scholarly journals Phonetic effects of grammatical category: How category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency impact the duration of nouns and verbs

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Lohmann ◽  
Erin Conwell
Keyword(s):  
Specific Effect ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Lexical Frequency ◽  
Frequent Word ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Prosodic Boundaries

This paper is concerned with phonetic correlates of grammatical category, specifically the finding that nouns are pronounced with greater duration than verbs in discourse. Most previous research has attributed this difference to the sentence positions that the two grammatical categories occupy and concomitant prosodic effects. Based on previous findings, we test two further effects, namely a category-specific effect on prosodic phrasing, which leads to stronger prosodic boundaries after nouns than verbs even in maximally similar syntactic contexts, and a reductive effect of lexical frequency leading to shorter durations of the more frequent word. These effects are tested in a production study investigating durational differences of twelve noun–verb homophone pairs in English in two clause-medial contexts. We find evidence for both effects: prosodic boundaries are stronger after nouns than verbs across all conditions, resulting in greater durations of nouns due to pre-boundary lengthening. Furthermore, differences in frequency result in a reduced duration of the homophone of the pair which has the greater frequency. We propose an explanation in which phonetic effects of grammatical category are caused by the interplay of sentence prosody, category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency.

Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene de la Cruz-Pavía ◽  
Gorka Elordieta
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Basque Country ◽  
First Language ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Length Effect ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Prosodic Boundaries

AbstractThe present production study investigates the prosodic phrasing characteristic of sentences containing a relative clause with two possible noun phrase antecedents [Noun Phrase 1 Noun Phrase 2 Relative Clause] in the variety of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. It aims to establish the default prosodic phrasing of these structures, as well as whether differences are found in phrasing between native and non-native speakers. Additionally, it examines the effect on prosodic phrasing of constituent length and familiarity with the sentences (skimming the sentences prior to reading them aloud). To do that, the productions of 8 Spanish monolinguals, 8 first language (L1) Spanish/second language (L2) Basque bilinguals, and 8 L1Basque/L2Spanish bilinguals are examined. A default phrasing consisting of the prevalence of a prosodic break after NP2 ([NP1 NP2/RC]) is obtained, and differences are found between the prosodic contours of native and non-native speakers. Additionally, a constituent length effect is found, with a higher frequency of prosodic boundaries after NP2 as RC length increases, as predicted by Fodor’s Same Size Sister Constraint. Last, familiarity with the sentences was found to increase the frequency of occurrence of the default phrasing.

scholarly journals Reading Fluency in Children and Adolescents Who Stutter

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1595
Author(s):  
Mona Franke ◽  
Philip Hoole ◽  
Ramona Schreier ◽  
Simone Falk
Keyword(s):  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Reading Fluency ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Matched Control ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Articulation Rate ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Prosodic Boundaries ◽  
Decoding Ability

Speech fluency is a major challenge for young persons who stutter. Reading aloud, in particular, puts high demands on fluency, not only regarding online text decoding and articulation, but also in terms of prosodic performance. A written text has to be segmented into a number of prosodic phrases with appropriate breaks. The present study examines to what extent reading fluency (decoding ability, articulation rate, and prosodic phrasing) may be altered in children (9–12 years) and adolescents (13–17 years) who stutter compared to matched control participants. Read speech of 52 children and adolescents who do and do not stutter was analyzed. Children and adolescents who stutter did not differ from their matched control groups regarding reading accuracy and articulation rate. However, children who stutter produced shorter pauses than their matched peers. Results on prosodic phrasing showed that children who stutter produced more major phrases than the control group and more intermediate phrases than adolescents who stutter. Participants who stutter also displayed a higher number of breath pauses. Generally, the number of disfluencies during reading was related to slower articulation rates and more prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, we found age-related changes in general measures of reading fluency (decoding ability and articulation rate), as well as the overall strength of prosodic boundaries and number of breath pauses. This study provides evidence for developmental stages in prosodic phrasing as well as for alterations in reading fluency in children who stutter.

scholarly journals Reflections on habituality across other grammatical categories

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Nora Boneh ◽  
Łukasz Jędrzejowski
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

Abstract The main aim of this introduction article is to give a general overview of how habituality has been investigated in the literature as a grammatical category. In doing so, we first elaborate on the question of how habituality can be characterized and what difficulties one encounters in determining its properties, which include non-contingent modal event recurrence. A brief discussion of these issues is given in Section 2. Section 3 outlines selected (conceptual and formal) connections between habituality and other grammatical categories. What our observations essentially indicate is that habituality, on the one hand, closely interacts with several TAM categories, most prominently imperfective aspect and its derivatives (progressive, continuative), and also interacts in special ways with modal categories, such as the evidential or the future, on the other hand, we also observe – as has been done previously – that habituality is often not encoded overtly and can be expressed by several forms within one and the same language, and if overtly marked by a dedicated form, diachronically, it is not always stable. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the most relevant findings of the articles collected in the present special issue and highlights their importance for the general discussion about habituality.

scholarly journals Prosodic disambiguation of noun/verb homophones in child-directed speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 734-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIN CONWELL
Keyword(s):  
Quality Measures ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Pitch Change ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Natural Child

AbstractOne strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such asnounandverbisdistributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus data, this study asks whether noun and verb uses of ambiguous words might differ prosodically as a function of their grammatical category in child-directed speech. The results show that noun and verb uses of ambiguous words in sentence-medial positions do differ from one another in terms of duration, vowel duration, pitch change, and vowel quality measures. However, sentence-final tokens are not different as a function of the category in which they were used. The availability of prosodic cues to category in natural child-directed speech could allow learners using a distributional bootstrapping approach to avoid conflating grammatical categories.

scholarly journals Non-Equivalence at the Grammatical Categories in the Kĩkamba Bible Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 216-226
Author(s):  
Eunice Nthenya Musyoka ◽  
Kenneth Odhiambo
Keyword(s):  
Text Message ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Language Resources ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Grammatical Categories

This paper explores the challenges of non-equivalence at the grammatical categories in the Kĩkamba Bible translation. Translation involves rendering a source text message into the target text by using the register, background knowledge, and other language resources to meet the intended purpose. The process is hampered by non-equivalence, which occurs when a lexical item or an expression in the source language lacks an equivalent item to translate it into the target language. A descriptive research design was used to obtain information from a sampled population. The Bible is divided into two sections; the Old and the New Testament. It is further categorized into seven groups. Purposive sampling was used to select one book from each category and one chapter from each book to form the sample for the study. Data was collected through careful study of the English Revised Standard Version Bible to identify non-equivalences at the grammatical category level and the Kĩkamba Bible to analyse how it is handled, guided by Equivalence theory proposed by Nida and the Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson). The study established four categories of non-equivalences at the grammatical category level; gender, number, person and case. According to the research non-equivalence at the grammatical level such as the third person singular and plural, the second person and pronouns in both subjective and objective case pose a challenge when the target language lacks a distinctive expression that is present in the source text, but appropriate strategies such as unit change, explicitation and specification meet the goal of translation. The study recommends that the translator needs to interpret what the categories represent in the context as a whole before translating the separate verses.  It is hoped that the research will be a contribution to applied linguistics in the area of translation, specifically on non-equivalence.

scholarly journals Teaching Georgian as a second language: Modality and Tense (modal unda) 1

2018 ◽  
Vol VI (2) ◽  
pp. 28-36
Author(s):  
Nino Sharashenidze ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
The Third ◽  
Subjunctive Mood ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Modal Semantics ◽  
Language Modality

In the Georgian language, the verb paradigm is distributed among the forms of screeves (Shanidze). A screeve is a complex grammatical category which embraces the characteristics of tense, person, aspect, mood, permansive, resultative, perfect, evidentiality. The agglutinative nature of the language implies the existence of several grammatical meanings in one and the same verb form. The category of modality is expressed by means of adding modal elements to the verb form. The modal element expresses modal semantics, whereas the verb form bears the semantics of other grammatical categories. Thus, in Georgian, a modal construction embraces a combination of several grammatical peculiarities and semantics. The modal element is not usually found with all screeve forms. In order to express a modal content, different modal elements choose different screeves. The categories of tense and aspect are important features of the modal construction. The modal element unda is used with three screeves in Georgian: Present Subjunctive, Second Subjunctive and Second Resultative. Out of these, two are subjunctive mood forms, whereas the third one is the form of the indicative mood. However, as a result of weakening of the functions of the third subjunctive, the screeve of the second subjunctive has acquired numerous functions. One of such functions is to express modality in the past. Acquisition of modal constructions is an important part of language teaching. Modal constructions express the speaker’s attitude. In this regard, at a certain stage of language teaching these constructions are frequently addressed. It is very important for the learner to grasp the rules of formation of these constructions.

Latin grammatical categories in the vernacular

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 269-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Poppe
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
History Of

Summary The grammatical category ‘declension’ cannot be applied to Welsh substantive nouns since they have one form only for the singular and the plural respectively. But some Welsh grammarians of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to use this category to classify substantive nouns by proposing new definitions, based on the system of plural formation (Robert 1567) or on the system of initial mutations (Rhys 1592; Salesbury 1593). The latter approach formed a short-lived ‘paradigm’ in Welsh grammaticography with a dynamism of its own. It became divorced from the classification of nouns only and was applied to all words which undergo initial mutations (Davies 1621). The history of the definitions of declension in Welsh grammaticography is thus an instructive example of the changes grammatical categories can undergo when applied to a specific vernacular and of the creativity of the vernacular grammarians.

Phonological and acoustic bases for earliest grammatical category assignment: a cross-linguistic perspective

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUSHEN SHI ◽  
JAMES L. MORGAN ◽  
PAUL ALLOPENNA
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Mean Values ◽  
Acoustic Measures ◽  
Cue Validity ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Category Assignment ◽  
Multidimensional Constellations ◽  
Self Organizing

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.

On the deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French

Phonology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julien Eychenne
Keyword(s):  
Basque Country ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Lexical Frequency ◽  
Phonological Knowledge ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Data Points

Although a growing body of literature in formal phonology has espoused the view that phonological knowledge is gradient and probabilistic, this perspective remains somewhat controversial. This paper provides further empirical support for this strand of work: it offers an analysis of the gradient deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French, using a corpus containing 7787 data points obtained from 45 subjects spread over three dialectal areas (the Basque Country, Languedoc and Provence). In addition to confirming or nuancing previous findings about the role of several phonological and non-phonological variables, the study demonstrates the influence of lexical frequency, grammatical category, sonority and the feature specification of the consonant before schwa.

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