Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Sensorimotor adaptation of speech depends on the direction of auditory feedback alteration.

Hardik Kothare
Inez Raharjo
Vikram Ramanarayanan
Kamalini Ranasinghe
Benjamin Parrell
Keith Johnson
John F. Houde
Srikantan S. Nagarajan
2020
A hallmark feature of speech motor control is its ability to learn to anticipate and compensate for persistent feedback alterations, a process referred to as sensorimotor adaptation. Because this process involves adjusting articulation to counter the perceived effects of altering acoustic feedback, there are a number of factors that affect it, including the complex relationship between acoustics and articulation and non-uniformities of speech perception. As a consequence, sensorimotor adaptation is hypothesised to vary as a function of the direction of the applied auditory feedback alteration...

Didn't hear that coming: Effects of withholding phonetic cues to code-switching.

Alice Shen
Susanne Gahl
Keith Johnson
2020

Code-switching has been found to incur a processing cost in auditory comprehension. However, listeners may have access to anticipatory phonetic cues to code-switches (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014; Fricke et al., 2016), thus mitigating switch cost. We investigated effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched word recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentences. In a concept monitoring experiment, Mandarin–English bilinguals took longer to recognize code-switches, suggesting a switch cost. In an eye tracking experiment, the...

In Memoriam, John J. Ohala (1941–2020)

Keith Johnson
2020

General adaptation to accented English: Speech intelligibility unaffected by perceived source of non-native accent.

Yevgeniy Melguy
Keith Johnson
2021
Foreign-accented speech commonly incurs a processing cost, but this cost can be offset when listeners are given informative cues to the speaker's purported ethnicity and/or language background. This study investigates the mechanism that underlies this facilitatory effect of top-down expectation, evaluating between general adaptation (an across-the-board relaxation of phonetic categorization criteria) and targeted adaptation (tuning in to accent-specific phonetics). In experiment 1, native speakers of American English completed a transcription-in-noise task with Chinese-accented English...

Hyman published in Africana Linguistica

January 11, 2022

Congratulations to Larry Hyman on the publication of a new article in Africana Linguistica:

Hyman, Larry M. 2021. Augmentability and High Tone Deletion in Runyankore. Africana Linguistica 27.103-140.

Lapierre files dissertation

January 9, 2022

Congratulations to Myriam Lapierre, who filed her doctoral dissertation last month:

"Towards a Theory of Subsegmental and Subfeatural Representations: The Phonology and Typology of Nasality"
Committee: Sharon Inkelas, Lev Michael (co-chairs), Larry Hyman, Darya Kavitskaya, Susan Lin

Garvin files dissertation

January 9, 2022

Congratulations to Karee Garvin, who filed her doctoral dissertation last month:

"Word-medial syllabification and gestural coordination"
Committee: Keith Johnson, Sharon Inkelas (co-chairs), Darya Kavitskaya

Twenty-eight years of vowels

Gahl, Susanne
Baayen, Harald
2019

Research on age-related changes in speech has primarily focused on comparing “young” vs. “elderly” adults. Yet, listeners are able to guess talker age more accurately than a binary distinction would imply, suggesting that acoustic characteristics of speech change continually and gradually throughout adulthood. We describe acoustic properties of vowels produced by eleven talkers based on naturalistic speech samples spanning a period of 28 years, from ages 21 to 49. We find that the position of vowels in F1/F2 space shifts towards the periphery with increasing talker age. Based on...

Didn't hear that coming: Effects of withholding phonetic cues to code-switching.

Alice Shen
Gahl, Susanne
Johnson, Keith
2020

Code-switching has been found to incur a processing cost in auditory comprehension. However, listeners may have access to anticipatory phonetic cues to code-switches (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014; Fricke et al., 2016), thus mitigating switch cost. We investigated effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched word recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentences. In a concept monitoring experiment, Mandarin–English bilinguals took longer to recognize code-switches, suggesting a switch cost. In an eye tracking experiment, the...

Outwards-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Nez Perce.

Amy Rose Deal
Matthew Wolf
2016

Theories of allomorph selection differ in the extent to which they allow the realization of morphemes closer to the Root to be sensitive to the shape of more peripheral morphemes. In contrast to the full parallelism of classic Optimality Theory (OT), various current approaches posit that morphemes are realized one at a time (serially), beginning with the Root and proceeding outwards. This predicts that no phonologically conditioned outward-sensitive allomorphy should exist. In this chapter we discuss new evidence from Nez Perce that morpheme realization is partly, though in fact not...