Schwa Insertion Research Articles

Segmental diagnostics of neurogenic and functional foreign accent syndrome

Abstract Previous research suggests differences in speech patterns between speakers with foreign accent syndrome (FAS) associated with a neurological (neurogenic FAS) versus a psychological aetiology (functional FAS). Differentiating sub-types holds important clinical implications, affecting the nature of follow-up assessment and treatment. To date, there exist no systematic comparisons between these sub-groups. To investigate possible differences, we employed auditory and acoustic analyses to compare schwa insertion and /r/production in speakers with FAS (12 neurogenic, 5 functional). Schwa insertion and /r/ production demonstrated significant differences between groups. Neurogenic aetiology was associated with higher within and between speaker performance consistency and congruence of derailments with phonetic-phonological and neurological accounts of ‘error’ origin. Individuals with functional FAS showed significant within and between speaker variability, which was poorly accounted for by linguistic and speech motor control explanations. We argue that schwa insertion and differences in /r/ realisations provide reliable and accessible variables for clinicians to employ to support differential diagnosis of functional versus neurogenic speech disorders. Findings are discussed in the context of understanding FAS and the broader context of understanding functional speech and language disorders.

Sonority Principle in French Nominal Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic: An Optimality-theoretic Analysis

This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morphologically driven, indirectly satisfies sonority principle; by doing so, it blocks the application of schwa or a high vowel epenthesis, which points to the fact that such phonological and morphological strategies conspire to satisfy sonority principle. The study also provides further support for the phonological stance on loanword adaptation.

Phonetics and phonology of schwa insertion in Central Yiddish

Central Yiddish (CY) has inserted schwas that occur between long vowels or diphthongs and certain coda consonants. In the most restrictive varieties, schwas are inserted only between long high vowels or diphthongs and uvular or rhotic codas (as in /biːχ/ → [biːəχ] ‘book’), and between long high vowels or diphthongs and coronal codas, as long as the vowel is [+back] (as in /ʃuːd/ → [ʃuːəd] ‘shame’). These patterns of insertion are both typologically unusual and synchronically hard to explain. In this paper, I argue that they can be traced back to the phonetic transitions between specific vowels and coda consonants: vowel-coda sequences that produce formant transitions through the mid-central acoustic vowel space are those that are most likely to exhibit schwa insertion. An analysis of 19th-century CY verse demonstrates that these inserted schwas were intended to count for purposes of poetic rhyme, suggesting that they are phonological schwas rather than exclusively phonetic transitions. This study thus adds to the phonological description and analysis of Central Yiddish, and provides novel predictions regarding the spreading of vowel epenthesis across different phonological environments.

A story of two schwas: a production study from Tashlhiyt

What is the status of schwa in Tashlhiyt? How does it pattern at the segmental and suprasegmental levels? This paper studies these questions by examining the frequencies with which schwa is inserted in different segmental contexts, and by exploring the nature of the interaction between schwa insertion and prosodic prominence. The results show the coexistence of two types of schwa in the language: a transitional schwa and a prosodically triggered schwa. The former is ignored by the phonological system of the language; its occurrence depends solely on the phonetic characteristics of the adjacent consonants. The latter surfaces whenever a prosodically prominent feature does not attach to a vowel or sonorant already present within the word. Both schwas are argued to be manifestations of a more general principle governing the coordination pattern of consonant sequences in Tashlhiyt.

Babanki verb tone

In Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of northwestern Cameroon, several tonal patterns can be found on a single verb root depending on the construction in which the verb is used. An underlying high tone may surface normally as high, but unexpectedly as low, or high-falling; while underlying low tones surface as high, high-falling, or normally as low. For this reason the low tone verb can have a L(L), HL, or even H(H) surface melody while the high tone verbs can be L(H), HL, or H(H). Accounting for these melodies in order to reconstruct the underlying forms is necessary for a proper understanding of the Babanki verb tone in particular and the tonal system of Centre Ring Grassfields Bantu languages in general. This paper demonstrates that five tone rules (Downstep, Tone Docking, High Tone Spread, Low Tone Spread, and Upstep) and one phonological rule (Schwa Insertion) are required to account for the complex tonal system of Babanki verbs.

Rational phonological lengthening in spoken Dutch

Dutch allows optional schwa insertion between a liquid and obstruent in words like film/filəm ("film") and dorp/dorəp ("village"), lengthening the word by one syllable. This epenthesis is productive and widespread, and is understood to be a phonological rather than phonetic process. A corpus analysis shows that a speaker's choice between the variant forms is influenced by probability: words that are less frequent or less probable given their immediate or discourse context are more likely to be lengthened. This may reflect a rational communication strategy in which language is manipulated to efficiently transmit information. As these results unambiguously show that lengthening is probabilistically influenced, they are informative to the understanding of the production mechanisms underlying pronunciation variation.

Finding schwa: Comparing the results of an automatic aligner with human judgments when identifying schwa in a corpus of spoken French

This paper compares the results of an automatic aligner with human judgments when identifying schwa in a natural language corpus of spoken French. All word-final, postconsonantal possible schwa insertion sites in the standardized text portion of investigations conducted in both Qu'ebec and France were both hand coded for schwa and time aligned at the word and phone level by the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner, modified for use with French. The results of the two methods of coding were statistically compared to determine their level of agreement. Preliminary results show a strong correlation between the two methods. Possible effects due to dialect or phonetic context were investigated using a two-way, between subjects analysis of variance. A mixed design analysis of variance was also conducted. Initial results have found no significant effect due to dialect, but a possible effect due to context. This suggests that the results of automatic alignment are comparable with human judgments in both dialects of French, but results may differ for individual speakers in specific contexts. The advantages of using an automatic aligner that can aid in the collection of larger volumes of natural language data than is possible when working manually is discussed.

Syllabic repairs in Macedonian

This article investigates syllabic repairs in Macedonian. It is shown that disparate processes are united in the effort to achieve a single goal: the elimination of extrasyllabic (i.e., unsyllabified) consonants, which constitutes a classic instance of a phonological conspiracy. The conspiracy includes the syllabification of sonorants, a-insertion before rhotics, a-insertion before nasals, and schwa insertion. There are four points of theoretical interest in this article. First, it is argued that Derivational Optimality Theory needs to be modified by admitting an additional level of evaluation: the clitic phrase level. Second, the behavior of rhotics and nasals is different at the same level of derivation: rhotics become syllabic while nasals remain extrasyllabic. Third, Macedonian is a language with two epenthetic vowels, each of which can act as a default vowel, which appears to lead to a ranking paradox. Fourth, OT-CC cannot handle the Macedonian data and is hence inadequate.

Merk toch hoe sterk - Sjwa-insertie in spontaan gesproken Standaardnederlands

This paper focuses on schwa epenthesis in present-day spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch. Schwa epenthesis is studied in consonant clusters consisting of /r/ followed by a non-dental consonant. We compare the pronunciation of men and women, older and younger speakers, Flemings and Dutchmen originating from several regions in the Dutch language area. Since words with tautosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werk ‘work’) showed somewhat more schwa epenthesis than words with heterosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werken ‘to work’), both word types were analyzed separately. In contrast to the results of Kloots et al. (2002/2004) the Flemish speakers produced more schwas than the Dutch ones. The older generation used more schwas than the younger generation. This tendency was particularly strong within the group of female speakers. Moreover, our study revealed that schwa epenthesis is much more likely when /r/ is pronounced as a trill or fricative, although a non-vocalic pronunciation of /r/ does not lead to schwa insertion automatically.

Schwa Insertion in English

Schwa Insertion in English

Die Schwa-Erweiterung in der deutschen Konjugation, natürliche Klassen und die Notwendigkeit des Merkmals „approximant“

Abstract In this paper dealing with schwa insertion in German conjugation, two rules are worked out and shown to be each necessary. They are compared with other formulations found in the literature. Some general problems related to the two rules are discussed, especially natural classes and the Naturalness Condition in phonology. One of the rules and the Naturalness Condition are used to show the necessity of the phonetic feature “approximant”.

English syllabification and schwa-insertion: from the sound pattern of English to the notion of phase

It is a well-known fact that in English, syllabification of derived words differs according to the attaching affix, Chomsky and Halle (1968). In words such as hinder, meter, burgle the final sonorant of the roots /hindr/, /mitr/, /burgl/ is syllabic in word final position, following the rule of schwa insertion that makes a final sonorant pre­ ceded by a consonant syllabic. However, in related forms where these roots are fol­ lowed by a vowel-initial affix, such as hindrance, metric, burglar, the sonorants in ques­ tion are not syllabic, but are syllabified as onsets of the following syllable. Not all affixes beginning in a vowel have the same effect on syllabification. The participle forming affix -ing triggers the schwa-insertion regardless of its vowel-initial status, e.g. (hinder /hindgr/: hindrance /hindrans/, but hindering /hindgril]/, */hindril]/). Chomsky and Halle (1968) treat this property as inherent to the attaching affix; i.e. -ance in hin­ drance differs from -ing in hindering with respect to the triggering of the schwa-insertion rule. Using a finer-grained syntax of words, this paper derives the differences in pronunciation of the above mentioned words as following not exclusively from a diacritic on the affix, as in Chomsky and Halle (1968), but rather from the attachment position of the affix in the syntactic structure of the word.

Phonology, phonetics, or frequency: Influences on the production of non-native sequences

This article examines the influence of phonetic and phonological factors and lexical frequency on accuracy and error types in the production of non-native phonotactics. In Experiment 1, English speakers were presented with non-native word-initial consonant clusters that were varied on several phonetic dimensions. Results showed that speakers are not equally accurate on the production of different illegal sequences. An analysis of lexical frequency statistics demonstrates that the frequency of these sequences in other positions across the lexicon does not correlate with accuracy. An explanation based on phonological knowledge is posited instead. A second experiment on the investigation of the strategies used to repair the illegal clusters indicated that speakers prefer schwa insertion. While previous research has assumed that such repairs are vowel epenthesis, a detailed acoustic analysis indicates that inserted schwas are significantly different than lexical schwas. These acoustic characteristics are compatible with articulatory evidence suggesting that there is a prohibition on applying canonical English consonant cluster coordination to phonotactically illegal sequences, leading speakers to “pull apart” the consonant gestures and causing a transitional schwa to appear on the acoustic record. The ramifications of these results for the role of an abstract phonological level in production are discussed.

Shortening and Ambisyllabicity in English

This article investigates the role of the syllable in the phonology of English. In particular, it centres on the problem of shortening and ambisyllabicity. The latter has sometimes been equated with resyllabification (Borowsky 1986; Myers 1987). In this view, ambisyllabicity is a phonetic phenomenon and it is resyllabification that plays a role in phonology. We demonstrate that shortening and ambisyllabicity/resyllabification are, counter to the currently held belief, entirely independent of each other, even though quantity-related processes (shortening and lengthening) are set in syllabic terms.This study continues the general line of generative research on English begun originally by Chomsky & Halle (1968, hereafterSPE) and developed in a number of later contributions, notably by Rubach (1984), Halle & Mohanan (1985), Myers (1987) and Yip (1987). Attention is focused on the latter two papers. The interpretations presented in these papers are revised and expanded in a number of substantial ways. The database has been broadened to cover the facts of British English, in particular Received Pronunciation (RP), as reported in the standard sources, such as Gimson (1970), Jones (1972), Jones & Gimson (1977) and Harris (1994). While in most cases the choice of the dialect of English plays no role, there are some rules and facts that refer exclusively to RP (Schwa Insertion, Tapping, the distribution of [I]/[ə]). For the sake of consistency, all the transcriptions cited in this article are drawn from RP.The presentation is organised as follows. § 1 introduces the problem of shortening. §2 presents a complete list of the relevant classes of data and a partial critique of the analyses by Yip (1987) and Myers (1987).

Schwa in Berber: A nonlinear analysis

This paper attempts a new analysis of the complex problem of the behavior and representation of the schwa vowel in Berber. The analysis, which tries to remedy the shortcomings of the previous studies in this area, relies on a theory of syllable structure (first sketched in work by Halle and Vergnaud (1980) ) in which phonological segments are represented in terms of three separate tiers: a tier of distinctive feature specifications called the ‘melody’, a skeletal tier of C's and V's, and a tier of Onsets and Rimes. On the basis of this theory, syllable-building rules are devised for the Kabyle dialect of Berber. A simple rule of schwa insertion seems to fit easily well within these rules. It is shown that the appearance of schwa in different forms is simply a reflex of the general Kabyle scheme for imposing a syllable structure on a string of consonants. The problem of general interest of whether syllabification is assigned at the word or phrase level is also discussed because of its relatedness to the problem of schwa in Berber.