PWorkshop: Semester 2, 2005–2006

31 Jan 2006

Ivan Yuen (QMUC)

It has been suggested that declination is a general phenomenon of weakening in articulation. Though most studies of declination have been focused on the laryngeal sub-system, a few studies reported declination in other articulatory sub-systems. In light of reported declination in articulation, a preliminary study was conducted to examine the effect of declination on the tongue-palate contact in Cantonese over time and test whether prosodic boundary will interact with declination during the production of vowel /a/ in Cantonese.

07 Feb 2006

Bob Ladd

14 Feb 2006

Catherine Dickie

Compound/phrase pairs like "'toy factory" vs "toy 'factory" are said to be minimal pairs on the suprasegmental level, just like /p/ and /b/ are minimal pairs on the segmental level. Here I will report the results of a small scale pilot study in which this stress contrast was elicited in Scottish English. When adult participants were presented with either member of the minimal pair, they were found to select the correct pictorial representation of its interpretation with a high degree of accuracy. I will discuss my findings in relation to Vogel & Raimy's (2002) study of the acquisition of this contrast.

21 Mar 2006

Sherry Ou

This talk aims at investigating the learning mechanisms which guide L2 word stress acquisition. Two general views are evaluated: (i) UG-based parameter-setting, which claims that L2 stress acquisition is a process of setting an a priori set of metrical parameters, and (ii) input-based statistical learning, which sees the development of L2 stress patterns as a process of statistical extraction based on the distribution of stress patterns in the input data.

In a perceptual preference experiment with English non-words, Chinese participants preferred initial stress for CVCC words when they were presented as nouns, but preferred final stress when they were presented as verbs, paralleling the behaviour of the English subjects. In trisyllabic words, some Chinese subjects preferred penultimate stress when the penult was closed by a consonant (CVC) and antepenultimate stress when the penult only contained a lax vowel (CV). The data show that some Chinese subjects were sensitive to the noun-verb contrast but not to the stress contrast conditioned by the penult of trisyllabic nouns. It is argued that this developmental pattern runs counter to the prediction of the parameter-setting model. If learners had acquired the noun-verb stress contrast via parameter-setting, they would also have acquired the weight implications of CV and CVC, hence the stress contrast in trisyllabic nouns, which is conditioned by the CV/CVC distinction. The observed pattern can however be explained by the input-based statistical learning model, which allows independent learning of the noun-verb contrast via statistical learning. Another type of data that favours the input-based statistical learning account comes from a corpus-based analysis of segmental effects on English stress, which shows that penults tend to be stressed when they contain a certain vowel (i.e., /ε/), regardless of syllable structure. This anomaly was reflected in the Chinese participants' data.

28 Mar 2006

Lukas Wiget

Models of spoken word recognition tend to make the assumption that the recognition of words involves the recognition of smaller, phoneme-sized units. I am investigating this issue with a combination of word-learning, repetition-priming and phonetic-categorisation paradigms, and I am now in a position to present the first fruits of this research. The results are yet very tentative but quite promising, and - as far as they go - appear to support direct word recognition.

04 Apr 2006

Sue Peppé, Jo Keating, Robin Lickley,
Pastora Martinez Castilla, Joanne McCann,
Ineke Mennen, Anne O'Hare,
Marion Rutherford & Ivan Yuen

11 Apr 2006

BAAP

18 Apr 2006

Corey McMillan (Psychology)

Researchers often analyse phonological speech errors to provide constraints on models of speech production. While the majority of this work has been based on perceptual transcription of phonological errors there is a growing interest in instrumental analyses of articulation during the production of errors. In this talk I will present a review of instrumental speech error analyses in addition to recent electropalatography (EPG) data collected using a tongue-twister and word-order competition experimental paradigm. For the latter, I will provide a qualitative analysis and consider how articulatory errors should be interpreted. For example, double articulations may be interpreted as evidence of residual activation in speech planning or a rapid articulatory repair. I will also present a quantitative analysis method for EPG measuring tongue-contact variation and consider if variations in contact can reflect higher-level lexical influences on lower-level articulatory implementation. Ultimately, I hope to provide evidence that investigating speech errors at the articulatory level is an important approach to develop comprehensive models of speech production.

25 Apr 2006

Alice Lee (QMUC)

The present study investigated the effect of listeners' linguistic background (Cantonese and English) on perceptual ratings of hypernasality in Cantonese speech samples. Results showed that Cantonese listeners were significantly more reliable than English listeners in judging hypernasality in the male speech samples. Moreover, English listeners gave significantly lower ratings than Cantonese listeners to both male and female speech samples. The findings suggested the possible difference between native speakers and non-native speakers in judging the severity level of hypernasality.

09 May 2006

Hannele Nicholson

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies, pauses, hesitations, restarts and less than ideal deliveries of information. But why do disfluencies occur? One hypothesis, which I will refer to as the Strategic Modelling View, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker to signal commitment to a listener. An alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, suggests that disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. During the talk, I will compare and contrast these theories by explaining data from three Map Task experiments involving eye gaze, a measure of speaker attention, and disfluency.

23 May 2006

Gero Kunter (Universität Siegen)

In this talk, I will present the results from our ongoing research on English noun-noun compounds. Our analysis of a large number of items allows us to give answers to questions such as: How do listeners perceive compound stress? How do phonetic cues determine stress perception? And how can we construct a model that predicts stress position in compounds?

13 Jun 2006

Robin Lickley (QMUC)

11 Jul 2006

Suzanne Boyce (University of Cincinnati)

It is well-known that American English /r/ may be produced with a number of different tongue shapes (Delattre & Freeman, 1968; Tiede et al. 2004), and that its most salient characteristic is a very low third formant. It is perhaps less well known that all attested shapes converge to identical patterns of the first three formants (Westbury et al. 1998). This fact suggests that speakers choose among several possible strategies for deriving the correct acoustics from vocal tract shape. Our work focuses on the following questions:

1. what are the different articulatory strategies that allow speakers to achieve similar acoustics with very different vocal tract shapes,
2. when do speakers switch between strategies, and
3. are there traces in the acoustic signal that indicate which tongue shape was used.