Syllabic Position Research Articles

Phonetic Diversity vs. Sociolinguistic and Phonological Patterning of R in Québec French

In this study, we investigate the multifaceted realizations of the /R/ consonant in Québec French (QF) by combining sociolinguistic and phonological approaches. First, from a sociophonetic point of view, we utilize a mixed-effects multinomial logistic regression model to analyze the impact of various variables on the distribution of /R/ variants. Our analysis of location, birth year and gender reveals that each variable and its interactions significantly influence the distribution of /R/ variants. We identify three distinct speaker groups based on their preferences for these variants: those favoring apical variants, those using uvular trills, and those employing neither apical nor uvular trills (mostly using fricatives and their approximantized or vocalized variants). From a phonological point of view, we show that the use of the /R/ variants among the three groups correlates with syllabic position, with weaker variants displayed in so-called “weakening” contexts, such as coda and intervocalic onset. Our results thus show that the apparent diversity of /R/ realizations in QF actually follows a pattern from both a sociolinguistic and a formal phonological point of view.

Phonological impairments in Hindi aphasics: Error analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons

ABSTRACT We assessed phonological and apraxic impairments in Hindi persons with aphasia (PwA) and compared them to Italian PwA reported in previous studies. Overall, we found strong similarities. Phonological errors were present across production tasks (repetition, reading and naming), most errors were non-lexical and, among those, a majority involved individual phonemes. There were significant effects of length, but not frequency. Hindi PwA, like the Italian PwA, showed strong effects of syllabic structure, with most errors occurring on consonants and weak syllabic positions, preserving syllable structure and simplifying phonemes or syllabic templates. These similarities were modulated by some language-specific patterns. Vowel insertions were more common in Hindi, possibly due to the presence of a central vowel, and segmental simplifications concentrated on marked aspiration and retroflection features. We hope our study will encourage further research in Hindi and other Indian languages. This will improve clinical diagnosis and our understanding of cross-linguistic differences.

Big data mining and comparative analyses across lexica on the relationship between syllable complexity and word stress

For about four decades, phonological theories have claimed that word stress assignment depends on the word’s syllabic structure complexity in relation to syllabic position. This study analyzes the syllabic structure implications for word stress in three languages with weight-sensitive lexical stress, namely Brazilian Portuguese, British English, and American English. After creating three corpora and applying Random Forest modeling, syllabic structure distributions for word stress were found to be bound to stress pattern and word length in number of syllables. To account for these observations, models of word naming must be extended with aspects of word stress.

Syllable position effects in the perception of L2 Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/ and /ɾ/) and their position-dependent deviant productions, suggesting that the cause of their perceptual confusability differs across syllable positions. Another syllabic position effect was attested in the acquisition order (/l/onset > /l/coda, /ɾ/coda > /ɾ/onset), demonstrating that an L2 sound is not mastered equally in all positions. Furthermore, we also observed that an increase in L2 experience affected only the perceptual identification accuracy of [l], but not of [ɾ]. This seems to suggest that L2 experience may exert different degrees of impact, depending on the L2 segments. Both theoretical and methodological implications of these results are discussed.

모어의 음운 체계가 음성 지각과 산출에 미치는 영향에 대한 연구

This study mainly investigated how the difference of the plosive system between Standard Chinese and Korean triggers different aspects of the perception and production of same linguistic stimulus, which is a velar plosive /k/ in Chinese. This study is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction, and Chapter 2 is an overall review of the Chinese and Korean phonological systems, especially in terms of plosives and vowels. Chapter 3 gives specific information about the subjects and the stimuli of the experiments in this study. Based on the information provided in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 is about the perception test. In the perception test, most of the Chinese subjects perceived two velar consonants in disyllabic words in the stimuli as a same sound. On the other hand, Korean subjects distinguished the two velar consonants into different sounds depending on both the tones and the syllabic positions. As for a velar consonant combining with tone1 and tone4, Korean subjects perceived them as a fortis sound in Korean, but as for a velar consonant combining with tone2 and tone3, they perceived them as a lenis sound. Furthermore, in the voicing production test in Chapter 5, VOT(Voice Onset Time) produced by Chinese and Korean subjects was measured. This experiment showed that both groups made a difference according to the tones and the syllabic positions, and however, this tendency was more apparently shown in the result of Korean subjects. That is, VOT of velar consonants with tone1 and tone4 was relatively shorter than that with tone2 and tone3, and the result of Korean subject shows more obviously the difference. In sum, the results of the tests in Chapter 4 and 5 suggest that the phonological system of mother tongue strongly influences on not only the perception of sounds but also the production of sounds. Chapter 6 is a summary of this paper.

Sound change and tonogenesis in Sylheti

Abstract Our study investigates the nature of tonogenesis in Sylheti, which was triggered by the merger of aspirated and unaspirated consonants in the language. We propose that the tonogenetic factors contributed by the four-way laryngeal contrast condition a three-way tonal contrast in Sylheti depending on the voicing and syllabic position of the sound. We take into consideration both monosyllabic and disyllabic sets of words and claim that Sylheti has three lexical level tones: high, mid, and low. We have built linear mixed-effect models of f0 and duration to examine the acoustic correlates of tone contrast in the language. We conclude that Sylheti has a three-way tonal contrast distinctively affecting pitch.

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/.

Acoustic and speaker variation in Dutch /n/ and /m/ as a function of phonetic context and syllabic position

In forensic speech science, nasals are often reported to be particularly useful in characterizing speakers because of their low within-speaker and high between-speaker variability. However, empirical acoustic data from nasal consonants indicate that there is a somewhat larger role for the oral cavity in nasal consonant acoustics than is generally predicted by acoustic models. For example, in read speech, nasal consonant acoustics show lingual coarticulation that differs by nasal consonant, and syllabic position also seems to affect realizations of nasal consonants within speakers. In the current exploratory study, the within- and between-speaker variation in the most frequent nasals in Standard Dutch, /n/ and /m/, was investigated. Using 3695 [n] and 3291 [m] tokens sampled from 54 speakers' spontaneous telephone utterances, linear mixed-effects modeling of acoustic-phonetic features showed effects of phonetic context that differed by nasal consonant and by syllabic position. A subsequent speaker-classification test using multinomial logistic regression on the acoustic-phonetic features seems to indicate that nasals displaying larger effects of phonetic context also perform slightly better in speaker classification, although differences were minor. This might be caused by between-speaker variation in the degree and timing of lingual coarticulatory gestures.

Echoes of L1 Syllable Structure in L2 Phoneme Recognition.

Learning to move from auditory signals to phonemic categories is a crucial component of first, second, and multilingual language acquisition. In L1 and simultaneous multilingual acquisition, learners build up phonological knowledge to structure their perception within a language. For sequential multilinguals, this knowledge may support or interfere with acquiring language-specific representations for a new phonemic categorization system. Syllable structure is a part of this phonological knowledge, and language-specific syllabification preferences influence language acquisition, including early word segmentation. As a result, we expect to see language-specific syllable structure influencing speech perception as well. Initial evidence of an effect appears in Ali et al. (2011), who argued that cross-linguistic differences in McGurk fusion within a syllable reflected listeners’ language-specific syllabification preferences. Building on a framework from Cho and McQueen (2006), we argue that this could reflect the Phonological-Superiority Hypothesis (differences in L1 syllabification preferences make some syllabic positions harder to classify than others) or the Phonetic-Superiority Hypothesis (the acoustic qualities of speech sounds in some positions make it difficult to perceive unfamiliar sounds). However, their design does not distinguish between these two hypotheses. The current research study extends the work of Ali et al. (2011) by testing Japanese, and adding audio-only and congruent audio-visual stimuli to test the effects of syllabification preferences beyond just McGurk fusion. Eighteen native English speakers and 18 native Japanese speakers were asked to transcribe nonsense words in an artificial language. English allows stop consonants in syllable codas while Japanese heavily restricts them, but both groups showed similar patterns of McGurk fusion in stop codas. This is inconsistent with the Phonological-Superiority Hypothesis. However, when visual information was added, the phonetic influences on transcription accuracy largely disappeared. This is inconsistent with the Phonetic-Superiority Hypothesis. We argue from these results that neither acoustic informativity nor interference of a listener’s phonological knowledge is superior, and sketch a cognitively inspired rational cue integration framework as a third hypothesis to explain how L1 phonological knowledge affects L2 perception.

Phonological aspects in premature children aged 12 to 25 months

Objetivo: analisar os aspectos fonológicos empregados na fala de crianças prematuras. Método: estudo observacional e descritivo da produção de fala espontânea em onze crianças prematuras durante seis meses de avaliações. Foram acompanhadas entre os anos de 2014 a 2017, ambos os sexos, nascidas com idade gestacional entre 24 e 35 semanas, independente do peso, sendo avaliadas entre 12 e 25 meses de idade. Inicialmente, consultou o prontuário do bebê, em seguida procedeu-se a anamnese fonoaudiológica e análise de fala espontânea entre criança e mãe em situação lúdica, seguindo-se os preceitos éticos, com o consentimento e a assinatura dos responsáveis. Foram computados em tabelas os totais das produções verbais e quantificado o preenchimento segmental vocálico e consonantal em sílabas tônica e átonas. Resultados: dentre os participantes, Sujeito 2 apresentou-se defasado em relação às demais crianças quanto ao total de palavras e ao preenchimento consonantal e vocálico em todas as posições silábicas. Sujeitos 1, 8, 10 e 11 destacaram-se nos segmentos consonantais presentes na pré-tônica, tônica e pós-tônica, resultando em palavras mais inteligíveis. Conclusão: a sílaba tônica foi a detentora de maior preenchimento segmental. A distinção entre segmentos consonantal e vocálico favoreceu a produção de novas palavras, refletidas no aumento do vocabulário.

The distribution of speaker information in Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues.

Although previous work has shown that some speech sounds are more speaker-specific than others, not much is known about the speaker information of the same segment in different linguistic contexts. The present study, therefore, investigated whether Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues contain differential speaker information as a function of syllabic position and labial co-articulation. These linguistic effects, established in earlier work on read broadband speech, were first investigated. Using a corpus of Dutch telephone speech, results showed that the telephone bandwidth captures the expected effects of perseverative and anticipatory labialization for dorsal fricative /x/, for which spectral peaks fall within the telephone band, but not for coronal fricative /s/, for which the spectral peak falls outside the telephone band. Multinomial logistic regression shows that /s/ contains slightly more speaker information than /x/ in telephone speech and that speaker information is distributed across the speech signal in a systematic way; even though differences in classification accuracy were small, codas and tokens with labial neighbors yielded higher scores than onsets and tokens with non-labial neighbors for both /s/ and /x/. These findings indicate that speaker information in the same speech sound is not the same across linguistic contexts.

Geminate attrition in the speech of Arabic–English bilinguals living in the United States

This study explores the phenomenon of language attrition. Specifically, we investigate the phonetic properties of consonant gemination across three groups of speakers of Palestinian Arabic: monolinguals (i.e., native speakers born in Palestine who have lived there their entire life, n = 5), late bilinguals (i.e., speakers born in Palestine who emigrated to the US during their teens, n = 6), and heritage speakers (i.e., speakers of Palestinian descent, born in the US and who speak both English and Arabic in their daily lives, n = 7). All speakers were in their mid-1920s. The participants were tested using a delayed word repetition task. The stimuli comprised 158 bi-syllabic Arabic minimal and near-minimal pairs (e.g., /ħam:aːm/ “bathroom” versus /ħama:m/ “pigeon”) including long and short stops, fricatives, and sonorants. We controlled for stress and syllabic position. Distractors were also included. The acoustic analysis is underway, and consists of manually aligning the target consonants, extracting the mean consonant duration and comparing it across groups. Additional measures include voicing, aspiration, and formant transitions. The findings will enable us to address the question whether universal phonetic factors (from the perspective of Markedness Theory) have an effect on degree of attrition by specifically comparing consonants from different voicing categories and manners of articulation.

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Two of the key tasks facing the language-learning infant lie at the level of phonology: establishing which sounds are contrastive in the native inventory, and determining what their possible syllabic positions and permissible combinations (phonotactics) are. In 2002–2003, two theoretical proposals, one bearing on how infants can learn sounds (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002) and the other on phonotactics (Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003), were put forward on the pages of Cognition, each supported by two laboratory experiments, wherein a group of infants was briefly exposed to a set of pseudo-words, and plausible phonological generalizations were tested subsequently. These two papers have received considerable attention from the general scientific community, and inspired a flurry of follow-up work. In the context of questions regarding the replicability of psychological science, the present work uses a meta-analytic approach to appraise extant empirical evidence for infant phonological learning in the laboratory. It is found that neither seminal finding (on learning sounds and learning phonotactics) holds up when close methodological replications are integrated, although less close methodological replications do provide some evidence in favor of the sound learning strand of work. Implications for authors and readers of this literature are drawn out. It would be desirable that additional mechanisms for phonological learning be explored, and that future infant laboratory work employ paradigms that rely on constrained and unambiguous links between experimental exposure and measured infant behavior.

Alignment of Lyrics With Accompanied Singing Audio Based on Acoustic-Phonetic Vowel Likelihood Modeling

This study addresses the task of aligning lyrics with accompanied singing recordings. With a vowel-only representation of lyric syllables, our approach evaluates likelihood scores of vowel types with glottal pulse shapes and formant frequencies extracted from a small set of singing examples. The proposed vowel likelihood model is used in conjunction with a prior model of frame-wise syllable sequence in determining an optimal evolution of syllabic position. In lyrics alignment experiments, we optimized numerical parameters on two independent development sets and then tested the optimized system on two other datasets. New objective performance measures are introduced in the evaluation to provide further insight into the quality of alignment. Use of glottal pulse shapes and formant frequencies is shown by a controlled experiment to account for a 0.07 difference in average normalized alignment error. Another controlled experiment demonstrates that, with a difference of 0.03, F0-invariant glottal pulse shape gives a lower average normalized alignment error than does F0-invariant spectrum envelope, the latter being assumed by MFCC-based timbre models.

Predicting segmental substitution errors in aphasic patients with phonological and phonetic encoding impairments

This paper analyses the factors that predict substitution errors produced by four Broca’s and four conduction aphasic subjects, all native speakers of Spanish, in reading and repetition tasks. Errors were elicited using a list of words where type of consonant, lexical stress and phonetic context were controlled for and where variables related to frequency of occurrence (word and syllable) and phonological neighbourhood characteristics were assigned using available online corpora. 675 substitution errors were obtained and preferential tendencies to devoice, occlusivise or spirantise were identified. Logistic regression mixed-effect models were performed on these three types of substitution errors to identify the predictors depending on the aphasic profile. While our results lent support to the hypothesis of a concomitant phonetic deficit in fluent aphasia, contrary to the classical claim, it also revealed differential patterns in the phonic behaviour of patients regarding the access to mental syllabary or syllabic position effects. Our results are discussed in relation to the phonetic vs. phonological impairments dimension in aphasia and the seriality/ interactivity axis in speech architectures.

Characteristics of the acquisition of sonorant consonants orthography in Brazilian children from a São Paulo municipality.

To describe the spelling performance of children with regard to the record of sonorant consonants in Brazilian Portuguese language, to verify if the errors in their records were influenced by the accent in the word, and to categorize the kinds of errors found. For this current survey, 801 text productions were selected as a result of the development of 14 different thematic proposals, prepared by 76 children from the first grade of primary school, in 2001, coming from two schools of a city from São Paulo, Brazil. Of these productions, all words with sonorant consonants in a syllabic position of simple onset were selected. They were then organized as they appeared as pre-tonic, tonic, and post-tonic syllables, unstressed and tonic monosyllables. The following was observed: the number of hits was extremely higher than that of errors; higher occurrence of errors in non-accented syllables; higher occurrence of phonological substitutions followed by omissions and, at last, orthographic substitutions; and higher number of substitutions that involved graphemes referring to the sonorant class. Considering the distribution of orthographic data between hits and errors, as well as their relationship with phonetic-phonological aspects, may contribute to the comprehension of school difficulties, which are usually found in the first years of literacy instruction.

The interaction of vowel quality and pharyngeals in Sephardic Modern Hebrew

AbstractThis paper examines the complex interactions between pharyngeals and vowel quality in Sephardic Modern Hebrew. Phonetically similar to low vowels, gutturals in general and pharyngeals in particular tend to trigger vowel lowering and epenthesis of low vowels. Sephardic Modern Hebrew exhibits multiple strategies in order to avoid the proximity of non-low vowels to pharyngeals. The language processes take into account several factors, including the syllabic position of the pharyngeal (onset or coda), prosody (stress) and lexical category (nouns vs. verbs).

Preservation and deletion in Mandarin loanword adaptation

This paper is about how English inputs that are not allowed in the native Mandarin phonology are adapted to Mandarin phonotactics in Mandarin loanwords. The focus of the discussion is on whether or not the elements in the inputs are preserved or deleted and what causes the phenomena. Through analyses of English consonant adaptation in Mandarin loanwords, the functions of both borrowers’ perception and the native Mandarin phonology are consistently found. The high preservation of the nasal consonants in any syllabic position clearly shows the functions, in that the salient segments are usually preserved and the acceptance of nasal codas in Mandarin phonology makes Mandarin speakers easily perceive the nasal sounds even in the coda positions. Furthermore, English /m/ and /n/ in the final positions are usually differently adapted into Mandarin loanwords. English /m/ mostly forms an independent syllable by vowel insertion while /n/ is mostly adapted into the coda nasal of the preceding syllable (e.g., English loam → Mandarin lú-mǔ, English pint → Mandarin pǐn-tuō). This tendency is due to the function of Mandarin phonology, because a nasal /n/ is allowed as a coda consonant, but /m/ is not allowed. The high deletion of English /ɹ/ in the coda or in the consonant clusters also supports the argument. The English /ɹ/, except in the initial position, is not easily perceived due to its own vowel-like quality and the fact that it is a non-Mandarin phoneme. Lastly, the higher preservation of consonants in the initial clusters than in the final clusters also shows the close relationship between perception and Mandarin phonology. Even though Mandarin does not allow consonant clusters in any position, final consonant clusters should be harder for Mandarin speakers to perceive. The reason is that in Mandarin phonology, consonants usually do not come in the final positions while all the consonants except /ŋ/ can come in the initial positions. More frequent deletion of consonants in final CCC clusters than in CC clusters can be identically explained.

Characteristics of fricatives consonants orthography in Brazilian children

Purpose (1) describe children’s orthographic performance in the record of fricative consonants in a position of simple syllabic attack; (2) verify the influence of the accent in errors occurrence; and (3) categorize the kind of errors found. Methods Fifteen children’s text productions were selected, they attended the First grade of Primary School in 2001, referred to 14 thematic proposals. From these productions, all the words with occurrence of fricative consonants in syllabic position of simple attack were selected. These occurrences were distributed in hits and errors, these were, then, organized according to the appearance in pre-tonic, tonic and post-tonic syllables, unstressed monosyllables and tonic monosyllables. Results It was noted that (1) a predominance of hits compared to the errors; (2) the non-relevance of the accent in the record of unconventional fricatives; (3) higher occurrence of phonological substitutions, followed by the orthographical ones and, finally, in lower number, omissions; (40 predominance of errors inside the fricative phonological class. Conclusion The group of children studied, even in the beginning of literacy, already shows very stable in the record of graphemes that is sent to the fricative phonemes. At last, it was observed that the errors seems to be motivated, mainly, by the difficulty of these children with the spelling of PB.

Stop Release in Polish English — Implications for Prosodic Constituency

Although there is little consensus on the relevance of non-contrastive allophonic processes in L2 speech acquisition, EFL pronunciation textbooks cover the suppression of stop release in coda position. The tendency for held stops in English is in stark opposition to a number of other languages, including Polish, in which plosive release is obligatory. This paper presents phonetic data on the acquisition of English unreleased stops by Polish learners. Results show that in addition to showing a tendency for the target language pattern of unreleased plosives, advanced learners may acquire more native-like VC formant transitions. From the functional perspective, languages with unreleased stops may be expected to have robust formant patterns on the final portion of the preceding vowel, which allow listeners to identify the final consonant when it lacks an audible release burst (see e.g. Wright 2004). From the perspective of syllabic positions, it may be said that ‘coda’ stops are obligatorily released in Polish, yet may be unreleased in English. Thus, the traditional term ‘coda’ is insufficient to describe the prosodic properties of post-vocalic stops in Polish and English. These differences may be captured in the Onset Prominence framework (Schwartz 2013). In languages with unreleased stops, the mechanism of submersion places post-vocalic stops at the bottom of the representational hierarchy where they may be subject to weakening. Submersion produces larger prosodic constituents and thus has phonological consequences beyond 'coda' behavior.