PWorkshop Archives: Semester 1, 2004–2005

28 Sep 2004

Elizabeth Wonnacott (University of Rochester)

12 Oct 2004

Catherine Dickie

The Phonological Representations Hypothesis put forward by Snowling (2000) proposes that dyslexia is caused by poor underlying phonological representations. The study presented here suggests that sensitivity to the wordlikeness of nonsense words is one indicator of the quality of an individual's phonological representations - highly wordlike nonwords will be easier to repeat for dyslexics than nondyslexics. However, conventional clinical/psycholinguistic methods of assessing phonological representations do not target phonological knowledge in a linguistically motivated way. Results were inconclusive with respect to my wordlikeness hypothesis, but they do highlight problems with the Phonological Representations Hypothesis as well as focusing on ways to construct stimuli that will explicitly target phonological knowledge.

19 Oct 2004

Matthew Aylett (Rhetorical Systems)

02 Nov 2004

Mits Ota

09 Nov 2004

Bert Remijsen (University of Leiden) & Leoma Gilley (University of Khartoum)

Dinka is a Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan. Most Dinka words have the segmental structure CVC (Andersen 1987). A range of inflections on nouns and verbs are encoded by prosodic contrasts in the stem. In this way, Dinka employs voice quality (breathy vs. modal), lexical tone, and vowel length in a contrastive manner. There is, however, an additional prosodic contrast of which the nature remains unclear. This contrast has been analyzed as an additional (third) level of vowel length by Andersen (1987), and as lexical stress by Gilley (forthc.).

Our acoustic study suggests that this contrast is one of 'complementary quantity' (Elert 1964). This means that vowels can be long or short relative to the duration of the following coda. The phenomenon is well known from Norwegian and Swedish. The Dinka case is very interesting, because here the complementary quantity contrast is independent of a vowel length contrast. That is, both short and long vowels additionally vary in length as a proportion of the overall rhyme duration. Our alternative analysis goes some way towards explaining previous interpretations of the phenomenon by Andersen (vowel length) and Gilley (stress). That is, the complementary quantity contrast is encoded primarily by segmental duration, just as a vowel length contrast would be, and by vowel quality, which is an established correlate of lexical stress in English and several other languages.

23 Nov 2004

Klaske van Leyden (University of Leiden)

30 Nov 2004

Sasha Calhoun

14 Dec 2004

Marianne Pouplier

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought, necessarily a matter of all-or-none, it is unclear what implications these studies have for phonological encoding as a cognitive process. Concerns have been raised that due to the tongue-twister based designs employed, the ill-formed errors obtained in these studies may be low-level motor execution errors or altogether task-artifacts. In this talk I will report tongue movement data collected during an error elicitation experiment that uses priming instead of overt repetition (SLIP; Motley & Baars 1976) to elicit errors. This study by and large confirms results from tongue-twister based designs, yet there is still a considerable gap to bridge to natural speech. Our current work focuses on the development of new elicitation techniques that negotiate the constraints imposed by the instrumentation, error elicitation and naturalness of speech in a new fashion.