The Phonology of Compounds

A number of recent developments in phonological theory, beginning with The Sound Pattern of English, are particularly relevant to the phonology of compounds. They address both the phonological phenomena that apply to compound words and the phonological structures that are required as the domains of these phenomena: segmental and nonsegmental phenomena that operate within each member of a compound separately, as well as at the juncture between the members of compounds and throughout compounds as a whole. In all cases, what is crucial for the operation of the phonological phenomena of compounds is phonological structure, in terms of constituents of the Prosodic Hierarchy, as opposed to morphosyntactic structure. Specifically, only two phonological constituents are required, the Phonological Word, which provides the domain for phenomena that apply to the individual members of compounds and at their junctures, and a larger constituent that groups the members of compounds together. The nature of the latter is somewhat controversial, the main issue being whether or not there is a constituent in the Prosodic Hierarchy between the Phonological Word and the Phonological Phrase. When present, this constituent, the Composite Group (revised from the original Clitic Group), includes the members of compounds, as well as “stray” elements such as clitics and “Level 2” affixes. In its absence, compounds, and often the same “stray” elements, are analyzed as a type of Recursive Phonological Word, although crucially, the combinations of such element do not exhibit the same properties as the basic Phonological Word.

Glottalization and linking in the L2 speech of Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

The use of linking or glottalization contributes to the characteristic sound pattern of a language, and the use of one in place of the other may affect a speaker’s comprehensibility and fluency in certain contexts. In this study, native speakers of Czech, a language that is associated with a frequent use of glottalization in vowel-initial word onsets, are examined in the second language (L2) context of three Romance languages that predominantly employ linking between words (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese). In total, 29 native speakers and 51 non-native learners were asked to read a short text in the respective language. The learners were divided into two groups based on their experience with the target language. A number of other factors were examined in a mixed-effects logistic regression model (segmental context, lexical stress, prosodic breaks, and the semantic status of the words). The main results show that, regardless of the target language, the more experienced (ME) learners displayed significantly lower rates of glottalization than the less experienced (LE) learners, but significantly higher rates than native speakers. The pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.

The slow development of real-time processing: Spoken Word Recognition as a crucible for new thinking about language acquisition and disorders

Words are fundamental to language, linking sound, articulation and spelling to meaning and syntax; and lexical deficits are core to communicative disorders. Work in language acquisition commonly asks how lexical knowledge – the sound pattern and meaning of words – is acquired. This is insufficient to account for skilled behavior. Sophisticated real-time processes must decode the sound pattern of words and interpret them appropriately. This paper reviews work that overcome this gap by using sensitive real-time measures of language processing (eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm) along with highly familiar words with school age children. This work reveals that the development of word recognition skills can be characterized by differences in the rate by which decisions unfold in the lexical system (the activation rate) and that this develops extremely slowly – through adolescence. In contrast language disorders can be linked to differences in the ultimate degree to which competing interpretations are suppressed (competition resolution), and this can be mechanistically linked to deficits in inhibition. This has implications for real-world problems such as reading and second language acquisition. It suggests that developing accurate, flexible, and efficient processing is just an important goal of language acquisition, as acquiring language knowledge.

THE ANAGRAMS IN PUSHKIN’S ESSAY «I TY TUT BYL…» («AND YOU WERE HERE…»)

Object of the essay: Pushkin’s essay «I ty tut byl…» (1835) («And you were here…»). Subject of the essay: the semantic function of anagrams. Purpose of the research: finding the anagrams conveying the hidden meaning of the text. Results: the author argues that the letter-sound pattern of the essay contains the anagrams of Pushkin’s name and nicknames. Field of application: literary criticism. Conclusion: anagrammatic structures encrypt the meaning of the text. The theme of the riddle is a central part of the hidden semantic content of the essay. The answer to the riddle – the name of the poet himself – is encoded in the anagrams.

Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

The road not taken: The Sound Pattern of Russian and the history of contrast in phonology

This article examines a turning point in the history of the theory of phonological distinctive features. In Morris Halle’s (1959) The Sound Pattern of Russian, features are organized into a contrastive hierarchy designed to minimize the number of specified features. Redundancy rules, however, ensure that the resulting underspecification has no real phonological consequences and, in subsequent generative approaches to phonology, contrastive hierarchies were largely abandoned. We explore how Halle’s hierarchy would have been different if it had been based on phonological patterns such as voicing assimilation, and show that this reorganization makes plausible predictions about other aspects of Russian phonology. We conclude by pointing to recent work in which the concept of a contrastive hierarchy has been revived, illustrating the range of phenomena that this theoretical device can account for if minimizing specifications is not the primary concern.

Ideophones in Moro

This article presents a descriptive study of ideophones in Moro, addressing both their structural characteristics and usage, with data from the Thetogovela dialect. We describe their sound patterns, word categorization and placement within sentences, and discuss their meaning and conventionalization. Moro ideophones convey a wide range of sensory meanings, including sound, touch, movement and visual patterns. They are uninflected and typically appear utterance finally, most closely resembling adverbs. Ideophones are often introduced by support verbs, including ‘do’, ‘be’ and ‘eat’, the latter for visual patterns. Ideophones may exhibit reduplication, which in some cases can correspond to pluractionality. The main distinctive sound pattern of Moro ideophones is a wider distribution of obstruents, as well as a performative use of expressive duration and phonation.

Uitsiton: wearable for mobility of the visually impaired

This article explains the development of the Uitsiton system, capable of detecting obstacles to alert visually impaired users, increasing their mobility and confidence when moving. Uitsiton is made up of a portable electronic device (wearable) and a mobile application (App) that operates under the Android platform. The wearable is integrated into a vest-like garment. It is used to compute the approximate distance between the visually impaired user and the obstacles that they can find in their path. The wearable covers a range of 180 degrees vertically and horizontally with respect to the center of the torso, and reaches a maximum distance of 120 cm. The App works synchronously with the wearable, it receives a series of data corresponding to the measurements of the distance between the user and the obstacle, and it triggers a sound pattern and a vibration pattern according to the proximity of the obstacle.