The Leipzig-Jakarta list as a means to test Old English / Old Norse mutual intelligibility

The use of basic word lists has long been common in the fields of second language acquisition and language typology. The application to the study of mutual intelligibility between closely related languages on the other hand has never gained much traction. This article will analyse the degree of mutual intelligibility between the vocabularies of Old English (Anglian) and Old Norse (Old Icelandic) with the use of the Leipzig-Jakarta List which ranks vocabulary by their resistance to borrowing. The entries were transliterated to the International Phonetic Alphabet and truncated so that only the word-roots remained. The entries were then compared using a rule-set based on phonetic deviations, the so-called Levenshtein Distance and a method derived from it called ALINE. The study finds a relatively low phonetic distance between the lists and concludes that they are overall close enough to be mutually intelligible.

Verbal humor

This chapter deals with puns. The classification of puns is discussed and a basic definition of pun is provided: a text in which a sequence of sounds must be interpreted with a formal reference to a second sequence of sounds and two incongruous meanings are triggered by this process. Puns may come from ambiguity, or paronymy (puns that are similar in sound). The phonetic distance is the measure of how far two paronyms may differ and still be considered puns. The position of the connector (the ambiguous or paronymic element) and the disjunctor (the element in the text that triggers the recognition of the pun) are discussed. A Cratylistic motivated folk-theory of language is shown to underlie puns in the minds of speakers. Finally, a discussion of the psycholinguistics of puns completes the chapter.

Development of voice onset time in an ongoing phonetic differentiation in Austrian German plosives: Reversing a near-merger

Sound change in the form of plosive mergers has been reported for a variety of languages and is the result of a reduction of phonetic distance between two (or more) sounds. The present study is concerned with the opposite development of phonetic differentiation in plosives (akin to a phonetic split), a less commonly reported phenomenon that is taking place in Austrian German at the moment. A previously small (or null) phonetic distinction between fortis and lenis plosives – a presumed near-merger – is gradually developing into a clear phonetic contrast in younger speakers. In the present study, voice onset time of word-initial plosives was measured in two generations of Austrian speakers (born in the middle and at the end of the 20th century), yielding an ongoing phonetic differentiation where the voice onset time of lenis consonants is shortened while, at the same time, that of fortis consonants is lengthened. These results present an insight into the recent diachronic development of Austrian German and the changes in plosive production that are currently taking place.

Towards Modeling Second Dialect Speech Learning: The Production of Bogota [s] in Ciudad Bolivar by Speakers of Three Different Varieties of Colombian Spanish

This study investigates the second dialect production of Bogota Spanish /s/ in coda position by speakers of three different varieties of Colombian Spanish, who have been in contact in Ciudad Bolivar, a community located in Bogota, Colombia. The study has three aims. First, it will examine the role of phonetic distance in the acquisition of /s/ production. Second, it will determine the linguistic factors that constrain the realization of /s/ sound by the speakers of the three varieties studied. Third, it will look into the role of extralinguistic factors in the production of /s/. A total of 2322 tokens extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 50 participants were acoustically analyzed in PRAAT. Statistical analyses were conducted using GoldVarb. The results showed the highest rate of [s] was produced by the speakers of the Eastern Andean variety, followed by the Western Andean, and then by the Coastal variety, suggesting that first dialect phonological processes may affect the acquisition of second dialect sounds. Consistent with previous studies that have examined /s/ variation and change, the linguistic factors position in the word, following segment, and syllable stress were also predictors of /s/ in second dialect production. The extralinguistic factors of age of arrival, age, and gender also had a significant effect on /s/ production in this study. Implications are discussed for models of second dialect speech learning.

Memory is one representation not many: Evidence against wormholes in memory

Memory search has long been pictured as taking place on a high-dimensional landscape. However, if people are able to cut corners in this landscape by dynamically shifting attention between the space’s dimensions to connect distant locations, then this may give rise to wormholes in memory much like those of Einstein-Rosen in external space. Alternatively, if search is constrained to one static landscape, then moving between distant locations necessarily means traveling through the intermediate space. To distinguish between these two scenarios, we had people name all the countries they could think of (verbal fluency task) in three different conditions. When people were free to retrieve countries in whatever fashion they liked, they relied on at least three dimensions: predominantly on spatial distances on the map and to lesser extent on phonetic distance and country frequency in media. However, when people were asked to retrieve countries either by the letters of the alphabet or along country borders, people’s retrieval sequences deviated from the “free” default, consistent with the instructed strategy. This shift in retrieval patterns did not affect the number of retrieved countries nor their distribution, but it did lead to increases in retrieval times. These increases in retrieval time scaled to the extent that the retrieval strategy disagreed with the default, supporting the notion of a static rather a dynamic landscape. We conclude that when people are searching for countries, irrespective of what guides their search, they are largely searching the same underlying memory landscape.

New Perspectives On Automatic And Morphophonological Alternations: Harmonic Processes In Two Peninsular Varieties Of Spanish

The present study investigated vowel harmony (VH) in two varieties of Peninsular Spanish - Eastern Andalusian and Montañes. Despite both varieties exhibiting VH, the triggers and targets for each variety result in metaphonic alternations that are quite distinct. Although previous research has extensively documented the VH of Andalusia and Montañes, no study has yet systematically compared the two using a singular metric for determining automatic (i.e., phonological) and morphophonological alternations.To address these questions, VH in each variety is described in detail and then classified as either an automatic or morphophonological alternation according to the following eight criteria indicated in Haspelmath and Sims (2010): phonological versus morphological or lexical conditioning, phonetic coherency, phonetic distance, restriction to derived environments, extension to loanwords, sensitivity to speech-style, creation of new segments, and restriction to the word level. In order to gain a more compete understanding of the morphology-phonology interface in Spanish, we explore similarities and differences in the VH of Eastern Andalusia and of the north of Spain. We seek to determine if VH in each region is more characteristic of automatic or morphophonological alternations.An in-depth analysis of the VH in each variety is revealed that a binary classification was less appropriate than viewing these alternations on a continuum. The nuanced representation of these alternations on a continuum is a unique contribution to the literature on Spanish VH and provides a fresh perspective on the nature of VH alternations in Peninsular Spanish.

Phonetic distance and dialect clustering on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau

The goal of this paper is to use string edit distance to describe the synchronic relationship between the Tibetan speech varieties located on the Northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. String edit distance provides a statistical way to compare a large number of linguistic features, in essence producing a statistical bundle of isoglosses. In this way, it can be used as a tool in dialect mapping and synchronic clustering. In this paper, the aggregate distance matrix produced by string edit distance reveals that the great degree of phonetic continuity on the grasslands of the northeastern edge of the plateau is matched by an equal degree of phonetic discontinuity in the mountains forming the eastern border of the plateau. While the dialects located on the grasslands can be grouped together into one cluster, the dialects in the mountains can be grouped together into six clusters.