scholarly journals Syllable weight and duration: A rhyme/intervals comparison

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anya Lunden

Steriade (2012) proposed intervals as a more appropriate syllable weight domain than rhymes. This study explores how interval weight cashes out as duration across word positions and compares this to a rhyme-based account. The data reported on in Lunden (2013), from native speakers of Norwegian (a language in which (C)VC syllables are heavy only non-finally) is reanalyzed with intervals. Lunden found that syllable rhymes in all three positions, if taken as a percentage of the average V rhyme in that word position, fell into a coherent pattern for weight. It is shown that interval durations allow for a similar, albeit less robust, pattern. The data from Lunden’s (2013) perception experiment that tested the correlation between increased vowel duration and listeners’ classification of syllable weight is also recast with interval durations, and the importance of the proportional increase over the raw increase, originally found for the rhyme data, is found to hold for the interval data. Thus, taking intervals as the weight domain is shown to result in reasonable durational relations between interval weights, although interval durations show less separation between some light and heavy units than the rhyme durations do. 

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1002-1017
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Reilly

Purpose This study investigated vowel and sibilant productions in noise to determine whether responses to noise (a) are sensitive to the spectral characteristics of the noise signal and (b) are modulated by the contribution of vowel or sibilant contrasts to word discrimination. Method Vowel and sibilant productions were elicited during serial recall of three-word sequences that were produced in quiet or during exposure to speaker-specific noise signals. These signals either masked a speaker's productions of the sibilants /s/ and /ʃ/ or their productions of the vowels /a/ and /æ/. The contribution of the vowel and sibilant contrasts to word discrimination in a sequence was manipulated by varying the number of times that the target sibilant and vowel pairs occurred in the same word position in each sequence. Results Spectral noise effects were observed for both sibilants and vowels: Responses to noise were larger and/or involved to more acoustic features when the noise signal masked the acoustic characteristics of that phoneme class. Word discrimination effects were limited and consisted of only small increases in vowel duration. Interaction effects between noise and similarity indicated that the phonological similarity of sequences containing both sibilants and/or both vowels influenced articulation in ways not related to speech clarity. Conclusion The findings of this study indicate that sensorimotor control of speech exhibits some sensitivity to noise spectral characteristics. However, productions of sibilants and vowels were not sensitive to their importance in discriminating the words in a sequence. In addition, phonological similarity effects were observed that likely reflected processing demands related to the recall and sequencing of high-similarity words.


Author(s):  
Jo Verhoeven

This study investigates the perceptual relevance of vowel duration and pitchmovement alignment to lexical tone identification in the Dutch-Limburgdialect of Weert. For this purpose a perception experiment was carried out inwhich listeners identified a series of experimental stimuli differing in vowelduration and tonal alignment as instances of the grammatical categories 'singular'or 'plural'. The results of this experiment suggest that native speakers ofthe Weert dialect are most sensitive to vowel duration differences. Only whenvowel duration is ambiguous, tonal alignment enables them to disambiguatethe stimuli. This supports the tonal re-interpretion hypothesis in terms ofvowel duration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Galina V. Fedyuneva ◽  

The article presents an analysis of the lexical composition of the newly discovered Zyryan-Russian dictionary of the 17th century and clarifies its place in the history of Komi lexicography. The article solves the problems of classification of lexicographic monuments and systematization of approaches to their description, and reveals gaps in research that has not been conducted since the mid-20th century. The currently known lexicographic monuments of the Komi language are limited to the dictionary materials of D.G. Messerschmidt, F.I. Stralenberg, G.F. Miller, P.S. Pallas and I.I. Lepekhin; the materials were collected during their expeditions in the 1720s–1770s. Unlike the church monuments of the Old Komi language of the 14th–17th and 18th centuries, the materials have not yet received a thorough archaeographic description, textual analysis and cultural and historical interpretation. The new Zyryan-Russian dictionary, discovered as part of the manuscript collection of the monk Prokhor Kolomnyatin and accurately dated (1668), is the earliest monument in the history of Komi lexicography today. The dictionary is interesting because it belongs to the period almost undocumented by written evidence and differs from all existing monuments in its dialect basis. The article describes the structure of the dictionary, thoroughly analyzes the lexical composition and presents most of its content, and reveals parallels with the dictionary materials of other monuments. The Russian-Komi dictionary-phrasebook that I.I. Lepekhin found and published in his Diary Notes is considered in more detail. Later V.I. Lytkin reprinted and deciphered the phrasebook, as well as made commentaries on it in his Old Permic Language (1952); thus, it became an auxiliary material for the reconstruction of the Old Komi language of the 14th–17th centuries. The dictionary dates back to the 18th century, although it has not been subjected to serious cultural-historical and chronological attribution. The newly discovered monument, unlike Lepekhin’s dictionary created by the type of translated old Russian dictionaries-phrasebooks based on the Russian questionnaire, reflects the live Komi-Zyryan language of the second half of the 17th century. It does not contain typical phrases, phrases from dialogues and connected texts that are typical of translated phrasebooks. There is only a certain tendency towards a thematic presentation of the material, although not always consistent. Like the dictionary materials contained in the draft papers of Russian and foreign travellers of the 18th century, the vocabulary of the new dictionary was written by the author of the collection directly from the words of a native speaker (or native speakers) of the Komi language in order to fix it and, apparently, was not intended for communicative use. Unlike the existing dictionary materials, which often contain short lists of Komi numerals, the new dictionary contains a consistent detailed money vocabulary list, from “denga” to “thousand rubles”. Numerical values are given in the Cyrillic numeral system using letters, which is undoubtedly of interest for ethnohistorical research and Russian paleography.


Author(s):  
Syed Akhter Hossain ◽  
M. Lutfar Rahman ◽  
Faruk Ahmed ◽  
M. Abdus Sobhan

The aim of this chapter is to clearly understand the salient features of Bangla vowels and the sources of acoustic variability in Bangla vowels, and to suggest classification of vowels based on normalized acoustic parameters. Possible applications in automatic speech recognition and speech enhancement have made the classification of vowels an important problem to study. However, Bangla vowels spoken by different native speakers show great variations in their respective formant values. This brings further complications in the acoustic comparison of vowels due to different dialect and language backgrounds of the speakers. This variation necessitates the use of normalization procedures to remove the effect of non-linguistic factors. Although several researchers found a number of acoustical and perceptual correlates of vowels, acoustic parameters that work well in a speaker-independent manner are yet to be found. Besides, study of acoustic features of Bangla dental consonants to identify the spectral differences between different consonants and to parameterize them for the synthesis of the segments is another problem area for study. The extracted features for both Bangla vowels and dental consonants are tested and found with good synthetic representations that demonstrate the quality of acoustic features.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zając

This paper reports the results of a pilot study concerned with phonetic imitation in the speech of Polish learners of English. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether native speakers of Polish imitate the length of English vowels and to determine whether the extent of phonetic imitation may be influenced by the model talker being a native or a non-native speaker of English. The participants were asked to perform an auditory naming task in which they indentified objects and actions presented on a set of photos twice, with and without the imitation task. The imitation task was further sub-divided depending on the model talker being a native or non-native speaker of English (a native Southern British English speaker and a native Polish speaker fluent in English). As the aim was to investigate the variability in durational characteristics of English vowels, the series of front vowels /æ e ɪ iː/ were analysed in the shortening and lengthening b_t vs. b_d contexts. The results of the study show that the participants imitated the length of the investigated vowels as a result of exposure to the two model talkers. The data suggest that the degree of imitation was mediated both by linguistic and social factors and that the direction of convergence might have been affected by the participants’ attitude toward L2 pronunciation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Nieder ◽  
Ruben van de Vijver ◽  
Fabian Tomaschek

Grammatical knowledge of native speakers has often been investigated in so-called wug tests, in which participants have to inflect pseudo-word forms (wugs). Typically it has been argued that in inflecting these pseudo-words, speakers apply their knowledge of word formation processes. However, it remains unclear what exactly this knowledge is and how it is learned.According to one theory, the knowledge is best characterized as abstractions and rules that specify how units can be combined. Another theory maintains that it is best characterized by analogy. In both cases the knowledge is learned by association based on positive evidence alone.In this paper, we model the classification of pseudo-words to Maltese plural classes on the basis of phonetic input using a shallow neural network trained with an error-driven learning algorithm. We demonstrate that the classification patterns mirror those of Maltese native speakers in a wug test. Our results indicate that speakers rely on gradient knowledge of a relation between the phonetics of whole words and plural classes, which is learned in an error-driven way.


2020 ◽  
Vol XVI (1) ◽  
pp. 115-151
Author(s):  
O. Vinogradova ◽  
◽  
A. Viklova ◽  
K. Pospelova ◽  
◽  
...  

The paper presents the results of the studies carried over the group of English verbs with the meaning of falling. The research goals included classification of the lexical meanings, both direct and metaphorical, rendered by those verbs, on the basis of the analysis of the components of the situations put together in the special questionnaire. This was carried out together with native speakers of English, after which the collected set of examples was verified and expanded with searches in the big corpora of English speakers’ oral and written production available at the SketchEngine platform. Besides being a great source of extracting lexical meanings, Sketch Engine also provided the data and the statistics for the analysis of collocational behaviour of the verbs in question used with different subjects of falling. The scope of application of the umbrella verb fall and the distribution between it and its two rivals — drop and fall down — was in focus of the three corresponding sections in the paper, while the range of peripheral verbs of falling with all the comparative analysis of their lexical features formed one more section. Separately from the verbs conveying the direct meanings of falling, metaphoric shifts in the meanings of these verbs made up the content of section 6. Based on the findings presented in the previous sections, the conclusions regarding the concept of falling in English are discussed in the last part of the paper. The research confirmed that the verb fall is by far the most widely used in various contexts of falling. Whether used alone or combined with adverbial or prepositional particles, it covers the overwhelming majority of meanings of falling, both literal and metaphorical. Although drop proved to be the most frequent synonym of fall, there is a distribution of meanings between the two related to the nature of the subject and the intentionality of the action. As shown in the paper, the choice between fall and fall down appears to be determined by the trajectory of the fall and whether the typical position of the subject is vertical or not. Likewise, the distribution between fall off and fall down is conditioned by the trajectory, with the surface mentioned with the latter. Among the various peripheral verbs of falling, come and go — the most general verbs of movement — are also used in combination with down in specific cases of falling.


2018 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Anna Dudek

The aim of this research is to estimate the degree of dialect untranslatability in audiovisual translation AVT. Polish regiolects may constitute a significant barrier to interlingual transfer. The problems with non-standard varieties of a language, which are frequently incomprehensible even to native speakers of their standard counterparts, can be overcome by means of, inter alia, explanatory periphrastic substitution added to the translated text. In the method of subtitling examined in this research, however, a translation of this kind is nearly impossible due to the broadly defined aesthetics of film e.g. time and space constraints frequently applied to the mode of AVT. Therefore, this article examines the hypothesis of dual constraint, which assumes a two-fold hindrance to a successful AV dialect transfer i.e. the lack of equivalents in the target language and the aforementioned aesthetic requirements of film. The corpus of the material researched here is based on the English subtitles for the screen adaptation of Chłopi — a Nobel Prize-winning novel written by Władysław Stanisław Reymont The Peasants; PolArt Video 2006. This article provides the theoretical background for the subsequent study as well as introduces its own classification of the translation techniques applicable to this particular piece of research as well as to other AV dialect transfers. The research part focuses on the research proper. The findings are briefly summarised and conclusions are drawn.


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Eva Sicherl
Keyword(s):  

The article aims to shed some light on the problems faced by non-native speakers in the formation of so-called prepositional collocations (i.e. typical, recurrent combinations of verbal, nominal or adjectival bases with prepositional collocators). The reasons for frequent mistakes mainly lie in the meaning of the preposition used as part of collocation, which tends to be even more dispersed, abstract and difficult to define than that of the preposition used in a free combination. However, the preposition when used as a collocator seems to act, at least to some extent, as a carrier of some content; this can be proven by valency patterns: meaning-related content words (collocational bases) tend to regularly combine with identical prepositions. The fact that prepositions used in collocations also have their semantic part to contribute to the whole unit should also be considered in the classification of collocations into grammatical and lexical ones.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Nan Jiang ◽  
Jianqin Zhang

Two lines of evidence emerged in the past suggesting that lexical form seemed to play a more important role in the organization of the second language (L2) mental lexicon than in that of the first language (L1) lexicon. They were masked orthographic priming in L2 word recognition and an elevated proportion of form-related responses in L2 word association. However, findings from previous word association studies were inconsistent regarding (1) how often L2 speakers produced form-related responses ( flood–blood) and (2) whether L2 speakers were more likely than L1 speakers to provide such responses. Attributing this inconsistency to two methodological causes, the classification of form-related responses and the selection of stimuli, the present study adopted an improved approach by quantifying the definition of form-related responses and by selecting stimuli that had both strong semantic associates and orthographically similar words as potential responses. The latter improvement helped remove the bias for producing either meaning-based or form-based responses. A group of 30 English native speakers and two groups of 65 non-native speakers were tested on the same set of stimuli of 74 English words. Three findings were obtained: (1) non-native speakers produced significantly more form-related responses than native speakers, (2) the two non-native speaker group who differed in L2 experiences showed comparable results, and (3) the participants’ familiarity with the stimuli and the lexical frequency of the stimuli negatively correlated with the proportion of form-related responses among non-native speakers. These results provided more compelling evidence for form prominence in the L2 lexicon.


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