Volume 3, Issue 1

The study of the acoustic correlates of word stress has been a fruitful area of phonetic research since the seminal research on American English by Dennis Fry over 50 years ago. This paper presents results of a cross-linguistic survey designed to distill a clearer picture of the relative robustness of different acoustic exponents of what has been referred to as word stress. Drawing on a survey of 110 (sub-) studies on 75 languages, we discuss the relative efficacy of various acoustic parameters in distinguishing stress levels.

Abstract: We investigated whether variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation has changed at a two-decade interval by collecting English and French loanword data in the early 1990s and the year 2011. Our data survey has revealed that the overall frequency of final vowel insertion and that of variable insertion and/or no vowel insertion are significantly decreased and increased, respectively, in the 2011 data, no matter whether the plosives are English or French. The data survey is supported by a recent perception study wherein young Koreans have no difference in vowel insertion after English and French plosives, regardless of whether they are released or not, compared to old Koreans. Based on these results, we propose that more direct contact with English than two decades ago has led to more exposure to its spoken usages and that less direct contact with French has led word-final French postvocalic plosives to be perceived more like their English counterparts in vowel insertion by Koreans. It is concluded that the present study suggests the role of sociolinguistic environments over time in loanword adaptation.

Abstract: The investigation of acoustic correlates of word stress is a prominent area of research. The literature is rife with studies of the acoustic exponents of what is often referred to as stress but the methodological diversity of this research has created an unclear picture of the properties robustly associated with it. The present paper explores the methodological issues involved in examining word stress correlates with the goal of proposing a set of recommendations for future research. Based on a survey of 110 (sub-) studies on 75 languages, desiderata for research on the acoustics of stress are identified: descriptions of employed methods should be as detailed as possible, speech material should be designed to allow for teasing apart word level stress from phrase level prominence, and sample sizes should be chosen according to statistical considerations.

This paper first shows how Frame Semantics grew out of earlier work on Case Grammar. Then, it discusses some of the basic principles of Frame Semantics and shows how these have been implemented in FrameNet, an online corpus-based lexicographic database (http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu). Using semantic frames to structure the lexicon of English, FrameNet provides a wealth of information showing how frame elements (situation-specific semantic roles) are realized syntactically (valence patterns). Finally, the paper provides an overview of how frame-semantic principles have been applied to cover non-lexical phenomena using compatible annotation and data formats. This so-called “constructicon” offers entries of grammatical constructions that are also based on corpus data and that are parallel to lexical entries in FrameNet.

Bantu applicatives are standardly analysed syntactically, as encoding a change in valency. However, in many cases applicatives do not change valency, but are rather related to a change in interpretation. In particular pragmatic functions of applicatives related to focus and emphasis are often noted in the description of individual languages, but are very rarely reflected in typological or theoretical work. To address this problem, this paper develops a pragmatic analysis of applicatives, in which applicatives signal that the action denoted by the base verb is being carried out in some way remarkably, and so differently from normal expectations about the action. Pragmatic effects are found with all uses of applicatives, and may lead to a change in valency, or not. Absence of a change in valency is found in particular with locative and instrument applicatives, while benefactive applicatives almost always entail a change in valency. This is related to the thematic hierarchy: Beneficiaries occupy a high position in the thematic hierarchy and have a strong effect on the expectedness of the action expressed. The advantage of our analysis is that it addresses both interpretational and structural aspects of applicative constructions and provides a unified explanation for them.

Certain uses of vague quantifiers few and many intuitively compare a true quantity to a priori expectations about that quantity. A concrete proposal for the truth conditions of such readings stipulates a contextually-stable threshold on a contextually-variable representation of a priori expectations (Clark, H. H. 1991. Words, the world, and their possibilities. In Lockhead G. R. & Pomerantz J. R. (eds.), The perception of structure: Essays in honor of Wendell R Garner, 263–277. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; Fernando, T. & H. Kamp. 1996. Expecting many. In Galloway T. & Spence J. (eds.), Proceedings of SALT VI, 53–68. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.) The main goal of this paper is to introduce data-driven computational modeling as a means to implement and test complex semantic theories of this kind, which may be hard to assess based on solitary introspection of meaning intuitions. Based on an empirical measure of a priori expectations, we use Bayesian inference to estimate likely values of the latent threshold parameters given empirical data from production and comprehension tasks. We demonstrate how posterior inference and statistical model comparison can help assess the plausibility of the fixed threshold hypothesis.

It has been reported that prosody contributes to the identification of utterances which lack lexico-syntactic indicators of interrogativity but do have characteristic prosodic correlates (e.g. Vion and Colas 2006. Pitch cues for the recognition of yes-no questions in French. Journal of Psycholinguistics Research 35. 427–445). In Persian wh-in-situ questions, the interrogativity device (the wh-phrase) does not move to the sentence-initial position, and the pre-wh part is characterized by specific prosodic correlates (Shiamizadeh et al. 2016. Do Persian native speakers prosodically mark wh-in-situ questions? Manuscript submitted for publication). The current experiment investigates the role of prosody in the perception of Persian wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives. To this end, an experiment was designed in which Persian native speakers were asked to choose the correct sentence type after hearing only the pre-wh part of a sentence. We hypothesized that prosody guides perception of wh-in-situ questions independent of wh-phrase type. The results of the experiment corroborate our hypothesis. The outcome is discussed in terms of Ohala´s frequency code, and Bolinger´s claim about the universal dichotomous association between relaxation and declarativity on the one hand and tension and interrogativity on the other hand.

Abstract: The present study examines whether individual differences in second language (L2) learners’ perceptual cue weighting strategies reflect systematic abilities. We tested whether cue weights indicate proficiency in perception using a naturalistic discrimination task as well as whether cue weights are related across contrasts for individual learners. Twenty-four native Korean learners of English completed a two-alternative forced choice identification task on /ɪ/-/i/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ contrasts varying orthogonally in formant frequency and duration to determine their perceptual cue weights. They also completed a two-talker AX discrimination task on natural productions of the same vowels. In the cue-weighting task, we found that individual L2 learners varied greatly in the extent to which they relied on particular phonetic cues. However, individual learners’ perceptual weighting strategies were consistent across contrasts. We also found that more native-like performance on this task – reliance on spectral differences over duration – was related to better recognition of naturally produced vowels in the discrimination task. Therefore, the present study confirms earlier reports that learners vary in the extent to which they rely on particular phonetic cues. Additionally, our results demonstrate that these individual differences reflect systematic cue use across contrasts as well as the ability to discriminate naturally produced stimuli.

Abstract: This article explores a more nuanced understanding of topological relations in the Pohnpeian language (Austronesian). The BowPed Toolkit (Bowerman Melissa and Pederson Eric 1992. Topological relations picture series. In Space stimuli kit 1.2: November 1992, 51 , Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/1992/bowped/.) is employed as an elicitation tool with five Pohnpeian speakers. Evolutionary classification tree modeling is used as a discovery tool to find patterns in the data. The results show that the two prepositions in Pohnpeian, nan and ni , should be redefined in terms of topological relations as ‘containment’ and ‘attachment’ respectively. Likewise the meaning of some prepositional nouns are further revised.

Any incremental parser must solve two computational problems: (1) maintaining all interpretations consistent with the words that have been processed so far and (2) excluding all globally-incoherent interpretations. While these problems are well understood, it is not clear how the dynamic, continuous mechanisms that underlie human language processing solve them. We introduce a Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) parser, a continuous-state, continuous-time stochastic dynamical-system model of symbolic processing, which builds up a discrete symbolic structure gradually by dynamically strengthening a discreteness constraint. Online, interactive tutorials with open-source software are presented in a companion website. Our results reveal that the GSC parser can solve the two computational problems by moving to a non-discrete blend state that evolves exclusively to discrete states representing contextually-appropriate globally-coherent interpretations. In a simulation study using a simple formal grammar, we show that successful parsing requires appropriate control of the discreteness constraint strength (a quantization policy ). With inappropriate quantization policies, the GSC parser makes mistakes that mirror those made in natural language comprehension (garden-path or local-coherence errors). These findings suggest that the GSC model offers a neurally plausible solution to these two core problems.

This paper uses a small-scale case study of the speech of a single speaker at two points in time to investigate the question of whether and how speakers’ mental representations change over their lives. Specifically, I test two predictions of usage-based models of phonological representation: that individuals surrounded by a changing community will show the community change in their own production, and that this individual-level change will show an effect of item frequency. The community change under study is the loss in English Received Pronunciation of [ɾ] as a realization of /ɹ/; the speaker studied is Sir David Attenborough, a well-known British nature documentary narrator. I find that Attenborough’s narrations do not show evidence of him participating in the community change away from [ɾ] over time; however, he does show a different sort of change, by which he increases his rate of [ɾ] in high-frequency collocations in later life. I propose that this result may be attributable to Attenborough’s mental representation of high-frequency collocations becoming more word-like over time. The results speak to questions about the malleability of mental representations and the role of the individual language user in cases of community change.

We explore the linguistic variant – as opposed to the variable – as the object of sociolinguistic perception. The sociolinguistic principle of accountability, in centering the variable as a choice between variants, implicitly models variation from the perspective of the speaker, who makes that choice. But is it a good model for the perception of sociolinguistic meaning on the part of the listener? This paper reports the results of a matched-guise study designed to test eight distinct functions of the form like – as a verb, approximate adverb, discourse particle, etc. – in an attempt to determine whether listeners attach the same social meaning to this variant regardless of the variable it represents, and if so, whether this could be a partial explanation for why the use of like is increasing in apparent time in several variables at once. We do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that listeners evaluate the different functions of like in the same way. However, our results do offer empirical support for the division of like into sociolinguistically salient “vernacular” and non-salient “grammatical” categories. Moreover, we find a consistent pattern in which the more recently a function of like entered the speech community, the more salient it is to listeners.

Although experimental methods are used in the study of language change, it has been claimed that there is no analogue of the biologist’s Drosophila – no means, in other words, of observing change in the laboratory. Here it is argued that this pessimism is unwarranted, and that there is in fact something equivalent: a set of experimental methods developed originally to study the emergence and evolution of language, and which involve the use of novel “laboratory languages” to play games with a social component. These methods are described, and arguments are made in favor of their broader application to questions of change in modern language. Ideally (as has begun to occur in a few cases) this should involve interdisciplinary collaborations, and it would both open new doors for the testing of hypotheses and bring researchers in the field of language evolution into contact with a vast store of real-world data. Concerns about the authenticity of laboratory data are not unreasonable, but less pressing than might be imagined, and in fact should call for precisely the kind of interdisciplinary approach advocated here. This can only benefit everyone involved.

Dialectal studies have traditionally divided Andalusia in three main areas based on the predominance of seseo , ceceo , or distinción . However, many speakers present a mix of the three phenomena in their speech, which has led to multiple opinions but has not been empirically studied yet. The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate, by means of a quantitative sociolinguistic study, that the alternating use of seseo , ceceo , and distinción is no free but that it can ben explained by means of linguistic and social factors. The corpus consists of 36 semi-casual interviews with native speakers of Alcalá de Guadaíra (Seville). The results indicate that these Andalusian speakers present a mix of seseo , ceceo , and distinción , but all of them tend to favor distinción in formal contexts. Seseo and distinción were found to be more positively valued in this community than ceceo , as they are more common among young speakers with education, especially women, while ceceo is more characteristic of male speech and less education.