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This article explores the readability of Sesotho reading comprehension and summary writing exam texts using a web-based tool. The study adapts the tool by using the Sesotho list of frequently used words and the rule-based syllabification system. A total of 80 reading comprehension and summary writing texts are analysed. The results show strong correlations between eight of the nine metrics. The Flesch Reading Ease metric shows strong negative correlations with the other eight metrics. Furthermore, the Dale-Chall index consistently correlates with the other eight metrics. Linear regression models reveal significant differences between the Home Language and the First Additional Language subject levels for at least the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, the Lasbarhets index, the Automatic Readability index, the Readability index, the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, and the Dale-Chall index. Furthermore, the regression models reveal the consistency of readability levels throughout the different years and examination opportunities. The study concludes that the differences between the Home Language and the First Additional Language subjects in Sesotho may be evident in the reading texts as opposed to the curriculum documents. In the end, it is suggested that the assessment component of the different curricula be considered carefully before the two curricula are merged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows the disagreement of poet George Ellis against historian and critic Thomas Warton over his negative aesthetic judgment on the verse form of William Langland's poem "Piers Plowman." It discusses the argument raised by Ellis in defense of the alliterative and metrical style of the poem, including the syllabical value of words, syllabication of early English verse, and the cultural meaning of alliterative verse.

Copyright of Turkish Studies - Language & Literature is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Radovi Zavoda za znanstveni rad Varazdin is the property of Institute for Scientific Work in Varazdin, Croatian Academy of Sciences & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ethnomusicology Research Centre Journal / Ethnomusikologion is the property of Academy of Music Gheorghe Dima (Musicology Papers) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Whereas W. H. Auden experimented with syllabic verse persistently in the latter half of his career and wrote a large quantity of poems in syllabic meter, the importance of his syllabic poetics is not generally understood and the few studies that discuss Auden's syllabic verse in some depth tend to focus on its technical inventiveness and are confined in an Anglocentric or Eurocentric context. Inspired and enriched by the prosody of world poetry, Auden's syllabic verse has much wider moral implications than any national or cultural perspective can contain. Moreover, the way Auden treated the relationship between the local and the universal in his syllabic verse shows its affinity with Goethe's view of world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the authors' insight on the challenges face by doctoral students and junior faculty in management research, teaching theory and theory building, along with methods for reading and teaching theory and theory building. Topics discussed include a study on the use of syllabi in doctoral classes, the learning activities for theory and theory building, and exploring and evaluating theory.

The essay tackles a particular linguistic facet of the sinicisation process in Southeast Asia. The focal argument addressed throughout this essay lies in the claim that Giao Chỉ (Jiaozhi 交趾) should be granted a central position regarding the transfer of Old and Middle Chinese diachronic features into Southeast Asian languages from Jiaozhi down to the Gulf of Thailand and Mekong Delta. The major linguistic argument underlying this essay is that the hallmark of the sinicisation process in Southeast Asia is not so much the monosyllabisation process per se but rather the "phonologisation" of its phonetic correlates. Exploiting Ferlus's lifelong seminal work on Chinese and "Southeast Asian" Diachronic Linguistics, it will be demonstrated that a pertaining consequence of this monosyllabisation was the phonologisation of a vowel lowering, high pitch and a modal voice developing along the tense Middle Chinese syllables (that is, originating from ancient Old Chinese sesquisyllables) and a contrastive vowel raising, low pitch and a breathy voice along the lax Middle Chinese syllables (that is, originating from ancient OC monosyllables); in other words, the monosyllabisation process was conductive to a split of the vocalic system associated with a suprasegmental contrast based on the breathy vs. modal feature and a pitch height distinction. It will be shown that the processes that Chinese transferred into proto-Vietic from the urban areas of Jiaozhi is the monosyllabisation and the phonologisation of the tension vs. laxness contrast alongside its phonetic correlates; it will also be demonstrated that, at a certain point during the Chinese and Southeast Asian tonogenetic process, there emerged a contrast between what is glottalised and what is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vietnamese reduplication shows harmony in tone height between base and reduplicant. This paper presents statistical analysis of productive reduplication in southern Vietnamese, which, unlike northern Vietnamese, has only one C tone and phonation of creakiness is not phonemically present. Our main findings show that reduplicative forms with tone-register harmony are used significantly less often than forms without and that the syllabic structure correlates with tone-register harmony preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the "How all occasions ... " soliloquy Hamlet expresses his own failure to understand why he has not fulfilled his promise to kill Claudius notwithstanding that he has the "cause, will, strength, and means to do't". The passage, occupying two and a half lines which begin and end with caesurae, consists entirely of 27–29 monosyllabic words, thus emphasizing its importance. This short essay analyses the speech in terms of the philosophical notion that action is the inevitable consequence of stimulus, intention, ability, and lack of hindrance, and, relying on the conventions applicable to soliloquies, argues that it reveals that Hamlet's inaction is the result of his fear of post-mortem torment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the explanation and arguments of the scholars about the points to be considered in the old English poetries with a special focus on the poetry Beowulf . Topics include the need of a process of syllabic equivalence known as resolution by the German philologist Eduard Sievers; an assumption of all the verses consisting of four positions irrespective of number of syllables; and the significance of the Bliss rule for old English poetries such as Beowulf.

This study provides data-driven insights and analyses on lexical and post-lexical resyllabification in Standard Arabic within the framework of Optimality Theory. More particularly, the study is devoted to examining the impact of prosthesis, voweled letters, affixation, and vowel epenthesis and shortening on resyllabification processes within words and across word boundaries. Results show that Standard Arabic typically makes use of prothesized non-phonemic segments, voweled letters and epenthesis to avoid inadmissible clusters. Findings also reveal that in certain cases this variety shortens long vowels to avoid lexical and post-lexical trimoraic syllables. Moreover, the data provided have well proven that complex codas resulting from the deletion of word-final short vowels or nunation utterance finally do not often adhere to the Sonority Sequencing Principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Studies of infants' early vocalizations have proven helpful in describing the developmental characteristics of various communication disorders. However, few studies have addressed the early vocalizations of infants and toddlers who were later diagnosed, as older children, with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). We refer to these infants and toddlers as LCAS. Extant studies also often lack a comparison group of infants and toddlers who were later diagnosed, as older children, with a speech sound disorder (SSD). We refer to these infants and toddlers as LSSD. We aimed to compare the volubility, consonant emergence, and syllabic structure from birth to age of 2 years, as observed in home videos, among 3 groups of infants and toddlers: LCAS, LSSD, and typically developing (TD). Method: We assessed the speech-language skills of 17 children (3.5-8.8 years old; 7 with CAS, 5 with SSD, and 5 TD) and transcribed home videos (obtained from parents) of these same children from birth to age of 2 years. Early vocalizations were coded as nonresonant or resonant. Nonresonant vocalizations could not be transcribed with the International Phonetic Alphabet. Resonant (speechlike) vocalizations were broadly transcribed, and resonant consonants were categorized by place, manner, and voicing. Results: Effect size comparisons revealed LCAS infants and toddlers were less voluble, used fewer resonant consonants, had a less diverse phonetic repertoire, and acquired resonant consonants later than either the LSSD or TD participants. For LSSD infants and toddlers, means for these dependent variables were lower than the means demonstrated by the TD group, but effect size were not strong due to LSSD variability. Conclusions: Findings imply there might be clinical "red flags" that could assist the identification of infants and toddlers at risk for later diagnosis of CAS. Data did not support red flags for identifying infants and toddlers at risk for later diagnosis of SSD. Because of significant study limitations, results obtained should be considered preliminary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of phonological awareness for the future learning of written language has been widely recognized, but there is still some debate as to whether syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic awareness are independent skills or manifestations of the same general skill. Consequently, the objective of this study was to test the independence of phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme, and phoneme levels. The study involved the participation of 256 children in their last year of preschool. The children completed 18 phonological awareness tasks. Three models were tested: a one-factor model (phonological awareness), two-factor model (supraphonemic unit awareness and phonemic awareness) and three-factor model (syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic awareness). The results indicated that the three-factor model had the best fit, suggesting the relative independence of syllable, rhyme, and phoneme awareness. These results have important implications for assessing and intervening in sound sensitivity and identification skills in the preschool period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WHILE SYNCOPATION GENERALLY REFERS TO ANY conflict between surface accents and underlying meter, in rock and other recent popular styles it takes a more specific form in which accented notes occur just before strong beats. Such ''anticipatory'' syncopations suggest that there is an underlying cognitive representation in which the accented notes and strong beats align. Syllabic stress is crucial to the identification of such syncopations; to facilitate this, we present a corpus of rock melodies annotated with lyrics and syllabic stress values. We propose a new measure of syncopation that incorporates syllabic stress; we also propose a measure of anticipatory syncopation, and show that it reveals a strong presence of this type of syncopation in rock music. We then use these measures to explore other aspects of syncopation in rock, including its occurrence in different parts of the 4/4 measure, its dependence on tempo, its historical evolution, and its aesthetic functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An automatic syllabification, decomposing a word into syllables, is an important part in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) that uses both syllable-based acoustic and language models. It can be performed to either phoneme or grapheme sequences. The phonemic syllabification is more complex than the other since it requires a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) as a previous process. It generally gives a high accuracy for many formal words but its accuracy may decrease for person-names. In contrast, the graphemic syllabification is simpler and more potential to be applied for person-names. This research focuses on developing a model of graphemic syllabification using a combination of phonotactic rules and Fuzzy k-nearest neighbour in every Class (FkNNC). The phonotactic rules are designed to find some deterministic syllabification points while FkNNC, as a statistical classifier, is expected to search the remaining stochastic syllabification points. A recovery procedure is proposed to correct the wrong syllabification points produced by FkNNC. Fivefold cross-validating on a dataset of 50k formal words, selected from the great dictionary of the Indonesian language, shows that the proposed model gives syllable error rate (SER) of 2.48% and the proposed recovery procedure reduces the SER to be 2.27%, which is higher than that produced by the phonemic syllabification (only 0.99%). But, this model is capable of handling a dataset of 15k high variance person-names with SER of 7.45% and the proposed recovery procedure reduces the SER to be 6.78%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major word formation processes exist in Hebrew (in addition to minor compounds, blends and acronyms): (a) nonlinear formation: a combination of consonantal root with template, e.g. higdil 'increased' and migdal 'tower' are derived from the root vgdl using the templates hiCCiC and miCCaC; (b) linear formation: affixation to a stem, for example balšanut 'linguistics' from balšan 'linguist' + -ut, and xidon 'quiz' from xida 'riddle' + -on. The ending -on exhibits ambiguous cases of root and template construction as opposed to suffixed word formations. In many cases this ending is built using the nominal templates CiCaCon, CiCCon and CaCCon, the first of which usually create abstract nouns. In other cases -on is attached to various stems carrying the following connotations which are not always mutually exclusive, and sometimes share some of their meanings with words formed by the above templates: diminutive (e.g. suson 'small horse'); collective (e.g. še'elon 'questionnaire'); instrumental (e.g. 'ecba'on 'thimble'); flora and fauna (e.g. zeron 'harrier (bird)'); periodicals (e.g. šavu'on 'weekly newspaper'); and division related words (e.g. 'axuzon 'percentile'). Thus the ending -on creates opacity as part of a template and as a suffix for both derivational processes and meanings. One outcome of the findings is that syllabic structure is the most important factor in determining Hebrew word structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welsh is described as having two series of nasals, a voiced series [m, n, ŋ], and a voiceless series, transcribed as [...] or [mh, nh, ŋh]. In this paper, I give a synchronic analysis of the nasals and argue that the second series are phonologically sequences of a nasal followed by [h], i.e. [mh, nh, ŋh]. Moreover, I show that the properties and distribution of these consonants all follow from this assumption. The argument for the analysis comes from: phonetics, the distribution of the mutation system, syllabification, the distribution of [h], poetry, and dialect data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three apparent exceptions to general processes in the phonology and morphology of standard Yiddish. These are 1) the resistance of several potentially syllabic final consonants to syllabication; 2) the insertion of an extra consonant [n] in some infinitives; and 3) the absence of some diminutive patterns from some nouns. All three cases are resolved by showing that some phonetically short segments are in fact underlyingly long ones, created by morpheme concatenation. The analysis, conducted within Strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996), thus argues for virtual, or "non surface‐true" length. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) methodology is emerging in the psycholinguistics literature, as a sensitive, reliable and dynamic psychophysiological measure of the cognitive effort produced by various aspects of language processing. This preliminary study aimed to assess the functionality and effectiveness of a TEPRs design for measuring the cognitive effort required for the processing and spontaneous (non-explicitly prompted) short-term retention of novel phonological forms presented auditorily. Twenty-four young adult participants (aged 19–28 years, M = 20.3, SD = 2.13) were auditorily presented with a series of pseudowords differing in their number of syllables and their syllabic complexity. Then, they were asked to produce a response to a delayed pseudoword–color matching task aimed to induce the short-term retention of the novel forms. Results on the size and timing of the TEPRs reveal a significant pupillary activation, starting immediately after the presentation of the auditory stimuli, peaking at 1080 ms and not subsiding significantly during the protracted retention period. Moreover, the differential complexity of the novel words phonology significantly affected pupillary activation. Overall, these preliminary results point to the effectiveness of pupillometry as a technique for capturing the cognitive effort entailed in the short-term maintenance of novel word forms in the phonological loop, a process deemed crucial in the everyday novel word learning process. Results are discussed in view of future research that could establish and extend their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • 61 clusters in 174 words were syllabified by 30 Czech speakers in two experiments. • Sonority type exercised a significant influence, following sonority sequencing. • Vowel length effects were found not induced by phonotactic constraints. • Onset frequency of occurrence and morphology also affected the results. • Task-related differences in syllabification patterns were identified. Abstract This study examines syllabification preferences of 30 speakers of Czech in two behavioural experiments using real disyllabic words with 61 intervocalic CC clusters as stimuli. The aim was to evaluate competing theoretical predictions about syllable boundaries in Czech. Participants synchronized individual syllables with metronome pulses in Experiment 1 (induced pause insertion) and produced syllables in reversed order in Experiment 2 (syllable reversal). Logistic regression analyses revealed significant effects of cluster sonority type, phonological length of the preceding vowel and word-edge phonotactics (also in relation to frequency of occurrence). Morphological structure of the items significantly influenced syllable boundary placement as well. The results of both experiments converge towards the effects found in previous studies on English and some other languages. However, ambisyllabic responses were virtually non-existent in pause insertion and relatively low (8%) in syllable reversal, which differs from the results on Germanic languages. Finally, the findings do not support strict onset maximization but rather indicate an onset-filling strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment of speech perception ability is important to understand the efficacy of amplification devices and for planning intervention. The present study adapted the minimal pair test developed for Indian children and normative was established on 200 normal hearing children (100 males and 100 females) of 5-7 years. The test stimuli were selected after familiarity rating for monosyllable minimal pairs. Content validity was evaluated by a panel of professionals. The test has 45 pairs of (hand drawn) picturable minimal pairs in 4- alternate forced choice method which are presented in quiet room situation with controlled signal to environmental noise ratio of +10 dB HL. No other sensory clue other than auditory was provided. The test retest and inter tester reliability were evaluated and found to be high with coefficients of 0.9 and 0.7 (p<0.01). Difference was not significant when four age groups were compared statistically for age and gender. (p<0.01). The maximum score ceiling was seen at 41.6. In conclusion, the minimal pair test in Indian English was thus adapted and standardized on 5-7-year-old children. The application of the test needs to be evaluated in children with hearing impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse a Liberian text from the first quarter of the twentieth century written in Vai, a Mande language of West Africa, using an indigenous syllabic script. Rank-frequency distributions of syllabic symbols and words are studied. The distribution of symbols is well-fitted by the 1-displaced negative hypergeometric distribution, confirming previous studies on alphabetic scripts, with a similar interpretation of parameters. Two regimes are discovered for the saturation of symbols in the text (growth of the number of types approaching the complete set versus the number of tokens). For the distribution of words, the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is found to be a proper model rather than the simple Zipfian dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shipibo, a Panoan language spoken in Amazonian Peru, has a set of 31 monosyllabic forms, representing mostly body parts, which are phonologically attached to the front of verbs, adjectives and nouns. For most of these morphemes, noun roots designating body parts exist which are semantically similar and whose initial segments are the same. Consequently, previous scholars have analyzed these prefixed forms as allomorphs of or otherwise synchronically derived from the noun roots. The present paper will present evidence demonstrating that Shipibo-Konibo body-part morphemes are independent prefixes and best analyzed as not being synchronically derived from body-part nouns. Furthermore, although body-part prefixation is quite productive in Shipibo, many lexicalized prefixed stems exist, which have undergone semantic and/or phonological changes. Therefore, a second goal of this paper is to provide a more accurate description of the grammar of Shipibo prefixation by identifying lexicalized stems and treating them separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time course of phonological encoding in Mandarin monosyllabic word production was investigated by using the picture-word interference paradigm. Participants were asked to name pictures in Mandarin while visual distractor words were presented before, at, or after picture onset (i.e., stimulus-onset asynchrony/SOA = −100, 0, or +100 ms, respectively). Compared with the unrelated control, the distractors sharing atonal syllables with the picture names significantly facilitated the naming responses at −100- and 0-ms SOAs. In addition, the facilitation effect of sharing word-initial segments only appeared at 0-ms SOA, and null effects were found for sharing word-final segments. These results indicate that both syllables and subsyllabic units play important roles in Mandarin spoken word production and more critically that syllabic processing precedes subsyllabic processing. The current results lend strong support to the proximate units principle (O’Seaghdha, Chen, & Chen, 2010), which holds that the phonological structure of spoken word production is language-specific and that atonal syllables are the proximate phonological units in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, the significance of word-initial segments over word-final segments suggests that serial processing of segmental information seems to be universal across Germanic languages and Chinese, which remains to be verified in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the phonological system of the Komnzo language. Topics discussed include the segmental phonology of consonants and vowels in Komnzo, the phonology of the language being characterised by widespread epenthesis, and a description of the syllable structure, consonant clusters and syllabification of the language.

Copyright of Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics is the property of Universidade de Vigo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cooper (2013: 11–12, 2015: 317–320) suggests that /m/ was less sonorous in PIE than /l/, /r/, and /n/. This article discusses the evidence proposed for this analysis and puts forward some further evidence, of differing degrees of strength, from Sanskrit, Oscan, Venetic, Celtic and Greek. It concludes that there is some evidence for a lower sonority of /m/ than /l/, /n/ and /r/ in Greek and Sanskrit, but that the evidence for other languages is inconclusive. There are a number of instances in which /m/ patterns with plosives rather than the other sonorants in a number of other contexts, whose relevance to questions of sonority, however, is not clear. Overall, it is plausible that /m/ may have had a lower sonority than the other sonorants in PIE, but this is not necessarily the explanation for all its odd behaviour relative to the other sonorants in PIE and its descendant languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reexamines the assignment of stress in the Paiwan language spoken in several central Paiwan villages, which differs from the other communalects in treating the central vowel, schwa /Ə/, as a weak element with regards to the syllable and stress. Contrary to previous quality-sensitive analyses, this paper explores new data and argues for a quantity-sensitive account based on a variable weight system for closed syllables. It is shown that the inherently non-moraic coda consonants gain weight only to satisfy the requirement for an appropriate foot head. The special behavior of schwa in stress assignment also parallels to other phonological evidence in Paiwan such as its distributional restriction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practically all of the research on syllable boundaries in Hebrew has so far focused on phonological awareness as a stage of language development in children, emphasizing the importance of this awareness in acquiring reading literacy. This paper is based on results of a research conducted with 125 native Hebrew university students. The two main goals of the study were: a) to track the perception of the notion syllable and its boundaries among Israeli high-educated native speakers, and b) to identify factors which may affect their syllabification judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian language Arrernte has been argued by Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Evans & Levinson (2009) to present a case of VC syllabification with coda maximisation, rather than CV syllabification with onset maximisation. In this paper we demonstrate that greater insights into a number of phenomena are achieved when they are analysed with CV syllabification and onset consonants that are moraic, a possibility independently proposed for a wide range of languages by Topintzi (2010). We review a range of evidence from phonetic studies, acquisition and musicology that points towards CV syllabification in Arrernte, and analyse allomorphy, stress assignment, reduplication and the transpositional language game ‘Rabbit Talk’ in terms of reference to moraic structure. The results lend themselves to new directions in the analysis of Arrernte, and provide further evidence for moraic onsets in prosodic morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with multisyllabic word reading in a sample of 50 children aged between 7 and 8 years. Prosodic awareness was the strongest predictor of multisyllabic word reading accuracy, after controlling for phoneme awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary and short-term memory. Children also made surprisingly few phonemic errors while, in contrast, errors of stress assignment were commonplace. Prosodic awareness was also the strongest predictor of stress placement errors, although this finding was not significant. Prosodic skills may play an increasingly important role in literacy performance as children encounter more complex reading materials. Once phoneme-level skills are mastered, prosodic awareness is arguably the strongest predictor of single word reading. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper aims at providing a CVCV analysis of the Icelandic syllabification phenomena and the distribution of vocalic quantity. Two syllabification algorithms are reported to exist in Icelandic: lexical and post-lexical (Árnason 1998, 2011). The article will focus on the post-lexical algorithm, which determines vowel length in derivatives with class 2 suffixation, compounds, and across word boundaries. A modified model of CVCV will be argued for, which combines the insights from Scheer's (2004, 2012) and Cyran's (2003, 2010) model. It will be proposed that phonological computation applies only once to the whole string (preferably the whole sentence) and that the activity of the interface boils down to representational intervention (in accordance with Scheerian Direct Interface). It will be proposed that manipulation of Final Empty Nuclei (at least in the form of distributing parametric government) is a possible interface operation, as assumed in earlier CVCV (Scheer 2004). The complex pattern of two syllabification algorithms in Icelandic arises via an intricate interplay of sonority profiles of consonants and the needs of intervening empty nuclei (some of which are parametrically governed, while some others are not). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of gender is much more complex than what it appears to be and when it is investigated through the lens of language the interrelationship appears to be both implicit as well as explicit. The present research is an attempt to reinstate the profound agreement between gender and number in Hindi (an Indo-Aryan) language with an aim to highlight the gendered behavior of numbers in this language. The investigational framework was based on threehypotheses: (a) gender bias in Hindi being both implicit as well as explicit; (b) gender bias is observed in gender and number interaction and (c) nouns with (+ Male attribute) do not take on as many overt affixes as nouns with (+ Female attributes). Around fifty disyllabic words were chosen as part of the first phase of study in this area and they were categorized based on (+Male/+Female), (+Human/-Human) and (+Countable/-Countable) attributes. Nouns with (-Human) attribute were further categorized on the basis of (+/- Animacy). Analysis of data not only established the validity of the hypotheses but it has also opened up new area of research where more studies can be carried out to investigate gender influenced morphological behavior in languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn't received much attention so far. This paper therefore reviews metrics proposed in the literature for quantifying orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, and morphological complexity of alphabetic languages. The review included searches of Web of Science, PubMed, PsychInfo, Google Scholar, and various online sources. Search terms pertained to orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in relation to reading acquisition, and dyslexia. Although the predictive value of these metrics is promising, more research is needed to validate the value of the metrics discussed and to understand the 'developmental footprint' of orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in the lexical organization and processing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the dynamics of speech production and perception in the context of syllabification and categorization. The selective review includes empirical work and dynamical models that account for changes in the perception and production of syllable structure as transitions between attractors in a dynamical system and that highlight the role of instabilities as a mechanism for regulating flexibility and change. Different conceptual approaches to changes in perceptual categorization are reviewed, including a nonlinear dynamic model, a related Bayesian approach, and a hybrid approach. Of particular importance are recent models that incorporate cognitive factors (such as attention, expectation, and memory) and that change slowly or quickly relative to the changing acoustic input. These dynamical models allow phenomena such as self-organization, emergence, and other hallmarks of complex adaptive systems and may also suggest a mechanism linking speech production and perception, providing an alternative description to the internal models often invoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new software paradigm `Software as a Service' based on web services is proposed for multilingual linguistic tools and exemplified with the BAS CLARIN web services. Instead of traditional tool development and distribution the tool functionality is implemented on a highly available server that users or applications access via HTTP requests. As examples we describe in detail five multilingual web services for speech science operational since 2012 and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the new paradigm as well as our experiences with user acceptance and implementation problems. The services include automatic segmentation of speech, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, syllabification, speech synthesis, and optimal symbol sequence alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) report recommended that foreign language (FL) graduate students be provided with “substantive training in language teaching and in the use of new technologies”. In the present study, I examined teaching methodology (“methods”) course syllabi in order to gauge the extent of professional development in technology after the publication of the MLA report. Using data from methods course syllabi (N = 31), I explored how FL Teaching Assistants (TAs) learned about technology and learned through technology and found that there were considerable missed opportunities for both. Data suggest that technology in the methods course is not keeping pace with advances in technology and that the methods course needs to be rethought [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectro-temporal features of speech are the basis of phonological comprehension and production in the brain. Thus, these features provide a relevant framework to study speech and language development in children. In this paper, we present a novel framework to study the statistics of spectro-temporal features of speech that are encoded at different timescales. These timescales correspond to different linguistic units such as prosodic or syllabic components. The framework is tested on a speech corpus consisting of 169 speech samples. The paper demonstrates usage of the proposed framework in finding milestones of speech development in children. The results indicate the presence of more number of spectro-temporal features encoded at short timescales in adults as compared to children. However, no significant difference is observed in the spectro-temporal features encoded at long timescales between these groups. The proposed framework is also used in studying the speech impairments of children and adults with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. The results reveal the absence of some spectro-temporal features encoded at both the timescales and their absence is more prominent in shorter timescales. The suggested framework can be used for studying speech development and impairment in different disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent psychophysics data suggest that speech perception is not limited by the capacity of the auditory system to encode fast acoustic variations through neural γ activity, but rather by the time given to the brain to decode them. Whether the decoding process is bounded by the capacity of ϑ rhythm to follow syllabic rhythms in speech, or constrained by a more endogenous top-down mechanism, e.g., involving c activity, is unknown. We addressed the dynamics of auditory decoding in speech comprehension by challenging syllable tracking and speech decoding using comprehensible and incomprehensible time-compressed auditory sentences. We recorded EEGs in human participants and found that neural activity in both ϑ and γ ranges was sensitive to syllabic rate. Phase patterns of slow neural activity consistently followed the syllabic rate (4 -14 Hz), even when this rate went beyond the classical ϑ range (4-8 Hz). The power of ϑ activity increased linearly with syllabic rate but showed no sensitivity to comprehension. Conversely, the power of β (14 -21 Hz) activity was insensitive to the syllabic rate, yet reflected comprehension on a single-trial basis. We found different long-range dynamics for ϑ and β activity, with β activity building up in time while more contextual information becomes available. This is consistent with the roles of θ and β activity in stimulus-driven versus endogenous mechanisms. These data show that speech comprehension is constrained by concurrent stimulus-driven ϑ and low-γ activity, and by endogenousβ activity, but not primarily by the capacity of ϑ activity to track the syllabic rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]