School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemBig words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon(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.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntonational rises and dialogue acts in the Australian English map task(Sage Publications, 2002)Eight map task dialogs representative of General Australian English, were coded for speaker turn, and for dialog acts using a version of SWBD-DAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. Dialog acts corresponding to information requests were consistently realized as high-onset high rises ((L +)H*H-H%). However low-onset high rises (e.g., L*H-H%) corresponded to a wider range of other "forward-looking" communicative functions, such as statements and action directives, and were rarely associated with information requests. Low-range rises (L*L-H%), by contrast, were mostly associated with backward-looking functions, like acknowledgments and responses, that is they were almost always used when the speaker was referring to what had occurred previously in the discourse. Two kinds of fall-rise tunes were also examined: the low-range fall-rise (H *L-H%) and the expanded range fall-rise (H* + L H-H%). The latter shared similar dialog functions with statement high rises, and were almost never associated with yes/no questions, whereas the low-range fall-rises were associated more with backward-looking functions, such as responses or acknowledgments. The Australian English statement high rise (usually realized as a L* H-H% tune) or "uptalk," appears to be more closely related to the classic continuation rises, than to yes/no question rises of typologically-related varieties of English.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFactors affecting the acquisition of vowel phonemes by pre-linguistically deafened cochlear implant users learning Cantonese(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2006-11-01)This paper describes the development of vowel inventories in 12 pre-linguistically deafened Cantonese-speaking cochlear implant users. The aim of the research was to understand the role of linguistic, perceptual and articulatory factors in determining the rate and order of vowel acquisition in this population of children. Rate and order of vowel acquisition were reported against two criteria. The "targetless" criterion for production required at least two correct productions of a vowel in a sample of speech. The second or "target" criterion required that a vowel first met the targetless criterion and was further produced correctly in the appropriate phonological context at least 50% of the time. Factors associated with articulatory difficulty were shown to explain the composition of pre-implant vowel inventories. Subsequent to receiving an implant, all children demonstrated a steady and systematic expansion in the size of their vowel inventories though the rate of acquisition varied between individuals. The order of vowel acquisition was affected by a combination of linguistic and articulatory factors. The paper concludes by discussing the clinical implications of these findings for helping children develop good spoken language skills subsequent to receiving an implant.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAn EMA/EPG study of vowel-to-vowel articulation across velars in Southern British English(Taylor & Francis, 2004-09-01)Recent studies have attested that the extent of transconsonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is at least partly dependent on degree of prosodic accentuation, in languages like English. A further important factor is the mutual compatibility of consonant and vowel gestures associated with the segments in question. In this study two speakers of standard southern British English produced sequences of [symbols: see text] sequences where the identity of V was either /i/ or /a/, and nuclear accent placement was varied systematically. A combined technique of EPA and EMA was used, as well as spectrographic measures. Results indicate that there were only minimal transconsonantal coarticulatory effects between the two full vowels /i/ and /a/, but there was evidence of dissimilation of the flanking vowels, particularly in /'kaki/ and /'kika/ sequences, suggesting that prosodically strong vowels resist vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Initial schwa, however, was highly coarticulated with following /a/ and /i/, and the spatial extent of this coarticulatory effect was correlated with degree of accentuation, particularly in the case of a following /i/ vowel. The velar stops showed a high level of coarticulation with flanking /i/ vowels, supporting earlier claims by Fowler and Brancazio, that this consonant is 'less' resistant to coarticulatory pressures than others in English.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAn acoustic phonetic analysis of intonational prominence in two Australian languages(Cambridge University Press, 2002)The intonational typology of two Northern Australian languages, Dalabon and the Kundedjnjenghmi dialect of Bininj Gun-wok, suggests that these languages can be analyzed within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonation as having two kinds of intonational events that serve to demarcate the boundaries of intonational phrases: pitch accents and boundary tones. Both languages have also previously been described as having lexical stress. In this study, the acoustic correlates of syllables associated with intonational pitch accents, were measured, namely, F0, duration, RMS amplitude and vowel quality, in one lengthy narrative text from each language. The duration of intonational phrase-final syllables was also measured. Results indicate that syllables associated with pitch accents are phonetically lengthened and have marginally higher RMS amplitude. However, there is little variation in vowel quality due to the presence of a pitch accent or intonational prominence. Final syllables are also lengthened at intonational phrase edges, indicating that duration is a cue to this level of prosodic constituency in these languages.