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Contains fulltext : 173223.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This electrophysiological study asked whether the brain processes grammatical gender violations in casual speech differently than in careful speech. Native speakers of Dutch were presented with utterances that contained adjective-noun pairs in which the adjective was either correctly inflected with a word-final schwa (e.g., een spannende roman, "a suspenseful novel") or incorrectly uninflected without that schwa (een spannend roman). Consistent with previous findings, the uninflected adjectives elicited an electrical brain response sensitive to syntactic violations when the talker was speaking in a careful manner. When the talker was speaking in a casual manner, this response was absent. A control condition showed electrophysiological responses for carefully as well as casually produced utterances with semantic anomalies, showing that listeners were able to understand the content of both types of utterance. The results suggest that listeners take information about the speaking style of a talker into account when processing the acoustic-phonetic information provided by the speech signal. Absent schwas in casual speech are effectively not grammatical gender violations. These changes in syntactic processing are evidence of contextually driven neural flexibility. 15 p.

This paper describes and analyses the vowel-harmony system of the Kordofanian language Moro. Moro has a cross-height dominant-recessive raising harmony system in which high vowels and a central mid vowel trigger harmony, while peripheral mid vowels and a central low vowel are harmony targets. Schwas can co-occur with any of the vowels, appearing inert to harmony. Yet when schwas occur alone in a morpheme, some trigger harmony and some do not. We suggest that an original ATR-harmony system shifted to a height system via merger and centralisation, producing two distinct central vowels, rather than a single schwa. One vowel patterns with the higher vowels in triggering harmony, and the other patterns with the lower vowels. We also propose that a particle-based representation offers the best characterisation of the groupings of target and trigger vowels in the language.

This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be ‘(L1) White South African English’. The article documents the differences among younger Black peoples’ English from the traditional L2 of their parents’ generation, via acoustic analyses of two sets of variables: schwa as a full vowel, and neutralizations of vowel length. At the same time there is considerable internal difference among younger Black speakers in relation to social class and gender. The finding that young Black women are in the lead in acquiring the prestige variety is triangulated with a perception experiment and citations from commentaries in the press and young peoples’ own attitudes.

This study was conducted in an effort to learn more about the phonology of the Irish language. The research is intended to be a phonetic analysis of one of the phonological processes characteristic to Celtic languages. The present study examines the extent to which schwa epenthesis in Irish acts as a neutralization process. A list of 30 Irish words acting as near-minimal pairs was compiled for this study. Vowel environment and syllable count matched across pairs, and only the vowel itself differed in whether it was epenthetic or underlying. Six native-Irish speakers were recruited for this experiment representing all three major dialects of the language: three speakers from Cork (Munster), two speakers from Donegal (Ulster), one speaker from Connemara (Connacht). Participants read from the word list, reading each word twice. Acoustic analysis focused on two measurements: vowel duration and formant frequencies. The formants for each vowel type are comparable, but the difference in duration is significant, indicating that Irish schwa epenthesis is an incomplete neutralization process. While schwa epenthesis has been reported to create an identical phonological form to that of the underlying schwa, the significant difference in vowel duration indicates a residual contrast of the original underlying forms.

Word frequency plays a role in reduction processes: high-frequency words undergo more reduction than low-frequency words. Pretonic schwa reduction in Dutch is susceptible to frequency effects in this way, but the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after schwa deletion also plays a role. An experiment shows that cluster well-formedness and frequency effects in fact interact with each other. This suggests that phonological models should incorporate both lexical as well a grammatical information. Key words: Frequency effects, phonotactics, pretonic schwa, reduction. Introduction It has been observed for Dutch, that schwa deletion is more likely to be applied, when the resulting consonant cluster consists of an obstruent and subsequent liquid (Booij 1995). Thus all other things being equal, gelijk > $ % –O - $ % –QL S@ µPHDQ¶, because in Dutch $O is a well-formed cluster but $n is not. However, pretonic vowels in Dutch are also known to be more reduced in high-frequency (HF) words than in low-frequency (LF) words (van Oostendorp 1999). This raises the question of whether frequency effects interact with the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after deletion. Is it the case that frequency effects are only found in potential well-formed onset clusters? Or is it rather the case that schwa reduction in consonant-liquid clusters is dependent on word frequency? How does frequency interact with phonotactics exactly? To investigate the effect of cluster well-formedness (CWF) and frequency, a word reading task was carried out. HF and LF words were extracted from Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Spoken Dutch Corpus) available on www.tst.inl.nl and from the CELEX database on www.celex.mpi. Each HF word with WKH FRQWH[W & %&- was matched with an LF word following a number of criteria: the consonants preceding the schwa and following the schwa were identical, the number of syllables was identical, the number of phonemes was matched as much as possible and stress placement was identical. The corpus frequency counts may deviate from the frequency of the individual lexicon of the subjects. It is well-known in psycholinguistics that word frequency is related to naming latency, in the sense that HF words have shorter latencies than LF words (Oldfield & Wingfield 1965, Jescheniak &

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What is the status of schwa in Tashlhiyt? How does it pattern at the segmental and suprasegmental levels? This paper studies these questions by examining the frequencies with which schwa is inserted in different segmental contexts, and by exploring the nature of the interaction between schwa insertion and prosodic prominence. The results show the coexistence of two types of schwa in the language: a transitional schwa and a prosodically triggered schwa. The former is ignored by the phonological system of the language; its occurrence depends solely on the phonetic characteristics of the adjacent consonants. The latter surfaces whenever a prosodically prominent feature does not attach to a vowel or sonorant already present within the word. Both schwas are argued to be manifestations of a more general principle governing the coordination pattern of consonant sequences in Tashlhiyt.

Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by and (or ) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position and / appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of theFrom Inglis to Scots(FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves.

Dans cet article j’aborde la description du processus phonologique connu sous le nom d’épenthèse dans deux dialectes limitrophes parlés à Carrare (MS) et à Pontremoli (MS). Bien que l’application de ce processus dans les variétés italiennes du nord plus « standard » ait été intensivement traitée par plusieurs chercheurs, une analyse du processus d’épenthèse n’a pas encore été proposée en ce qui concerne les variétés les plus périphériques. Ce travail vise à combler en partie cette lacune. La Lunigiana, la zone géographique où les deux dialectes sont parlés, s’étend sur les frontières politiques et linguistiques de l’Émilie, de la Ligurie et de la Toscane. Cela explique en partie la forme en éventail assumée par l’ensemble des isoglosses (la ligne La Spezia-Rimini) qui divisent la Romania dans les deux blocs principaux, et donc le taux élevé de micro-variation linguistique qui caractérise cette région. Pour cet article deux dialectes ont été choisis. Ceux-ci présentent des infimes différences sur le plan phonétique et phonologique pour ce qui concerne le phénomène de l’épenthèse. Afin d’étayer ces différences, une série d’unités lexicales ont été produites à partir d’un questionnaire qui a permis de vérifier la réponse de trois locuteurs pour chaque dialecte en ce qui concerne les contextes phonologiques où le déclenchement est prédit (CCV; CCC, CC#), ainsi que le contenu acoustique des voyelles insérées. Il a été démontré que les deux dialectes diffèrent dans ces deux dimensions. Ensuite, une brève analyse est proposée pour ce qui concerne la question de la suppression des voyelles non accentuées liée à l’épenthèse, ce qui montre que l’apocope et la syncope ne s’appliquent pas à ces dialectes aussi régulièrement que dans les autres variétés du nord de l’Italie. De cette façon, l’interprétation proposée par Rolhfs (1966), selon laquelle ces dialectes limitrophes présentent toutes les caractéristiques précédemment communes dans les variétés italiennes du nord plus « standard » (comme la suppression des voyelles atone de l’émilian) en récupérant plus tard certaines caractéristiques du toscan (comme les vocoïdes en position finale), peut être rejetée. Par conséquent, ces dialectes limitrophes peuvent être mieux interprétés comme des variétés qui se sont arrêtées sur leur chemin qui les aurait amenées à devenir un dialecte « standard » du nord. In this work I tackle the description of the phonological process known as epenthesis in two geographically-related dialects spoken in Carrara (MS) and Pontremoli (MS). While the application of this process to the more “standard” Northern Italian varieties has been intensively dealt with by several scholars, an analysis of the epenthesis process has not yet been proposed as far as the more peripheral varieties are concerned. This paper is meant to partially fill this gap. Lunigiana, the geographical area where the dialects under review are spoken, extends over the political and linguistic borders of Emilia, Liguria and Tuscany. This partly explains the fan-like shape assumed by the bundle of isoglosses that split the Romance speaking area in the two main blocks (the La Spezia–Rimini line), and hence the high rate of linguistic micro-variation characterizing this region. Two dialects have been chosen which depict tiny differences as far as the phonetic and phonological sides of epenthesis are concerned. In order to substantiate these differences, words have been elicited by means of a questionnaire which allowed to check the response of three speakers per dialect with respect to the predicted triggering phonological contexts (CCV; CCC; CC#), as well as the acoustic content of the epenthesized vowels. It has been shown that the two dialects differ in both of these dimensions. On one hand, Pontremolese, depending on the featural content of the consonants, requires the epenthesis in the two last phonological contexts and inserts a non-etymological quasi-low vowel ([ɐ]). On the other hand, Carrarino is more “tolerant” inasmuch as under certain conditions it allows prepausal muta cum liquida clusters. Furthermore, its epenthetic vowel is a schwa ([ə]). A brief analysis is then proposed of the closely related issue of unstressed vowel deletion, which shows that apocope and syncope don’t apply in these dialects as regularly as in the other Northern Italian varieties. In this way, the interpretation proposed by Rolhfs (1966), according to which these boundary dialects depicted all of the previously-shared features of the more “standard” Northern Italian varieties (such as unstressed vowel deletion of Emilian), only to later recuperate some features from the adjacent Tuscan (such as word final vocoids), can be rejected. Hence, these boundary dialects are better interpreted as varieties which stopped along the process of becoming fully northern.

This paper presents the findings of an ultrasound study of 10 New Zealand English and 10 Tongan-speaking trombone players, to determine whether there is an influence of native language speech production on trombone performance. Trombone players’ midsagittal tongue shapes were recorded while reading wordlists and during sustained note productions, and tongue surface contours traced. After normalizing to account for differences in vocal tract shape and ultrasound transducer orientation, we used generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to estimate average tongue surface shapes used by the players from the two language groups when producing notes at different pitches and intensities, and during the production of the monophthongs in their native languages. The average midsagittal tongue contours predicted by our models show a statistically robust difference at the back of the tongue distinguishing the two groups, where the New Zealand English players display an overall more retracted tongue position; however, tongue shape during playing does not directly map onto vowel tongue shapes as prescribed by the pedagogical literature. While the New Zealand English-speaking participants employed a playing tongue shape approximating schwa and the vowel used in the word ‘lot,’ the Tongan participants used a tongue shape loosely patterning with the back vowels /o/ and /u/. We argue that these findings represent evidence for native language influence on brass instrument performance; however, this influence seems to be secondary to more basic constraints of brass playing related to airflow requirements and acoustical considerations, with the vocal tract configurations observed across both groups satisfying these conditions in different ways. Our findings furthermore provide evidence for the functional independence of various sections of the tongue and indicate that speech production, itself an acquired motor skill, can influence another skilled behavior via motor memory of vocal tract gestures forming the basis of local optimization processes to arrive at a suitable tongue shape for sustained note production.

The present paper aims to describe instances of phonological and orthographic interference in the English speech of bilingual speakers of Galician and Spanish. Data were collected from both high school and university level subjects, and three spoken tasks were used: (a) a picture-story; (b) a text reading; and, (c) oral presentations. General British was taken as a model in classifying mistakes. Findings reveal that a high number of the pronunciation mistakes made by bilingual speakers of Spanish and Galician when speaking in English can be attributed to phonological or orthographic interference from their native languages. More particularly, at the phonological level, these subjects had identifiable problems with /ŋ/, word stress, and certain initial and word-final consonant clusters. Furthermore, many mistakes due to orthographic transfer were registered across all groups of participants and tasks, most of which could be categorised into two groups: (a) transfer involving the pronunciation of a Spanish vowel guided by the spelling of a word; and (b) interference in which speakers did not pronounce unstressed syllables with a schwa in spellings like but rather with a full Spanish vowel followed by a /ɾ/ sound. Some pedagogical implications of learner findings will be discussed in the last section.

RP used the KIT and FOOT vowels very widely in weak syllables. Before consonants, they’re increasingly interchangeable with, or replaced by, schwa /ə/. This is further advanced with FOOT than with KIT.

Marathi is a language derived from Sanskrit and spoken in the state of Maharashtra, India. In this chapter, we describe Marathi’s orthographic and phonological systems. The script used to write Marathi is Devanagari. Because Devanagari is described in the Hindi chapter (Singh & Sumathi), we focus our description on how it is implemented in Marathi and how this differs from how Devanagari is implemented in Hindi. In addition to describing the orthographic and phonological systems separately, we explain how Marathi’s orthography codes phonology. Written Marathi is generally transparent. However, there are some exceptions including graphs that code multiple phonemes and an inconsistent expression of the schwa vowel. After describing the language and its writing system, we summarize experiments with both native Marathi speakers and second language learners of Marathi. For native speakers, we explain the consequences of inconsistent schwa expression for speakers’ awareness of the vowel. For second language learners, we review experiments comparing different methods for teaching Marathi’s orthographic and phonological systems.

Competition of segmental material is inherent to all proposals of phonological template satisfaction. Segments are aligned with a prosodic template and compete for prosodic space. This vowel competition for space is well-known from the Semitic languages. In this paper, we argue that competition is also present in West-Germanic languages, albeit in disguised form. Basing ourselves on new Pomeranian data, we propose a competitive vocalic tier on which elements compete for prosodic slots besides the well-known vocalic tier that allows for element coalescence. An axiomatic model is developed that predicts alternations such as the [ɑi]-[ɪ] and [e]-[ɪ] root alternation (German treten – tritt ‘(he) step(s), Pomeranian gaita-git ‘(he) pour(s)’). The model allows us to solve three riddles in German morphology: 1. the “epenthesis conundrum”, i.e. the anti-correlation between OCP-driven schwa epenthesis between root and suffix in German ( rett [ə] t/*rett versus *rat [ə] t/rat ) and root alternations in present tense verbs (alternating verbs): retten – er rettet, raten – (er) rat (Neef 1997; Trommer 2010; Scheer 2016); 2. the “imperative conundrum” (Raffelsiefen 2016), which describes a correlation within the class of alternating verbs: the correlation between |A|-subtraction in a subset of alternating verbs ( geben – gibt ‘give(s)’) and ending-less imperatives in German ( gib! ‘give!’); 3. the vowel shortening conundrum: change in quantity of the root vowel in function of the type of vowel alternation: [e:]-[i] versus [a:]-[ɛ:]. A formal model is presented that provides us with a calculus of coalescence and competition of phonological features. Languages: Standard German; Pomeranian; Dutch; Low Saxon; Limburgian; Frisian.

O schwa em francês moderno é um fenômeno referente ao nível fonético e fonológico da língua e bastante instável na produção oral. Também conhecido por E-mudo, E-instável ou E-caduco, o schwa tem sido bastante discutido por autores na área do francês como língua materna a respeito da sua identidade e seu papel na língua francesa (LÉON, 1996; APPIA; METTAS, 1968; LAURET, 2015; LÉON et al, 2012), uma vez que ele pode ser pronunciado ou não sem que isso comprometa o sentido da palavra. É sabido que o schwa francês é uma vogal de média abertura, anterior e labializada, diferentemente do schwa em outras línguas e daquele apresentado no Alfabeto Fonético Internacional (AFI). Nossos objetivos foram os de verificar em qual grupo ocorreu a maior taxa de apagamento do schwa; verificar se a duração relativa do schwa é maior ou menor que a das vogais médias vizinhas [e ε ø œ o ͻ]; verificar se a duração relativa do schwa aumenta ou diminui em relação aos níveis de aprendizagem; e identificar o grau de distanciamento do schwa por meio de seus valores formânticos, F1 e F2, comparando-os aos das vogais médias vizinhas [e ε ø œ o ͻ] nos diferentes níveis de aprendizagem (iniciante, intermediário e independente). Como teorias de base, toma-se o Modelo de Aprendizagem da Fala de Flege (1981, 1991, 1995) e da Aquisição de segunda língua como Sistema Complexo e Dinâmico (LARSEN-FREEMAN, 1997; BOT et al, 2007), compreendendo a interlíngua de aprendizes de L2 como um sistema adaptativo complexo. Os dados foram coletados por meio de gravações da fala de aprendizes de FLE de três níveis (iniciante, intermediário e independente) de um centro de idiomas da Universidade Federal do Ceará, a Casa de Cultura Francesa, os quais leram uma lista de palavras com a presença do schwa, bem como de vogais vizinhas, inseridas em uma frase-guia a fim de controlar os efeitos de prosódia. Utilizamos o software PRAAT para segmentação e etiquetação das vogais em análise e o R para testes estatísticos e geração de gráficos com a finalidade de testar as hipóteses de pesquisa. Os resultados para as taxas de apagamento entre os grupos não foram estatisticamente significativas, de forma que não podemos vincular apagamento com nível de aprendizagem. Também mostraram que os participantes produzem o schwa com duração relativa menor apenas que as vogais [ø], [œ] e [ͻ], nos grupos iniciante e independente, não sendo encontrado resultado estatisticamente significativo para o grupo intermediário. Verificamos ainda que não há redução do valor de duração à medida que aumenta o nível de aprendizagem dos participantes. A respeito do grau de distanciamento do schwa, os resultados da plotagem das vogais e as distâncias euclidianas mostraram que o schwa encontra-se sobreposto ao mesmo espaço acústico das outras vogais médias, nos três grupos, sendo percebido e produzido como muito próximo acusticamente dessas vogais. Le schwa en français moderne est un phenomène qui fait référence au niveau phonétique et phonologique de la langue et il est assez instable dans la production orale. Également appelé E-muet, E-instable ou E-caduc, le schwa a été beaucoup discuté par les spécialistes dans le domaine du français langue maternelle en ce qui concerne son identité et son rôle dans la langue française (LÉON, 1996; APPIA; METTAS, 1968; LAURET, 2015; LÉON et al, 2012), car il peut être prononcé ou pas, sans compromettre le sens du mot. On sait que le schwa français est une voyelle d’ouverture moyenne, antérieure et labialisée, contrairement au schwa dans d’autres langues et d’une qualité différente de celle présentée dans l’Alphabet Phonétique International (API). Les objectifs de cette recherche sont de vérifier dans quel groupe a été observé le taux d’effacement le plus élévé du schwa ; vérifier si la durée relative du schwa est supérieure ou inférieure à celle des voyelles moyennes voisines [e ε ø œ o ͻ] ; vérifier si la durée relative du schwa augmente ou diminue en fonction des niveaux d’apprentissage ; et identifier le dégré de distanciation du schwa à travers ses valeurs des formants, F1 et F2, en les comparant aux voyelles moyennes voisines [e ε ø œ o ͻ] pour les différents niveaux d’apprentissage (débutant, intermédiaire et indépendant). Pour les théories de base, nous nous basons sur le Modèle d’Apprentissage de la Parole de Flege (1981, 1991, 1995) et l’Acquisition de langue seconde en tant que Système Complèxe et Dynamique (LARSEN-FREEMAN, 1997; BOT et al, 2007), cela faisant, nous considérons l’interlangue des apprenants de L2 comme un système complexe adaptatif. Les données ont été réunies au moyen d’enregistrements de paroles d’apprenants de FLE de trois niveaux (débutant, intermédiaire et indépendant) d’un centre de langues de l’Univeristé Fédérale du Ceará, la Maison de la Culture Française, qui ont lu une liste de mots avec le schwa ainsi que les voyelles voisines dans une phrase-guide, afin de contrôler les effets de la prosodie. Nous avons utilisé le software PRAAT pour la segmentation et l’étiquetage des voyelles analysées et le R pour des tests statistiques afin de vérifier nos hypothèses de recherche. Les résultats pour les taux d’effacement entre les groupes n’ont pas été statistiquement significatifs, donc nous ne pouvons pas lier l’effacement au niveau d’apprentissage. Ils ont également montré que les participants produisent le schwa avec une durée relative inférieur uniquement aux voyelles [ø], [œ] e [ͻ], du groupe débutant et indépendant, et aucun résultat statistiquement significatif n’a eté trouvé par le groupe intérmediaire. Nous vérifions qu’il n’y a pas de réduction de la valeur de la durée lorsque le niveau d’apprentissage des participants augmente. À propos du degré de distanciation du schwa, les résultats des répresentation graphique des voyelles et des distances euclidiennes ont montré que le schwa est superposé au même espace acoustique des autres voyelles moyennes, dans les trois groupes, en étant perçu et produit de manière très proche acoustiquement de ces voyelles.

Machine learning is a powerful method when working with large data sets such as diachronic corpora. However, as opposed to standard techniques from inferential statistics like regression modeling, machine learning is less commonly used among phonological corpus linguists. This paper discusses three different machine learning techniques (K nearest neighbors classifiers; Naïve Bayes classifiers; artificial neural networks) and how they can be applied to diachronic corpus data to address specific phonological questions. To illustrate the methodology, I investigate Middle English schwa deletion and when and how it potentially triggered reduction of final /mb/ clusters in English.

Previous research suggests differences in speech patterns between speakers with foreign accent syndrome (FAS) associated with a neurological (neurogenic FAS) versus a psychological aetiology (functional FAS). Differentiating sub-types holds important clinical implications, affecting the nature of follow-up assessment and treatment. To date, there exist no systematic comparisons between these sub-groups. To investigate possible differences, we employed auditory and acoustic analyses to compare schwa insertion and /r/production in speakers with FAS (12 neurogenic, 5 functional). Schwa insertion and /r/ production demonstrated significant differences between groups. Neurogenic aetiology was associated with higher within and between speaker performance consistency and congruence of derailments with phonetic-phonological and neurological accounts of ‘error’ origin. Individuals with functional FAS showed significant within and between speaker variability, which was poorly accounted for by linguistic and speech motor control explanations. We argue that schwa insertion and differences in /r/ realisations provide reliable and accessible variables for clinicians to employ to support differential diagnosis of functional versus neurogenic speech disorders. Findings are discussed in the context of understanding FAS and the broader context of understanding functional speech and language disorders.

Studies have shown that children benefit from a spelling pronunciation strategy in remembering the spellings of words. The current study determined whether this strategy also helps adults learn to spell commonly misspelled words. Participants were native English speaking college students (N = 42), mean age 22.5 years (SD = 7.87). An experimental design with random assignment, pretests, training, and posttests assessed effects of the pronunciation strategy on memory for the spellings of 20 hard to spell words. Half of the participants were trained to read the words by assigning spelling pronunciations during learning (n = 21). The comparison group (n = 21) practiced reading the words normally without the strategy. Strategy trained adults recalled significantly more words, total letters, silent letters, and schwa vowel letters correctly than controls. Poor spellers benefited as much if not more from this strategy as good spellers. Results support orthographic mapping theories. Optimizing the match between spelling units and sound units, including graphemes and phonemes, syllables, and morphemes, to create spelling pronunciations when words are read enhances memory for spellings of the words. As a result, higher quality lexical representations are retained in memory. Results suggest the value of teaching college students this strategy to improve their ability to spell words correctly in their written work.

The pronunciation of stop consonants varies markedly with age, gender, accent, etc. Yet by extracting appropriate cues common to these varying pronunciations, it is possible to correctly identify the spoken consonant. In this paper, the structure underlying Hindi stop consonants is presented. This understanding may potentially be used as a "recipe" for their artificial synthesis. Hindi alphabet stops were analyzed for this purpose. This alphabet has an organized and comprehensive inventory of stop consonants, and its consonants invariably terminate with the neutral vowel schwa. While the former consideration makes the findings potentially applicable to many languages including English, the latter rationale helped reduce the endeavor's analytical complexity. The alphabet has velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and bilabial stops in voiceless-unaspirated, voiceless-aspirated, voiced-unaspirated, voiced-aspirated, and nasal flavors. It is shown that additive combinations of relatively simple acoustic functions can be used to generate most of the 20 non-nasal stops. This work will potentially help speech therapists improve diagnosis and rectification of speech and hearing disabilities, speed up electronic communication of audio data, and improve voice recognition.

This study investigates the effects of immediate repetition of auditory words on L2 pronunciation improvement of English schwa by Japanese EFL learners. More specifically, the study is concerned with how the amount of input (i.e., five or ten repetitions) and stimuli characteristics (i.e., the position of schwa in a word, word familiarity) influences the repetition effect. The study consists of a study and a test phase: In the study phase, participants listened to and repeated words. In the test phase, they repeated spoken stimuli including previously heard as well as new words, both ten minutes and one week after the study phase. The auditory materials consisted of 32 real words. The duration ratio of schwa to a stressed vowel in a word and the quality of the schwa were acoustically examined. A repetition effect was mainly found in the durational aspect. Repeating the stimuli more than five times did not differentiate the effect. One week after the study phase, the effect persisted only for initial schwa, which is weakly represented in the participants’ mental representation. The pedagogical implications for L2 pronunciation teaching from the view of language processing are discussed.

The preverbal clitic pronouns of French manifest in their phonology three phenomena which have exercised phonologists and variationists for many years: liaison, schwa or e-caduc, and variable (l). Hitherto these have been treated as separate phenomena, of which the clitics are sometimes invoked as instances (the main instance, in the case of (l)). This article, by contrast, takes the preverbal clitic pronoun system as a whole and applies some of the key constructs of Firthian Prosodic Analysis to its synchronic phonological analysis. Using a polysystemic approach, we present subsystems of pronouns and the structural and phonematic contrasts that characterize them. We show how these systems of contrasts and Firthian constructs such as the ‘prosody’ afford new, insightful ways of formalizing these phonological phenomena, which have the potential for broader application to the language. Our analysis is theoretical, but we demonstrate briefly how some of its testable predictions are confirmed by empirical findings in the existing literature, illustrating its potential to provide new insights and a more holistic framework for further analysis of these and other variable phonological features of French.

This paper presents some of the major English pronunciation errors made by Jordanian students at the University of Jordan. The corpus is designed to investigate the production of English consonants, vowels, consonant clusters, and word stress by informants. The tested consonants are /p - v - ʧ - ʤ - ŋ - ɹ - ƚ/. The tested vowels are /ɪ - ɛ - ɑ - ɔ: - oʊ - ə /. Words containing consonant clusters; square - explain or across words; best friend - ride and swim are tested for epenthetic vowels. The stress pattern is investigated in words such as isn’t- unfortunately. It is found that informants frequently confuse the following phonemes /p - ŋ - ɹ - ƚ/ with /b - nɡ - ɾ - l/ respectively. Moreover, informants frequently insert an epenthetic /ɛ/or /ɪ/ in consonant clusters whether within words; /sɪkɾi:m/ for /skɹi:m/ or across words; /bɛst ɪ fɾɛnd/ for /bɛst fɹɛnd/. Regarding vowels, informants commonly confuse the KIT-DRESS vowels produceing both as /e/. The realization of the schwa /ə/ is greatly influenced by spelling. The LOT vowel is produced similar to its RP /ɒ/ realization as [ɞ]even though most informants adopt a General American accent and should therefore produce the vowel as /ɑ/. The THOUGHT-GOAT vowel distinction is missing; both vowels are often merged as [o:]. Finally, the informants very often shift the stress pattern from its trochaic English stress pattern; /ɪ'zɪnt/ for /'ɪzɪnt/.

The Long Terawan Berawan system of vowel phonemes consists of one monophthong in the antepenult, schwa, and four monophthongs in the penult, i, ə, a , and u . However, the final syllable exhibits ten monophthongs ( i, ĭ, e, ĕ, a, a, u, ŭ, o, ŏ) and six diphthongs ( əi, ǝu, ai, ai, au, au ). The paper describes how the Long Terawan vowel phoneme system emerged from a Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian system of four monophthongs (*i, *ə, *a, *u).

The phonology of Bario Kelabit and most dialects of Lun Dayeh is more complex than that of many languages in island Asia. Among noteworthy features are a typologically rare series of true voiced aspirates /bh /, /dh /, /gh /, consonant gemination that is stress-dependent, two processes that delete underlying vowels, a system of partial verbal ablaut targeting bases with penultimate schwa, and synchronic processes that reduce underlying voiced aspirates to their plain voiced counterparts under certain conditions, and create surface voiced aspirates from underlying plain voiced stops under others. This paper aims at a general overview of the phonology of both languages, although a disproportionate amount of attention is given to the voiced aspirates because of their uniqueness or near-uniqueness in global perspective, and their revealing interactions with such processes as stress, gemination, and vowel laxing/lowering.

We describe in detail a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) converter required for the development of a good quality Marathi Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. The Festival and Festvox framework is chosen for developing the Marathi TTS system. Since Festival does not provide complete language processing support specie to various languages, it needs to be augmented to facilitate the development of TTS systems in certain new languages. Because of this, a generic G2P converter has been developed. In the customized Marathi G2P converter, we have handled schwa deletion and compound word extraction. In the experiments carried out to test the Marathi G2P on a text segment of 2485 words, 91.47% word phonetisation accuracy is obtained. This Marathi G2P has been used for phonetising large text corpora which in turn is used in designing an inventory of phonetically rich sentences. The sentences ensured a good coverage of the phonetically valid di-phones using only 1.3% of the complete text corpora.

Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore the potential over-reporting of gender accuracy, we conducted parallel phonetic and morphosyntactic analyses of read and semi-spontaneous speech produced by 11 Monolingual speakers and 13 Early and 13 Late Spanish-English bilinguals. F1 and F2 values were extracted at five points for all word-final unstressed vowels and vowel sequences. All determiner phrases (DPs) from narratives were coded for morphological and contextual parameters. Early bilinguals exhibited clear patterns of vowel centralization and higher rates of hiatuses than the other groups. However, the morphological analysis yielded very few errors. A follow-up integrated analysis revealed that /a and o/ were realized as centralized vowels, particularly with [+Animate] nouns. We propose that bilinguals&rsquo, schwa-like realizations can be over-interpreted as target Spanish vowels. Such variable vowel realization may be a factor in the vulnerability to attrition in gender marking in Spanish as a heritage language.

This study is motivated by the need for a descriptive and analytical research related to the basic dimensions of early reading skills of elementary school students to determine the level of students’ reading skills, including their difficulties in learning to read. This study aims to get a picture of the early reading skills of elementary school students in Bandung. The results of this study can be used as a guide for education practitioners, policy makers, and related institutions. Through a descriptive and analytical method, the findings are (1) 98percent of students are able to identify letters in words, to analyze words, to identify the direction of letters, and to arrange letters into words. (2) 96percent of students are able to strip words into syllables, to sort syllables in words, to identify words with the same forms, to identify words with the same meanings, to replace words with logical words, to insert words in incomplete sentences, and to identify abstract words. (3) The students seem to have difficulties in identifying similar consonant sounds, in identifying similarities in vowel and schwa sounds, in identifying sounds that are similar in sentences, and in identifying reversed sounds. Only 57percent of students do not encounter obstacles. (4) 90percent of students are capable of making sentences from random words, making sentences from words that are not sequential, correcting sentences that have wrong words, identifying simple sentences in paragraphs, and understanding simple sentences. (5) 70percent of students have the ability to understand shapes, sizes, locations, and colors. This study has implications for the need for an integrated remedial program that can be used by both teachers and parents, especially for students who have difficulties with sound identification abilities.

International audience; Algerian Arabic-French bilinguals show phonetic variation with respect to vowel timber in both their languages. Our study aims to automatically identify vowel variants frequently produced by such bilinguals. To that end, the speech corpus FACST, containing French and Algerian Arabic code-switched speech, was analyzed. A second corpus with native French speakers (NCCFr) was used to provide a reference baseline and to compare vowel variants across the two speaker groups. Three experiments were carried out: first, the French speech of both corpora was aligned with a French acoustic model including parallel nearest-neighbor vowel variants in its pronunciation dictionary. Second, the Arabic speech was aligned using the same acoustic model with parallel vowel variants in its dictionary. Finally, we tested whether peripheral vowels in Al-gerian Arabic-French bilinguals are more often centralized than in French native speech by allowing schwa as a competing variant. The results show that French natives and Algerian Arabic-French bilinguals globally have a comparable amount of vowel variation in French. However, French natives have stable high vowels whereas bilinguals tend to produce stable low and back vowels. In the centralization experiment, Algerian bilinguals favor the centralization of mid, open and back vowels.

International audience; The vowel system of the Maghrebi Arabic dialects (MA) contains three peripheral vowels /i, a, u/ and one short central vowel, often referred to as schwa. A comparison between Classical Arabic (CA) and MA clearly shows that the latter lost length contrast in the vowels. In a number of items shared by these languages, there is a regular change whereby the long vowels of CA correspond to short vowels in MA, whereas short vowels in CA disappear in MA, resulting in consonant clusters often simplified by means of schwa epenthesis (e.g. CA raːsala / MA rasəl ‘correspond’, CA kataba / MA ktəb ‘write’). The same situation arises in Berber. Apart from Tashlhiyt which allows utterances without any vocalic segment, all Berber varieties use schwa to break up complex consonant clusters. This observation is of paramount importance for it shows that the distribution of schwa is largely predictable. It also suggests that the loss of vowel length in MA results from the influence of Berber. This chapter discusses ə/ø alternations in Berber and MA, in connection with syllable structure. It reviews previous analyses of the phenomenon and provides a principled account of the distribution of epenthetic vowels. Tashlhiyt Berber will be analyzed as having a highly marked syllable structure. Any segment in this language, even a voiceless obstruent, can occur in the nucleus position.

L’objectif de cet article est de faire le point sur le programme de recherche PFC (« Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés et structure »), plus de quinze ans après son lancement et d’illustrer le travail mené dans ce cadre par la question du schwa, phénomène bien connu dans le domaine de la variation phonologique et central à la phonologie du français. Après avoir brièvement présenté le programme, nous abordons la question du schwa en français et expliquons son traitement dans PFC. Nous illustrons ensuite le travail effectué en nous penchant tout d’abord sur les variétés méridionales, que nous opposons aux variétés septentrionales, avant d’aborder la question du schwa dans les variétés suisses romandes. In this paper, we present the research programme “Phonology of Contemporary French : usage, varieties and structure” (PFC). After more than 15 years of existence, the PFC corpus has become a reference in the field of oral French. The methodology adopted in the programme is then illustrated through the phenomenon of schwa, which is central to the phonology of French and one of the foci of the PFC venture. First, we examine the behaviour of schwa in the Southern varieties of French (vs. Northern varieties) and then we present an experimental study on schwa in three varieties of Swiss French.

To date, Irish English (IrE) lacks a broad, diachronic and empirical investigation of its phonology, simply because the available material has been limited. In the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR)—a collection of over 6000 texts written between the late 1600s and the early 1900s, most of which are Irish emigrant letters—many non-standard features of IrE phonology can be found. Today, schwa-epenthesis is a well-known feature of IrE, and occurs across the island in e.g. [ˈfɪləm] film and more regionally in clusters such as /rm/ and /rl/, e.g. [ˈfarəm] farm and [ˈgɛrəl] girl. Nevertheless, little evidence of epenthesis in past varieties of IrE has been presented. How common is epenthesis in CORIECOR, and does its phonological distribution differ from present day IrE?

K-Pop or known as Korean Pop is one of the famous phenomena in the world. It is obvious when some of the singers, actors and public figures, provide the lyrics in a song and conversations in a drama into English. Somehow, the word in English pronounced by Korean people will sound different from the way English people pronounce the word, thus making some words not clearly understood. This phenomenon usually happens when one language has different system from other languages. English and Korean have different systemsin phonology. It is simple to recognize that when Koreans pronounce the English words, they need to insert certain sound to ease the pronunciation. The phenomenon of schwa insertion in Korean pronunciation is interesting to discuss, for it will show not only the reason why schwa insertion is a must but also what effect is created by the insertion.Phonology is expected to throw a light on how a certain sound can be inserted in a word under the influence of certain sound system. Using phonology features and phonology rules can help the reader understand why certain sound can be inserted into some words, how the environment of the sound will influence the other word, thus a certain sound is needed in the word. The paper examines this phenomenon in phonology by analysing the insertion of schwa in Korean speakers’ pronunciation. In the end, the paper is expected to show the schwa insertion in Korean pronunciation and the effect created by the insertion.

In order to convey pragmatic functions, a speaker has to select an intonation contour (the tune) in addition to the words that are to be spoken (the text). The tune and text are assumed to be independent of each other, such that any one intonation contour can be produced on different phrases, regardless of the number and nature of the segments they are made up of. However, if the segmental string is too short, certain tunes – especially those with a rising component – call for adjustments to the text. In Italian, for instance, loan words such as “chat” can be produced with a word final schwa when this word occurs at the end of a question. This paper investigates this word final schwa in the Bari variety in a number of different intonation contours. Although its presence and duration is to some extent dependent on idiosyncratic properties of speakers and words, schwa is largely conditioned by intonation. Schwa cannot thus be considered a mere phonetic artefact, since it is relevant for phonology, in that it facilitates the production of com-municatively relevant intonation contours.

Mastering ‘schwa' is one of the major challenges that non-native speakers face when learning French as a foreign language. The present study, set within the framework of the IPFC project (“Interphonologie du Français Contemporain”), describes the schwa-coding system applied to the IPFC corpus data and is illustrated here with data from Alemannic-speaking Swiss learners of French (two tasks: text reading and guided conversation). Our results show that, even though studying abroad in a French-speaking area alone does not have a direct significant impact on schwa's behavior, it does interact with two variables: the type of task (more schwa deletion after studying abroad observed in the conversation but not in the reading task) and the type of word (more schwa deletion after studying abroad observed in monosyllabic words but not in polysyllabic words, both in word-initial or word-medial syllabic positions). In this respect, studying abroad seems to help learners achieve native-like sociolinguistic proficiency. These first results pave the way for the development of in-class pedagogical material which could help learners achieve such a level of proficiency, whether or not they have the opportunity to study abroad in a French-speaking area.

In casual conversations, words often lack segments. This study investigates whether listeners rely on their experience with reduced word pronunciation variants during the processing of single segment reduction. We tested three groups of listeners in a lexical decision experiment with French words produced either with or without word-medial schwa (e.g., /ʀvy/ and /ʀvy/ for revue). Participants also rated the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of the words. If the recognition accuracy and reaction times (RTs) for a given listener group correlate best with the frequencies of occurrence holding for that given listener group, recognition is influenced by listeners’ exposure to these variants. Native listeners’ relative frequency ratings correlated well with their accuracy scores and RTs. Dutch advanced learners’ accuracy scores and RTs were best predicted by their own ratings. In contrast, the accuracy and RTs from Dutch beginner learners of French could not be predicted by any relative frequency rating; the rating task was probably too difficult for them. The participant groups showed behaviour reflecting their difference in experience with the pronunciation variants. Our results strongly suggest that listeners store the frequencies of occurrence of pronunciation variants, and consequently the variants themselves.

Only little research regarding the phonology of Persian native speakers’ English has been conducted. In the present study, we compared different individual cognitive factors which result in ESL Iranian English pronunciation, such as cognitive ability and short-term memory (working memory and Llama_D), language aptitude (MLAT III, IV and V; Llama_D) and working memory (Tewes U, Hamburg-Wechsler-Intelligenz-Test fur Erwachsene Revision. HAWIE-R, Bern, 1994). These measures were correlated with English pronunciation and phonetic measurements (vowel length measurement) of Persian ESL learners. The sample comprised 30 Iranians aged 20–40 years (mean age 26.08) with L1 Farsi and an academic education. Their age of onset of learning (AOA) ranged from 2 to 16 years (mean age 11.03). Three learner groups were identified based on their language proficiency, and results confirmed previous findings about the contribution of cognitive factors (Rota G, Reiterer SM, Cognitive aspects of pronunciation talent. In: Dogil G, Reiterer S (eds) Language talent and brain activity. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 67–96, 2009), language aptitude and multilingualism in L2 phonological processing. We observed significant correlations between English pronunciation scores and these three factors: schwa length pronunciation (r = −0.8), MLAT III (r = 0.8) and working memory (r = 0.78). Schwa length pronunciation also correlated highly with the number of languages (r = −.74) and the age of onset of acquisition (r = .41). Our cross-linguistic results suggest that phonological native-like L2 achievement in ESL adult learners is possible, as individuals with higher L2 aptitude and working memory capacity can overcome the transfer of L1 phonological categories in L2 processing.