Phonetic Theory
Linguistics 210

In this edition of Ling 210 we will explore four key topics of phonetic theory. Our approach will be to evaluate a series of target articles in light of the methodological and theoretical context provided by a set of background readings.

Time: F 12:30-3:30 Location:1303 Dwinelle Hall
Course Code: 52578 No. of Units: 3

Instructor: Keith Johnson, 1222 Dwinelle Hall
keithjohnson@berkeley.edu

Office hours: TuTh 1:30-2:30, and by appointment.

Coursework: For each of four topics in phonetic theory we will choose a recent paper (the "target article"), read background papers to situate the current work in its research context and then read and respond to the current article. Students taking the course for credit are expected to (1) present readings to the class, (2) write a short review article on each of the target articles, and (3) write a research proposal in one of the four topics covered in the course..

1. Phonetic convergence. There is evidence in personal experience, and in controlled research studies, that people start to sound like each other when they talk to each other. This process of subconscious imitation is potentially important for understanding language sound change and many aspects of sociolinguistic phonetic convergence.

Background:

Bourhis, R. Y. & Giles, H. (1977). The language of intergroup distinctiveness. In Language, Ethnicity, and Intergroup Relations, edited by Howard Giles. New York: Academic Press. 119-135.

Sancier, M.L. and Fowler, C.A. (1997) Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English. Journal of Phonetics 25(4), 421-436.

Goldinger, S.D. (1998) Echoes of Echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review 105 (2), 251-279.

Shockley, K., Sabadini, L., and Fowler, C.A. (2004). Imitation in shadowing words. Percept. & Psychophys. 66:422-429.

Pardo, J.S. (2006) On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction . J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 119(4), 2382-2393.

Delvaux, V. and Soquet, A. (2007). The influence of ambient speech on adult speech productions through unintentional imitation. Phonetica 64, 145-173.

Evans, B.G. and Iverson, P. (2007). Plasticity in vowel perception and production: A study of accent change in young adults. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121,3814-3826.

Nielsen, K. (2008). The specificity of allophonic variability and its implications for accounts of speech perception. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA.

Target Article (due Sept. 18)

2. Gestural timing in speech production. In this section of the course we will study the cognitive processes of speech production by focussing on the problem of gestural timing. We will focus on dynamical systems models of speech production and the problem of intergestural coordination.

Saltzman, E. & Munhall, K. (1989). A dynamical approach to gestural patterning in speech production. Ecological Psychology, 1, 333-382.

Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis. (2000). Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures. Bulletin de la Communication Parlee. 5:25-34.

O'Dell, M.L. & Nieminen, T. (2008) Coulpled oscillator model for speech timing: Overview and examples.

Gick, B; Campbell, F; Oh, S; Tamburri-Watt, I. (2006) Toward universals in the gestural organization of syllables: A cross-linguistic study of liquids. Journal of Phonetics 34(1), 49-72.

Byrd, D; Lee, S.; Carnpos-Astorkiza R (2008) Phrase boundary effects on the temporal kinematics of sequential tongue tip consonants. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 123(6), 4456-4465.

Saltzman, E., Nam, H., Krivokapic, J., & Goldstein, L. (2008). A task-dynamic toolkit for modeling the effects of prosodic structure on articulation. Proceedings of the speech prosody 2008 conference, Campinas, Brazil.

Cummins, F. & Port, R.F. (1998) Rhythmic constraints on stress timing in English Journal of Phonetics 26, 145-171.

Port, R.F. (2003) Meter and speech. Journal of Phonetics 31(3-4), 599-611

Target Article ()

Tilsen, S. (2009) Multitimescale dynamical interactions between speech rhythm and gesture. Cognitive Science 33, 839-879.

3. Pronunciation Variation. Pronunciation in conversational speech is an emerging area of key importance in phonetics. This area of study opens new and important questions regarding the processes of speech production and perception. Our focus in this section will be on studies that use large "corpora" of conversational speech.

Background

Keating, P. (1997) Word-level phonetic variation in large speech corpora. ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics.

Fosler-Lussier, E. & Morgan, N. (1999) Effects of speaking rate and word frequency on pronunciation in conversational speech. Speech Communication 29 (2-4), 137-158.

Ernestus, M., Lahey, M., Verhees, F. & Baayen, R.H. (2006) Lexical frequency and voice assimilation. JASA 120(2), 1040-1051.

Sumner, M. & Samuel, A.G. (2005) Perception and representation of regular variation: The case of final /t/. Journal of Memory and Language 52(3), 322-338.

Janse, E., Nooteboom, S.G. & Quene, H. (2007) Coping with gradient forms of /t/-deletion and lexical ambiguity in spoken word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes 22(2), 161-200.

Mitterer, H., Csepe, V., Honbolygo, F., & Blomert, L. (2006) The recognition of phonologically assimilated words does not depend on specific language experience. Cognitive Science 30(3), 451-479.

Pitt, M.A. (2009a) The strength and time course of lexical activation of pronunciation variants. J. Exp. Psych: HPP 35(3), 896-910.

Ranbom, L.J., Connine, C.M., Yudman, E.M. (2009) Is phonological context always used to recognize variant forms in spoken word recognition? The role of variant frequency and context distribution. J. Exp. Psych.: HPP 35(4), 1205-1220.

Gow, D.W. and Im, A.M. (2004) Cross-linguistic examiniation of assimilation context effects. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 279-296.

Target Article: (report due Nov. 6)

Pitt, M.A. (2009b) How are pronunciation variants of spoken words recognized? A test of generalization to newly learned words. Journal of Memory and Language 61(1), 19-36.

4. Neurophonetics. This section provides a sampling of research on the neuropsychology of speech perception. We will start with a very interesting and controversial (?) overview paper and then sample several different techniques and results in the literature. Our target article looks at the influence of lexical knowledge on speech perception. One of the questions I will be thinking about in this section is "if Hickok and Poeppel are right, how can Gow et al. have found what they did?" I hope that by the end of the section that will seem like an interesting question.

Background

Hickok, G. & Poeppel, D. (2004) Dorsal and ventral streams: a framework for understanding aspects of the functional anatomy of language. Cognition 92, 67-99.

Blumstein, S.E., Baker, E. and Goodglass, H. (1977) Phonological factors in auditory comprehension in aphasia. Neuropsychologia 15, 19-30.

Jacquemot, C., Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Bachoud-Lévi, A-C. (2002) Comprehending spoken words without hearing phonemes: A case study. Cortex 38, 869-873.

Burton, M.W., Small, S.L., Blumstein, S.E. (2000) The role of segmentation in phonological processing: An fMRI investigation. J. Cog. Neurosci. 12(4), 679-690.

Myers, E. (2007) Dissociable effects of phonetic competition and category typicality in a phonetic categorization task: An fMRI investigation. Neuropsychologia 45, 1463-1473.

Benson, R.R., Whalen, D.H., Richardson, M., Swainson, B., Clark, V.P., Lai, S. & Liberman, A.M. (2001) Parametrically dissociating speech and nonspeech perception in the brain using fMRI. Brain and Language 78, 364-396.

Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Dupoux, E., Gout, A. (2000) Electrophysiological correlates of phonological processing: A cross-linguistic study. J. Cog. Neurosci. 12(4), 635-647.

Krishnan, A., Swaminathan, J., Gandour, J.T. (2008) Experience-dependent enhancement of linguistic pitch representation in the brainstem is not specific to a speech context. J. Cog. Neurosci. 21(6), 1092-1105.

Target Article: ()

Gow, D.W., Segawa, J.A., Ahlfors, S.P. & Lin, F-H. (2008) Lexical influences on speech perception: A Granger causality analysis of MEG and EEG source estimates. NeuroImage 43, 614-623.