The problem of this study was to determine through the use of taped media receptivity to dissonant or consonant information and to appraise those conditions which bring about change in attitude in light of dissonance theory.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to describe the realizations of consonant clusters in an age- homogenous group of Czech-speaking children. The theoretical part of this thesis deals with the syllable and consonant clusters as language universals, as well as with the syllable structure and consonant clusters in Czech. Furthermore, some theories of speech acquisition which take combinations of segments and forming of syllable structure in children's speech into account are also presented. A number of studies in consonant cluster acquisition is also summarized. The practical part of this work consists of an experiment in which consonant clusters in 16 typically developing Czech children aged 3;8-4;9 ( x = 4,4) were analysed. Eleven various two-element consonant clusters were selected according to their frequency of occurrence in the corpus of written Czech. Clusters were placed in 30 real words and 30 pseudowords - the pseudowords had the same structure as real words. Imitation was used as a elicitation method. Pictures were used only as complementary elements. The entire sample consisted of 461 consonant clusters realized in real words and 464 clusters realized in pseudowords. We described the structure of the target consonant clusters (i.e. manner and quality/accuracy of realizations) and their...

This master thesis provides a relatively detailed description of the consonant-vowel structure of standard spoken Czech. The first part covers approaches to and findings on the combinatorial system and distribution of sound units in speech; aspects of continuous speech segmentation into intonation phrases and stress groups, phonotactics of languages in general and Czech in particular, and speech rhythm are also addressed. Recordings of 12 professional speakers of Czech - comprising 6639 words and 5368 stress groups in total - have been used to create data sets that have enabled the author to describe CVCV structures of Czech words and stress groups. The results of this research present frequencies of words and stress groups and their relations to word-class dimension, frequencies of phones in words and stress groups; in this respect, both syllabic liquids and glottal stops have been taken into account. Further, the thesis includes an overview of the most frequent CVCV patterns in words and stress groups and their variability with regard to word classes. The final part focuses on how frequently consonants, vowels and their pairs and trios occur at different places within a unit. The results are continuously compared both between themselves and with the research that used the larger SYN2005 written...

The roles of phonetics (e.g., Jun 1995, Holt 1997, Steriade 2001) and Articulatory Phonology (AP, Browman and Goldstein 1986, et seq.) in both the diachronic evolution of and synchronic analyses for phonological processes are relatively recent incorporations into Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy and Prince 1993/2001). I continue this line of inquiry by offering an AP-based OT proposal of three fricative-vowel assimilations in Latin American Spanish: /f/>[x] velarization (fui [xui] "I went"), /f/>[phi] bilabialization (fumo "I smoke") and /x/>[ç] palatalization (gente [çente] "people"). In this dissertation, I pursue three main objectives: to update and clarify via empirical study and spectral analysis the available data; to account for the crosslinguistically recurrent phonological patterns that affect fricative-vowel sequences; and to explain the above processes' genesis and diffusion in Latin American Spanish by integrating the first two goals into an Optimality Theoretic framework. Concerning the first task, data for the three processes are culled primarily from sociolinguistic corpora (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975, Sanicky 1988, inter alia). Lacking from these accounts are detailed phonetic analyses. To fill this gap, I report on a four-part perception and production study designed to update the descriptive facts and provide spectral analyses for the allophonic variants. Regarding the second goal, I show that fricatives are susceptible to regressive consonant-vowel assimilation given the recurrence of assimilatory patterns nearly identical to the Spanish processes under investigation in disparate languages throughout the world. I argue that articulatory and acoustic facts conspire to render place features in (non-sibilant) fricatives difficult to recover given the vast interspeaker, intraspeaker and crosslinguistic variability in production (e.g., Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996) and the greater reliance on fricative-vowel transitional cues as opposed to cues internal to the frication on the part of the hearer (e.g., Manrique and Massone 1981, Feijóo and Fernández 2003). To that end, I argue that the sound changes originate(d) with the hearer's misperception of a speaker's extremely coarticulated target (Baker, Archangeli and Mielke 2011, inter alia). The dissertation concludes with a proposal adapting Jun (1995) that encodes the above articulatory and acoustic facts into an AP-based, typologically-minded OT approach that accounts both diachronically and synchronically for /f/ velarization, /f/ bilabialization and /x/ palatalization in Spanish (updating previous analyses by Lipski 1995 and Mazzaro 2005, 2011).

This dissertation explores the nature and extent of retroflex consonant harmony in South Asia. Using statistics calculated over lexical databases from a broad sample of languages, the study demonstrates that retroflex consonant harmony is an areal trait affecting most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, including languages from at least three of the four major families in the region: Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages in the southern half of the subcontinent do not exhibit retroflex consonant harmony. In South Asia, retroflex consonant harmony is manifested primarily as a static co-occurrence restriction on coronal consonants in roots/words. Historical-comparative evidence reveals that this pattern is the result of retroflex assimilation that is non-local, regressive and conditioned by the similarity of interacting segments. These typological properties stand in contrast to those of other retroflex assimilation patterns, which are local, primarily progressive, and not conditioned by similarity. This is argued to support the hypothesis that local feature spreading and long-distance feature agreement constitute two independent mechanisms of assimilation, each with its own set of typological properties, and that retroflex consonant harmony is the product of agreement, not spreading. Building on this hypothesis, the study offers a formal account of retroflex consonant harmony within the Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) model of Rose & Walker (2004) and Hansson (2001; 2010). Two Indo-Aryan languages, Kalasha and Indus Kohistani, figure prominently throughout the dissertation. These languages exhibit similarity effects that have not been clearly observed in other retroflex consonant harmony systems; retroflexion is contrastive in both non-sibilant (i.e., plosive) and sibilant obstruents (i.e., affricates and fricatives), but harmony applies only within each manner class, not between them. At the same time, harmony is not sensitive to laryngeal features. Theoretical implications of these and other similarity effects are discussed.

This dissertation explores the nature and extent of retroflex consonant harmony in South Asia. Using statistics calculated over lexical databases from a broad sample of languages, the study demonstrates that retroflex consonant harmony is an areal trait affecting most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, including languages from at least three of the four major families in the region: Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages in the southern half of the subcontinent do not exhibit retroflex consonant harmony. In South Asia, retroflex consonant harmony is manifested primarily as a static co-occurrence restriction on coronal consonants in roots/words. Historical-comparative evidence reveals that this pattern is the result of retroflex assimilation that is non-local, regressive and conditioned by the similarity of interacting segments. These typological properties stand in contrast to those of other retroflex assimilation patterns, which are local, primarily progressive, and not conditioned by similarity. This is argued to support the hypothesis that local feature spreading and long-distance feature agreement constitute two independent mechanisms of assimilation, each with its own set of typological properties, and that retroflex consonant harmony is the product of agreement, not spreading. Building on this hypothesis, the study offers a formal account of retroflex consonant harmony within the Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) model of Rose & Walker (2004) and Hansson (2001; 2010). Two Indo-Aryan languages, Kalasha and Indus Kohistani, figure prominently throughout the dissertation. These languages exhibit similarity effects that have not been clearly observed in other retroflex consonant harmony systems; retroflexion is contrastive in both non-sibilant (i.e., plosive) and sibilant obstruents (i.e., affricates and fricatives), but harmony applies only within each manner class, not between them. At the same time, harmony is not sensitive to laryngeal features. Theoretical implications of these and other similarity effects are discussed.

This thesis presents a study concerning stop consonant to vowel transitions which are modeled making use of acoustic tube model. Characteristics of the stop consonant to vowel transitions are tried to be obtained first. Therefore several transitions including fricative to vowel transitions are examined based on spectral and time related properties. In addition to these studies, x-ray snapshots, lip videos and also experiments including subjects are used to intensify the characterization, from the production and the perception side of views. As results of these studies the plosive to vowel transitions are observed to be uttered by exponential vocal tract movements and the perception mechanism is observed to be highly related with exponential spectral changes. A model, based on the acoustic tube model, is tried to be established using the knowledge and the experience gained during characterization therefore proposed model involves the vocal tract parameters observed in characterization part. Finally, plosive to vowel transitions including three types of plosives (alveolar, labial and velar) are synthesized by the proposed model. The formants of the synthesized sounds are compared with the formants of the natural sounds. Also the intelligibility tests of these sounds are done. Performance evaluation tests show the proposed model&rsquo / s performance to be satisfactory.

Children at risk for reading problems also have difficulty perceiving critical differences in speech sounds (Breier et al., 2004; Edwards, Fox, & Rogers, 2003; de- Gelder & Vroomen, 1998). These children rely more heavily on context than the acoustic qualities of sound to facilitate word reading. Dialect use, such as African American English (AAE) may influence literacy development in similar ways. Dialect use has been shown to affect speech sound processing and can even result in spelling errors (Kohler, et al., in press). The purpose of this study is to determine if children who speak AAE process cues indicative of final consonant voicing differently than children who speak a more mainstream dialect of English. Twenty-six typically developing children in grades K-2 who spoke either AAE or a more mainstream American English dialect participated. The speech stimuli consisted of nonsense productions of vowel + plosive consonant. These stimuli were systematically altered by changing the vowel and stop-gap closure duration simultaneously, which resulted in the final consonant changing from a voiced consonant, like “ib”, to a voiceless consonant, like “ip”. Two tasks were developed: a continuum task where the child had to indicate when the stimuli changed in voicing and a same-different task which involved determining if two stimuli were identical in voicing or not. No significant differences between groups were found for dialect use or grade for the same/different task. In the continuum task, chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in response patterns attributable to dialect and grade. In addition, a significant consonant by speaker interaction was found for mean ratings. Correlations between mean continuum rating and phonological awareness composites were not significant. In conclusion, it was evident that children who speak AAE present with differences in their perception of final consonants in VC nonsense syllables. This finding suggests the dialect speakers may be using different cues to make judgments regarding the speech signal, or that the speakers of AAE have a less mature ability to extract fine phonetic detail due to the influence of their dialect (Baran & Seymour, 1979). More research is warranted to determine the exact role that dialect plays.

Foreign accent can be everything from hardly detectable to rendering the second language speech unintelligible. It is assumed that certain aspects of a specific target language contribute more to making the foreign accented speech intelligible and listener friendly, than others. The present thesis examines a teaching strategy for Swedish pronunciation in second language education. The teaching strategy “Basic prosody” or BP, gives priority to temporal aspects of Swedish prosody, which means the temporal phonological contrasts word stress and quantity, as well as the durational realizations of these contrasts. BP does not prescribe any specific tonal realizations. This standpoint is based on the great regional variety in realization and distribution of Swedish word accents. The teaching strategy consists virtually of three directives: · Stress the proper word in the sentence. · Stress proper syllables in stressed words and make them longer. · Lengthen the proper segment – vowel or subsequent consonant – in the stressed syllable. These directives reflect the view that all phonological length is stress-induced, and that vowel length and consonant length are equally important as learning goals. BP is examined in the light of existing findings in the field of second language pronunciation and with respect to the phonetic correlates of Swedish stress and quantity. Five studies examine the relation between segment durations and the categorization made by native Swedish listeners. The results indicate that the postvocalic consonant duration contributes to quantity categorization as well as giving the proper duration to stressed syllables. Furthermore, native Swedish speakers are shown to apply the complementary /V: C/ - /VC:/ pattern also when speaking English and German, by lengthening postvocalic consonants. The correctness of the priority is not directly addressed but important aspects of BP are supported by earlier findings as well as the results from the present studies. / <p>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se</p>

Consonant assimilation between noncontiguous consonants within words is one of the characteristic error patterns for children reported in observations of the earliest periods of speech acquisition. Previous analyses of consonant assimilation in young children have been based on formal phonological theories. However, phonological perspectives do not provide comprehensive explanations for potential mechanisms underlying children’s output forms when they are different from adult forms. The present study tests the hypothesis that functionalist phonetic approaches have the potential to provide a more comprehensive explanation for assimilation patterns in children’s speech output. Consonant assimilation patterns were observed from the onset of word use (approximately 12 months) to 36 months of age in ten English-speaking children. Assimilated forms in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) words produced by these children were analyzed. Predictions based on the Frame/Content perspective were evaluated relative to place and manner characteristics, vowel context, word level, and development over time. Results confirmed the prediction that motorically less available forms assimilate to more available forms in children acquiring ambient language speech patterns. Labial and coronal place of articulation more frequently motivated assimilation than dorsal. Stop and nasal manner of articulation more frequently motivated assimilation than fricative. The vowel context effects in assimilated forms were stronger for lingual consonants than labials and greater for CVCV more than CVC word forms. A word shape effect was observed related to place characteristics, direction of assimilation, and vowel context. A word position effect was observed for manner assimilations. Analysis of developmental trends revealed that children maintained a preference for motorically available forms in assimilations. The vowel context effects decreased over time. These findings suggest that patterns of consonant assimilation in these children are strongly motivated by behaviors already available within their production system capacities from the pre-linguistic babbling period, rather than being driven by patterns found in the targets they are attempting. Results also suggest that perceptual influences from language input may influence assimilation patterns to a lesser extent. Functionalist phonetic approaches that emphasize the understating of the production system and perceptual influences played a seminal role in understanding of children’s speech development relative to assimilation patterns. / text