Syllable Boundaries Research Articles

Disrupting uniformity: Feature contrasts that reduce crowding interfere with peripheral word recognition

Peripheral word recognition is impaired by crowding, the harmful influence of surrounding objects (flankers) on target identification. Crowding is usually weaker when the target and the flankers differ (for example in color). Here, we investigated whether reducing crowding at syllable boundaries improved peripheral word recognition. In Experiment 1, a target letter was flanked by single letters to the left and right and presented at 8° in the lower visual field. Target and flankers were either the same or different in regard to contrast polarity, color, luminance, and combined color/luminance. Crowding was reduced when the target differed from the flankers in contrast polarity, but not in any of the other conditions. Using the same color and luminance values as in Experiment 1, we measured recognition performance (speed and accuracy) for uniform (e.g., all letters black), congruent (e.g., alternating black and white syllables), and incongruent (e.g., alternating black and white non-syllables) words in Experiment 2. Participants verbally reported the target word, briefly displayed at 8° in the lower visual field. Congruent and incongruent words were recognized slower compared to uniform words in the opposite contrast polarity condition, but not in the other conditions. Our results show that the same feature contrast between the target and the flankers that yielded reduced crowding, deteriorated peripheral word recognition when applied to syllables and non-syllabic word parts. We suggest that a potential advantage of reduced crowding at syllable boundaries in word recognition is counteracted by the disruption of word uniformity.

Nasal Coarticulation and Prosody in Kakataibo

This paper presents the first phonetic description of the patterns of nasal coarticulation in Kakataibo. While closely related Panoan languages have been described as having anticipatory nasal coarticulation in VN sequences, there are only a few reports of other types of nasal coarticulation. Based on a detailed investigation of the aerodynamic properties of nasality, we account for the full variety of nasal coarticulation patterns in Kakataibo and discuss their interaction with prosody. This paper shows that nasal coarticulation occurs in all contexts in which there is vowel-nasal contiguity, although the amount and patterns of nasal coarticulation are dependent on the directionality of the process, the presence or absence of a syllable boundary and stress.

Lenition and morphology in Finnish

This paper investigates an interaction between consonant lenition and morphology in Finnish. The language has a process of consonant lenition whereby underlying geminate consonants at syllable boundaries lenite (degeminate) when the addition of an affix makes the post-geminate rime bimoraic. A small class of possessor agreement affixes do not condition lenition, even if they create the appropriate phonological environment. A puzzling interaction emerges when possessor agreement affixes are stacked on top of certain lenition-conditioning affixes. I account for this interaction in a way that improves on Kiparsky’s (2003) analysis. In doing so, I extend Pater’s (2010) method for modeling exceptional phonology via lexically-indexed constraints.

L1 Phonological Influences among Malay Speakers Learning Korean

Phonologically, Korean disallows several consonant sequences emerge in the syllable boundary. The occurrence of consonant sequences at this morphological domain is resolved by assimilation process. Hence, this study intends to discuss the pronunciation patterns produced by Malay speakers when speaking Korean particularly on consonant clusters. This study also intends to examine the influence of L1 phonological system of Malay when learning Korean as foreign language. Classroom learning observation in a Korean language class was carried out at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. This language class is offered to undergraduate students who are interested to learn Korean. Three students from level one to three from this class were chosen based on their competency. A list of Korean words was prepared before interview session with the students started. During the interviews, students were asked to pronounce the words in the word list. The pronunciations produced by the students were recorded and transcribed. The data analysis shows that coronal consonant clusters assimilate to other places of articulation namely dorsal and labial. The data also reveals that Malay speakers learning Korean incorrectly pronounce nasal-lateral assimilation found in Korean. The incorrect pronunciation produced by Malay speakers was due to the native phonological system. They tend to produce certain consonant clusters in Korean when the clusters are not in their native language. This study hence, provides an added value of phonological knowledge to language learners of Korean. In conclusion, this study gives exposure to Malay speakers who wish to learn Korean as their foreign language.

Wielowarstwowy model podziału wyrazów ortograficznych języka polskiego na sylaby

This paper presents a model for the syllabification of Polish words written in orthographic form. It raises some significant issues related to syllabification, including the linguistic definition of a syllable and certain phonological principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Maximal Onset Principle. The article describes the steps of a designed syllabification procedure. This procedure provides four layers of syllable boundary placement. The first layer is related to the morphological structure of the word (it concerns mainly boundaries between a prefix and a stem). The structure of the rules in the first layer is based on the initial and final strings in words. The goal of the second layer is to put boundaries between syllable nuclei. The next layer modifies the boundaries that result from the phonological principles. The last layer places boundaries resulting from the phonological principles. Rules applied earlier mask rules on the succeeding layers. The article also presents a structure of rules based on probability. A description of static syllabification systems is also given — these work much faster, but it is not possible to modify the rules associated with them. The last described feature of the presented solution is the ability to create generative systems.

The Time Course of Activation of Semantic and Orthographic Information in Morphological Decomposition by Korean Adults and Developing Readers

The current study examined the involvement of semantic and orthographic information in the processing of derived words in Korean Hangul. Sixth grade children and adults participated in four masked priming lexical decision experiments in which the prime duration varied from 36, 48, 57, and 72ms (in Experiments, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively). Morphological (M), semantic (S), and orthographic (O) relatedness between prime-target pairs were manipulated. There were four types of Korean prime-target pairs: (1) -M-S+O: 도시락-도시, scandal-scan, (2) +M-S+O: 구두쇠-구두, archer-arch, (3) +M+S+O: 음악가-음악, bravely-brave, and (4) -M+S-O: 반대-이의, accuse-blame. There were several key findings: (1) adults showed significant priming effects at 57 and 72ms in +M+S+O and significant priming effects at 72 ms in +M-S+O; (2) less skilled readers showed significant facilitation at 36ms in +M+S+O; and (3) in -M-S+O, both skilled and less skilled readers show significant inhibition across four prime durations. The different time course of +M+S+O priming for adults and children may be due to developing readers’ smaller lexicon and less competition for semantic activation of the monosyllabic suffix (e.g., 가 in 음악가), which is a homograph in Korean Hangul. The consistent orthographic inhibition for both age groups suggest that orthographic information is activated early and continues to play an important role throughout the course of Korean visual word recognition. The current study extends previous research with readers of Roman alphabets to readers of an alpha-syllabary orthography written in a nonlinear spatial layout with more clear-cut syllable boundaries. Taken together, it appears that the involvement of semantic and orthographic information in the decomposition of morphologically complex word may vary depending on the characteristics of the orthography.

The effect of syllable-level hyphenation on reading comprehension: Evidence from eye movements.

Syllabification by hyphens (e.g., hy-phen-a-tion) is a standard procedure in early Finnish reading instruction. However, recent findings indicate that hyphenation slows down children’s reading already during the first grade (Haikio, Hyona, & Bertram, 2015, 2016). In the present study, it was examined whether this slowdown is indicative of deeper processing and/or more strategic reading. To this end, 2nd grade children (N = 36) read short expository and narrative stories while their eye movements were registered. The presence of syllable boundary cue (SBC) was manipulated; for half of the stories, each word was hyphenated at syllable boundaries whereas the other half included no hyphenation. After each story, story comprehension (SC) was measured by three types of oral questions, namely free recall, cued recall, and true/false questions. With regard to reading behavior, SBC interacted with independently measured reading comprehension scores for both forward and regressive fixation times during first pass sentence reading. Hyphenation slowed down reading of good comprehenders to a larger extent than weaker comprehenders in comparison to nonhyphenated condition, especially for regressive fixation times. With respect to SC, cued recall scores were lower in the hyphenated than in the nonhyphenated condition. There was no effect of SBC in free recall or true/false questions. Hyphenation seems to promote phonological encoding even when readers might want to access words via orthographic codes, which are obscured by hyphenation, especially at the whole-word level. This more piecemeal reading style then makes it harder to integrate the pieces into a bigger whole, affecting not only reading speed but also reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Productive pitfalls in the phonetic pursuit of psycholinguistic questions

Coarticulation in adult speech spans multiple segments, including across syllable and word boundaries. Little in the way of comparable data is available for child speech, where the focus has been on within-syllable anticipatory effects. Still, the developmental studies indicate that anticipatory coarticulation within a syllable is as strong in child speech as in adult speech, and perhaps stronger. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that words are fundamental units of production under the long-held assumption that anticipatory coarticulation reflects speech motor planning. Our current work leverages this same assumption to investigate age-related changes in the structure of the speech plan. A related goal is to characterize the development of long-distance anticipatory coarticulation. For example, we are testing the hypothesis that younger children’s plan consists of more fully individuated word-sized production units than the plan guiding older children’s and adults’ speech in sentence elicitation experiments, where the initial boundary of a production unit is operationalized as the onset of lip rounding. The work has propelled us to develop a novel psycholinguistic measure of coarticulation, and is now leading us to question the concept of a speech plan and the nature of anticipatory coarticulation. [Work supported by NIH award number R01HD087452.]

Syllabic processing in handwritten word production in German children and adults

Syllables are thought to be processing units in handwritten word production. Yet, little is known about whether the orthographic characteristics of different languages influence syllabic processing during handwriting, which is critical for the evaluation and further development of extant models of handwritten language production. In the present study, we manipulated syllabic ambiguity, a characteristic of the German language, to investigate the role of syllables in handwritten word production in German. Forty-four 10 to 12-year-old children and fourteen adults were asked to write on pen tablets five-letter disyllabic words that varied in terms of their syllabic ambiguity, while their handwriting was recorded with high spatiotemporal resolution. Productions were analyzed in terms of Mean Stroke Duration (MSD) and Writing Onset Duration (WOD). Increased MSD at syllable boundaries was observed across conditions for both children and adults. There was no difference in WOD across conditions. Our findings offer support for the idea that syllables are functional units in handwriting production in German and motivate the further development of the spelling module in models of handwritten language production.

Experimental evidence on the syllabification of two-consonant clusters in Czech

This study examines syllabification preferences of 30 speakers of Czech in two behavioural experiments using real disyllabic words with 61 intervocalic CC clusters as stimuli. The aim was to evaluate competing theoretical predictions about syllable boundaries in Czech. Participants synchronized individual syllables with metronome pulses in Experiment 1 (induced pause insertion) and produced syllables in reversed order in Experiment 2 (syllable reversal). Logistic regression analyses revealed significant effects of cluster sonority type, phonological length of the preceding vowel and word-edge phonotactics (also in relation to frequency of occurrence). Morphological structure of the items significantly influenced syllable boundary placement as well. The results of both experiments converge towards the effects found in previous studies on English and some other languages. However, ambisyllabic responses were virtually non-existent in pause insertion and relatively low (8%) in syllable reversal, which differs from the results on Germanic languages. Finally, the findings do not support strict onset maximization but rather indicate an onset-filling strategy.

An Indonesian speech synthesis system considering low-power event before vowel-starting-syllable

In our Indonesian concatenative speech synthesis system, there existed a linking issue between vowel-starting-syllable with its preceding phoneme. Unlike other languages, in Indonesian the power of the speech signal decreases (sometime it is a pause) in this kind of boundary. Phonemes before and after the boundary are uttered separately. For example, the underlined phonemes before and after the boundary in “buah apel (apple fruit)” are not to be uttered continuously, but should be separated. This is not the case in English, where the underlined phonemes in “an apple” are linked. We did not treat this kind of low-power event (“lpow”) explicitly, such that the lpow generated indirectly from the syllable boundary information, is sometime too short, resulting in the above linking issue. In this paper, we propose to explicitly treat the lpow. The lpow is treated similarly with phoneme during the model training, so that it is appropriately generated during the synthesis. We confirmed that the synthesized speech is more natural by the introduction of lpow.

Syllabification of Bi-Consonantal Clusters Between Vowels in Albanian

Syllabification is one of the most complex issues in Albanian phonetics. An extensive treatment of the topic was made by Dodi (2004), who, thanks to a thorough acquaintance with the existing literature on the area, also clearly states the drawbacks of the main theories of the syllable, based on material from the Albanian language. However, despite the huge research carried out and the important results achieved, the positions of linguists on syllabification remain different. One reason for this is that linguistic literature lacks an established definition of the syllable as a linguistic unit. In the present research on syllabification, we support some of the existing rules by bringing new arguments and making some additions in order to make them more convincing, with a view to improving and simplifying their practical application. We focus on syllable boundary when there are two consonants between vowels, based on the Sonority Sequencing Principle, on the Syllable Contact Law, the Dispersion Principle, and the Maximum Onset Principle.

Effects of Word Position on the Acoustic Realization of Vietnamese Final Consonants

A variety of studies have shown differences between phonetic features of consonants according to their prosodic and/or syllable (onset vs. coda) positions. However, differences are not always found, and interactions between the various factors involved are complex and not well understood. Our study compares acoustical characteristics of coda consonants in Vietnamese taking into account their position within words. Traditionally described as monosyllabic, Vietnamese is partially polysyllabic at the lexical level. In this language, tautosyllabic consonant sequences are prohibited, and adjacent consonants are only found at syllable boundaries either within polysyllabic words (CVC.CVC) or across monosyllabic words (CVC#CVC). This study is designed to examine whether or not syllable boundary types (interword vs. intraword) have an effect on the acoustic realization of codas. The results show significant acoustic differences in consonant realizations according to syllable boundary type, suggesting different coarticulation patterns between nuclei and codas. In addition, as Vietnamese voiceless stops are generally unreleased in coda position, with no burst to carry consonantal information, our results show that a vowel's second half contains acoustic cues which are available to aid in the discrimination of place of articulation of the vowel's following consonant.

Automatic syllabification of speech signal using short time energy and vowel onset points

This paper describes a language independent method for automatic syllabification of speech signal. This method utilizes the valleys in short time energy (STE) contour and location of vowel onset points (VOP) for marking the syllable boundaries. In the proposed method, automatic syllabification is performed in three steps. First, long silence/pause regions are marked with the help of speech/non-speech detection. Then VOPs are located from the Hilbert Envelope of LP residual. The existence of more than one VOP in a continuous speech region (identified using speech/non-speech detection in the first step) is an indication of syllable boundaries within the region. Location with minimum energy in the STE contour between two consecutive VOP is identified as the syllable boundary. Since automatic VOP detection algorithm fails to detect some of the VOPs, certain syllable boundaries will be missed. Therefore, at the third step, additional syllable boundaries are detected from STE contour by fixing a valley threshold which is equal to the mean value of STE corresponding to each speech region between two consecutive syllable boundaries. This method is evaluated for 50 sentences each in read, extempore and conversational mode speech of Malayalam and Bengali languages. Overall accuracy of 80% is obtained with ± 50 ms tolerance with reference to manually marked syllable boundaries for this database. Method also shows good accuracy in case of TIMIT and NTIMIT data without tuning of thresholds and other parameters. This method is useful for applications that do not require exact syllable boundaries, rather a meaningful separation of syllables. Application of this technique for prosody based emotion recognition is illustrated using Emo-DB German emotional database.

Delayed silent phoneme monitoring in adults who do and do not stutter

ABSTRACT Previous research employed silent phoneme monitoring tasks to examine differences in phonological encoding in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to adults who do not stutter (AWNS). The primary purpose of this study was to apply a modified version of the task – the delayed silent phoneme monitoring task – to examine the integrity of the phonological speech plan within working memory in AWS and AWNS before and after subvocal rehearsal. The secondary purpose of this study was to examine whether group differences were more apparent when greater phonological demand was placed upon phonological working memory. In Experiment 1, 20 adults (10 AWNS, 10 AWS) identified target phonemes within trochaic nonwords held in memory before the initiation of subvocal rehearsal (1 s) and after subvocal rehearsal (4 s). In Experiment 2, an additional 20 adults (10 AWNS, 10 AWS) monitored identical nonwords with low-frequency iambic stress. Speed and accuracy of manual response was measured, as well as post-trial verbal productions. Both groups identified the initial phoneme of trochaic stimuli fastest, irrespective of stress, and both groups monitored phonemes faster after the 4 s delay. However, AWS identified phonemes within iambic stimuli with less accuracy than AWNS. Group differences in monitoring errors were most evident for phonemes immediately following syllable boundary, and after subvocal rehearsal. Preliminary findings suggest AWS may exhibit distinct difficulties relative to AWNS when accessing segmental information after subvocal rehearsal is required, but only when target words are more phonologically demanding (i.e., low-frequency iambic stress).

Ambiguous Syllabification in English : Foot Structure and the Schwa Syncope Problem

The syllabification of an intervocalic consonant in a trochaic sequence in American English (AE) is problematic. For example, speakers disagree on the syllabification of /t/ in metal. This study proposes that AE has blurred syllabification within the trochaic foot and that this is connected to the importance of foot structure in AE phonology. Phonetic work on AE indicates that foot-initial phonemes are enhanced or demarcated (e.g. by aspiration and other means) making clear the syllable boundary at the beginning of the foot. Blurred syllabification helps enhance foot-initial demarcation by making foot-internal syllable boundaries less distinct. Evidence for blurred syllabification comes from schwa syncope (Zwicky 1972; Hooper 1978; Kenstowicz 1994). Consider the words like (a) chocolate and opera, where schwa syncope (SS) is likely versus (b) pelican and felony, where it is unlikely. The oddity of English SS is that it is preferred in (a) when the resulting consonant cluster after SS has a syllabification that is uncertain (i.e. blurred), but is avoided in (b) when the syllabification between the two consonants would be very distinct. Under a new conception of English SS developed in this paper, SS is viewed as a problem of foot structure reduction: SS reduces a dactylic foot into a preferred trochaic foot. The pattern of SS can best be understood if AE actually prefers nondistinct (or blurred) syllabification within a trochaic foot. This functionally helps to enhance the foot-initial boundary.

The Parsing Syllable Envelopes Test for Assessment of Amplitude Modulation Discrimination Skills in Children: Development, Normative Data, and Test-Retest Reliability Studies.

Intensity peaks and valleys in the acoustic signal are salient cues to syllable structure, which is accepted to be a crucial early step in phonological processing. As such, the ability to detect low-rate (envelope) modulations in signal amplitude is essential to parse an incoming speech signal into smaller phonological units. The Parsing Syllable Envelopes (ParSE) test was developed to quantify the ability of children to recognize syllable boundaries using an amplitude modulation detection paradigm. The envelope of a 750-msec steady-state /a/ vowel is modulated into two or three pseudo-syllables using notches with modulation depths varying between 0% and 100% along an 11-step continuum. In an adaptive three-alternative forced-choice procedure, the participant identified whether one, two, or three pseudo-syllables were heard. Development of the ParSE stimuli and test protocols, and collection of normative and test-retest reliability data. Eleven adults (aged 23 yr 10 mo to 50 yr 9 mo, mean 32 yr 10 mo) and 134 typically developing, primary-school children (aged 6 yr 0 mo to 12 yr 4 mo, mean 9 yr 3 mo). There were 73 males and 72 females. Data were collected using a touchscreen computer. Psychometric functions (PFs) were automatically fit to individual data by the ParSE software. Performance was related to the modulation depth at which syllables can be detected with 88% accuracy (referred to as the upper boundary of the uncertainty region [UBUR]). A shallower PF slope reflected a greater level of uncertainty. Age effects were determined based on raw scores. z Scores were calculated to account for the effect of age on performance. Outliers, and individual data for which the confidence interval of the UBUR exceeded a maximum allowable value, were removed. Nonparametric tests were used as the data were skewed toward negative performance. Across participants, the performance criterion (UBUR) was met with a median modulation depth of 42%. The effect of age on the UBUR was significant (p < 0.00001). The UBUR ranged from 50% modulation depth for 6-yr-olds to 25% for adults. Children aged 6-10 had significantly higher uncertainty region boundaries than adults. A skewed distribution toward negative performance occurred (p = 0.00007). There was no significant difference in performance on the ParSE between males and females (p = 0.60). Test-retest z scores were strongly correlated (r = 0.68, p < 0.0000001). The ParSE normative data show that the ability to identify syllable boundaries based on changes in amplitude modulation improves with age, and that some children in the general population have performance much worse than their age peers. The test is suitable for use in planned studies in a clinical population.

Badanie poczucia subiektywnego związanego z dzieleniem na sylaby wyrazów języka polskiego – podział wieloelementowych grup spółgłoskowych

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation of subjective feelings related to the syllabification of Polish words written in orthographic form. The results are part of a wider study, and the data presented here are limited to polysegmental word-internal consonant clusters. In the author’s previous articles it was noted that some morphological boundaries are perceived as syllable boundaries – particularly boundaries between a prefix and a stem. The words that contain such boundaries were excluded from the investigation. The main goal was to verify whether the phonostatistical properties of consonant clusters influence subjective feelings related to syllabification. The investigated statistical proprieties concern the frequency of occurrence of consonant clusters, and of parts of them at the beginning of words, in the text corpus. Another goal was to verify whether the syllabification based on phonology differs from that based on subjective feelings.

THE ROLE OF DISTINCTIVE FEATURES IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE SYLLABLE. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND SLOVAK

The placement of the syllable boundary in consonant clusters occurring word-medially is a perennial problem in phonological theory. The comprehension of the syllable as the “smallest binding unit of language” (Pauliny 1979: 101), as the unit necessary for the understanding of the phonological structure of the language, enables us to determine the boundaries of syllables on the basis of contrasts between the neighbouring phonemes in the syllable. The degree of contrast depends on the distinctive features of the given phonemes. To evaluate this approach, distinctive features of phonemes from two different languages – English and Slovak – were delimited according to two distinctive features theories – Feature Geometry and synthetic phonological theory. The sample analysis of the English and the Slovak words with word-medial consonant clusters indicates the validity of this approach for the demarcation of the syllable boundary in polysyllabic words.

Hindi Syllable Segmentation Using ZCR and Dual Band Energy Ratio

In this paper, a technique for Hindi syllable segmentation is proposed. Syllable segmentation boundaries for words are first computed using the zero-crossing-rate of the speech signals. Words comprising of syllables ending with consonants and vowels are considered. The performance of the segmentation using a zero-crossing-rate algorithm can be further improved. The ZCR computed boundaries are optimized by decomposing the signal into low and high-frequency components using wavelet decomposition. A method is proposed which uses the ratio of the high to the low-frequency energy of the decomposed signal to compute the accurate syllable segmentation boundaries along with the ZCR function. The accuracy rate of syllable segmentation thus achieved is 96.02% for syllables ending with stop consonants and vowels.