This thesis investigates the phonetic and phonological properties of laryngeal distinctions in the consonant inventory of Tahltan, a northern Athapaskan language. This thesis does not examine the phonetic properties of all Tahltan consonants. Instead, this thesis focuses on the phonetic acoustic properties of plain stop consonants, which have been described inconsistently in Tahltan, to determine their laryngeal specification. This thesis also examines the observed patterns of behavior governing syllable structure to help determine the laryngeal specification of consonants in Tahltan. In addition, several morphophonemic processes are examined to determine the phonological laryngeal specification of consonants in Tahltan. Based on the phonetic findings, and observed patterns of behavior governing syllable structure, I will argue that stop consonants in Tahltan exhibit four laryngeal articulations: voiced, voiceless unaspirated voiceless aspirated and glottalized. Based on the morphophonemic evidence, I will argue that fricative consonants exhibit two laryngeal articulations: voiced and voiceless. Furthermore, I will argue that glottal stop is specified for the laryngeal specification [constricted glottis] (henceforth [CG]) and that [h] is specified for the laryngeal specification [spread glottis] (henceforth [SG]). / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Orientador: Plínio Almeida Barbosa / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T13:16:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Machado_Aline_M.pdf: 1068208 bytes, checksum: 5fde2bb97b66beab86daeec0c2e28087 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta pesquisa investiga a eficácia de um conjunto de medidas acústicas para o reconhecimento da fala de um indivíduo em um grupo de dez falantes do português brasileiro. Um sujeito desse grupo foi sorteado e nomeado o "criminoso". Entre as medidas usadas na pesquisa estão, as frequências dos dois primeiros formantes das vogais, a frequência fundamental média, a duração de unidades do tamanho da sílaba e da vogal, a dinamicidade dos formantes e o desvio padrão de durações de intervalos consonânticos ('delta'C). Todos os trechos escolhidos são de entrevistados divididos em dois grupos, (i) entrevistas ao ar livre e (ii) gravações telefônicas (de celular para celular). Os indivíduos consistem em falantes do português brasileiro das regiões do estado de São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Pará e Bahia. Nesta pesquisa fazemos um apanhado histórico da Fonética Forense, os métodos de análise utilizados ao longo história e também quais parâmetros acústicos mais usados para diferentes contextos de gravação, direta e por celular e quais deles foram mais significantes na pesquisa. Em nossos resultados, os parâmetros que menos sofreram variação com a mudança de canal de transmissão foram parâmetros de ritmo e tempo, como duração, taxa de elocução, 'delta'C; e um parâmetro que mede a dinamicidade do formante, que foi a taxa de movimento do segundo formante. As medidas temporais da pesquisa, por serem as mais variáveis inter-sujeito, tiveram grande poder discriminador. Os testes estatísticos apontaram que três dos indivíduos estudados, apresentavam semelhanças com o "criminoso" / Abstract: The aim of this research is to use some acoustic techniques for recognizing a subject in a group of ten speakers of the Brazilian Portuguese variety and pointing out what are the most relevant acoustic parameters for speaker recognition in that group. The analysis of the first two formants for the oral vowels, fundamental frequency, speech length, formant movement rate, syllable-sized duration, intensity and 'delta'C (standard deviation of consonantal interval durations of the collected samples) will help identifying an individual from within the group. All the samples are from interviews made in a poorly treated acoustic environment and into a mobile phone. Moreover, the samples of one the speakers (the "criminal"), which were collected in an acoustically-treated room, will simulate the questioned pattern of the forensic situation / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestra em Linguística

The pioneers and settlers of the Oregon Territory were not of one ilk. They came from various places and brought their separate speech patterns with them. This study sought to identify which major North American English dialect was present in the first half of the 20th century in Oregon. Analysis relied on the descriptions for the Southern, Northern, Midlands, and Western dialects. Some dialect features have acoustic measurements attached to their descriptions, and others do not. The analytical process was based on acoustic measurements for vowel classes and individual tokens, as well as global observations about the place of a particular class means within the larger vowel system. Findings indicate weak presence of Southern and Western speech patterns. The Northern and Midlands dialects were present, but they were not advanced. No single dialect predominated. Part of the process attempted to find a dialect diagnosis to help determine a one-step indicator as to which dialect may be present. Observations implied that the front/back relation of /e/ and /o/ is a reliable dialect indicator.

Prosody is the flow of speech created by controlling elements such as pitch, rate, loudness, and stress (Tiffany and Carrell, 1977). Prosody is vital to intelligibility of speech and also communicates meaning. Despite the importance of prosody, however, few tests for the adequacy of prosodic ability in young children have been published (Koike and Asp, 1981a). To remedy this paucity of tools, Koike and Asp published the Tennessee Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns (T-TRIP). The clinical usefulness of the T-TRIP has been limited by a lack of normative data against which to compare individual children's performance. The purpose of this study was to collect normative data on the T-TRIP scores of normal four and six-year-olds. The question this study asked was: What are the means and standard deviations of T-TRIP scores from the samples of four and six-year-olds? A secondary question was: Are differences between the means of the two age groups statistically significant?

丁國偉. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2007. / 參考文獻(p. 851-857). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2007. / Can kao wen xian (p. 851-857). / Ding Guowei.

This thesis investigates the role of phonetic biases and systemic effects in the actuation of sound change through computer simulations and experimental methods. Phonetic biases are physiological and psychoacoustic constraints on speech. One example is vowel undershoot: vowels sometimes fail to reach their phonetic targets due to limitations on the speed of the articulators. Phonetic biases are often paralleled by phonological patterns. For instance, many languages exhibit vowel reduction, a phonologised version of undershoot. To account for these parallels, a number of researchers have proposed that phonetic biases are the causal drive behind sound change. Although this proposal seems to solve the problem of actuation, its success is only apparent: while it might be able to explain situations where sound change occurs, it cannot easily explain the lack of sound change, that is, stasis. Since stability in sound systems seems to be the rule rather than the exception, the bias-based approach cannot provide an adequate account of their diachronic development on its own. The problem of bias-based accounts stems from their focus on changes affecting individual sound categories, and their neglect of system-wide interactions. The factors that affect speech production and perception define an adaptive landscape. The development of sound systems follows the topology of this landscape. When only a single category is investigated, it is easy to take an overly simplistic view of this landscape, and assume that phonetic biases are the only relevant factor. It is natural that the predicted outcomes will be simple and deterministic if such an approach is adopted. However, when we look at an entire sound system, other pressures such as contrast maintenance also become relevant, and the range of possible outcomes is much more diverse. Phonetic biases can still skew the adaptive landscape towards themselves, making phonetically natural outcomes more likely. However, their effects will often be countered by other pressures, which means that they will not be satisfied in every case. Sound systems move towards peaks in the adaptive landscape, or local optima, where the different pressures balance each other out. As a result, the system-based approach predicts stability. This stability can be broken by changes in the pressures that define the adaptive landscape. For instance, an increase or a decrease in functional load or a change in lexical distributions can create a situation where the sound system is knocked out of an equilibrium and starts evolving towards a new stable state. In essence, the adaptive landscape can create a moving target for the sound system. This ensures that both stability and change are observed. Therefore, this account makes realistic predictions with respect to the actuation problem. This argument is developed through a series of computer simulations that follow changes in artificial sound systems. All of these simulations are based on four theoretical assumptions: (i) speech production and perception are based on probabilistic category representations; (ii) these category representations are subject to continuous update throughout the lifetime of an individual; (iii) speech production and perception are affected by low-level universal phonetic biases; and (iv) category update is inhibited in cases where too many ambiguous tokens are produced due to category overlap. Special care is taken to anchor each of these assumptions in empirical results from a variety of fields including phonetics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Moreover, in order to show that the results described above follow directly from these theoretical assumptions and not other aspects of these models, the thesis demonstrates that exemplar and prototype models produce the same dynamics with respect to the observations above, and that the number of speakers in the model also does not have a significant influence on the outcomes. Much of the thesis focuses on rather abstract properties of simulated systems, which are difficult to test in a systematic way. The last chapter complements this by presenting a concrete example, which shows how the simulations can be linked to empirical data. Specifically, I look at the effect of lexical factors on the strength of contextual effects in sound categories, using the example of the voicing effect, whereby vowels are longer before voiced obstruents than they are before voiceless ones. The simulations implemented in this chapter predict a larger effect in cases where a given vowel category occurs equally frequently in voiced and voiceless environments, and a smaller difference where one of the environments dominates the lexical distribution of the vowel. This prediction is borne out in a small cross-linguistic production experiment looking at voicingconditioned vowel length patterns in French, Hungarian and English. Although this is only one of many predictions that fall out of the theory of sound change developed in this thesis, the success of this experiment is a strong indication that the research questions it brings into focus are worth investigating.

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis provides a historical review of the theoretical and practical influence of Protestant missionaries on the late Qing Chinese language reformers. The origins of the language reform movement have always been concealed in historical records. The missionaries’ contribution to this movement has almost entirely been forgotten. With a focus on the key figures in the language reform movement, including W.A. P. Martin, John Macgowan, Joseph Edkins, Lu Zhuangzhang, and Wang Bingyao, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the similarities between the missionaries’ views on the Chinese language and those of their Chinese assistants. The Chinese reformers’ imitations of the missionaries’ language experiments are also outlined. In the historical context of late Qing China, the Chinese reformers made language reform a way of enhancing the national strength of China. Thus, they made modifications to the original Romanized system and invented their own written forms of phonetic characters. With reference to the collaborations between China and the West, the thesis emphasizes Western influence as one of the crucial aspects of the origin of the language reform movement in China. This movement is still ongoing today with the widespread use of the pinyin input method in computers and smartphones. The thesis is divided into two chapters, analysing both the theoretical and the practical dimensions of language reform. It demonstrates how the missionaries’ critique of the perceived defects of the Chinese language and their practice of changing the linguistic situation in China strongly affected the views and practice of the Chinese reformers. It also offers a critical analysis of the Chinese reformers’ rationale, including their eagerness to advance the modernity of China. The first chapter discusses their views on the defects of the Chinese language in terms of its ideographic features, chaotic grammatical structure, and the discrepancy between speech and writing; it examines how their statements, proposals, and debates on these issues amounted to a discursive formation that defined the classical Chinese language as an inadequate instrument for China’s modernization project. I argue that the Chinese reformers accepted the missionaries’ phonocentric critique of the Chinese language and recognized the need to reform it in order to revitalize Chinese civilization. Through an examination of the genealogy of the missionaries’ influence on the practice of the early Chinese language reformers, particularly Lu Zhuangzhang and Wang Bingyao, I argue in the second chapter that the early stage of language reform in China sought its embodiment in the missionaries’ language practice: it was carried out through a combination of defence, argument, and negotiation between the Chinese reformers and the missionaries, eventually resulting in a compromise between reforming the language and preserving the cultural essence of China. With the knowledge and institutions that had been produced, the reformers’ final objective was to increase the literacy rate of the Chinese population, as this would thus strengthen the power of China as a modern nation-state. Finally, by revisiting the historical contribution of the late Qing language reformers, I argue that language reform in China is an unfinished project. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study examines the relationship between tonal phonetics, tonal reduction and orthographic patterns produced by Me'phaa Vátháá speaking teachers. It discusses these patterns in the context of Indigenous education in Mexico and of the language ideologies held by the teachers, which have parallels to those held by speakers of Spanish and practitioners of language revitalization. Its main finding is that tones undergo phonetic changes which reduce their relative psychoacoustic distances, and this combines with the writing practices of the teachers (in which they repeat the words to themselves at varying speeds) to produce hesitation when writing the tonal markers. This is framed in an ideological process of privileging writing as the ideal form of language revitalization, and of rejection of variants and spelling 'mistakes', which results in further linguistic insecurity by the teachers. This has repercussions for the revitalization of the language, in that teachers sometimes choose not to write in Me'phaa Vátháá, particularly in contexts involving technology such as social media, out of fear of making 'mistakes'. In studying these phenomena, this study also describes the processes of tonal reduction in Me'phaa Vátháá and describes its similarities and differences with the reduction described for other tonal languages such as Mandarin, Thai and Triqui. Tonal reduction processes in Me'phaa Vátháá are not an exact match to any of these languages, which suggests that, while reduction is universal, it has language-specific expressions, which suggest that reduction typologies should be further studied. In addition to this, the study offers a report on the process of tonal spelling learning by adults who didn't receive this training as children. This is relevant to both educational and language planners, as well as to practitioners of language revitalization.

The goal of the present project is to provide a preliminary descriptive analysis of the language found in a short manuscript in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library. The manuscript is a five-page Catholic catechism written in an Eastern Algonquian language. It is the only extant record of the language which is presumed to be Piscataway (also called Conoy). The identification of the language is based on the attribution of authorship to Father Andrew White, a seventeenth-century English Jesuit missionary. By providing as much of a description as possible through morphological and phonological analysis of the data, I hope to recover some knowledge about this extinct language and add to the sparse data on Eastern Algonquian languages. Because the goal of the project is to uncover the data in the manuscript, no theoretical viewpoint has been adopted regarding morphological entities or processes.