Syllabic Features Research Articles

Syllable-Initial Phonemes Affect Neural Entrainment to Consonant-Vowel Syllables.

Neural entrainment to speech appears to rely on syllabic features, especially those pertaining to the acoustic envelope of the stimuli. It has been proposed that the neural tracking of speech depends on the phoneme features. In the present electroencephalography experiment, we examined data from 25 participants to investigate neural entrainment to near-isochronous stimuli comprising syllables beginning with different phonemes. We measured the inter-trial phase coherence of neural responses to these stimuli and assessed the relationship between this coherence and acoustic properties of the stimuli designed to quantify their “edginess.” We found that entrainment was different across different classes of the syllable-initial phoneme and that entrainment depended on the amount of “edge” in the sound envelope. In particular, the best edge marker and predictor of entrainment was the latency of the maximum derivative of each syllable.

An Overview of Itu Mbon Uso Consonants

This study attempts a systematic description and classification of Itu Mbon Uso Consonants, using a descriptive framework. This research will provide a background study for the description of Itu Mbon Uso consonants. It aims to establish and provide a detailed study of the consonant sounds available in the Itu Mbon Uso language. Data was collected through primary and secondary sources. The trial version of the Ibadan 400 wordlist was used in data collection. In addition, there was the need to develop short sentences in the language so as to capture the pronunciation of words not found in the 400 wordlist and to show the position of each segment in words. The objective of this research is the need to develop our indigenous languages and save them from extinction, which should begin with the development of the orthography. The study revealed that they are seventeen phonemic and twenty phonetic consonants in Itu Mbon Uso with syllabic features such as aspiration and consonant processes like nasalization and palatalization. Our contribution is the provision of the consonantal inventory of the language which will act as a springboard for the eventual development of orthography for the language. The study is also important documentation of an endangered language, which had hitherto received little attention. It is recommended that research be carried out on the vowel system of the language to ensure an eventual orthography for the language.

한국어 단어의 어휘성에 영향을 미치는 표기음절 요인 탐구 -무선 단어생성 실험 연구-

한국어 단어의 어휘성에 영향을 미치는 표기음절 요인 탐구 -무선 단어생성 실험 연구-

Lower Beta: A Central Coordinator of Temporal Prediction in Multimodal Speech.

How the brain decomposes and integrates information in multimodal speech perception is linked to oscillatory dynamics. However, how speech takes advantage of redundancy between different sensory modalities, and how this translates into specific oscillatory patterns remains unclear. We address the role of lower beta activity (~20 Hz), generally associated with motor functions, as an amodal central coordinator that receives bottom-up delta-theta copies from specific sensory areas and generate top-down temporal predictions for auditory entrainment. Dissociating temporal prediction from entrainment may explain how and why visual input benefits speech processing rather than adding cognitive load in multimodal speech perception. On the one hand, body movements convey prosodic and syllabic features at delta and theta rates (i.e., 1–3 Hz and 4–7 Hz). On the other hand, the natural precedence of visual input before auditory onsets may prepare the brain to anticipate and facilitate the integration of auditory delta-theta copies of the prosodic-syllabic structure. Here, we identify three fundamental criteria based on recent evidence and hypotheses, which support the notion that lower motor beta frequency may play a central and generic role in temporal prediction during speech perception. First, beta activity must respond to rhythmic stimulation across modalities. Second, beta power must respond to biological motion and speech-related movements conveying temporal information in multimodal speech processing. Third, temporal prediction may recruit a communication loop between motor and primary auditory cortices (PACs) via delta-to-beta cross-frequency coupling. We discuss evidence related to each criterion and extend these concepts to a beta-motivated framework of multimodal speech processing.

A linguistic analysis of the Lao writing system and its suitability for minority language orthographies

Standard Lao, the official language in the Lao PDR, is spoken in and around the capital Vientiane. Lexicon, vowels and especially tone inventories of the many Lao dialects in the nation differ tremendously. A new orthography to replace the traditional Pali-based orthography which was hard to teach and learn was established during the Lao language reform in 1975. This study investigates the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of Lao orthography and its applicability to other languages in the multilingual nation. After a short introduction to the Lao language and the linguistic situation in the country, the Lao phoneme inventory and a description of the nature and historical development of Lao script are presented, including some taxonomic considerations discussing the segmental, suprasegmental and syllabic features of this script. This is followed by a linguistic evaluation of the orthography and a summary in the light of how to apply Lao script to other languages spoken in the country. Three minority orthogr...

More Than Words: Fast Acquisition and Generalization of Orthographic Regularities During Novel Word Learning in Adults

In literates, reading is a fundamental channel for acquiring new vocabulary both in the mother tongue and in foreign languages. By using an artificial language learning task, we examined the acquisition of novel written words and their embedded regularities (an orthographic surface feature and a syllabic feature) in three groups of university students with different exposures (Group 1 saw 2 words once, Group 2 saw 20 words once, Group 3 saw 20 words three times). Recognition memory results for Groups 2 and 3 indicated that adults can learn novel written words even with just a single exposure, albeit repeated exposure improved target detection. A generalization task revealed that even the minimal exposure in Group 1 was enough for acquisition of the two embedded regularities. More exemplars and repeated exposure provided more robust effects for the syllable regularity. Finally, post-test interview showed that repeated exposure was needed to become aware of the regularities. The present results show that adults learn novel written words and their inherent regularities in a fast and effective fashion.

Mismatch responses to lexical tone, initial consonant, and vowel in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers

The present study investigates how age, phonological saliency, and deviance size affect the presence of mismatch negativity (MMN) and positive mismatch response (P-MMR). This work measured the auditory mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, initial consonants, and vowels in 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers using the multiple-deviant oddball paradigm. The data showed the coexistence of MMN and P-MMR in the same age group when responding to the three types of syllabic features in Mandarin. The transition from a predominantly positive response to a predominantly negative response supported the multiple MMN mechanisms. Congruent with the phonological saliency hypothesis and the phonetic acquisition order of Mandarin in behavioral studies, for the compulsory elements of Mandarin syllables, lexical tones, and vowels, the larger deviants elicited adult-like MMNs, whereas the smaller deviants elicited P-MMRs. The optional elements of the Mandarin syllables, the initial consonant, only elicited P-MMR in preschoolers. These findings suggest that MMN and P-MMR index different functional characteristics and may provide information on when and how children's speech perception becomes automatic at different developmental stages.

Zwischen Wort und Zeichen. Die graphische Markierung suprasegmentaler Einheiten in der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract Variation is an essential feature of Early New High German orthography. I attribute this phenomenon to the exhortation to pursue stylistic diversification, a striving for which rhetoricians like Erasmus expressed support. The segmentation and transformation of written words in the 16th century shows that variation led to conditions favorable for an analysis that contributed to the establishment of new—morphological and syllabic—principles for spelling words. Examples such as <darvon> (instead of <daruon>) and <bisher> (instead of <biſher>) demonstrate morphological segmentation of the written word form. Distinctive syllabic features in historically unfounded spellings like <mehr> and <Jhar> call attention to a syllabic analysis. Both new spelling principles document a process of turning away from the segmental-phonographic practice that had prevailed prior to that time. These new spellings refer to a fundamental change in how the written word was perceived.

Locality and the nature of nasal harmony

There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposing a strict adjacency condition on related entities. One pattern of nasal harmony adheres to this condition; nasality extends over a sequence of segments that may include vowels, semivowels, liquids, nasals and fricatives, and no segments can be skipped. In another pattern, locality appears to be violated, because obstruents are invariably transparent. This paper proposes a novel solution to the locality problem posed by the latter by advancing a theory in which nasality always spreads locally either at the segmental level or at the level of the heads/nucleus of syllables. The apparent skipping of obstruents arises in the second mode of spreading, a type of vowel harmony. The analysis attributes the obligatory nasalisation of sonorant consonants when harmony is the nucleus-to-nucleus type to an independent principle of Syllable Nasalisation, which is necessarily in effect when Nasal is a syllabic feature.

Toward automatic segmentation and syllabification of dysarthric speech

A program has been developed which uses heuristic processing of the output of a neural network to locate syllable boundaries in connected speech. The neural network attempts a broad segmental (8 category) classification. This is followed by a program which locates syllable boundaries using phonological constraints and the pattern of network classifications over time. On test data consisting of 150 sentences (about 1800 syllables) from the TIMIT database, this program correctly identifies between 83% and 88% of the syllable boundaries (depending on the error criteria), including syllables bounded by sonorant consonants and syllables containing syllabic consonants. This program is now being applied to the identification of syllable boundaries in speech from talkers with cerebral palsy. In preliminary analyses of 20 sentences from ten dysarthric talkers (140 syllables) only 12 boundary omissions occurred. However, since dysarthric speech often contains hesitations, false starts, and extraneous noises, assessing boundary insertion errors is more difficult; about 50 boundary insertions occurred. Roughly 2/3 of these represented instances in which the talker inserted additional syllabic features into the speech. Further studies will examine methods for reducing the number of these ‘‘unintended’’ boundaries identified by the algorithm. [Work supported by the Nemours Foundation.]

補綴物装着者の時間経過に伴う発音改善について

A hypothetical process of speech productive alteration procedures is presented. The recent pronounciation studies in dental prosthetic literature is reviewed with emphasis on statistical references of the sample means. In this case, the alteration level scores of speech production is demonstrated as habituation to follow the sample variances in inter-word or inter-syllabic variations. A dual-type trend of the state in statistical variences, one time-dependent and one time independent, are assumed to develop respectively in temporal sound feature. Syllabic features of time-dependent parameter is effectively displayed in the capital or pre-syllabic word unit. Auditory feedback controls are possively relevant to the second and the ensuring syllables, and are evaluated in the area where the sound parameters are relatively stable. From the neurophysiological standpoint of the speechchain model theory, natural speech sound series consist practically in the chain model. Though, in earlier period, the plate wearer's sounds cause a breakdown of the interrelation of chain model, the sounds are in time recovered from the disorder. In experiments and observations of human habituation in dental research, the series of speech materials should be in chain model and the research object of a unit should be in the first syllable.

Automatic detection and description of syllabic features in continuous speech

The details of the implementation of a syntax-controlled acoustic encoder of a speech understanding system (SUS) are presented. Finite-state automata operating on artificial descriptions of suprasegmentals and global spectral features isolate syllables in continuous speech. Then a combinational algorithm tracks the formants for the voiced intervals of each syllable, and other algorithms provide a complete structural description of spectral and prosodic features for a spoken sentence. Such a description consists of a string of symbols and numerical attributes and is a representation of speech in terms of perceptually significant primitive forms. It contains all the information required to reconstruct the analyzed sentence with a formant synthesizer; it can be used directly either for emitting or verifying hypotheses at the lexical level of an SUS and for automatically learning phonetic features by grammatical inference.

Syllabic features and phonic impression in English, German, French and Spanish

An attempt is made to analyze objectively the syllabic features which contribute to the subjective impression a language makes upon a foreign ear. Four languages are involved in this analysis - English, German, French and Spanish. The syllabic character of each one is emphasized by comparison with the others. 2000 syllables are analyzed in each of the four languages. Seven aspects of the syllable emerge from the objective data. (1) Phonic content in terms of place of articulation based either on the ten most frequent syllables or on the complete corpus of 2000 syllables, shows the following preferences: in English, apical consonants with central vowels: in German, apical consonants with center and front vowels; in (2) The research reported herein was performed pursuant to a contract with the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education. French, apical consonants with front vowels; in Spanish, apical consonants with a balance of open and mid-open vowels. (2) Consonant-to-vowel ratio, or simply consonantal load since each syllable has only one vowel, is highest in German, almost balanced in English, and lowest in French and Spanish. (3) Variety and complexity of syllabic structures are both greater in the two Germanic languages than in the two Romance languages. The prevailing structures are divided among CVC and CV in German and English, whereas in Spanish and French the CV structure holds a majority by itself alone. (4) Syllable length, in terms of number of phonemes, is also greater in Germanic than in Latin languages. (5) The predominance of closed syllables in German and English (63 and 60 percent) is almost as marked as the preference for open syllables in Spanish and French (72 and 76 percent). (6) In frequency of different-syllable structures, Spanish stands alone - it shows the smallest number of different syllables; English shows the largest number, with German and French not far behind. (7) And again Spanish is set apart with respect to the relationship of syllable length with average-group frequency — Spanish repeats its shorter syllables more often than the three other languages. To these objective data correspond subjective impressions such as frontal resonance, active articulation, auditory richness, forward motion, heaviness, musical predominance, sequential legato, repetitiveness, monotony, (or their opposites) the sum of which contributes considerably to characterizing a language.