On Segments and Syllables in the Sound Structure of Langage: Curve-Based Approaches to Phonology and the Auditory Representation of Speech. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Units of speech perception: Phoneme and syllable
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1975
Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Unlike previous experiments heterogeneous lists of syllables and phonemes were used to remove possible bias created by homogenous lists. In Experiment I, targets that matched the response items in linguistic level were recognized faster than those that mismatched, whether the targets were syllables or phonemes. In Experiment II, where all targets and response items matched in level, phonemes were recognized faster than syllables when phonemes were relatively easy to identify, but the reverse held when phonemes were harder to identify. These results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception.
The syllable's role in speech segmentation
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1981
In this study a monitoring technique was employed to examine the role of the syllable in the perceptual segmentation of words. Pairs of words sharing the first three phonemes but having different syllabic structure (for instance, pa-lace and pal-mier) were used. The targets were the sequences composed of either the first two or three phonemes of the word (for instance, pa andpal). The results showed that reaction times to targets which correspond to the first syllable of the word were faster than those that did not, independently of the target size. In a second experiment, two target types, V and VC (for instance, a and al in the two target words above) were used with the same experimental list as in experiment one. Subjects detected the VC target type faster when it belonged to the first syllable than when it belonged to the first two syllables. No differences were observed for the V target type which was in the first syllable in both cases. On the basis of the reported results an interpretation in which the syllable is considered a processing unit in speech perception is advanced.
Introduction: models of phonology in perception
The aim of this book is to provide explicit discussions on how perception is connected to phonology. This includes discussions of how many representations a comprehensive view of phonology requires, and how these representations are mapped to each other in the processes of comprehension and production. Of the two directions of processing, this book centres on comprehension, the direction that has received relatively little attention from phonologists.
Phonology, 2002
Without doubt, the most significant development in phonology over the past decade has been the ascendance of constraint-based formalisms over ordered rules. Constraints have provided us with a much richer and more nuanced conception of markedness-the answer to the question why sound x is more natural than sound y in context z. In recent markedness discussions, listeneroriented notions such as salience, contrast, similarity and cue have figured prominently. These terms derive from the speech-perception literature, whose goals and methods are often tangential to phonology. In the belief that the moment had arrived for linguists and speech scientists to reconnect with one another, Hume and Johnson organised a satellite meeting of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in August 1999 in the San Francisco Bay Area that brought together leading phonologists and phoneticians to discuss how research in the speech laboratory can illuminate sound patterns in language. 1 The volume under review contains ten papers from the conference, plus a foreword by Björn Lindblom. It presents a healthy diversity of opinion on the nature and the extent of the grounding of phonology in speech perception. The reader gets a good sense of the kinds of experiments that can be brought to bear on these questions and the difficulties in interpreting their results. Space limitations preclude discussion of each chapter in this review. All are well worth reading. The paper by Patrice Speeter Beddor, Rena Arens Krakow & Stephanie Lindemann, ' Patterns of perceptual compensation and their phonological consequences', is an instructive example of how the study of speech perception in the laboratory can elucidate the phonology of nasal vowels. Previous literature showed that listeners readily compensate for nasal coarticulation. For example, Kawasaki (1986) found that American English subjects detect nasality in the vowel of a NṼ N syllable when the coda nasal is attenuated. Building on these results, Beddor et al. designed an experiment to show that such perceptual compensation (attributing a property of one segment to an adjacent one) is more gradient. Stimuli were constructed by excising and cross-splicing oral and nasal vowels from words like bode [bod] and moan [mõn]. American Englishspeaking subjects were presented with two pairs of stimuli and asked to judge which pair is ' more different '. In a control trial of [bod]-[bõd] vs. [bod]-[bod] (and [mon]-[mõn] vs. [mõn]-[mõn]) subjects were highly accurate in detecting nasal vs. oral vowels in contexts not susceptible to coarticulatory compensation. The test trials gauged listeners' ability to discriminate the V vs. Ṽ contrast in different consonantal contexts. Performance was quite good (80-90 %) in oral 1 The volume appears exactly 50 years after the most famous and influential collaboration between phonologists and phoneticians : Jakobson et al. (1951).
Review of A. Bell and JB Hooper, eds.,(1978) Syllables and Segments
1982
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Language, 2000
Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Dr. W.A. Wagenaar, hoogleraar in de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 10 september 1998 te klokke 16.15 uur door Robertus Wilhelmus Nicolaas Goedemans geboren te Haarlem in 1967 1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units. Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments. However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. * Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem. This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length. phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts. A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel-velar nasal". Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages. Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature. A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf. Peterson & Lehiste 1960; Chen 1970). The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset. For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf. English bed vs. bet). These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated. Following Lehiste's (1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf. Fudge 1969; Selkirk 1978). This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3). (3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a nd Not only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules. An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984). He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix. Let us look at some of Lass' data. 4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wīf 'women' 1.2.1 Stress: an introduction to the phenomenon Sweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs. He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress. There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate. The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal. 5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener). 1 The experiments reported on in this chapter have been published in Goedemans & van Heuven (1993).