Marlyse Baptista gave a colloquium address to the Pittsburgh Linguistics Colloquium Series on November 6th, 2009.
Title: On the development of nominal and verbal morphology in four lusophone creoles
Abstract
Several UM linguists will be presenting their work at the 158th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Antonio, Oct. 26-30.
Presenters and abstracts listed below
The perceptual time course of coarticulatory nasalization.
Patrice S. Beddor, Julie E. Boland, Andries Coetzee, Kevin McGowan
Abstract:
Listeners’ moment‐by‐moment processing of anticipatory vowel nasalization and a following nasal consonant was investigated. English‐speaking participants’ eye movements were monitored as they heard instructions to look at one of two pictured objects on a computer screen. Trials included pictured pairs for naturally produced words of the form CVNC‐CVC (e.g., bend‐bed), CVNC‐CVNC (bend‐bent), and CVC‐CVC (bed‐bet). Vowels in CVNC words were coarticulatorily nasalized. Results to date show that, when participants heard a CVNC word (bend), they visually fixated the correct picture earlier when the competing picture was CVC (bed)—that is, when the vowel in the competitor would be expected to be non‐nasal—than when the competitor was another CVNC word (bent). Results also suggest that participants often fixated the target CVNC picture in CVNC‐CVC trials after onset of vowel nasalization but before N onset. However, although vowel nasalization facilitated early selection of CVNC over CVC, a non‐nasalized vowel was not similarly helpful for selecting CVC over CVNC. When participants heard CVC (bed), they did not fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture was CVNC (bend) than when the competitor was CVC (bet). Findings are interpreted in light of production data for English and perceptual theories.
Nasal coarticulation in clear speech
Anthony Brasher
Abstract:
This study tests whether speakers, when trying to speak clearly, employ variable enhancement strategies as a function of phonetic environment. Using aerodynamic and acoustical methods, this study examines the effects of phonemic context and speaking modality and on the spatial and temporal extent of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in English. Target words are English (C)VNCvoiced (e.g., bend) and (C)VNCvoiceless (e.g., bent) words spoken in either clear or citation speech modes. In order to enhance the percept of ／n／ in clear speech, speakers increase the duration of the nasal consonant in CVNCvoiced words but marginally increase, or even decrease, ／n／ duration in CVNCvoiceless words. While highly variable, airflow results suggest little difference on anticipatory nasalization as a function of speech mode. These results argue against models predicting a global reduction in coarticulation in clear speech.
Effects of prosodic structure on the relative timing of articulators in English lateral production.
Susan S. Lin
Abstract:
Previous research has established that American English speakers tend to produce syllable‐final ／l／ with movement of the tongue dorsum preceding movement of the tongue tip. However, the results of these studies differ with respect to the articulator timing in syllable‐initial ／l／, with some claiming synchrony (Browman and Goldstein, 1995) and others claiming asynchrony in the direction opposite that of syllable‐final ／l／ (Gick, 2003). This study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate the relative timing of the tongue tip and dorsum during production of syllable‐initial and syllable‐final ／l／ in multiple prosodic contexts. Prosody has a significant effect on both duration and extent of articulator movement in speech production—onsets of larger prosodic units involve larger and longer movement than onsets of smaller prosodic (Keating, 2006). The explanation that these effects result from speakers’ attempts to render perceptually more clear the segments that initiate phrases and utterances suggests that examining these segments at varying prosodic positions may provide insight into speakers’ knowledge of speech perception. Current preliminary results show that American English speakers may utilize at least two distinct timing relations in initial laterals, supporting a position that speaker knowledge may be variable between speakers.
Aerodynamic modeling for concatenative speech synthesis.
Kevin B. McGowan
Abstract:
Listeners can perceive and use a wide array of fine‐grained phonetic details, including the detailed coarticulatory influences of adjacent sounds, when perceiving speech. Details like anticipatory nasalization can, for example, potentially provide the listener with a rich network of informative cues and are a key to understanding listeners’ ability to disambiguate speech sounds from seemingly ambiguous input. Unfortunately, these coarticulatory cues are generally missing or contradictory in the output of speech synthesis systems. These systems work by concatenating variable‐length sound units chosen from a large database of recorded speech. Units are chosen to minimize two functions: the cost of aligning a particular unit with the desired speech output (target cost) and the cost of adjoining the next sound to the most recently selected unit (join cost). Generally, these costs are calculated using features which can be automatically extracted from the acoustic speech signal. A unit selection database is created, automatically segmented and automatically labeled with nasal and oral airflow feature vectors. These aerodynamic features are used as a proxy for articulatory information in the calculation of join and cost functions. Listeners’ mean opinion scores are obtained on output from this system and a baseline acoustic system for comparison.
Tim Chou presented his paper, “Feature Inheritance and Object Raising in Epistemic Modal Constructions in Mandarin Chinese” at the 2009 Mid-America Conference on Linguistics held at the University of Missouri, Oct. 9-11.
Excerpt from the abstract:
Epistemic modals like yinggai ‘should’ in Chinese have been assumed to be main predicates taking a TP complement as in (1a) since the subject can undergo A-movement to matrix Spec-T as in (1b) (cf. [8]). Besides, Lin (to appear) argued that the embedded object can raise to the matrix clause as illustrated by (2). What makes (2) interesting is that it appears to violate the Minimal Link Condition (MLC). Lin (to appear) suggests that the object raising in (2) is an instance of A’-movement, and the MLC violation is only apparent. However, this paper presents arguments challenging an A’-movement analysis of (2). First, given that Weak Crossover Effect (WCO) is a typical diagnosis of A’-movement (*Whoi does [hisi mother] like ti?), if object raising in (2) is an instance of A’-movement, we should expect it to be ruled out by WCO. However, this prediction is not borne out as shown in (3). Second, if object raising in (2) is actually A-movement, it should be able to feed binding condition A (Johni seems to himselfi [ti to like Mary]). This prediction is borne out as evidenced by (4). (3) and (4) jointly indicate that the object in (2) is an A-movement targeting the matrix Spec-T, rather than an instance of A’-movement. However, we need to explain why object raising in (2), as A-movement, is not excluded by MLC in Chinese.
Following Chomsky’s idea of feature inheritance ([3] and [4]), the unvalued φ-features on T are inherited from the phase head C. I assume that the embedded T in (2) does not contain any unvalued φ-features due to the lack of the CP-layer. It only has the inherent EPP feature, which needs to have only its edge filled. Crucially, in the absence of unvalued φ-features, the EPP does not impose any restriction on minimality. It only needs to attract some active goal with unvalued features to Spec-T, regardless of minimality. What determines the minimality effect in the derivation is the probe-goal relation between unvalued features, not the EPP. For this reason, the embedded object wancan ‘dinner’ may raise to embedded Spec-T for EPP requirements, producing (5a). Next, the matrix T with the unvalued φ-features inherited from C probes for the closest goal wancan ‘dinner’ at the embedded Spec-T and attracts it to its specifier for EPP as in (5b) (= (2)). In sum, the EPP alone does not force the applicability of the MLC, and the apparent MLC violation of object raising in (2) results from the lack of unvalued φ-features on the embedded T. Note that the effect of the MLC in Chinese is still evidenced elsewhere, as in (5c). The probe-goal relation between the matrix T and Zhangsan at Spec-v* cannot be established since the head of the A-chain (wancani, ti) at embedded Spec-T intervenes. As a result, Zhangsan at Spec-v* cannot move to matrix Spec-T.
The analysis shown in this paper contributes to the long-standing debate on the motivation for A-movement in linguistic theory. Specifically, it presents evidence against the universality of a checking-based theory of A-movement (cf. [1], [5], and [6]) because even though the embedded T does not contain any unvalued features except for its inherent EPP structural requirement, argument raising still occurs. Moreover, the fact that the embedded object can raise to matrix Spec-T via embedded Spec-T in (2) indicates that Mandarin Chinese employs the delayed version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition in [2] as in (6) so that the object within the domain of v* is accessible to EPP on the embedded T. We argue that the employment of delayed PIC is related to the lack of Case-valuation by v* in Chinese (in contrast to English) as implied by the analysis of Icelandic in [7].
Anna Babel presented a paper entitled “Valley Spanish: Origin and orientation” at the First International Workshop on Andean Spanish at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
Marlyse Baptista has been elected Vice-President (2009-2011) and President-Elect (2011-2013) for the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. She was elected at the SPCL conference that took place in Cologne, Germany in August 2009.
Marlyse presented a paper entitled “Evolution of verbal and nominal morphology in four Lusophone Creoles” at the SPCL conference in Cologne, Germany in August 2009. She also participated in a panel on Fieldwork Ethics at the same conference.
Andries Coetzee delivered the keynote address, entitled “An integrated grammatical/non-grammatical model of phonological variation,” in June at the “2009 Seoul International Conference in Linguistic Interfaces“.
Andries also gave an invited talk at the “2009 International Phonology and Phonetics Forum” in Kobe, Japan in August. The title of
his talk was “Gradient well-formedness in Harmonic Grammar: on the interaction of grammar and frequency.”
Pictured below: Andries, Mirjam Broersma, Maki Aoyagi, Shin-ichi Tanaka.
Marlyse Baptista was invited by the Institute Camoes and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and by the Institute Camoes and the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at Rutgers University (Newark) to give the invited lecture: “Creoles in the 21st century: when creolistics intersects with cognitive psychology and genetics”
Andries Coetzee presented a keynote address at the VI Congresso Internacional da ABRALIN (6th International Congress of ABRALIN) entitled”Grammar and non-grammar: an integrated model of phonological variation”.
In the talk, he develops an Harmonic Grammar model of phonological variation that simultaneously allows for grammatical and non-grammatical factors to impact variation. Over 3000 people from all over Brazil attended the conference, and it therefore felt like attending the LSA Annual Meeting.
Sally Thomason gave an invited talk, “How much can we know about ancient language contacts?” at the workshop on Interaction and Networking: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, which was part of the project Early Networking in Northern
Fennoscandia held in Oslø, Norway.
Abstract
For the vast majority of the world’s language families, there are no written records to help with the task of unraveling language history. It is nevertheless possible, in favorable circumstances, to identify a history of language contact and to establish the existence and direction of contact-induced language changes. This paper discusses methodological criteria for distinguishing favorable from unfavorable circumstances, using the Pacific Northwest Sprachbund of North America as an example. The paper concludes with some observations about contributions that linguistic evidence can and can’t make — in conjunction with evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics — to efforts to understand human history.
San Duanmu presented “Syllabification and the Weight-Stress Principle” at the CUNY Conference on the Foot, City University of New York, New York
Abstract available in .pdf
