The phonation types in Fuzhou Chinese

This pilot study provides an acoustic description of the phonation types in Fuzhou Chinese. Speech samples from 5 native speakers show that tones [21 242 24] are breathy, while [44 32 4] are mainly modal and [51] is modal-breathy. Acoustic measure HNR35 can distinguish these phonation types, while H1*-A1* can only differentiate [24] and the end of [51] from other tones.

Duration measurement of vocants in infants with Cochlear Implants

Vocants are precursors to speech and are facially neutral. The presence of these speechlike vocalizations was evident during the precursors to mature phonology called “protophones”. The prosodic feature of duration of the nuclei plays a crucial role in the shift of prelexical to mature speech, since speech intelligibility is closely related to the control of duration. The aim of this work is to determine whether cochlear implants (CIs) positively trigger language acquisition and the development of verbal skills. Recent literature findings are compared and discussed with the performance of two Greek congenitally hearing-impaired infants who were matched with three normal-hearing (NH) infants. This work highlighted an important weakness of the prosodic abilities of young infants with CIs.

A neurophonetic perspective on articulation planning

This paper gives an overview of a model that predicts articulation ease for German phonological words on the basis of error data from patients with apraxia of speech (AOS). AOS is introduced as a clinical model of higher order motor processes for articulation. Word production accuracy in AOS is considered as a window into the structure of articulation plans as acquired through speech motor learning in childhood. The NLG model of apraxia of speech is explained. Applications in speech development and adult speech are outlined.

How do writing systems shape reading and reading acquisition? Kathy Rastle DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0001/000416 Published in ExLing 2020 Children’s syntax: a parametric approach William Snyder DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0002/000417 Published in ExLing 2020 A neurophonetic perspective on articulation planning Wolfram Ziegler DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0003/000418 Published in ExLing 2020 Masked priming in picture naming and lexical selection Manal Alharbi DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0004/000419 Published in ExLing 2020 Syllable rate vs. segment rate in perceived speech rate Yahya Aldholmi DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0005/000420 Published in ExLing 2020 Properties of nominal stress grammar in Greek Vasiliki Apostolouda DOI: 10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0006/000421 Published in ExLing 2020 Eliciting focus-sensitive why-questions in Japanese

The study argues that in focus-sensitive why-questions in Japanese, why must precede its focus associate. It is proposed that this word order restriction follows if the why-as-CPmodifier approach is applied to the Japanese construction under investigation. It also reports the results of the elicitation experiment conducted to experimentally confirm the word order restriction.

Disambiguating cues of disjunctive questions

This paper aims to find out the similarities and differences between Jordanian (JA), Egyptian (EA), and Kuwaiti (KA) Arabic in which cues disambiguate alternative questions (altqs) and disjunctive yes-no questions (dynqs): intonation contour and choice of disjunctive element (DE). A perception study was run in the three dialects, replicating Pruitt & Roelofsen’s (2013) perception study on English. Mixed-effects logistic regression was used to explore the results which revealed all dialects show a main effect of both intonation and DE choice; a rise contour and use of ʔaw significantly increased the likelihood of dynq responses. The effect of intonation was larger than that of DE choice in all dialects. The differences between the dialects lay in the relative strength of the DE coefficients.

The processing of cataphora coreference in Brazilian Portuguese

This study aimed to explore whether the processing of cataphoric coreference in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is guided by a top-down strategy as postulated by the active search mechanism (ASM) or by a bottom-up routine, as well as if this process is restricted by the Principle C constraint. The results revealed that ASM is not a mechanism used to solve the intended coreference in BP and that the participants have demonstrated sensitiveness to establish the coreference while they had to interpret it. In addition, there is evidence that illicit antecedents are not considered during cataphoric resolution, which suggests that the Principle C constraint impacts on the processing and seems to not be violated during the time course of the computation.

Complements vs. adjuncts and mouse-controlled reading

The relationship between sentence processing and cognitive demand has received a lot of attention in the past decades. In valency theory, some elements of the sentence are determined by the verbs either in terms of their form or by their presence (Herbst & Schüller 2008). It has to be said that little attention has been paid to the processing of such fundamental categories in the theory of syntax. On the one hand, this is remarkable since given the amount of research, we still do not know whether this distinction is psychologically real, or whether it only serves a lexicographic and pedagogical purpose. On the other hand, there is a consensus among linguists about the problematic character of the distinction itself even on a more theoretical level (Dowty 2000; Herbst & Schüller 2008). Therefore, this study attempts to explore whether complements and adjuncts are associated with different kinds of processing. To answer the research questions, an experiment consisting in a mouse-controlled reading task has been designed. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new method in psycholinguistic research. The paper presents the results of a pilot study.

Production of Greek vowels by hearing-impaired children

The present study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Greek vowels produced by hearing-impaired children with profound prelingual hearing loss and cochlear implants. The results revealed a significant difference between vowels produced by hearingimpaired children and those produced by normal-hearing ones in terms of duration. Stressed vowels were significantly longer than non-stressed for both groups, while F0, F1 and F2 did not differ significantly between the two groups for any vowel, with the exception of /a/, which had significantly higher F1 when produced by hearingimpaired children. Acoustic vowel spaces were similar for the two groups but shifted towards higher frequencies in the low-high dimension and somehow reduced in the front-back dimension for the hearing-impaired group.

Individual differences in processing pseudo-inflected nonwords

While the role of word stems has received much attention in morphological processing, the effects of inflectional suffixes on lexical access remain unclear. We address this gap as well as the contribution of individual differences on morphological segmentation with a visual priming experiment. Inflected and uninflected nonwords were preceded by a non-linguistic baseline string or the target’s suffix/word-final letters (e.g. XXXXing  SMOYING). The results indicate that the suffix length is crucial for morphological effects to surface in visual priming and that morphological processing may be modulated by the individual’s reading profile and vocabulary size. We interpret this as evidence for variable morphemic activation: morphological cues can facilitate visual access when rapid whole-word processing is unavailable. The theoretical implications are discussed.

Automated speech analysis enables MCI diagnosis

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a condition characterized by cognitive decline greater than expected for an individual's age and education level. In this study, we are investigating whether acoustic properties of speech production can improve the classification of individuals with MCI from healthy controls augmenting the Mini Mental State Examination, a traditional screening tool, with automatically extracted acoustic information. We found that just one acoustic feature, can improve the AUC score (measuring a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity) from 0.77 to 0.89 in a boosting classification task. These preliminary results suggest that computerized language analysis can improve the accuracy of traditional screening tools.