of rural dialects from Southwest Germany was carried out. Results show clear and unidirectional tendencies in the analyzed etymological sound classes: The statistical probability of reoccurrence of a phonological item after an antecedent identical item is higher than statistically estimated. The strength of this receny effect varies among the analyzed etymological sound classes. In classes, in which a sound change from realization A to B is nearly completed, A shows stronger recency effects, whereas sound classes with a beginning sound change from A to B the latter shows stronger recency. This fi nding contributes to the explanation of the typical S-curve that occurs in phonological change (Aitchison 1994; Bailey 1973): At the beginning of a sound change recency effects accelerate the spread of a new variant whereas in the fi nal phase of a sound change the same effects decelerate the disappearance of the receding variant. According to the presented results recency has thus to be acknowledged as an important factor for the way a sound change moves forward.

Surnames and geolinguistics in Brittany: a study of concordances

Abstract This study tries to contribute to the linguistic geography of France by comparing historical records of surnames in the five departments of Brittany with other geolinguistic resources of the same area. In order to map these data, a new software was developed and applied to the respective data sets. The results show interesting concordances between the distributions of patronyms and isoglosses of lexical and phonological variants.

All representations are not equal: Differential activation of words and phonological variants across accents

Given the massive variation in natural speech, how listeners recognize words is a central issue for linguistic theory. Listener sensitivity to acoustic fluctuations in speech has provided us with one piece of the puzzle: detailed, specific representations. We provide another piece: differential activation of these representations. We conducted a semantic priming with General American listeners of positively viewed non-rhotic British English accents and negatively viewed non-rhotic New York City accents (slender'THIN; slend-UH(BE)'THIN; slend-UH(NYC)'THIN). Controlling participant experience and self-reported familiarity with both accents, only the words produced in a British accent primed semantically related targets. There is no a priori reason to expect this pattern, as the phonological variant and lexical items are controlled. We suggest that two variants equally experienced in number (raw frequency) are perceived differentially because positive and negative attitudes influence the activation lexical representations. Additionally, by examining particular participant groups from non-rhotic regions, we show an oscillation between effects of raw frequency and listener attitudes. This work (1) provides a broader understanding of factors influencing activation, (2) increases our understanding of how frequency effects are modulated by other factors (subjective listener attitudes), and (3) illuminates the interactive nature of linguistic and social factors in speech perception.

Lexical representation of phonological variants: Evidence from pseudohomophone effects in different regiolects

This study examined the lexical representation of words with two pronunciation variants. We tested whether both the schwa and reduced variants of French words are stored as lexical entries. The results of four experiments in which speakers named pseudohomophones and pseudowords show an advantage for pseudohomophones over matched pseudowords for both variants. As the pseudohomophone effect is assumed to reflect the activation of phonologically matching stored phonological representations, these results suggest that both variants of schwa words are stored. Importantly, the pseudohomophone effect is found for alternating words (Experiments 1 and 2) and for non-alternating words when the non-produced variant corresponds to the word’s spelling (Experiment 3) or is frequently encountered in the speech of speakers of other regiolects (Experiment 4). These findings extend the scope of our previous proposal that words with two variants are stored with two lexemes. This conclusion needs to be integrated in word production models.

"If I Actually Talked Like That, I'd Pull a Gun on Myself": Accent, Avoidance, and Moral Panic in Irish English

The robust "accent culture" of English-language speech in the Irish Republic provides an opportunity to explore the concept of verbal taboo in terms of non-referential indexical function (in this case, phonological variants). The paper documents an ongoing moral panic of language in Irish society, centering on a new and fashionable accent of Irish English. This new accent, termed "D4" (after the postal code of a mostly well-to-do part of south Dublin), has been explained by observers and commentators in the Irish media as a way for younger, newly affluent speakers to "hive off" from the masses, by avoiding pronunciations seen as emblematic either of working-class Dublin identity or of rural Irish provincialism. And now, "D4" itself has become an accent to avoid. Determined at the intersection of this double avoidance, D4, and voicings of D4, reveal the anxieties surrounding the compulsive mentionability of "accent" in contemporary Irish media texts.

Using probability distributions to account for recognition of canonical and reduced word forms

The frequency of a word form influences how efficiently it is processed, but canonical forms often show an advantage over reduced forms even when the reduced form is more frequent. This paper addresses this paradox by considering a model in which representations of lexical items consist of a distribution over forms. Optimal inference given these distributions accounts for item based differences in recognition of phonological variants and canonical form advantage.