Separate Phonemes Research Articles

SOME REMARKS REGARDING PRONUNCIATION OF THE SOUND /Ʀ/ BY THE INITIAL RUS’

Pronunciation of the Scandinavian Younger Futhark’s rune Ýr, conventionally transcribed as /ʀ/, varied in Old Norse dialects. In the western dialect, this consonant merged with /r/ due to the active rhoticism; while eastern dialects, including a dialect presumably spoken by the initial Rus’ after its origination (in the Viking Era), probably preserved it as a separate phoneme. Some pronunciation features of the sound /ʀ/ by the initial Rus’ were indirectly emerged in foreign-language rendering cases of certain Rus’ words. The article considers examples of such renderings: a few Rus’ proper names in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ De Administrando Imperio as well as the presumptive Rus’ self-naming in Geografus Bavarus and Finnish-language reproductions. With regard to restrictions of the alphabets involved in the discussed examples, an assumption was proposed that the initial Rus’ pronounced the sound /ʀ/ as a palate-alveolar (or even alveo-palatal) sibilant with the uncompleted rhoticism.

Distribution of phonemes in seven-component primary roots of modern Ukrainian literary languages

The article analyzes the latest research on the problems of distribution of phonemes of modern Ukrainian literary language, in particular with the use of statistical and mathematical methods and modeling methods. On the material of the «Dictionary of Ukrainian morphemes» edited by L. Polyuga the composition of primary seven-component root morphemes of modern Ukrainian literary language and connecting possibilities of separate phonemes in primary triphonemic root morphemes are analyzed. The scientific novelty of the study is determined by the fact that the primary seven-component root morphemes from the use of statistical and mathematical methods and the method of modeling have not yet been considered. The aim of the work is to comprehensively analyze the compatibility of phonemes in primary seven-component root morphemes of modern Ukrainian literary language, in particular to investigate the structure of combinations in primary seven-component roots of modern Ukrainian literary language, to identify frequency of group use. functioning in the primary seven-component morphemes of the modern Ukrainian literary language. A study of the dictionary revealed 41 primary seven-component root morphemes, the first component of which are often closed-breakthrough (19) and slit phonemes (12). It was found that among the sevenphonemic roots of modern Ukrainian literary language the following distributive structures of phonemes are characteristic: “prelingual + vowel + prelingual + vowel + vowel + lip + vowel + preligual (5)”, “preligual + vowel + lip + vowel + prelingual + vowel + prelingua” (5), “hard + vowel + hard + vowel + hard + vowel + hard” (16), “har vowel + hard + vowel + hard + vowel + soft” (9), “call + vowel + call + vowel + call + vowel + call” (4), “deaf + call + vowel + deaf + deaf + vowel + call” (4), “deaf + vowel + call + vowel + deaf + vowel + call” (3), “deaf + vowel + call + vowel + call + vowel + call” (3), “call + vowel + deaf + vowel + call + vowel + call” (3).

The concept of “Linguistic structure” as the basis of the Methodic for analyzing Vocal Composition

Relevance of the study. In the art vocal music of the second half of the 20 th — early 21st centuries the approaches to the selection of verbal texts are changing, they become the fundamental principle of musical works. The variety of verbal lines gives rise to a variety of composer’s work with them. Composers offer different, including previously unused, ways of working with a verbal text. In this regard, it is necessary to find new methods for the analysis of modern compositions, because traditional methods are no longer suitable for such material.
 The purpose of the study. The using of the concept of linguistic structure for the analysis of modern vocal scores and its approbation on the example of “Choven” (“Boat”) for three voices a cappella by Alla Zagaykevych is proposed.
 Methods. The article is based on general scientific and especially scientific methods. Among general scientific methods descriptive, comparative, systemic ones are applied. Among special scientific methods structural and functional ones are used.
 The results and conclusions. The conception of “language structure” was developed in structural linguistics and is now common in linguistics. It is based on the consideration of verbal language as a holistic system, which is divided into four tiers: phonological, morphological, lexicalsemantic and syntactic. Each tier has a main element, which is the smallest component in its layer. The composer, choosing a specific verbal text, works with it, applying changes at different language levels, which leads to individualization in the interpretation and sound embodiment of the verbal source. Based on the concept of language structure, a method of analysis of a modern vocal work is proposed, which in the article finds approbation on the example by Alla Zagaykevycs work “Choven” [“Boat”] on the text by Mykola Vorobyov’s poetry. It is proved that the composer works only on three language levels: phonological, morphological and lexical-semantic. It was found that when the composer is working at the phonological level it is important to highlight a separate phoneme, presenting its sound color. At the morphological level, the key is the morpheme, which becomes the main expression of the image. If M. Vorobyov works only at the lexical-semantic level, then A. Zagaykevych develops two other levels (phonological and morphological), based on the fact that the lexeme is a combination of smaller quantities. To identify the core of the lexeme, the composer breaks it down into smaller details: from the most important lexeme “choven” the phoneme “ch” stands out, which becomes the core of the whole composition.

The Phonetics and Phonology of Old Armenian <V>, <W>, and Prevocalic <OW>*

AbstractThe Old Armenian letters <v> and <w> occur in nearly complementary distribution, but a century of scholarship has failed to resolve whether they denote separate phonemes, allophones, or allographs. The relation of these sounds to the vowel /u/ and interpretation of prevocalic <ow> spellings are also debated. It is argued that Old Armenian had a single phoneme /u/ realized as [u] in syllabic positions, i.e. between consonants or between consonant and word boundary, and [w] or [v] next to a vowel. In initial position the nonsyllabic allophone was realized as [v], including before [ə] < pretonic *i, e.g. vasn [ˈvɑsən] ‘because of, with respect to’, vnas [vəˈnɑs] ‘harm, damage’, underyingly /uasn/, /uinas/. In word‐medial position the realization was [w] or perhaps [ʋ], which was written <v> after o and <w> after other vowels. After a consonant, <w> occurs in the oblique case forms of wo‐ and wo/ea‐stems, where it reflects dissimilation in the sequence *‐iyo‐ > *‐yo‐ > *‐wo‐; otherwise we find <ow> representing [əw], e.g. in lowanam [ləwɑˈnɑm] ‘wash’, gen. anowan [ɑnəˈwɑn] ‘name’, underlyingly /luanam/, /anuan/. The diphthongs aw, ew, iw, ov can therefore be interpreted as sequences of vowel + /u/, as in t‘iw /t‘iu/ ‘number’, gen. t‘owoy /t‘iuoy/.

“Linguistic autumn”? A remark in connection with Vytautas Kardelis’s article “Three questions regarding the prosodic system of the Lithuanian language” (Lietuvių kalba, 11, 2017)

Some considerations in connection with the three main claims in Vytautas Kardelis’s article Three questions regarding the prosodic system of the Lithuanian language, concerning (a) the order of procedures in the investigation of the ‘sound form of language’, (b) the domain of prosodic features and (c) the term priegaidė. According to Kardelis, the description of speech chain should begin with an instrumental investigation. This may be true of acoustic analysis of a signal (not necessarily that of speech), but not the phonological analysis of a speech chain that, by definition, begins with isolating its discrete units, which, at the same time, are the units of the phonological system of the language in question. Likewise, phonetic suprasegmental elements (pitch, tone, etc.) may be associated with any loci of speech chain, including those coinciding with individual phonemes, either vowel or consonantal, but the domain of prosodic features, such as acute and circumflex in Lithuanian, is undoubtedly the syllable, rather than separate phonemes. In poliaccentual languages, syllable accents can be absolutely adequately described using the term priegaidė, which here means ‘syllable intonation’, while substituting it with ‘tone’ or ‘stress’ is misleading and, in the last analysis, simply fruitless or simply wrong.

Deciding the status of controversial phonemes using frequency distributions; An application to semiconsonants in Spanish

Exploiting the fact that natural languages are complex systems, the present exploratory article proposes a direct method based on frequency distributions that may be useful when making a decision on the status of problematic phonemes, an open problem in linguistics. The main notion is that natural languages, which can be considered from a complex outlook as information processing machines, and which somehow manage to set appropriate levels of redundancy, already “made the choice” whether a linguistic unit is a phoneme or not, and this would be reflected in a greater smoothness in a frequency versus rank graph. For the particular case we chose to study, we conclude that it is reasonable to consider the Spanish semiconsonant /w/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /u/, on the one hand, and possibly also the semiconsonant /j/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /i/, on the other. As language has been so central a topic in the study of complexity, this discussion grants us, in addition, an opportunity to gain insight into emerging properties in the broader complex systems debate.

The speech ability on maxillary denture wearer: a systematic review

Objective: Getting information about on influence of denture bases design on speech ability on maxillary denture wearer.Methode: Electronic search in PubMed and Wiley online library databases to find articles that were published in last 20 years; between January 1998 to December 2017 with keywords “denture bases” and “speech”. The articles were then selected by reviewing the title and abstract.Result: The initial search obtained 52 articles. Then selected by involving the inclusion criteria. Finally, it gain 2 articles only that suitable with the inclusion criteria.Conclusion: Speech ability is usually not the main complain of denture wearer. Subjects with inappropriate design of the prosthetic base, disposition of artificial teeth and functional quality (retention, support, stability) have dyslalia when pronunciation of separate phonemes is changed.

Вокальная тембрика в хоровых сочинениях Маурисио Кагеля 1958–1982 годов

The article is devoted to the choral music of Mauricio Kagel from the years 1958–1982, presenting an example of one of the most radical phenomena in choral music of the second half of the 20th century. Most of the attention is focused on examination of the vocal techniques which determined the composer’s choral writing. The article examines the complex of the utilized vocal techniques (singing, Sprechgesang, declamation), the regulators of vocal soundproduction (the character of vibrato, the indicators of the scale of the phonatory exhalation); provides a characterization of the main articulatory techniques: both traditional ones for 20th century choral music (singing with closed mouth, falsetto, whisper), as well as innovative ones, which demonstrated themselves for the first time in Kagel’s compositions (singing with clenched teeth, singing with closed mouth while simultaneously pronouncing the text in a trembling voice). The questions regarding Mauricio Kagel’s work with separate phonemes are highlighted. As part of the analysis of the work “Anagrama” used the first attempt in Western European music of applying quasi-serial procedures to work with a verbal text, stipulating the appearance in the score of signs of tables of the International Phonetic Association. The present composition is examined as the first example of a new vocal genre – phonemic composition. Study of compositions written by the composer during the first two decades of his life in Germany makes it possible to come up with the conclusion about a consistent solution by the composer of a particular goal – the search for a new choral sound capable of enabling choral music to continue its development, to lead it away from a state of stagnation, in which, according to the composer, contemporary choral culture was existing. The publication is prepared within the framework of scholarly project No. 16-04-50011, supported by the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (RFFI). Keywords: Mauricio Kagel, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, choral music, post-war avant-garde, vocal timbral patterns, phonemic composition.

The ‘ph’ of English orthography; a digraph or a sequence of separate phonemes?

The aim of this short article is to offer a belated defense of L. M. Boyd (author of a daily, nationally syndicated column ‘Trivia’ in numerous newspapers throughout the USA) against a critique published in English Today over a decade ago by Alan S. Kaye (2006), and present arguments in support of Boyd's beleaguered claim. Kaye (2006: 54) writes: I do not mean to be picking on Mr. Boyd, but considering his track record, perhaps the time has come for his quitting pontificating on matters of English grammar, pronunciation, and the history of the language.

Fricative Debuccalization and Primary Split in Terena (Arawak) Historical Phonology

This paper discusses a set of morphophonemic alternations in Terena, an Arawak language of Brazil. I propose a number of non-alternating Pre-Terena forms and a sound change in a diachronic account of these alternations. Using internal, comparative, and philological (early documentary) evidence, I trace the development of these alternations from its precursors in allophonic variation to its partial morphologization. The proposed change debuccalized the voiceless allophones of the Pre-Terena coronal fricatives, changing them to glottal fricatives while leaving unaffected their voiced allophones, whose occurrence is restricted to nasal contexts related to the exponence of 1psg possessors and subjects. I suggest that the partial merger between the Pre-Terena oral fricatives and h took place gradually rather than abruptly and that this accounts for the existence of a contrast between two glottals, h and hʲ, which existed as separate phonemes but that nowadays appear fully merged as h.

Asymmetrical interpretation of English liquid consonants by Japanese speakers

Japanese speakers have difficulty in differentiating English /l/ and /r/ because they are not contrastive. Actually, variations of both /l/ and /r/ occur in Japanese speech. The most common realization of Japanese /r/ is alveolar tap [ɾ] and all variants of both /l/ and /r/ are considered as allophones of /r/. Previously, it was found that Japanese speakers have more problems with /l/ than with /r/ in their English production. So, this study investigates why these differences occur. Analysis of Japanese speakers’ mimicry speech of (a) American English and (b) English accented Japanese suggested that Japanese speakers are aware of acoustic and articulatory features of English approximant [ɹ]. Japanese speakers overused approximant [ɹ] and r-colored vowels in their mimicries of both (a) and (b). Further articulatory analysis of Japanese and English consonants showed that the English approximant [ɹ] is quite distinct from Japanese consonants, all of which lack lip rounding. The results of these studies suggest that Japanese speakers may not be able to recognize English /l/ and /r/ as separate phonemes, but that they can hear the approximant [ɹ] as it forms a new sound category, whereas they interpret /l/ as /r/.

Simultaneous recognition of phone and speaker using three-way restricted Boltzmann machine

In this study, we attempt a simultaneous recognition method of phone and speaker using a single energy-based model, a three-way restricted Boltzmann machine (3WRBM). The proposed model is a probabilistic model that includes three variables: acoustic features, latent phonetic features, and speaker-identity features. The model is trained so that it automatically captures the intensity of relationships among the three variables. Once the training is done, we can apply the model to many speech signal processing tasks because it has an ability to separate phoneme and speaker-related information from the observed speech, and generate a speech signal from the phoneme and speaker-related information on the contrary. Simultaneous phone and speaker recognition is achieved by estimating the latent phonetic features and the speaker-identity features given the input signal. In our experiments, we discuss the effectiveness of the mode lin a speaker recognition and a speech (continuous phone) recognition tasks.

Testing the Roles of Distribution and Alternation in Phonological Relationships

This study investigates how two factors, distribution and morphological alternation, affect speakers’ ability to group sounds into the same phoneme category. Previous findings indicate that allophonic variants of a single phoneme are rated as more similar than sounds belonging to separate phonemes. The present study builds on these findings by conducting a similarity rating task to investigate the processing of anterior and posterior coronal sibilants [s] and [ɕ/ʃ] in three languages in which the two sounds participate in different types of relationships: (i) English, in which [s] and [ʃ] occur in the same environment (e.g. see versus she); (ii) Korean, in which [s] and [ɕ] are in complementary distribution and participate in regular and productive morphological alternations; and (iii) Mandarin, in which [s] and [ɕ] are in complementary distribution but do not participate in morphological alternations due to its phonotactic restrictions. The results showed that both English and Mandarin speakers rated the...

On Sources of the Word Length Effect in Young Readers

We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (Haus-Bauch-Schach). In the remaining conditions, phoneme length increased in correspondence with letter length. One presented monosyllabic words with consonant clusters (Herbst); the other presented disyllabic words without consonant clusters (Kö.nig). Phoneme and letter length contributed to the length effect in naming latencies. Words with consonant clusters elicited the largest length effect. We interpreted this finding as reflecting difficulties of young readers with accessing the output phonology of the tightly coarticulated consonant clusters from the separate phonemes delivered from serial grapheme-to-phoneme conversions. Moreover, eye-movement data indicated that increased reading speed, accompanied with decreased word length effects, is due to more efficient grapheme-to-phoneme conversions rather than the emergence of whole-word recognition.

Spanish Rhotics: More Evidence of Gradience in the System

The present study examines the nature of the Spanish rhotics experimentally, investigating the possibilities that the trill is best understood as deriving from an underlying geminate or that the tap and trill may be separate phonemes. In order to explore these two theories, a behavioral task was designed exploiting the absence of native words in Spanish containing a final trill onset that carry antepenultimate stress. The geminate view of Spanish rhotics argues that this pattern is absent because it is prohibited by the synchronic phonological grammar, while two-phoneme approaches consider it a diachronic gap. A nonword naming task tested the representation of this nonextant word shape by comparing trisyllabic nonce forms containing trills to other controlled sequences in theoretically banned (antepenultimate) and permitted (penultimate) stress conditions. The results of the experiment are interpreted as evidence against a geminate analysis of Spanish taps and trills. The data also suggest gradience in phonemic categorization and are considered within an emergent conception of the lexicon.

Viduslejasvācu valodas fonoloģiskās sistēmas un rakstības ietekme pirmo latviešu rakstu valodā

INFLUENCE OF THE MIDDLE LOW GERMAN PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM AND ORTHO­GRAPHY ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARLY LATVIAN WRITINGSSummaryIn this article, the author deals with the possible influence of the Low German phonological system and orthography tradition on the language of the Latvian writings in the 16th–early 17lh century. Three types of interference in the vowel system are discussed in the article: under-differentiation of the Latv. /e/ and /æ/ as well as /ē/, /æ/ and /ie/; over-differentiation, as separate phonemes, of the allophones [e] and [ö] of the phoneme /e/ and the allophones [i] and [ü] of the phoneme /i/ in a position next to labial consonants; substitution of Latv. [au] by Low German [ou].

The phonetic status of the (inter)dental approximant

The (inter)dental approximant is a little-studied speech sound in the Philippines and Western Australia. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, providing acoustic and video data from Kagayanen and Limos Kalinga, respectively. The sound is attested in at least fifteen languages. It is contrastive in five Western Australian languages, while in the Philippines it generally patterns as an allophone of /l/ but has emerged recently as a separate phoneme due to contact. It arose independently in the two regions. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters. All of these factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Segmentation of isolated words based on dynamics of parameters of short correlation functions

In the paper, results of theoretical and experimental studies of dynamics of parameters of short correlation functions of speech signals are exposed. We present the results of the theoretical investigation of the dependence of the maxima of correlation functions of quasi-periodic signals in a general form on the characteristics defining the degree of their quasi-periodicity. Based on these dependences, estimates for the parameters of the quasi-periodicity degree, of the length of quasi-periodic intervals, of the main period, etc. are constructed. The obtained estimates are interpreted in the case of speech signals, and it is shown that many important parameters used in speech technologies can be calculated from them. Experimental results on segmentation of isolated words into separate phonemes are given as an example of efficiency of the approach based on the analysis of correlation functions. It is shown that the segmentation based on monitoring of singularities of dynamics of parameters of short correlation turns out to be stable and adequate to perception.

Some principles of second language phonology

The research we report here is intended to build an understanding of several well-known yet poorly comprehended problems relating to phonemic contrasts in the learning of L2 pronunciation. The competing influences of similarity and difference between native and target language sound systems, in particular, are central to this understanding, which we believe show that L2 phonology is a highly abstract enterprise parallel to the phonologies of primary languages, rather than - as has been assumed - a mere imitation of the target language’s pronunciations. We identify three interesting learning situations which involve the target language’s having different phonemic contrasts from the native language. In the first situation, the native language has neither of two sounds which contrast in the target language; in the second situation, the native language includes just one of two sounds which contrast in the target language. And in the third situation, the native language has both of the sounds in question but shows no contrast between them, i.e., a phoneme of the native language has two (or more) allophones that categorize as separate phonemes in the target language.

The timing of nonmodal phonation in vowels

In a language where breathiness or laryngealization is a contrastive property of vowels, such nonmodal phonation lasts longer and is more differentiated from modal phonation than in a language where nonmodal phonation results from the influence of preceding consonants. In Tagalog, breathy phonation occurs incidentally on vowels after /h/, and laryngealized phonation occurs after glottal stops. Mazatec, on the other hand, employs breathy and laryngealized vowels as separate phonemes that contrast with modal vowels. Several acoustic measures show that nonmodal and modal vowels are differentiated more strongly and over a longer duration in Mazatec than in Tagalog.An experiment examined words from six male and six female speakers of each of those languages, with corroborating modal and breathy vowels from four male and four female speakers of Chong, and modal and laryngealized vowels from one male speaker of Mpi. From each speaker, three vowels of each phonation type were analyzed. To determine the time course of phonation effects, measurements were made at 25 ms intervals through each vowel. The measurements were the amplitude differences between the first and second harmonic and between the first harmonic and the second formant, and cepstral peak prominence (a measure of periodicity).