School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    An Acoustic Study of Bininj Gun-Wok Medial Stop Consonants
    STOAKES, HM ; FLETCHER, J ; Butcher, (UNIVERSITY OF SAARLAND, 2007)
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    SPECTRAL AND DURATIONAL PROPERTIES OF VOWELS IN KUNWINJKU
    FLETCHER, J ; STOAKES, HM ; LOAKES, D ; Butcher, (UNIVERSITY OF SAARLAND, 2007)
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    A Blueprint for a Comprehensive Australian English Auditory-Visual Speech Corpus
    Burnham, D ; Ambikairajah, E ; Arciuli, J ; Bennamoun, M ; Best, CT ; Bird, S ; Butcher, AR ; Cassidy, S ; Chetty, G ; Cox, FM ; Cutler, A ; Dale, R ; Epps, JR ; Fletcher, JM ; Goecke, R ; Grayden, DB ; Hajek, JT ; Ingram, JC ; Ishihara, S ; Kemp, N ; Kinoshita, Y ; Kuratate, T ; Lewis, TW ; Loakes, DE ; Onslow, M ; Powers, DM ; Rose, P ; Togneri, R ; Tran, D ; Wagner, M (Cascadilla Press, 2009)
    Contemporary speech science is driven by the availability of large, diverse speech corpora. Such infrastructure underpins research and technological advances in various practical, socially beneficial and economically fruitful endeavours, from ASR to hearing prostheses. Unfortunately, speech corpora are not easy to come by because they are both expensive to collect and are not favoured by the usual funding sources as their collection per se does not fall under the classification of ‘research’. Nevertheless they provide the sine qua non for many avenues of research endeavour in speech science. The only publicly available Australian speech corpus is the 12-year-old Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL) database (see http://andosl.anu.edu.au/; Millar, Dermody, Harrington, & Vonwillar, 1990), which is now outmoded due to its small number of participants, just a single recording session per speaker, low fidelity, audio-only rather than AV data, its lack of disordered speech, and limited coverage of indigenous and ethnocultural Australian English (AusE) variants. There are more up-to-date UK and US English language corpora, but these are mostly audio-only, and use of these for AusE purposes is not optimal, and results in inaccuracies.
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    Big words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon
    EVANS, N ; FLETCHER, J ; ROSS, BB (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008)
    This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placement within the verbal word in Dalabon, a polysynthetic Australian language of Arnhem Land. Though the phenomenon is incipient and in two sample texts occurs in only around 4% of verbs, there are clear possibilities for interrupting the grammatical word by pause after the pronominal prefix and some associated material at the left edge, though these within-word pauses are significantly shorter, on average, than those between words. Within-word pause placement is not random, but is restricted to certain affix boundaries; it requires that the paused-after material be at least dimoraic, and that the remaining material in the verbal word be at least disyllabic. Bininj Gun-wok, another polysynthetic language closely related to Dalabon, does not allow pauses to interrupt the verbal word, and the Dalabon development appears to be tied up with certain morphological innovations that have increased the proportion of closed syllables in the pronominal prefix zone of the verb. Though only incipient and not yet phonologized, pause placement in Dalabon verbs suggests a phonology-driven route by which polysynthetic languages may ultimately become less morphologically complex by fracturing into smaller units.