<p>Neural responses to anticipatory coarticulatory cues were investigated across systematically varying phonological conditions. Congruent or incongruent subphonemic information was placed between an initial consonant and a vowel in a consonant-vowel- consonant (CVC) spoken word (Archibald & Joanisse, 2011). Due to physical and temporal differences across sound classes, the objective was to investigate whether coarticulatory information would be processed differently across controlled manipulations of onset (fricative vs. stop) and vowel type (height vs. backness). Event- related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a printed-word/spoken-word matching paradigm, in which participants indicated whether a visual prime stimulus and a spoken word matched/mismatched. The “Phonological Mapping Negativity” (PMN) component provides strong evidence that the use of coarticulatory information in speech recognition varies in strength and timing as a function of onset type (fricative vs. stop) and vowel height (high vs. low). Coarticulatory cues were more readily perceived in spoken word beginning with fricatives than with stops. Similarly, subphonemic variations were more easily detected in low vowels than in high vowels. Observed perceptual and temporal differences are interpreted to reflect variations in subphonemic and phonological processing.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

Graphical techniques for modeling the dependencies of randomvariables have been explored in a variety of different areas includingstatistics, statistical physics, artificial intelligence, speech recognition, image processing, and genetics.Formalisms for manipulating these models have been developedrelatively independently in these research communities. In this paper weexplore hidden Markov models (HMMs) and related structures within the general framework of probabilistic independencenetworks (PINs). The paper contains a self-contained review of the basic principles of PINs.It is shown that the well-known forward-backward (F-B) and Viterbialgorithms for HMMs are special cases of more general inference algorithms forarbitrary PINs. Furthermore, the existence of inference and estimationalgorithms for more general graphical models provides a set of analysistools for HMM practitioners who wish to explore a richer class of HMMstructures.Examples of relatively complex models to handle sensorfusion and coarticulationin speech recognitionare introduced and treated within the graphical model framework toillustrate the advantages of the general approach.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:24:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Amaury Flavio Silva.pdf: 6544112 bytes, checksum: c648f2d679889ea8f71012575e1cf2ad (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-05-21 / The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the strategies used by a group of bilingual speakers in the production of a dialogue and a monologue in English and to analyse a listening activity from a course book. In order to do it, the theoretical background used in the investigations was based on the theories and models about coarticulation found in the book organised by Hardcastle and Hewlett (2002) Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques; The Articulatory Phonology; developed by Browman and Goldstein (1986; 1989; 1990a; b; 1992); and the findings accomplished by Cho (2002) on The Effects of Prosody on Articulation. The production of the dialogue and the monologue were carried out by a group of late bilingual male speakers of English and Portuguese, aged from 18 to 48 years old. So as to carry out the analyses, the PRAAT free software version 4.5.18, developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, from the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdan was used. The results obtained through the investigations indicated the presence of coarticulatory phenomenona such as hiding in contexts like let me see; blending in almost daily; the presence of the flap in get out; the presence of vowels between consonants in contexts like much better; and so forth. The investigations concerning the course book revealed the fact that the consonants, which according to the course book answer key were not pronounced, were, indeed, pronounced. This was possible through the analyses of the spectrograms of each segmentation / O objetivo desta dissertação é o de investigar as estratégias de falantes bilíngues na produção de um diálogo e um monólogo em inglês e de analisar um exercío de compreensão auditiva proveniente de um livro didático. Para tanto, como base teórica para a realização das investigações foram utilizadas as teorias e modelos sobre a coarticulação provenientes do livro organizado por Hardcastle e Hewlett (2002) Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques; a Fonologia Articulatória, desenvolvida por Browman e Goldstein (1986; 1989;1990a; b; 1992); e as descobertas realizadas por Cho (2002) sobre os Efeitos da Prosódia nos Articuladores. Participaram das gravações do diálogo e do monólogo um grupo de sujeitos bilíngues tardios do português e do inglês, todos do sexo masculino cujas idades variam entre 18 e 48 anos. Para realizar as análises foi utilizado o software livre PRAAT versão 4.5.18, desenvolvido por Paul Boersma e David Weenink, do Instituto de Ciências Fonéticas da Universidade de Amsterdã. Os resultados obtidos nas investigações apontaram a presença dos fenômenos coarticulatórios como hiding em contextos como em let me see; blending em almost daily; a presença do flepe em get out; a presença de vogais entre consoantes em contextos como much better; além de outros. Quanto ao livro didático, as investigações revelaram o fato de que as consoantes tidas como não pronunciadas puderam ser detectadas através da análise espectrográfica das segmentações

This thesis focuses on changes in the height of articulation in Czech Sign Language affected by coarticulation. The theoretical base of the thesis originates from both Czech and foreign linguistic literature devoted to phonological processes in speech. One part of the thesis is basic insight into the issues of phonological processes in sign languages. The research of the height of articulation in Czech Sign Language affected by coarticulation follows the recent studies dedicated on changes in height of articulation of speakers of Dutch, American, Australian and New Zealand Sign Languages (Ormel, Crasborn, Kooij 2013; Tyrone, Mauk 2010; Grosvald, Corina 2012a; Russell, Wilkinson, Janzen 2011; Lucas et al. 2002; Schembri et al. 2009). The goal of the research is to describe the changes in height of articulation by the one-handed lexical signs with the place of articulation in the head area (the target signs KNOW and REMEMBER) affected by their phonetic context. The data were collected during the recordings of sign langugae production of 15 participants, all speakers of Czech Sign Language. 1400 tokens of target signs were excerpted and analysed in total. Results of research are compared with the present findings on coarticulation in foreign sign languages. Key words: Czech Sign Language, production...