Jonathan Washington - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Jonathan Washington
Folia Linguistica
Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infi... more Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infinitives, with multiple uses of a form within one category considered to constitute multiple functions. This multifunctionality approach predicts that all non-finite verb forms within each of the categories should have the same range of syntactic functions. We show that this is not the case. Based on analysis of a representative set of Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, and Tuvan), we propose a categorisation based on morphological and syntactic properties of non-finite verbs, resulting in four categories: verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, verbal adverbs, and infinitives. Under this approach, forms that are typically labelled as participles end up categorised as verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, or both, and forms that are typically labelled as converbs end up categorised as verbal adverbs, infinitives, or both. Some forms even span these two divisions. When a non-fini...
LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty ... more LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles Universit
The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apert... more The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apertium APy), is a free and open-source toolchain that supports a range of open-source technologies. The internationalised interface allows users to translate text, documents, and web pages, as well as morphologically analyse and generate text. Other features, including support for multi-step/pivot translation, dictionary-style lookup, spell-checking, and accepting user suggestions for translations, are nearing release.1
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008).
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2020
In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambig... more In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambiguous se-lection of structural transfer rules in a rule-based machine translation (MT) system. In rule-based MT systems, transfer rules are the component responsible for converting source language morphological and syntactic structures to target language structures. These transfer rules function by matching a source language pattern of lexical items and applying a sequence of actions. There can, however, be more than one potential sequence of actions for each source language pattern. Our model consists of a set of maximum entropy (or logistic regression) classifiers, one trained for each source language pattern, which select the highest probability sequence of rules for a given sequence of patterns. We perform experiments on the Kazakh - Turkish language pair - a low-resource pair of morphologically-rich languages - and compare our model to two reference MT systems, a rule-based system where transfer rules are applied in a left-to-right longest match manner and to a state-of-the-art system based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture. Our system outforms both of these reference systems in three widely used metrics for machine translation evaluation
Folia Linguistica
Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infi... more Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infinitives, with multiple uses of a form within one category considered to constitute multiple functions. This multifunctionality approach predicts that all non-finite verb forms within each of the categories should have the same range of syntactic functions. We show that this is not the case. Based on analysis of a representative set of Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, and Tuvan), we propose a categorisation based on morphological and syntactic properties of non-finite verbs, resulting in four categories: verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, verbal adverbs, and infinitives. Under this approach, forms that are typically labelled as participles end up categorised as verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, or both, and forms that are typically labelled as converbs end up categorised as verbal adverbs, infinitives, or both. Some forms even span these two divisions. When a non-fini...
LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty ... more LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles Universit
The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowe... more The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowel classes represented as parallelograms.. . 3.4 Duration measures of the vowels produced by the Turkish-speaking
The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apert... more The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apertium APy), is a free and open-source toolchain that supports a range of open-source technologies. The internationalised interface allows users to translate text, documents, and web pages, as well as morphologically analyse and generate text. Other features, including support for multi-step/pivot translation, dictionary-style lookup, spell-checking, and accepting user suggestions for translations, are nearing release.1
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008).
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2020
In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambig... more In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambiguous se-lection of structural transfer rules in a rule-based machine translation (MT) system. In rule-based MT systems, transfer rules are the component responsible for converting source language morphological and syntactic structures to target language structures. These transfer rules function by matching a source language pattern of lexical items and applying a sequence of actions. There can, however, be more than one potential sequence of actions for each source language pattern. Our model consists of a set of maximum entropy (or logistic regression) classifiers, one trained for each source language pattern, which select the highest probability sequence of rules for a given sequence of patterns. We perform experiments on the Kazakh - Turkish language pair - a low-resource pair of morphologically-rich languages - and compare our model to two reference MT systems, a rule-based system where transfer rules are applied in a left-to-right longest match manner and to a state-of-the-art system based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture. Our system outforms both of these reference systems in three widely used metrics for machine translation evaluation
The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowe... more The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowel classes represented as parallelograms.. . 3.4 Duration measures of the vowels produced by the Turkish-speaking
This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, ... more This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish) using ultrasound tongue imaging in order to determine what aspects of tongue position correspond to the vowel anteriority contrasts in these languages, especially regarding the tongue body (TB) and tongue root (TR). The results of this study suggest that the Turkish vowel anteriority contrast involves mainly TB position, whereas the Kazakh and Kyrgyz vowel anteriority contrasts involve both TR and TB position. This latter pattern appears to confirm the existence of a type of vowel anteriority contrast whose existence has been hypothesised but not previously verified instrumentally. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol25/iss1/24 An Investigation of the Articulatory Correlates of Vowel Anteriority in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Jonathan North W...
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). This release contains the test data used in the CoNLL 2017 shared task on parsing Universal Dependencies. Due to the shared task the test data was held hidden and not released together with the training and development data of UD 2.0. Therefore this release complements the UD 2.0 release (http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-1983) to a full release of UD treebanks. In addition, the present release contains 18 new parallel test sets and 4 test sets in surprise languages. The present r...
This paper describes the development of a free/open-source finitestate morphological transducer f... more This paper describes the development of a free/open-source finitestate morphological transducer for Tuvan, a Turkic language spoken in and around the Tuvan Republic in Russia. The finite-state toolkit used for the work is the Helsinki Finite-State Toolkit (HFST); we use the lexc formalism for modelling the morphotactics and twol formalism for modelling morphophonological alternations. We describe how the development of a transducer can provide new insight into grammatical generalisations, as the transducer functions as a testable model of the language’s morphology. Based on this, we add to the existing literature on Tuvan morphology a novel description of the morphological combinatorics of quasi-derivational morphemes in Tuvan, as well as some previously undescribed morphophonological phenomena. An evaluation is presented which shows that the transducer has a reasonable coverage—around 93%—on freely-available corpora of the language, and high precision—over 99%—on a manually verifie...
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 2021
This paper presents work towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Dizhsa,... more This paper presents work towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Dizhsa, or San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, an endangered Western Tlacolula Valley Zapotec language. The implementation of various aspects of the language's morphology is presented, as well as the transducer's ability to perform analysis in two orthographies and convert between them. Potential uses of the transducer for language maintenance and issues of licensing are also discussed. Evaluation of the transducer shows that it is fairly robust although incomplete, and evaluation of orthographic conversion shows that this method is strongly affected by the coverage of the transducer.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
An analytic method has been developed to assist in interpreting data from two-dimensional ultraso... more An analytic method has been developed to assist in interpreting data from two-dimensional ultrasound tongue imaging by determining whether the position of the tongue surface significantly differs for two categories of speech sound and, if so, which region is most associated with the difference. Individual tongue traces are modeled as curves in a polar coordinate system around a reference point. Two categories of speech sound are compared as a function of the distance between the traces of the two categories at each arc angle. The regions of the arc with the most significant deviation (i.e., where the categories are best contrasted) are shown by the largest ratio of mean to standard deviation (the greatest number of standard deviations separating the mean tongue surfaces). Categories are most distinguished in regions with more than one standard deviation separating them. A ratio of the angular distance between a point of complete overlap (no contrast) and the maximum positive and neg...
Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, 2019
This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz... more This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014
It has been argued that Kazakh primarily distinguishes its anterior ("front") vowels fr... more It has been argued that Kazakh primarily distinguishes its anterior ("front") vowels from its posterior ("back") vowels through retraction of the tongue root. This analysis is at odds with the traditional assumption that the anteriority of Kazakh vowels is contrasted by tongue body position. The present study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate the extent to which the position of the tongue root and the tongue body are involved in the anteriority contrast in Kazakh. Native speakers of Kazakh were recorded reading words (in carrier sentences) containing target vowels, which were controlled for adjacent consonants and metrical position. An audio recording was also made of these sessions. Frames containing productions of the target vowels were extracted from the ultrasound video and the imaged surface of the tongue was manually traced. Analyses of tongue root and body position were analyzed for each vowel and will be presented together with formant measurements f...
Folia Linguistica
Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infi... more Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infinitives, with multiple uses of a form within one category considered to constitute multiple functions. This multifunctionality approach predicts that all non-finite verb forms within each of the categories should have the same range of syntactic functions. We show that this is not the case. Based on analysis of a representative set of Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, and Tuvan), we propose a categorisation based on morphological and syntactic properties of non-finite verbs, resulting in four categories: verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, verbal adverbs, and infinitives. Under this approach, forms that are typically labelled as participles end up categorised as verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, or both, and forms that are typically labelled as converbs end up categorised as verbal adverbs, infinitives, or both. Some forms even span these two divisions. When a non-fini...
LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty ... more LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles Universit
The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apert... more The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apertium APy), is a free and open-source toolchain that supports a range of open-source technologies. The internationalised interface allows users to translate text, documents, and web pages, as well as morphologically analyse and generate text. Other features, including support for multi-step/pivot translation, dictionary-style lookup, spell-checking, and accepting user suggestions for translations, are nearing release.1
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008).
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2020
In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambig... more In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambiguous se-lection of structural transfer rules in a rule-based machine translation (MT) system. In rule-based MT systems, transfer rules are the component responsible for converting source language morphological and syntactic structures to target language structures. These transfer rules function by matching a source language pattern of lexical items and applying a sequence of actions. There can, however, be more than one potential sequence of actions for each source language pattern. Our model consists of a set of maximum entropy (or logistic regression) classifiers, one trained for each source language pattern, which select the highest probability sequence of rules for a given sequence of patterns. We perform experiments on the Kazakh - Turkish language pair - a low-resource pair of morphologically-rich languages - and compare our model to two reference MT systems, a rule-based system where transfer rules are applied in a left-to-right longest match manner and to a state-of-the-art system based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture. Our system outforms both of these reference systems in three widely used metrics for machine translation evaluation
Folia Linguistica
Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infi... more Non-finite verbs in Turkic are typically categorised as participles, converbs, and sometimes infinitives, with multiple uses of a form within one category considered to constitute multiple functions. This multifunctionality approach predicts that all non-finite verb forms within each of the categories should have the same range of syntactic functions. We show that this is not the case. Based on analysis of a representative set of Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, and Tuvan), we propose a categorisation based on morphological and syntactic properties of non-finite verbs, resulting in four categories: verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, verbal adverbs, and infinitives. Under this approach, forms that are typically labelled as participles end up categorised as verbal nouns, verbal adjectives, or both, and forms that are typically labelled as converbs end up categorised as verbal adverbs, infinitives, or both. Some forms even span these two divisions. When a non-fini...
LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty ... more LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles Universit
The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowe... more The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowel classes represented as parallelograms.. . 3.4 Duration measures of the vowels produced by the Turkish-speaking
The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apert... more The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apertium APy), is a free and open-source toolchain that supports a range of open-source technologies. The internationalised interface allows users to translate text, documents, and web pages, as well as morphologically analyse and generate text. Other features, including support for multi-step/pivot translation, dictionary-style lookup, spell-checking, and accepting user suggestions for translations, are nearing release.1
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008).
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2020
In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambig... more In this paper we present an unsupervised method for learning a model to distinguish between ambiguous se-lection of structural transfer rules in a rule-based machine translation (MT) system. In rule-based MT systems, transfer rules are the component responsible for converting source language morphological and syntactic structures to target language structures. These transfer rules function by matching a source language pattern of lexical items and applying a sequence of actions. There can, however, be more than one potential sequence of actions for each source language pattern. Our model consists of a set of maximum entropy (or logistic regression) classifiers, one trained for each source language pattern, which select the highest probability sequence of rules for a given sequence of patterns. We perform experiments on the Kazakh - Turkish language pair - a low-resource pair of morphologically-rich languages - and compare our model to two reference MT systems, a rule-based system where transfer rules are applied in a left-to-right longest match manner and to a state-of-the-art system based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture. Our system outforms both of these reference systems in three widely used metrics for machine translation evaluation
The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowe... more The approximate acoustic values of Turkish vowels in this study, with anterior and posterior vowel classes represented as parallelograms.. . 3.4 Duration measures of the vowels produced by the Turkish-speaking
This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, ... more This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish) using ultrasound tongue imaging in order to determine what aspects of tongue position correspond to the vowel anteriority contrasts in these languages, especially regarding the tongue body (TB) and tongue root (TR). The results of this study suggest that the Turkish vowel anteriority contrast involves mainly TB position, whereas the Kazakh and Kyrgyz vowel anteriority contrasts involve both TR and TB position. This latter pattern appears to confirm the existence of a type of vowel anteriority contrast whose existence has been hypothesised but not previously verified instrumentally. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol25/iss1/24 An Investigation of the Articulatory Correlates of Vowel Anteriority in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Jonathan North W...
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treeban... more Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). This release contains the test data used in the CoNLL 2017 shared task on parsing Universal Dependencies. Due to the shared task the test data was held hidden and not released together with the training and development data of UD 2.0. Therefore this release complements the UD 2.0 release (http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-1983) to a full release of UD treebanks. In addition, the present release contains 18 new parallel test sets and 4 test sets in surprise languages. The present r...
This paper describes the development of a free/open-source finitestate morphological transducer f... more This paper describes the development of a free/open-source finitestate morphological transducer for Tuvan, a Turkic language spoken in and around the Tuvan Republic in Russia. The finite-state toolkit used for the work is the Helsinki Finite-State Toolkit (HFST); we use the lexc formalism for modelling the morphotactics and twol formalism for modelling morphophonological alternations. We describe how the development of a transducer can provide new insight into grammatical generalisations, as the transducer functions as a testable model of the language’s morphology. Based on this, we add to the existing literature on Tuvan morphology a novel description of the morphological combinatorics of quasi-derivational morphemes in Tuvan, as well as some previously undescribed morphophonological phenomena. An evaluation is presented which shows that the transducer has a reasonable coverage—around 93%—on freely-available corpora of the language, and high precision—over 99%—on a manually verifie...
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 2021
This paper presents work towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Dizhsa,... more This paper presents work towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Dizhsa, or San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, an endangered Western Tlacolula Valley Zapotec language. The implementation of various aspects of the language's morphology is presented, as well as the transducer's ability to perform analysis in two orthographies and convert between them. Potential uses of the transducer for language maintenance and issues of licensing are also discussed. Evaluation of the transducer shows that it is fairly robust although incomplete, and evaluation of orthographic conversion shows that this method is strongly affected by the coverage of the transducer.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
An analytic method has been developed to assist in interpreting data from two-dimensional ultraso... more An analytic method has been developed to assist in interpreting data from two-dimensional ultrasound tongue imaging by determining whether the position of the tongue surface significantly differs for two categories of speech sound and, if so, which region is most associated with the difference. Individual tongue traces are modeled as curves in a polar coordinate system around a reference point. Two categories of speech sound are compared as a function of the distance between the traces of the two categories at each arc angle. The regions of the arc with the most significant deviation (i.e., where the categories are best contrasted) are shown by the largest ratio of mean to standard deviation (the greatest number of standard deviations separating the mean tongue surfaces). Categories are most distinguished in regions with more than one standard deviation separating them. A ratio of the angular distance between a point of complete overlap (no contrast) and the maximum positive and neg...
Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, 2019
This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz... more This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014
It has been argued that Kazakh primarily distinguishes its anterior ("front") vowels fr... more It has been argued that Kazakh primarily distinguishes its anterior ("front") vowels from its posterior ("back") vowels through retraction of the tongue root. This analysis is at odds with the traditional assumption that the anteriority of Kazakh vowels is contrasted by tongue body position. The present study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate the extent to which the position of the tongue root and the tongue body are involved in the anteriority contrast in Kazakh. Native speakers of Kazakh were recorded reading words (in carrier sentences) containing target vowels, which were controlled for adjacent consonants and metrical position. An audio recording was also made of these sessions. Frames containing productions of the target vowels were extracted from the ultrasound video and the imaged surface of the tongue was manually traced. Analyses of tongue root and body position were analyzed for each vowel and will be presented together with formant measurements f...