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Uipo, also called Khoibu, is an underdescribed Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 1800 people in the Chandel district of Manipur. Uipo has four lexical tones: a high falling tone, a low level tone, a low falling tone and a high level tone. These are called Tone 1, Tone 2, Tone 3 and Tone 4 respectively. When tones are combined within one word, there are two sandhi rules that explain how the tones change. This article will look at the different context where tone sandhi occurs, focusing on compounds, possessive constructions, and nominal attribution. For instance, a noun that start with a Tone 1 or a Tone 2 syllable will get a Tone 4 when following a Tone 2 possessive prefix. There are examples of minimal pairs that become homonymic in certain morphological contexts, and these are used to illustrate that the tonal category of a given words has really changed. Interestingly, what otherwise seem like phonological rules have some specific lexical exceptions. For instance, the word toŋ1kan2 does not change its tone in contexts where it is expected. The sandhi rules are argued to be  evidence that Uipo has a four-tone system, as opposed to what has been proposed by some previous accounts of the language which have described it as having only three.

In India, most of the Science and Technology resources available are in English. Developing an Automatic Language Translation Engine from English (source language) to Tamil (target language) is very essential for the people who need to get technical resources in their native language. The challenges in designing such engines using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools include Lexical, Structural, and Syntax level ambiguity. To solve these challenges, the development of a Part- Of-Speech (POS) tagger is essential. The Verb-Framed languages like Tamil, Japanese, and many languages in Romance, Semitic, and Mayan languages families have high morphological richness but lack either a large volume of annotated corpora or manually constructed linguistic resources for building POS tagger. Moreover, the Tamil Language has a low resource, high word sense ambiguity, and word-free order form giving rise to challenges in designing Tamil POS taggers. In this paper, we postulate a Hybrid POS tagger algorithm for Tamil Language using Cross-Lingual Transformation Learning Techniques. It is a novel Mining-based algorithm (MT), which finds equivalent words of Tamil in English on less volume of English- Tamil bilingual unannotated parallel corpus. To enhance the performance of MT, we developed Tamil language-specific auxiliary algorithms such as Keyword-based tagging algorithm (KT) and Verb pattern-based tagging algorithm (VT). We also developed a Unique pair occurrence-tagging algorithm (UT) to find the one-time occurrence of Tamil-English pair words. Our experiments show that by improving Context-based Bilingual Corpus to Bilingual parallel corpus and after leaving onetime occurrence words, the proposed Hybrid POS tagger can predict 81.15% words, with 73.51% accuracy and 90.50% precision. Evaluations prove our algorithms can generate language resources, which can improve the performance of NLP tasks in Tamil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pali classical grammars reflect a specific idea of what Pali Buddhist texts are. According to this traditional idea, texts are mainly conceived as sound and therefore the initial portions of every grammar deal with sound and sound ligature or sandhi. Sandhi in Pali does not work as systematically as it does in Sanskrit and therefore Pali grammarians have struggled with the optionality of many of their rules on sound ligature. Unlike modern linguists, however, they identify certain patterns of fixed or frozen sandhis that are often associated to the formulas of Pali prose. This paper focuses on these specific frozen sandhis in Pali prose and their connection to the nature of Pali literature broadly. The main working hypothesis is the following: in the same way that certain frozen sandhis in verse obey metrical patterns, frozen sandhis in prose suggest that Pali speech-sounds are subordinated to formulaic rhythmic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A "checked" syllable usually refers to one with a short vowel and an oral or glottal coda, which results impressionistically in a "short" and "abrupt" quality. Although common in languages of the world, it is unclear how to characterize checked syllables phonetically. In this study, we investigated the acoustic features of checked syllables in citation and sandhi forms in Xiapu Min, an under-documented language from China. We conducted a production experiment and analyzed the F0, phonatory quality, vowel duration, and vowel quality in checked syllables. The results show that, in citation tones, checked syllables are realized with distinct F0 contours from unchecked syllables, along with glottalization in the end and a shorter duration overall. In sandhi tones, checked syllables lose their distinct F0 contours and become less glottalized. However, the shorter duration of checked syllables is retained in sandhi forms. This study lays out the acoustic properties that tend to be associated with checked syllables and can be used when testing checked syllables in other language varieties. The fact that in Xiapu Min sandhi checked tones become less glottalized but preserve their shorter duration suggests that, when checked syllables become unchecked diachronically, glottalization might be lost prior to duration lengthening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the assimilation in terms of voicing on the border between words in Macedonian and in Romanian. Although the compared languages belong to different language families, the pronunciation of the obstruental segments in this position is similar. In both Romanian and Macedonian, a regular regressive assimilation is observed on the border between two words. In Macedonian, the voiced obstruent at the end of a word can be pronounced as a voiced or a voiceless before a resonant at the beginning of the next word. It is important that more often the voiced obstruent at the end of the word loses voicing before a vowel in the initial position than before a sonant. In Romanian, before a resonant in the initial position, the voiced obstruent in the final position of the word in front of it is pronounced voiced. The voiceless obstruent on the border between words can be pronounced as a voiced if it occurs before a sonant in the initial position of the next word. This is an optional phenomenonlike the voiceless pronunciation of the voiced obstruent before a resonant on the border of two words in Macedonian. As one can see, in both languages, obstruents at the end of a word behave differently before initial vowels and sonants on the inter-word border.

This study attempts to present an Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) analysis of the svara sandhi changes occurring in Odia (An Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern state of Odisha, India). Odia, like other major Indian languages such as Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, etc., has been influenced by Sanskrit and has hence subsumed the phenomenon of sandhi occurring in Sanskrit. The phenomena of two sounds combining to form a new sound (/vowels of differing heights combine to result in a sort of Vowel Harmony where instead of one vowel influencing the other, both vowels influence each other and result in a sound which has q b v L G; are some of the processes that will be looked into. This paper uses the Optimality Theoretic framework to explain these processes. Newly developed constraints such as COALESCENE, *Diphthongs, (low, back V + low, back V = /a/) are proposed in this study along with certain other common and well-established faithfulness constraints such as MAX-V and DEP-V. The study analyses the svara sandhi process in Odia which has evolved from Sanskrit and shares the same features in most constructions while simultaneously showing the applicability of Optimality Theory in such a study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Khoekhoegowab has a tone sandhi process that replaces each underlying tonal melody with an arbitrary secondary melody. This process at first appears to be an unusual example of a "left-dominant" sandhi process in the sense of Yue-Hashimoto (1987) or Zhang (2007). Within a given domain, the leftmost word retains its base from, but the other words undergo paradigmatic substitution; left-dominant systems typically involve spreading of a tonal melody rather than substitution. However, this description of Khoekhoegowab sandhi seems to break down when we consider verbs. Prior descriptions disagree as to whether verb sandhi depends on the placement of a tense-marking clitic (Haacke 1999) or the embedding status of the clause (Brugman 2009). This paper presents the results of a new prosodic production experiment aimed at resolving this conflict. The result is a hybrid generalization: verbs in matrix clauses undergo sandhi when preceded by a tense marker, but verbs in embedded clauses resist sandhi across the board. Thus, Khoekhoegowab continues to look like an exceptional left-dominant system: The verb and tense marking form a sandhi domain in matrix clauses (triggering sandhi on the verb whenever it is not leftmost within that domain), but in embedded clauses verbs form their own independent domain instead.

Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward in a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by a phonologically nasal consonant or stressed nasal vowel and does not affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive nasalization affects morpheme-initial voiceless stops across a morpheme boundary. Many forms that include a causative prefix show this kind of progressive nasalization. However, this nasal spread lacks any obvious nasal trigger and does not occur consistently. In this paper, I propose an explanation of these cases as vestiges of earlier phonological rules from pre-Proto-Tupi-Guarani but not active in Paraguayan Guarani, followed by the emergence of a regressive oralization rule and ending in a reanalysis of the basic form of the causative prefix. In so doing, I will provide a revised sequence of changes involving contour allophones in the reconstruction of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often said, independently of any linguistic evidence, that the refusal of the redactors of the Rigveda text to allow sandhi between the second and third eight-syllable verses (pādas) of the three-line Rigvedic gāyatrī stanza is based on their parallel convention in the cases of the four-line triṣṭubh and anuṣṭubh stanzas, where the first two lines predominantly serve as an independent discourse unit (distich) relative to the last two. This paper attempts to provide independent linguistic evidence for the redactors' treatment of the gāyatrī line by examining the syntactic and rhetorical structures of the first 300 gāyatrī stanzas in the Rigveda. The results show that nearly 60% of these show a clear syntactic and/or rhetorical break at the end of the second verse, whereas fewer than 19% show such a boundary following the first verse. While this does not prove that the redactors' procedure was based on syntactic-rhetorical structure alone, it is maintained that the redactors could not have been unaware of the preponderance of a linguistic break following the second verse of the gāyatrī and that, even if they were influenced by their treatment of the distich boundary in four-line stanzas, their procedure was not simply a matter of analogical extension independent of linguistic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the predictability effects of pitch accent on word recognition using the sandhi rule in Kansai Japanese (KJ). Native KJ speakers and native Tokyo Japanese (TJ) speakers (control group) saw images of four objects while hearing modifier + noun phrases and selected the corresponding image as quickly as possible. The word-initial tone of the noun's initial mora was predictable or unpredictable based on the tone of the preceding modifier's final mora in KJ but not in TJ. Experiment 1 found faster reaction times in the predictable conditions compared with the unpredictable conditions in KJ speakers but only when the modifier had an all-low tone sequence. This finding suggests that a modifier-ending that changes following the sandhi rule can function as a reliable cue to constrain an upcoming tone, whereas a modifier-ending tone that remains the same as in the citation form cannot (although the next tone is predictable). Unexpectedly, we found the same effect, albeit weaker, in TJ speakers. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and additionally showed that the facilitation effect was not due to TJ speakers having sufficient exposure to KJ to be familiar with the KJ sandhi rule. We speculate that the effect in TJ speakers is related to a language universal constraint against a sequence of low tones without a high tone within a phonological word, which may urge listeners to listen for a high tone in the upcoming input., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

A “checked” syllable usually refers to one with a short vowel and an oral or glottal coda, which results impressionistically in a “short” and “abrupt” quality. Although common in languages of the world, it is unclear how to characterize checked syllables phonetically. In this study, we investigated the acoustic features of checked syllables in citation and sandhi forms in Xiapu Min, an under-documented language from China. We conducted a production experiment and analyzed the F0, phonatory quality, vowel duration, and vowel quality in checked syllables. The results show that, in citation tones, checked syllables are realized with distinct F0 contours from unchecked syllables, along with glottalization in the end and a shorter duration overall. In sandhi tones, checked syllables lose their distinct F0 contours and become less glottalized. However, the shorter duration of checked syllables is retained in sandhi forms. This study lays out the acoustic properties that tend to be associated with checked syllables and can be used when testing checked syllables in other language varieties. The fact that in Xiapu Min sandhi checked tones become less glottalized but preserve their shorter duration suggests that, when checked syllables become unchecked diachronically, glottalization might be lost prior to duration lengthening.

This article explores in depth various sandhi (joining) rules in Kerala's Malayalam language, which play a vital role in framing of the inflected and agglutinated forms of words and their compounds. It discusses significant progress in a scientific method to generate a specific annotated data set of Malayalam words that would be useful in many Natural Language Processing tasks which involve Malayalam preprocessing. The article discusses the results and issues encountered in developing this word-splitting tool for Malayalam, mainly in the context of improving the alignments between parallel texts that form a core resource in the Machine Translation task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the assimilation in terms of voicing on the border between words in Macedonian and in Romanian. Although the compared languages belong to different language families, the pronunciation of the obstruental segments in this position is similar. In both Romanian and Macedonian, a regular regressive assimilation is observed on the border between two words. In Macedonian, the voiced obstruent at the end of a word can be pronounced as a voiced or a voiceless before a resonant at the beginning of the next word. It is important that more often the voiced obstruent at the end of the word loses voicing before a vowel in the initial position than before a sonant. In Romanian, before a resonant in the initial position, the voiced obstruent in the final position of the word in front of it is pronounced voiced. The voiceless obstruent on the border between words can be pronounced as a voiced if it occurs before a sonant in the initial position of the next word. This is an optional phenomenon like the voiceless pronunciation of the voiced obstruent before a resonant on the border of two words in Macedonian. As one can see, in both languages, obstruents at the end of a word behave differently before initial vowels and sonants on the inter-word border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bohemistyka is the property of Instytut Filologii Slowianskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu 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.)

This article traces the history of how modern Western linguistics adopted the term sandhi from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and adapted it to its theoretical needs. In particular, we will acknowledge the fundamental role played by Müller,1 who combining both Indic (Prakriyā grammars and Prātiśākhyas) and Western approaches (those of Colebrooke and Bopp) to the representation of Sanskrit grammar, coined in 1866 the labels of internal sandhi and external sandhi. Such labels gained momentum thanks to the works of Whitney in the 19th century and Bloomfield in the 20th century and eventually became common parlance in Western linguistics.

Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) displays a complex tone sandhi system, sensitive to phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure. In this paper, I argue that the opaque, phonetically unnatural alternations are best accounted for in an allomorph selection approach, following work by Tsay and Myers (1996), Zhang and Lai (2008), and others on Taiwanese Southern Min sandhi. In this model, lexical entries contain multiple surface allomorphs along with subcategorization frames, and forms that follow the same pattern are abstracted into increasingly general lexical templates or schemas. Morphology is post-syntactic, with syntactic structure matched with lexical entries, along the lines of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Embick and Noyer 2007), but with a richer generative lexicon, as in Construction Morphology (Booij 2010b) or analogical approaches to word formation (e.g. Bybee 1995). The domains of application and the interaction of tone sandhi with both itself and other morphotonological processes point to the need for cyclic application, which I implement using phase-based spell out (Uriagereka 1999; Chomsky 2000). This approach allows for productive extension of the patterns without recourse to an overly complicated phonological component.

This study examined whether the phonological substitution rule of tone sandhi modulates tone perception in the preattentive stage. Tone sandhi is commonly present in East Asian languages. An example from Mandarin is the Tone tone 3 sandhi rule: T3 is pronounced as T2 when followed by another T3 (33 → 23). Previous mismatch negativity (MMN) studies in Mandarin have reported a smaller amplitude or longer latency in standard-deviant pair consisting of T2 and T3 (T2-T3) than in T1-T3. The most widely accepted explanation for this is that T2 and T3 have steeper pitch slopes than T1. This study tested an alternative account based on the phonological rule that the frequent substitution that occurs between T2 and T3 results in reduced MMN. In Experiment 1, we first tried to replicate the finding in Mandarin. In Experiment 2, using both unskilled and skilled speakers, we tested a sandhi tone pair of very different pitch slopes in Taiwanese. Delayed peak latency of sandhi pair was evident in both languages but only in skilled speakers. Our results did not support the shared-pitch-slope account and were instead consistent with the argument that a language-specific phonological rule could modulate preattentive tone processing. • Examining whether phonological substitution rule, i.e. tone sandhi, can affect tone perception at the pre-attentive stage. • Experiment 1 reveals MMN tone sandhi effect of Mandarin. • Experiment 2 reveals MMN tone sandhi effect of Taiwanese. • Language-specific phonological rule modulates pre-attentive auditory processing. • MMN is a potential index of phonological rule learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kunming exhibits a special kind of interaction between tone and prominence whereby the prosodic headedness is shown to play an indirect role in tone sandhi. Due to higher-ranked tonal faithfulness constraints, lower tones, which are universally unfavored in the head position, do not change to higher tones, and higher tones, which are universally unfavored in the non-head position, do not change to lower tones. Nonetheless, though the unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation does not directly trigger tone sandhi, it indirectly decides whether tone sandhi will take place. Falling tones, inter-syllabic tone segment disagreement, and tonal combinations with identical contours are marked tonal structures in the language. But not all these structures result in tone sandhi. The penalization of these structures is tied to an unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation; only when an undesired tone-(non-)head correlation is involved are the marked tonal structures penalized. The indirect tone-(non-)head interaction observed in Kunming is special but not unique to the language as a similar correlation is found in the Chinese dialects of Dongshi Hakka and Beijing Mandarin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tianjin Mandarin is a member of the northern Mandarin Chinese family (ISO 693-3: [cmn]). It is spoken in the urban areas of the Tianjin Municipality (CN-12) in the People's Republic of China, which is about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Beijing. Existing studies on Tianjin Mandarin have focused mainly on its tonal aspects, especially its intriguing tone sandhi system, with few studies examining the segmental aspects (on tone, see e.g. Li & Liu 1985, Shi 1986, Liu 1993, Lu 1997, Wang & Jiang 1997, Chen 2000, Liu & Gao 2003, Ma 2005, Ma & Jia 2006, Zhang & Liu 2011, Li & Chen 2016; on segmental aspects, see e.g. Han 1993a, b; Wee, Yan & Chen 2005). As also noted in Wee et al. (2005), this is probably due to the similarity in segmental structures between Tianjin Mandarin and Standard Chinese, especially among speakers of the younger generation, and what differentiates the two Mandarin varieties is most notably their tonal systems. The aim of the present description is therefore to provide a systematic phonetic description of both segmental and tonal aspects of Tianjin Mandarin, with main focus on the tonal aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a few observations on the external (consonant) sandhi formation in Telangana Telugu. In the beginning of this paper, Sandhi definitions are discussed in detail, drawn both from Panini and modern Indian (Telugu) grammarians/linguists. The possible sandhi forms in Telugu identified by earlier grammarians were also depicted in the beginning of the paper. Examples given in this paper are primarily drawn from the Telugu natives of Telangana. The issues discussed in this paper may be seen as the continuation work of Prof. Bh. Krishna Murti's research work on external sandhi in Telugu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies on the Tibeto-Burman Ngwi (Lolo) language family describe tone behavior in the framework of tonogenesis/historical reconstruction among the different languages, but synchronic tonal analyses are rare or are lacking in specifics. After laying out the phoneme inventory, this paper presents a look at the tone of Pyen, belonging to the Bisoid subgroup of Southern Ngwi, spoken in Myanmar. We focus especially on tone sandhi and phrase-final intonation. Its three contrastive tones, high, mid, and low, occur on every word type. Verbal suffixes differ from this pattern; they carry only the high or low tone, depending on the tone of either the preceding verb stem or any preceding tone-bearing suffix. A non-lexical intonational-phrase-final boundary tone is frequently used to express exclamation or emphasis, and is often found in conjunction with phrasal affixes indicating grammatical mood. This falling boundary tone is associated with a greater excursion of pitch than the low boundary tone found in neutral expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of how modern Western linguistics adopted the term sandhi from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and adapted it to its theoretical needs. In particular, we will acknowledge the fundamental role played by Müller,1 who combining both Indic (Prakriyā grammars and Prātiśākhyas) and Western approaches (those of Colebrooke and Bopp) to the representation of Sanskrit grammar, coined in 1866 the labels of internal sandhi and external sandhi. Such labels gained momentum thanks to the works of Whitney in the 19th century and Bloomfield in the 20th century and eventually became common parlance in Western linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper titled “Grammar talks - Sanskrit and Tamil” is a humble attempt to learn and understand some of the basic features of Classical Tamil in the light of Paninian Grammar. It may appear that Classical Sanskrit and Classical Tamil are not related, but still we see that there are some common features such as Sandhi, Samasa (puNarchi in Tamil), karaka and vibhakti (Case theory) etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwanese, a variety of Southern Min, is a dialect spoken in Taiwan with a pervasive tone sandhi system. To speak Taiwanese fluently and appropriately, one has to frequently apply Taiwanese tone sandhi. While it is common knowledge that tone sandhi is pervasive in spoken Taiwanese, there are no studies reporting on the rate of Taiwanese tone sandhi in spoken corpora in any genre. This paper attempts to determine the average tone sandhi rates of L1 Taiwanese dominant speakers and L1 Taiwanese L2 Mandarin bilinguals by analyzing a spoken corpus. Our study shows that the two groups do not reveal any significant differences in their tone sandhi application rate. On average, out of every 100 syllables, approximately 67 syllables have undergone tone sandhi. Regarding the application rates of individual tone sandhi rules, all speakers show a consistency as to which rules are most common and which are not. Consequently, one implication of our study is that L2 Mandarin fluency does not impact L1 Taiwanese tone sandhi frequency. Other implications help make clear the specific nature of the Taiwanese tone sandhi system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological categories are often differentiated by multiple phonetic cues. This paper reports a production and perception study of a laryngeal contrast in Shanghai Wu that is not only cued in multiple dimensions, but also cued differently on different manners (stops, fricatives, sonorants) and in different positions (non-sandhi, sandhi). Acoustic results showed that, although this contrast has been described as phonatory in earlier literature, its primary cue is in tone in the non-sandhi context, with vowel phonation and consonant properties appearing selectively for specific manners of articulation. In the sandhi context where the tonal distinction is neutralized, these other cues may remain depending on the manner of articulation. Sonorants, in both contexts, embody the weakest cues. The perception results were largely consistent with the aggregate acoustic results, indicating that speakers adjust the perceptual weights of individual cues for a contrast according to manner and context. These findings support the position that phonological contrasts are formed by the integration of multiple cues in a language-specific, context-specific fashion and should be represented as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphemes involved in the formation of Somali verbs and nouns are, in most instances, clearly individuated into categories corresponding to their role in word formation. Verbs contain a base, derivational extensions, inflectional affixes, and clitics that attach in a fixed order. Nouns also contain a base and derivational affixes, but little inflectional morphology. Indeed, both parts of speech have similar morphological templates in Somali, but the relationship between the language's morphological domains and prosodic domains has only recently become a subject of detailed inquiry. We add to this ongoing trend by illustrating in this paper that there are close correlations between these domains in the language's verbal and nominal systems that can be elucidated by morphophonological processes; certain processes occur only in a particular prosodic domain, and these process/domain combinations are similar in both the nominal and verbal systems. By establishing diagnostic phenomena attributable to phrase-level domains, this paper fills a gap between recent works focused only on defining prosodic characteristics of Somali words (Downing & Nilsson 2017; Green & Morrison 2016) and the accentual behavior of Somali clauses (Le Gac 2002, 2003a, b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Polish Linguistics is the property of Jagiellonian University Press 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.)

This paper presents data from two experiments on the perception of phrase-medial word-initial vowels in Polish. Previous research has suggested that Polish resembles German in its resistance to the types of sandhi linking processes found in English or French. In production, glottalization frequently intervenes to block such processes involving vowel-initial words. In the listening tests described here, glottalization had an impact on response time only in the word monitoring task, in which other top-down factors may have played a role. It is therefore suggested Polish listeners have only minimal perceptual sensitivity to glottalization, a feature that is prevalent in production. This largely negative result may be interpreted as evidence that when it appears, glottalization in Polish is not due to the insertion of a boundary marker, which would be perceptually more salient. Rather, glottalization reflects the preservation of the prosodic well-formedness of vowel-initial syllables in Polish, as formulated in the Onset Prominence representational framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consonant cluster simplification in Tundra Nenets coexists with other consonantal alternations, such as fricative strengthening, lenition of stops, and a variety of NC-effects, which all apply within the same phrasal domain. These processes interact with each other, suggesting an opaque ordering within the same post-lexical domain and thus presenting a challenge not only for inherently parallel theories like classical Optimality Theory, but also for the cyclic derivational approaches such as Stratal OT. We analyze all instances of Tundra Nenets cluster simplification as coalescence and show that a variety of apparently opaque alternations accompanying cluster simplification can be seen as transparent on this account. We also argue that strengthening in consonant clusters is caused by an intermediate stage where coda obstruents lose their place and turn into a glottal stop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandarin lexical tones are modified in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech, resulting in tone hyperarticulation. However, it is unclear if these registers also alter contextual tones (neutral tone and tone sandhi) and if such phonetic modification might affect acquisition of these tones. This study therefore examined how neutral tone and tone sandhi are realized in IDS, and how their acoustic manifestations compare with those in Lombard speech, where the communicative needs of listeners differ. Neutral tone and tone sandhi productions were elicited from 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during (1) interactions with their 12-month-old infants (IDS), (2) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a noisy environment (Lombard speech), and (3) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). The results showed that, although both contextual tones were modified in IDS and Lombard speech, their key tone features were maintained. In addition, IDS and Lombard speech modified these tones differently: IDS increased pitch height and modified pitch contour, while Lombard speech increased pitch height only. The realization of neutral tone and tone sandhi across registers is discussed with reference to listeners' different communicative needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study illustrates how three level tones might have developed diachronically by comparing two synchronic Mandarin dialects. In Standard Mandarin (SM), the four lexical tones are denoted as /H, LH, L, HL/ or /H, R, L, F/ phonologically. However, based on evidence from two acoustic experiments, this study proposes that the four lexical tones in Taiwan Mandarin (TM) should be analyzed as /H, M, L, HM/, with /H, HM/ in a high register and /M, L/ in a low register. The proposed tonal structure can account for all the tone sandhi in TM using the framework of Optimality theory, and the register difference plays an important role in the analyses. Also, the new TM tonal representation has an advantage in explaining the absence of the SM Tone 2 Sandhi. The new tonal representations illuminate how pitch contour differences might have developed into structural tone changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the glottalization of Taiwan Min checked tones 3 and 5 with a CV [ptk ʔ] syllable structure. Electroglottography (EGG) supplements acoustic data on disyllabic words with checked tones collected from 40 speakers from five dialect regions. The results indicated that a final coda can be realized as a full oral/glottal stop closure, an energy dip at vowel's end, an aperiodic voicing at vowel's end, or a coda deletion. Over 80% of /ʔ/ codas and less than 20% of /ptk/ codas were deleted. The undeleted /ptk/ codas were more likely to be produced with a full stop closure among tone 3 and sandhi tones. Glottal contact quotient (CQ_H) distinguished tones 3 and 5 from unchecked tones 31 and 51, respectively. In sandhi positions, the vowels of tone [5] /3/ were produced with a longer CQ_H, lower H1*-A3* and a higher Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), suggesting a longer close phase, a more abrupt glottal closure and more periodic voicing than tone [3] /5/. In juncture position, coda deletion and the merging of H1*-A1*, H1*-A3* and A1*-A2* of tones [3] /3/ and [5] /5/ suggest a sound change among checked tones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]