Marina Nespor - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Marina Nespor

5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1997)

will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible... more will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible factors influencing the domain of final lengthening are described. Results indicate that final lengthening is generally confined to the final syllable, except when its rhyme contains only a schwa, in which case the penultimate rhyme is lengthened as well. Apparently, only the weight of the final syllable influences the size of the domain which is lengthened. Next, a perceptual acceptability experiment was run. Results indicate that while listeners are sensitive to differences in the amount of final lengthening, they are not very sensitive to the way this is distributed over the preboundary segments. Apparently, the specific distribution of final lengthening in production has no communicative function, but is the result of the human speech mechanism, together with restrictions on the expandability of segments.

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 2011

Logical Issues in Language Acquisition, 1990

Developmental Psychology, 2019

Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development, 2002

is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los consti... more Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los constitutivos gramaticales, así como cuestiones afines tales como la percepción y la métrica poética.

Scientific Reports, 2015

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has ... more Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a v...

Linguistic Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk

Psychological Science, 2011

Volume 5/Part 1: Clitics in the Languages of Europe, 1999

Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, 1999

... Gleitman & Wanner 1982; Echols & Newport 1992; Sansavini, Ber... more ... Gleitman & Wanner 1982; Echols & Newport 1992; Sansavini, Bertoucini & Giovanelli 1997), the conclusion can be drawn that prosodic structure is the decisive cue to fix the syntactic parameter concerning the direction of recursivity of the language. ...

Sandhi Phenomena in the Languages of Europe

The Linguistic Review, 1996

This paper deals with a case of morphology —phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek ... more This paper deals with a case of morphology —phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek compounding. It is claimed that two types of compounds are distinguished with respect to the stressing procedure: a) [stem + stem] com-pounds, submitted to the application of the ...

Science, 2002

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebr... more Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included in the stream even when the familiarization is greatly extended. With the introduction of subliminal segmentation cues, however, these regularities can be rapidly captured.

Phonology, 1989

In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languag... more In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languages is that the overall rhythmic pattern tends to be organised such that there is an alternation of strong and weak syllables (cf. among others, Hayes 1980, 1984; Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984). In other words, languages tend to avoid strings of adjacent strong syllables, as well as strings of adjacent weak syllables. These generalisations are expressed by clauses (a) and (b), respectively, of Selkirk's Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (PRA):(1)Principle of Rhythmic Alternation(Selkirk 1984: 52)a. Every strong position on a metrical levelnshould be followed by at least one weak position on that levelb. Any weak position on a metrical levelnmay be preceded by at most one weak position on that levelOf course, the underlying rhythmic patterns of a language are not always in conformity with the PRA.

5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1997)

will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible... more will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible factors influencing the domain of final lengthening are described. Results indicate that final lengthening is generally confined to the final syllable, except when its rhyme contains only a schwa, in which case the penultimate rhyme is lengthened as well. Apparently, only the weight of the final syllable influences the size of the domain which is lengthened. Next, a perceptual acceptability experiment was run. Results indicate that while listeners are sensitive to differences in the amount of final lengthening, they are not very sensitive to the way this is distributed over the preboundary segments. Apparently, the specific distribution of final lengthening in production has no communicative function, but is the result of the human speech mechanism, together with restrictions on the expandability of segments.

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 2011

Logical Issues in Language Acquisition, 1990

Developmental Psychology, 2019

Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development, 2002

is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los consti... more Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los constitutivos gramaticales, así como cuestiones afines tales como la percepción y la métrica poética.

Scientific Reports, 2015

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has ... more Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a v...

Linguistic Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk

Psychological Science, 2011

Volume 5/Part 1: Clitics in the Languages of Europe, 1999

Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, 1999

... Gleitman & Wanner 1982; Echols & Newport 1992; Sansavini, Ber... more ... Gleitman & Wanner 1982; Echols & Newport 1992; Sansavini, Bertoucini & Giovanelli 1997), the conclusion can be drawn that prosodic structure is the decisive cue to fix the syntactic parameter concerning the direction of recursivity of the language. ...

Sandhi Phenomena in the Languages of Europe

The Linguistic Review, 1996

This paper deals with a case of morphology —phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek ... more This paper deals with a case of morphology —phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek compounding. It is claimed that two types of compounds are distinguished with respect to the stressing procedure: a) [stem + stem] com-pounds, submitted to the application of the ...

Science, 2002

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebr... more Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included in the stream even when the familiarization is greatly extended. With the introduction of subliminal segmentation cues, however, these regularities can be rapidly captured.

Phonology, 1989

In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languag... more In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languages is that the overall rhythmic pattern tends to be organised such that there is an alternation of strong and weak syllables (cf. among others, Hayes 1980, 1984; Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984). In other words, languages tend to avoid strings of adjacent strong syllables, as well as strings of adjacent weak syllables. These generalisations are expressed by clauses (a) and (b), respectively, of Selkirk's Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (PRA):(1)Principle of Rhythmic Alternation(Selkirk 1984: 52)a. Every strong position on a metrical levelnshould be followed by at least one weak position on that levelb. Any weak position on a metrical levelnmay be preceded by at most one weak position on that levelOf course, the underlying rhythmic patterns of a language are not always in conformity with the PRA.