SCHEDULE OF TALKS: Fall 2010
PREVIOUS MEETINGS:
SEPTEMBER 13 -
KEITH JOHNSON, REIKO KATAOKA, SHIRA KATSEFF, RONALD SPROUSE, & MELINDA WOODLEY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Tour of the Phonology Lab
What is a phonology lab? What goes on there? Can I use the facilities of the UC Berkeley Phonology Lab?
The first meeting of Phorum this semester (Sept. 13) is an introduction to the Phonology lab. The plan is to have an overview presentation, and then some demos of how people get their work done in the lab.
- How to make an audio recording in the sound booth — Keith Johnson
- How to set up a listening experiment using E-prime — Melinda Woodley
- How to use the department server to analyze a phonetic database — Keith Johnson
- How to collect and analyze speech aerodynamic data — Ronald Sprouse
- How to use the Phonology Lab Research Crew — Reiko Kataoka
- How to get IRB approval to do research — Shira Katseff
SEPTEMBER 20 -
KIYOKO YONEYAMA
VISITING SCHOLAR FROM DAITO BUNKA UNIVERSITY, TOKYO
The Influence of Lexical Factors on Word Recognition by Native English Speakers and Japanese Speakers Acquiring English: A First Report
The talk is based on Yoneyama and Munson (2010), a first report of a study of the influence of word frequency, word familiarity, and phonological neighborhood density on spoken-word recognition in Japanese adults acquiring English. Three groups of listeners participated: lower-proficiency English learners in Tokyo, Japan, higher-proficiency English learners in Minneapolis, US, and native speakers of English in Minneapolis. Following Imai, Walley, and Flege (2005), we presented listeners with 80 words that varied orthogonally in word frequency and phonological neighborhood density, spoken by either a native speaker of English or a native speaker of Japanese producing Japanese-accented English. Robust effects of phonological neighborhood density and talker native language were found for all three groups; moreover, the high-proficiency Japanese listeners showed a smaller decrement in perception when listening to the accented talker than did listeners in the other two groups. However, a close analysis of the stimuli showed that vowels and consonants were not distributed randomly across conditions, and that the specific errors that non-native listeners made were on vowels that were disproportionately represented in high-density words. Suggestions for future research are presented.
Imai, S., Walley, A. C., & Flege, J. E. (2005) "Lexical frequency and neighborhood density effect on the recognition of native and Spanish-accented words by native English and Spanish listeners," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 117, 896-907.
Yoneyama, K. & Munson, B. (2010) "The influence of lexical factors on word recognition by native English speakers and Japanese speakers acquiring English: A First report," Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 14-1, 35-47.
SEPTEMBER 27 -
RACHELE DELUCCHI
VISITING SCHOLAR FROM UNIVERSITÄT ZÜRICH
Outcomes of Unstressed -A in Swiss-Italian Dialects: Vowel Harmony and Context-Independent Alterations of the Final Vowel
In this talk I’m going to present a brief overview of my PhD dissertation. In northern Italo-Romance dialects – with the exception of Ligurian as well as central and southern Venetian – -a is the only vowel that survived the general loss of all unstressed final vowels, which are supposed to have passed through a first stage of centralization in a pre-documentary phase, followed by vowel deletion. In the majority of these varieties the outcome of Proto-Romance -a is a low central vowel. However, there are some varieties in which this segment has undergone phonological processes: centralization, backing, fronting or — in particular — vowel harmony (VH).
The analysis of the systems of progressive VH in Swiss-Italian dialects is the focus of my research. This will then be extended to consider regressive VH phenomena and context-independent developments of the final vowel, in order to explore possible interactions of these phenomena with each other.
Though some of such VH systems have been mentioned in the literature, a systematic account is not yet available. In my research, I will consider the outcomes of -a in 40 dialects of the Swiss-Italian area where I carried out fieldwork; my dissertation aims to provide a detailed phonological description of the VH systems and some phonetic analyses of specific aspects.
OCTOBER 4 -
LOUIS GOLDSTEIN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA & HASKINS LABORATORIES
Representations Matter: Insights from Automatic Speech Recognition
In work on Articulatory Phonology (e.g., Browman & Goldstein, 1992) gestural representations of a word form were hypothesized to embody the information that is invariantly present in the signal, even when the form is produced in a variety of contexts that alter its acoustic and articulatory properties. This hypothesis was never really tested until recently. I will report on automatic speech recognition experiments (e.g., Mitra et al, accepted) that show that gestural information can be accurately recovered from the acoustic signal, and that augmenting standard acoustic representations with the extracted gestural information can lead to improvements in automatic word recognition, particularly in noise, where the improvements are dramatic. The gestural extraction algorithms are not based on statistics from real-word data, but rather artificial neural net learning from a purely theoretically-motivated model. The bottom line is that having a representation of the right kind is more important than getting the representation exactly right.
Browman, C. P., and Goldstein, L. (1992). "Articulatory Phonology: An Overview." Phonetica49: 155–180.
Mitra, V., Nam, H., Espy-Wilson, C., Saltzman, E., and Goldstein, L. (Accepted pending minor revisions). "Tract variables for noise robust speech recognition." IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.
OCTOBER 11 -
LARRY HYMAN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Markedness and the Phonological Typology of Two-Height Tone Systems
Abstract (PDF)
OCTOBER 18 -
KEREN RICE
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
What is Emergent? What Contrasts Reveal
The establishment of a universal set of innate distinctive features is a hallmark of generative phonology. In recent years, the universality of distinctive features has been called into question from the viewpoint of both phonological theory (‘unnatural’ natural classes, ambivalent patterning, sign languages; e.g., Mielke 2008, Morén 2007) and language acquisition (Menn and Vihman 2010). I add to this debate through a study of the coronal phonology in languages with rich coronal systems. Such languages show different groupings of the coronals with respect to phonology, suggesting perhaps that a range of groupings are possible subject to physiological constraints rather than to innate features.
OCTOBER 25 -
ELSA SPINELLI
VISITING SCHOLAR FROM LABORATOIRE DE PSYCHOLOGIE ET NEUROCOGNITION, CNRS, UNIVERSITÉ PIERRE MENDES FRANCE
Fine-Grained Lexical Access: Sub-Phonemic Acoustic-Phonetic Details Guide Segmentation
How do listeners accomplish the task of word segmentation given that in spoken language, there are no clear and obvious cues associated with word beginnings and ends? A given stretch of speech can be consistent with multiple lexical hypotheses, and these hypotheses can begin at different points in the input. In the French sequence l’abricot[labʁiko] ‘the apricot’, segmental information could be compatible with several competing hypotheses, such as l’abri [labʁi] ‘the shelter’, la brique [labʁik] ‘the brick’. Listeners are routinely confronted with such transient segmentation ambiguities, and in some cases ambiguities are total, as in Il m’a donné la fiche / l’affiche [ilmadonelafiʃ] ‘He gave me the sheet / the poster’. Yet the word recognition system is efficient, as listeners are rarely misled and generally segment correctly, retrieving the correct meaning.
In this talk, I am going to present a series of experiments examining the role of sub-phonemic acoustic-phonetic cues in speech segmentation and lexical access. We examined acoustic differences between phonemically identical sequences (e.g., l’affiche ‘the poster’, la fiche ‘the sheet’, both [lafiʃ]) and listeners’ discrimination and identification of these sequences. A series of off-line experiments (ABX & 2AFC paradigms) demonstrated that listeners can discriminate between and identify such utterances. Moreover the manipulation of the acoustic cues had an impact on the perceived segmentation: e.g., increasing the F0 in the /a/ of la fiche increased the percentage of vowel-initial (affiche) responses. A series of on-line experiments (cross-modal identity and fragment priming) suggested that listeners retrieve on-line the correct segmentation and modulate activation of targets and competitors in favor of the correct candidate, without ruling out alternative interpretations. These results provide further evidence for fine-grained lexical access and suggest that the recognition system exploits sub-phonemic information to guide segmentation towards the beginning of words. The implications of these findings for models of word recognition will be discussed.
NOVEMBER 1 -
SHIRA KATSEFF
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Articulatory Plans Are Constrained by Phonological and Situational Knowledge
Articulatory plans are learned and modified via information from multiple internal and external sources: auditory, somatosensory, visual, social, etc. This experiment measures how flexible those plans are, and whether that flexibility is tied to high-level properties of a speaker's native language or individual production habits.
During the experiment, specialized software altered speakers' formants in real time. Speakers produced CVC words but heard the vowels in those words with a higher F2. Previous studies have shown that speakers compensate for the mismatch between heard and expected auditory feedback by opposing the alteration: for example, a talker would compensate for an F1 increase in /ɛ/ by producing a vowel with a lower F1. Here, subjects heard their F2 altered in several vowels with a range of somatosensory and acoustic properties. On the whole, subjects compensated more for vowels with few phonological neighbors, providing some evidence for an influence of top-down knowledge about phonological categories on the processing of incoming auditory feedback. However, there was substantial individual variation in vowel production and compensation across subjects.
A second analysis asked whether a subject's formant trajectory during experiments altering vowels in several regions of vowel space could be predicted by the familiarity or phonological identity of acoustically similar vowels. Two models were tested -- one in which the subject's vowel space was determined from his casual speech, and one in which the subject's vowel space was determined from vowels in citation form words. Several regression and optimization analyses showed that the citation form vowel space matched the formant trajectory more consistently than the casual speech vowel space.
This analysis suggests that articulatory plans are modified with respect to high-level phonological categories and information about the speaking situation.
NOVEMBER 8 -
REIKO KATAOKA
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Variability in Speech Production, Perception, and Repetition: the Case of /u/ in Fronting and Non-Fronting Contexts
In this talk I will report some results from my dissertation research that examines how speakers of American English produce, perceive, and repeat the high back vowel /u/ in fronting and non-fronting contexts. Results from production study show that acoustic distance between fronted /u/ and canonical /u/ remains approximately constant across the changes in speech rate, suggesting that the fronted variants are produced by controlled articulation. The results also show that fronted /u/ has much smaller variability than canonical /u/. This variability in production correlates with the variability in category judgment in perception. Perception data show considerable individual variation in perceived /i/-/u/ category boundaries both in fronting and non-fronting contexts. Related to this variation, results from vowel repetition study show that ambiguous vowel stimuli were repeated as categorically different sounds across subjects depending on how they interpret each stimulus. Based on these observations, I argue for the following propositions: 1) controlled coarticulations provide precondition of phonologization by ensuring distinct phonetic distribution of exemplars; 2) speech perception is influenced by phonological knowledge that includes knowledge of the distribution of within-phoneme variants; and 3) it is the listener’s interpretation of acoustic patterns that gives rise to innovative pronunciation.
NOVEMBER 15 -
2010-2011 FIELD METHODS CLASS
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Recent Findings
At this talk, members of the 2010-2011 Field Methods class will present their most recent findings on Abo, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon.
NOVEMBER 22 -
JESSICA CLEARY-KEMP, CLARA COHEN, STEPHANIE FARMER, JOHN SYLAK, MELINDA WOODLEY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
QP Fest
At this event, scheduled outside of Phorum's normal time, the third-year cohort will present 20 minute presentations on the findings of their Qualifying Papers. This event will take place from 3:00 to 5:45 in 370 Dwinelle (G-Level).
NOVEMBER 29 -
URIEL COHEN PRIVA
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Faithfulness as Information Utility: Addressing the Actuation Problem
In this talk I will introduce a new theoretical concept: information utility. I will discuss the need for a different information-theoretic approach in linguistics, and demonstrate how the new approach can be used to address Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (1968) actuation problem. The actuation problem revolves around the reasons that lead some language to choose one structural change and other languages to choose other structural changes. In both UK and American English, for instance, there are several /t/-weakening processes, a rather uncommon process cross-linguistically. Likewise, in many different dialects of Arabic /q/ is weakened. I show that these parallel processes are not due to language contact, and that the key to solving the actuation problem for weakening processes lies in balancing information utility with effort. While articulatory effort is relatively constant cross-linguistically, the information utility of segments emerges from their language-specific distibutions, and is therefore different in each language. In order to demonstrate how utility and effort interact, I present an OT-based model in which faithfulness constraints instantiate information utility, and markedness constraints represent effort. With this reinterpretation of faithfulness and markedness, I show that the proposed model predicts the observed distribution of weakening processes.
SCHEDULE OF TALKS: Spring 2010
PREVIOUS MEETINGS:
JANUARY 25 - REIKO KATAOKA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: INDIVIDUAL VARIATION IN SPEECH PERCEPTION AS A SOURCE OF 'APPARENT' HYPO-CORRECTION
This study addresses the issue of individual variation in mental representations of speech sounds and considers how this variation might contribute to sound change. Ohala (1981) proposed that hypo-corrective misperception could occur when a listener fails to employ compensation for coarticulation. However, findings from later studies (Beddor and Krakow, 1999; Harrington et al, 2008) suggest that there could be yet another source of 'apparent' hypo-correction—namely, individual variation in category boundaries and compensation norms.
Against this background, Kataoka (2009) reported, among others, that speakers of American English exhibited a systematic variation in identification of the vowels taken from /i/-/u/ continua in that a group of listeners ('Fronters') who had the /i/-/u/ category boundary closer to the /i/-end than the rest of the listeners ('Backers') in one condition consistently had it this way in other three conditions.
In this talk I will present the results of the repetition experiment with the same listeners, in which the listeners were asked to listen to the vowel stimulus from the /i/-/u/ continuum either in the [d_t] or [b_p] context or in isolation and repeat the vowel. The results show that: 1) the listeners repeated the vowel more faithfully when the stimuli were presented in isolation than in [C_C] contexts; 2) for ambiguous vowel stimuli, repeated vowels had lower mean F2 when stimuli were in [d_t] context than in [b_p] context; and 3) Fronter's category boundary was closer to /i/-end than Backer's boundary (from /bVp/ stimuli but not from /dVt/ stimuli). However, in all cases the differences were small and none reached to the statistical significance. Plans for re-running of the same experiment with the improved stimuli and the theoretical implications will be discussed.
FEBRUARY 1 - LARRY HYMAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: DOES GOKANA REALLY HAVE NO SYLLABLES?
In the early 1980s I made the claim that Gokana, an Ogoni (Niger-Congo) language of Nigeria, does not organize its consonants and vowels into syllables. This was a radical and, in principle non-welcome position, given the centrality of the syllable in almost all phonological work at the time. Still, as Dick Hayward pointed out many years later, my extensive treatment of Gokana barely caused a ripple (and I may be exaggerating):
Hyman's account of the Nigerian language Gokana and in particular his well-argued claim that Gokana represents a case where invocation of the syllable buys nothing insightful for explaining the phonology of the language should have disturbed profoundly the settled orthodoxy surrounding the universality of the syllable. That a vowel (the quintessential syllable nucleus) is not guaranteed syllable membership is a very strong proposal, but one has little sense that it has attracted overmuch comment.…In my view it would be unfortunate if Gokana were to be regarded simply as an interesting oddity, rather than as the limiting case in a clinal situation in which many languages may participate to some degree in the course of their phonologies. (Hayward 1997:78)
While no one responded to the claim of no syllables in Gokana, the proposal of Hyman (1983, 1985) to establish moras as a central building block in phonology did gain currency, and was particularly welcome by specialists of Japanese, long viewed as exclusively moraic in its prosodic structure. Since that time work on the syllable has gone in opposite directions: While Kubozono (2003) has presented evidence that the syllable may in fact play a role in Japanese, scholars such as Steriade (1999) and Blevins (2003) have argued that the syllable is less needed elsewhere, e.g. to account for phonotactic constraints and, more recently, certain rhythmic effects (Steriade 2009). It seems that the status of the syllable is thus once again up for grabs, as has been the case in its rocky "on-again, off-again" past.
In this talk I take a new look at the Gokana facts and my original claim to ask the question in my title, motivated in part by a possible indirect (but ambiguous) piece of evidence which I have now discovered 25+ years later (I'm slow sometimes!). The talk will end by situating the issue within the context of recent discussions of universals vs. diversity (Evans & Levinson 2009), with my claim that Gokana and English are at the opposite ends of the "clinal situation" which Hayward suspected in the above quote.
REFERENCES
Blevins, Juliette. 2003. The independent nature of phonotactic constraints: an alternative to syllable-based approaches. In Caroline Féry & Ruben van de Vijver (eds), The syllable in optimality theory, 375-403. Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Nicholas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavior and Brain Sciences 32.429-492 (including commentaries and response).
Hayward, R. J. 1997. External sandhi in the Saho noun phrase. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 50.53-80. Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität zu Köln.
Hyman, Larry M. 1983. Are there syllables in Gokana? In Jonathan Kaye, Hilda Koopman, Dominique Sport-iche & André Dugas (eds), Current approaches to African linguistics (vol. 2), 171-179. Dordrecht: Foris.
Hyman, Larry M. 1985. A theory of phonological weight, 26-32. Dordrecht: Foris. (Reprinted, 2003, Stanford: CSLI).
Kubozono, Haruo. 2003. The syllable as a unit of prosodic organization in Japanese. In Caroline Féry & Ruben van de Vijver (eds), The syllable in optimality theory, 92-122. Cambridge University Press.
Steriade, Donca. 1999. Alternatives in syllable-based accounts of consonantal phonotactics. In Osamu Fujimura, Brian Joseph, and Bohumil Palek (eds), Proceedings of LP 1998, v.1, 205-246. Prague: Charles University and Karolinum Press.
Steriade, Donca. 2009. Units of representation for linguistic rhythm. Sapir Lecture, LSA Linguistics Institute, UC Berkeley, July 6, 2009.
FEBRUARY 8 - KATHERINE DEMUTH, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY AND BROWN UNIVERSITY: THE ACOUSTICS AND GESTURAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CHILDREN'S EARLY PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS
Little is known about the acoustics or the articulatory gestures underlying children's early phonological and morphological representations, and how these develop over time. Yet this could help inform our understanding of when and how knowledge of language emerges. In this talk I present preliminary findings on several aspects of this issue. The first part of the talk shows that mothers make systematic differences in their use of some landmark cues to voicing and place contrasts, and that these diminish over time, suggesting early enhancement of acoustic cues to feature contrasts in early child-directed speech. Children have exhibit some of the same feature contrasts as mothers at 1;6, though others were not fully acquired by 2;6. The second part of the paper explores these issues further with respect to 2-year-olds' acquisition of the plural morpheme. Here we find that acoustic cues to the morpheme are largely intact, despite cluster simplification, especially in utterance medial contexts. Finally, we present preliminary data from ultrasound recordings of a 2-year-old, showing that the articulatory gestures for lexical vs. morphemic final clusters differ, despite the content of the cluster being the same. These findings are discussed in terms of some of the articulatory/planning mechanisms that may underlie children’s early grammars, and the implications for understanding the nature of children’s phonological and morphological development more generally.
FEBRUARY 22 - MOLLY BABEL, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (WITH GRANT MCGUIRE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ): THE WEIGHTING OF AUDIO AND VISUAL CUES IN THE PERCEPTION OF /F/ AND /Θ/ ACROSS TALKERS
Across the world's languages, /θ/ is a rare phoneme, occurring in fewer than 5% of languages (UPSID, Maddieson & Precoda 1990). In addition to its rarity cross-linguistically, it is a volatile sound in English often undergoing patterns of stopping to [t] or fronting to [f], particularly in coda position (Dubois & Horvath 1998, Wells 1982). The vulnerability of /θ/ has been claimed to be due to articulatory difficulty (Wells 1982) and to its perceptual similarity with /f/ (Labov et al. 1968). Articulatory difficulty is an unlikely reason as Edwards & Beckman (in press) find that in Greek, where /θ/ occurs more frequently, it is acquired earlier. However, /f/ and /θ/ are highly perceptually confusable (Miller & Nicely 1955). This is likely due to their spectral similarity (Tabain 1998) and consequently listeners rely heavily on formant transitions to identify them (Harris 1985); listeners have been found to make use of semantic and visual information as well (Jongman et al. 2003). This latter aspect may help account for a notable asymmetry: the sound change /θ/ > /f/ is common, while /f/ > /θ/ is rare or nonexistent. We propose this is due to asymmetries in visual cues and cross-talker cue variability in /θ/ production. Support for this hypothesis comes from a series of four experiments that explored the weighting of audio and visual cues in /f/ and /θ/ identification using stimuli from multiple talkers.
The stimuli consisted of recordings of ten talkers (5 = male) producing /f/ and /θ/ in CV, VC, and VCV contexts in /i a u/ environments. Audio and video were recorded separately, but in the same session. Participants were assigned to an Audio Condition (A; n = 27), a Video Condition (V; n = 16), an Audio-Video Condition (AV; n = 16), and an Audio Cross-spliced Condition (AC; n = 16). In each they participated in a 2AFC classification task blocked by talker. Sensitivity (d') was calculated on the identification data, and analyses using reaction time were conducted on the correct responses. To briefly summarize the results, /u/ increased sensitivity to the contrast, likely due to lip-rounding exaggerating the differences in formant transitions. In the V Condition, /u/ led to decreased sensitivity likely because the lip-rounding obscured the visibility of the tongue gesture. In the AV Condition, /u/ was again facilitative; this indicates that listeners weighted the auditory cues more highly than the visual cues in identification. A trained phonetician coded the presence vs. absence of a visible tongue gesture for each token. This measure was highly correlated with sensitivity in the V Condition (Spearman = 29.2, p < 0.01, rho = 0.82), but was not significant for the AV Condition. These results suggests that listeners use visual cues when necessary, but that they weight auditory cues more highly when discriminating speech sounds. Overall our findings indicate that /θ/ identification is more variable, both in visual and audio-only conditions, which may contribute to its volatility across time.
MARCH 1 - MARISA PINEDA, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: NON-NATIVE LONG-LAG VOT: INSIGHTS FROM A DISTRIBUTION-BASED ANALYSIS
Speakers encountering long-lag voice onset time (VOT) for the first time in their second language (L2) produce VOTs between their L1 and L2 values. Native-like long-lag productions are conditioned by speaker proficiency factors such as age of acquisition and experience, showing significant production differences between late bilinguals, early bilinguals, and native L2 speakers. Thus far, analyses have focused on mean VOTs across speaker groups. The current study investigates the full distributional properties of VOT in bilinguals (e.g. variance, skewness) in addition to means, providing a more informative picture of bilingual acquisition. VOT production data were collected from French-English bilinguals (age of English onset 0-15 years) and submitted to a distribution-based analysis. Results show that while speaker groups differ predictably in mean VOT, there is a surprising amount of overlap between speaker groups and behavioral differences other than mean VOT. New behavioral differences lead to new hypotheses about the representation of target L2 values. Ultimately, these results may fill in some missing blanks between perception and production, and suggest, for example, that differences in perceived accent and comprehensibility diverge due to the degree of overlap with native L2 VOTs.
MARCH 8 - ERIN HAYNES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE IN ENDANGERED LANGUAGES LEARNED BY ADULTS – A CASE STUDY OF OREGON NORTHERN PAIUTE
Rapid phonetic and phonological change is a pervasive characteristic of endangered languages, and is especially prevalent when these languages are primarily learned by adults. There are three proposed accounts for change: transfer effects from learners’ first languages, internally motivated regularization towards universally unmarked features, and intensification of socially salient features. Transfer effects are expected because they are commonly seen in second language (L2) learning, and may be especially prominent in endangered languages, where learners have little access to fluent speakers and few opportunities for feedback. However, Cook (1995) contends that transfer is not the primary cause for change in endangered languages, but argues instead that changes are internally motivated and result in a process of grammatical regularization. Both of these accounts are acknowledged by Wolfram (2002), who makes the additional claim that external social factors have an effect on endangered languages, with some socially salient features intensified by language learners.
This paper presents research examining these accounts in the context of the possible effects of adult learning on Oregon Northern Paiute, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language of the Western Numic branch. In addition to demonstrating support for the three accounts described above, the findings suggest a fourth possibility for language change: transfer of socially salient features from another non-related but geographically close endangered language. Fluent speakers' reactions to non-speakers' productions are also presented and discussed in an examination of which changes will likely result in perceivably accented speech.
REFERENCES
Cook, E. (1995). Is there convergence in language death? Evidence from Chipewyan and Stoney. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 5(2), 217-231.
Wolfram, W. (2002). Language death and dying. In J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The handbook of language variation and change (pp.764-787). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
MARCH 15 - CHARLES CHANG, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: LEARNING TO PRODUCE A MULTIDIMENSIONAL LARYNGEAL CONTRAST
Much research in second-language (L2) speech has investigated how L2 learners acquire laryngeal categories that differ from the laryngeal categories of their first language (L1), but most of this work has concentrated on languages with two laryngeal categories that differ between L1 and L2 in terms of the same primary cue: voice onset time, or VOT (French and English: Caramazza et al. 1973, Flege 1987; Spanish and English: Flege & Eefting 1988; Italian and English: Flege et al. 1995; Portuguese and English: Major 1996). In the present study, I examine how L2 learners come to produce a laryngeal contrast that requires the use of a second phonetic dimension in addition to VOT—namely, the three-way Korean laryngeal contrast among lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops, which in initial position differ primarily in terms of VOT and fundamental frequency (F0) onset (cf. Han & Weitzman 1970, Kim 2004, inter alia). How do learners use (or not use) onset F0 in conjunction with VOT to realize this three-way contrast?
In a five-week longitudinal study, 26 adult native speakers of American English taking intensive beginning Korean classes in South Korea completed a reading task in Korean in which they pronounced word-initial lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops in a low vowel context. Results of acoustic analyses show that while most learners are eventually successful at producing a full three-way contrast, there is wide variation in the way in which they produce it. Whereas learners’ Korean teachers generally produce the contrast in a manner consistent with the literature on Korean (which shows a trading relation between VOT and F0 for the lenis and aspirated stops), learners themselves come to produce the contrast in several different ways. One group (n=9) ends up distinguishing the three categories by producing two one-way contrasts—some learners contrasting lenis and fortis stops in terms of F0 and lenis and aspirated stops in terms of VOT, and other learners distinguishing between lenis and fortis stops on the basis of VOT and between lenis and aspirated stops on the basis of F0. In another group (n=6), learners do not use F0, and instead contrast the three laryngeal categories solely in terms of VOT. Other learners show still different patterns of contrast realization, occasionally using both dimensions at the same time.
In this paper, I describe the range of variation in phonetic spaces that learners construct for this novel laryngeal contrast, show how these differ from the results of cross-linguistic perception studies on English speakers hearing Korean (cf. Francis & Nusbaum 2002, Schmidt 2007), and conclude that a perseverative kind of "equivalence classification" (Flege 1987, 1995) plays a large role in how learners (given no explicit instruction on how to produce the L2 laryngeal contrast) link L2 laryngeal categories to L1 laryngeal categories.
REFERENCES
Caramazza, A., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., Zurif, E. B., & Carbone, E. (1973). The acquisition of a new phonological contrast: The case of stop consonants in French-English bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 54, 421–428.
Flege, J. E. (1987). The production of "new" and "similar" phones in a foreign language: Evidence for the effect of equivalence classification. Journal of Phonetics, 15, 47–65.
Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Cross-Language Speech Perception, edited by W. Strange, 233–272. Baltimore, MD: York.
Flege, J. E. & Eefting, W. (1988). Imitation of a VOT continuum by native speakers of English and Spanish: Evidence for phonetic category formation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 83, 729–740.
Flege, J. E., Munro, M. J., & MacKay, I. R. A. (1995). Effects of age of second-language learning on the production of English consonants. Speech Communication, 16, 1–26.
Francis, A. L. & Nusbaum, H. C. (2002). Selective attention and the acquisition of new phonetic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28, 349–366.
Han, M. S. & Weitzman, R. S. (1970). Acoustic features of Korean /P, T, K/, /p, t, k/, and /ph, th, kh/. Phonetica, 22, 112–128.
Kim, M. (2004). Correlation between VOT and F0 in the perception of Korean stops and affricates. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH-2004), 49–52. Jeju Island, Korea: International Speech Communication Association.
Major, R. C. (1996). L2 acquisition, L1 loss, and the critical period hypothesis. In Second-Language Speech: Structure and Process, edited by A. James & J. Leather, 147–159. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schmidt, A. M. (2007). Cross-language consonant identification: English and Korean. In Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In Honor of James Emil Flege, edited by O.-S. Bohn & M. J. Munro, Chapter 11, 185–200. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.
MARCH 29 - PAUL WILLIS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ: GESTURAL OVERLAP AND LABIAL PLACE ASSIMILATION IN KOREAN: A (SYNCHRONIC) FAILURE OF PARALLEL TRANSMISSION
Language-specific patterns of gestural coordination have been claimed to be organized around achieving PARALLEL TRANSMISSION, by "choosing" optimal systemic gestural overlap settings that maximize overlap while maintaining recoverability of the overlapped speech gestures (Liberman et al. 1967, Mattingly 1981, Wright 1996). While parallel transmission has largely been discussed as a synchronic goal of language structure, like all substantive constraints it could also logically emerge through conditions on sound change. In this talk I argue for the latter source, based on evidence from overlap and assimilation of labial codas in Korean, a case that I claim involves a synchronically non-optimal balance between overlap and gestural recoverability. I argue that, as in other cases of unnatural processes in phonology, the principle behind both the exceptions and the rule becomes clear when considered in a diachronic context.
In Korean, the issue of non-optimal gestural overlap settings comes down to the differential behavior of codas in /p.k/ and /k.p/ clusters: labial codas are highly overlapped and optionally assimilate in /p.k/, but dorsal codas maintain low overlap and do not assimilate in /k.p/ (Son 2008). Hypothesizing that this pattern was driven by a general diachronic pressure towards greater overlap in CC clusters, I ran a series of experiments to investigate the perceptual effects of overlap variability in /p.k/ and /k.p/. The results indicate that labial VC formant transitions are quite stable and recoverable across all levels of overlap in /p.k/, but dorsal transitions are "quantal", becoming abruptly labial-like at moderate levels of overlap in /k.p/. I propose that the Korean pattern can be explained by a constraint against sound changes that are perceptually non-gradual, thus resisting the overlap drive in /k.p/. In /p.k/, however, shortening closure durations lead gradually to confusability with singleton /k/, feeding labial coda assimilation in spite of strong VC formant transitions.
APRIL 5 - SHIRA KATSEFF, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: LEXICAL AND PHONOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON ONLINE ADJUSTMENTS TO SPEECH
In order to minimize speech errors, talkers use feedback from multiple sources to make online adjustments to their articulatory plans. It is possible to induce such adjustments experimentally by altering the auditory feedback that the speech motor control system receives. Speakers are known to compensate for even subtle alterations in F0, F1, and F2.
Individual variation in responses to auditory feedback shifts suggests that top-down knowledge from a speaker's phonological and lexical systems might be involved in the otherwise low-level adjustment process. This study compares compensatory responses to altered auditory feedback in two parts of the vowel space in order to measure the effects of phonological and lexical neighbors on speech motor control.
APRIL 12 - JOHN OHALA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: VOICED OBSTRUENTS, ATR & SOME POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS FOR PIE STOPS.
Rather than being a report of research done (aside from library research), I am intending this talk to be a something of a discussion of research that is still in the planning stages and to invite critical comments from the Phorumanians. There is evidence that one way voiced stops can overcome the aerodynamic voicing constraint (AVC) is to enlarge the pharynx, exposing more compliant surface area to the impinging oral pressure and thus keeping the oral pressure sufficiently below subglottal pressure. This can have the effect diachronically of causing following vowels with some pharyngeal constriction to shift to front vowels (in the N. Sarawakan languages, in Cambodian, and, arguably in earlier Armenian via Adjarian’s Law). In other languages, voiced stops have induced ATR (advanced tongue root) harmony (e.g., in certain Akan languages). ATR, like front rounding, vowel nasalization, voice quality, etc. are, I would maintain, “second class features” (okay, I need a better term), that only arise distinctively as a result of the phonologization of a secondary cue from “first class features”, like voicing or nasal consonants. The implication is that all ATR harmony had to arise from something else and I speculate that this was voiced stops. In some languages, ATR harmony is so ancient that it may not be possible to verify this. I will also present some speculations on how the link between voiced stops and ATR could have implications for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop system.
APRIL 19 - ANDREW GARRETT AND KEITH JOHNSON, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: BIASES IN SPEECH PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION GUIDE PHONOLOGIZATION
Typologies of sound change have mainly drawn either a two-way distinction between articulatorily and perceptually grounded changes (neogrammarians, Bloomfield, Kiparsky) or a three-way distinction among perceptual confusion, hypocorrective changes, and hypercorrective changes (Ohala, Blevins). We seek to develop a typology of asymmetric sound change patterns based on biases emerging from speech production and perception: biases in motor planning, gestural mechanics (including gestural overlap and gestural blend), and perceptual planning; we suggest that most asymmetric sound change types emerge from biases in motor planning and gestural mechanics. Finally, we sketch some features of a theory linking speech production and perception biases to the emergence of new speech norms.