Multimodal dataset of real-time 2D and static 3D MRI of healthy French speakers

The study of articulatory gestures has a wide spectrum of applications, notably in speech production and recognition. Sets of phonemes, as well as their articulation, are language-specific; however, existing MRI databases mostly include English speakers. In our present work, we introduce a dataset acquired with MRI from 10 healthy native French speakers. A corpus consisting of synthetic sentences was used to ensure a good coverage of the French phonetic context. A real-time MRI technology with temporal resolution of 20 ms was used to acquire vocal tract images of the participants speaking. The sound was recorded simultaneously with MRI, denoised and temporally aligned with the images. The speech was transcribed to obtain phoneme-wise segmentation of sound. We also acquired static 3D MR images for a wide list of French phonemes. In addition, we include annotations of spontaneous swallowing.

Vocalic Intrusions in Consonant Clusters in Child-Directed vs. Adult-Directed Speech

In this paper, we investigate a prosodic-phonetic feature in child-directed speech within a dynamic, complex, interactive theoretical framework. We focus on vocalic intrusions, commonly occurring in Norwegian word initial consonant clusters. We analysed child-directed speech from nine Norwegian-speaking mothers to their children, aged 2;6, 4, and 6 years, and compared the incidence and duration of vocalic intrusions in initial consonant clusters in these data with those in adult-directed speech and child speech. When viewed overall, vocalic intrusion was found to be similar in incidence in child- and adult-directed speech. However, closer examination revealed differential behaviour in child-directed speech for certain conditions. Firstly, a difference emerged for one particular phonetic context: While vocalic intrusions in /Cr/ clusters are frequent in adult-directed speech, their presence is near-categorical in child-directed speech. Secondly, we found that the duration of vocalic intrusions was longer in child- than in adult-directed speech, but only when directed to 2;6-year-olds. We argue that vocalic intrusions in child-directed speech may have both a bonding as well as a didactic function, and that these may vary according to the age of the child being addressed.

A Variationist Analysis of Second Language Spanish Trill Production

The current study examines the production of the Spanish trill by advanced second language (L2) learners using a variationist approach. Findings indicate that learners produced less multiple occlusion trills than native speakers and their variation was not constrained by the same factors as native speakers. Phonetic context conditioned the use of the multiple occlusion variant for native speakers, whereas frequency and speaker sex conditioned this variation for learners, and in the opposite direction of effect as expected from previous native speaker research. Nevertheless, the majority of tokens produced by learners were other variants also produced by native speakers, and when the variation between native and non-native variants was examined, learners’ variation was conditioned not only by frequency, but also phonetic context. Some of the phonetic contexts in which learners produced non-native variants were comparable to those in which native speakers were least likely to produce the multiple occlusion trill, indicating that articulatory constraints governed variation in trill production similarly for both groups. Thus, although L2 learners do not exhibit native-like trill variation, they appear to be developing toward a more native-like norm. These insights provide support for adopting a multifaceted variationist approach to the study of L2 phonological variable structures.

Oznaczanie palatalności l w drukach polskich z XVI wieku

The article presents the results of an analysis of marking of palatal l in prints from the source database of Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku (16th-century Polish language dictionary). The analysis takes into account the various conditions of this phenomenon: functional, frequency, contextual, textual, regional and publishing ones. The analysis shows that the rare records of the consonant l’ certified in the papers originated from the spelling of manuscripts. Most often, they appear in printed texts from the first half of the sixteenth century, mainly in the earliest texts and dictionaries, as well as in texts originating from southern Poland and southern Borderlands. Marking of palatal l in printed materials is characterised by a high degree of lexicalisation and dependence on the phonetic context and less dependent on the place of publication.

Gradual conventionalization of pragmatic inferences

The alternation in Spanish between y and e on the one hand, and u and o in the other, is examined. It is proposed that the standard account under which the choice of one variant over the other is sensitive only to the phonetic context is incomplete. Specifically, the paper argues that pragmatic inferences that typically appear cross-linguistically associated with these connectors, and that result in asymmetric interpretations, are not favoured in Spanish with the morphological variants e and u, which favour symmetric interpretations. The paper proposes that the relevant pragmatic inferences have been partially conventionalized for y and o, but that this conventionalization has not occurred in the case of e and u for the reason that they are much less frequently used. Thus, discussion and data offer a view of a stage in a gradual process of semantic change via conventionalization of pragmatic inferences.

Acquisition of sociophonetic variation

This study investigates the acquisition of nativelike variation in the production of Spanish /d/ by English-speaking learners. Specifically, we examine the production of /d/ in word-internal intervocalic position in the speech of 13 highly advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and 13 native speakers (NSs) of Spanish in digitally-recorded sociolinguistic interviews. The analysis includes a discrete categorization of /d/ realization based on spectrographic examination (stop vs. spirant vs. deleted) and a continuous intensity difference measure. Tokens were coded for grammatical category, surrounding segments, stress, number of syllables, and lexical frequency. Results indicate that both NNSs and NSs exhibit /d/ spirantization and deletion, but these two processes are affected by different factors both between and across groups: NNS deletion patterns are predicted most significantly by lexical frequency, whereas degree of spirantization is influenced by articulatory/contextual factors of phonetic context and stress. NS patterns for both processes are influenced by most factors in a similar manner.