Front vowel chain shift and the vowel rephonologization in Early Middle Chinese (In Chinese)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Front Vowel

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110530
Author(s):  
Dan Villarreal ◽  
Lynn Clark
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Repetition Effect ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Repetition Effects ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Linguistic Material

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

Velar variation in French

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Berns
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Representative Data ◽  
History Of

It is commonly noted that French velar plosives tend to take a fronted realization when followed by a front vowel. These observations are generally not accompanied by representative data, and consequently, little is known about the actual characteristics and spread of the phenomenon. This study provides a corpus analysis of velar palatalization in contemporary French, and addresses the potential linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved. Moreover, the synchronic results are considered in the light of the palatalization processes that took place in the history of French.

scholarly journals Are Tims hot and Toms not?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Functional Feature ◽  
Physical Size ◽  
Gender Group ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
The Relationship

Sound symbolism – the idea that there are motivated links between the sound of a word and its meaning has been established to be an existing phenomenon across different languages. Especially size sound symbolism seems to be a functional feature in many languages meaning that different types of vowels in words are associated with different physical size. Words with front vowels (e.g. little, tiny) are more likely to be used to indicate small physical size whereas words with back vowels (e.g. humungous, huge) are more likely to indicate large physical size. Because physical size plays an important role in ratings of attractiveness, we tested whether vowels in first names can influence how attractive the bearer of the name is perceived. In our experiment, participants saw faces paired with popular first names and rated the attractiveness of the depicted person. Masculine names were paired with pictures of men and feminine names with pictures of women. The names either contained a front or back vowel in the accented syllable and were within gender group randomly paired with pictures. We found that female raters preferred faces paired with back vowel names while male raters preferred faces paired with front vowel names, showing that the rater's gender – far more than the gender of the depicted person – determined the relationship between vowel quality and perceived attractiveness of faces. Our results confirm the role of sound symbolism in perception of attractiveness.

scholarly journals Regressive Vowel Harmony in Libyan Arabic

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Yousef Mokhtar Elramli ◽  
Tareq Bashir Maiteq
Keyword(s):  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Skeletal Structure ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
The City

The aim of this paper is to study Regressive vowel harmony induced by a suffixal back round vowel in the Libyan Arabic dialect spoken in the city of Misrata. The skeletal structure in the collected words is a /CVCVC-/ stem followed by the third person plural suffix /-u/. Consequently, the derived form of the examined words becomes /CVCVCV/. Following a rule of re-syllabification, the coda of the ultimate syllable in the stem becomes the onset of the newly formed syllable (ultimate in the derived form). Thus, in the presence of the suffix /-u/ in the derived form, all vowels in the word must harmonise with the [+round] feature of /-u/ unless there is a high front vowel /i/ intervening. In such cases, the high front vowel is defined as an opaque segment that is incompatible with the feature [+round]. Syllable and morpheme boundaries within words do not seem to contribute to blocking the regressive spreading of harmony. An autosegmental approach to analyze these words is adopted here. It is concluded that there are two sources in underlying representations for regressive vowel harmony in Libyan Arabic. One source is floating [+round] and another source is [+round].

scholarly journals Drifting towards Ambiguity: A Closer Look at Palatalisation in L2 Irish

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 55-69
Author(s):  
Marina Snesareva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Knowledge ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Everyday Communication ◽  
At Home

This article focuses on palatalisation in the Irish spoken by Dublin-based bilinguals for whom English is their first language. All informants had a good knowledge of both Irish and English; however, Irish was their second language, used less frequently in everyday communication. Most Dubliners start learning Irish at school; only a few informants had the opportunity to speak it at home, but even then the language was not used outside class on a regular basis. The study showed that most deviations in the distribution of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants in the speech of Dublin bilinguals were of the palatalisation absence type. Such deviations were especially frequent next to back and mid-back vowels. On the other hand, a palatalised consonant was often pronounced instead of a non-palatalised one next to a front vowel. Previous research suggests that these tendencies also apply in weak positions (Snesareva 2014a; 2014b). Consequently, even though in traditional Irish dialects palatalisation is not position-bound, in the speech of Dublin bilinguals there is correlation between the palatalisation of a consonant and the quality of its neighbouring vowel. However, such consonant distribution was not encountered in all contexts: even those informants whose speech had deviations used palatalisation properly in some contexts. This means that position-bound use of palatalisation is still a tendency rather than an entrenched feature of Dublin Irish.

scholarly journals English and Portuguese consonant clusters: contrasts and challenges

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Madureira
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Learning Model ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Vowel Epenthesis ◽  
Speech Learning Model ◽  
Speech Learning

ABSTRACT Consonant clusters occur both in Portuguese and English. However, clusters are more productive in English than in Portuguese and there are sequences which are only found in English.This study focuses on the contrasts between American English and Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and on three strategies Brazilian learners tend to apply when producing them: adding the high front vowel (epenthesis) between the consonants in the clusters, discarding consonants, or introducing phonetic changes. The relevance of introducing English clusters to Brazilian learners of English is pointed out and discussed under the framework of the Speech Learning Model (SLM).

scholarly journals Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Annie Helms
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Balearic Islands ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Vowel Production ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
Probabilistic Nature ◽  
Contact Effects

The disproportionate number of studies in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands observing Spanish contact effects in Catalan production, rather than Catalan contact effects in Spanish production, is an oversight of bidirectionality and the probabilistic nature of social factors in situations of language contact. Accordingly, the present study analyzes both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate whether Catalan contact effects occur in Spanish via a process of dissimilation, and whether such effects are strengthened in younger speakers due to the relatively recent implementation of Catalan linguistic policy in the educational and public spheres. The results are suggestive of dissimilation, where phonetic distinctions are maintained between Spanish /e/ and the two Catalan mid front vowels across both F1 and F2. Additionally, analyses of variance across F1 and F2 reveal that Spanish /e/ productions across F1 are more diffuse in younger speakers and Catalan mid front vowels across F2 are less diffuse, providing evidence of reciprocity in contact effects. These results underscore the bidirectional nature of language contact and advocate for the use of variance of F1 and F2 as a metric of phonological contact effects.

The Effects of Post-Velar Consonants on Vowels in Nuu-chah-nulth: Auditory, Acoustic, and Articulatory Evidence

2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Front Vowel

AbstractPrevious phonetic documentation of Nuu-chah-nulth consonant-vowel interactions has either solely relied on transcriptions or has been incomplete in some other respect. Using auditory, acoustic, and articulatory evidence, this article documents the effects of all post-velar consonants on all vowels. Results show that /i/ and /i:/ almost always have a schwa offglide before the uvular and pharyngeal stops, but not always before the fricatives. When these vowels follow uvulars and pharyngeals (with the exception of the labialized uvular), they are usually lowered and do not have a schwa offglide. Ultrasound data confirm that the tongue root is active in articulating uvular and pharyngeal consonants and that the schwa off-glide occurs because the tongue is moving through a schwa-like configuration on its way from the high front vowel to the retracted consonant. The vowels /u/ and /u:/ are lowered and/or diphthongized following (but not preceding) pharyngeals, and they are unaffected by uvulars.

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