Title and abstract from colloquium talk at USC, Sept 23, 2019:

The temporal geometry of phonology

 Abstract: Languages differ in how the spatial dimensions of the vocal tract, i.e., constriction location/degree, are organized to express phonological form. Languages also differ in temporal geometry, i.e., how sequences of vocal tract constrictions are organized in time. The most comprehensive accounts of temporal organization to date have been developed within the Articulatory Phonology framework, where phonological representations take the form of temporally coordinated action units, known as gestures (Browman & Goldstein, 1986; Gafos & Goldstein, 2012; Goldstein & Pouplier, 2014). A key property of Articulatory Phonology is the feed-forward control of articulation by ensembles of temporally organized gestures.

In this talk, I first make explicit how the temporal geometry of phonology conditions language-specific patterns of phonetic variation. Through computational simulation, I illustrate how distinct temporal geometries for syllable types and segment types (complex segments vs. segment sequences) structure phonetic variation. Model predictions are tested on experimental phonetic data from English (Shaw, Durvasula, & Kochetov, 2019; Shaw & Gafos, 2015), Arabic (Shaw, Gafos, Hoole, & Zeroual, 2011), Japanese (Shaw & Kawahara, 2018) and Russian (Kochetov, 2006; Shaw et al., 2019). Phonological structure formalized as ensembles of local coordination relations between articulatory gestures (Gafos, 2002) and implemented in stochastic models (Gafos, Charlow, Shaw, & Hoole, 2014; Shaw & Gafos, 2015) reliably describes patterns of temporal variation in these languages. These results crucially rely on feed-forward control of gestures. I close with data from Mandarin Chinese which presents a potential challenge to strict feed-forward control. Unexpectedly, inter-gestural coordination in Mandarin appears to be sensitive to the spatial position of articulators—gestures begin earlier in time just when they are farther in space from their target. To account for the Mandarin data, I explore the possibility that gestures are temporal organized according to spatial targets, which requires a combination of feedback and feedforward control, and discuss some implications of the proposal for speech perception and sound change.

References

Browman, C., & Goldstein, L. (1986). Towards an Articulatory Phonology. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 219-252.

Gafos, Charlow, S., Shaw, J. A., & Hoole, P. (2014). Stochastic time analysis of syllable-referential intervals and simplex onsets. Journal of Phonetics, 44, 152-166.

Gafos, A. (2002). A grammar of gestural coordination. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 20, 269-337.

Gafos, A., & Goldstein, L. (2012). Articulatory representation and organization. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. K. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 220-231).

Goldstein, L., & Pouplier, M. (2014). The Temporal Organization of Speech. The Oxford handbook of language production, 210-240.

Kochetov, A. (2006). Syllable position effects and gestural organization: Articulatory evidence from Russian. In L. G. Goldstein, D. H. Whalen, & C. Best (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology 8 (pp. 565-588). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Shaw, J. A., Durvasula, K., & Kochetov, A. 2019. The temporal basis of complex segments. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 676-680). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Shaw, J. A., & Gafos, A. I. (2015). Stochastic Time Models of Syllable Structure. PLoS One, 10(5), e0124714 0124711-0124736.

Shaw, J. A., Gafos, A. I., Hoole, P., & Zeroual, C. (2011). Dynamic invariance in the phonetic expression of syllable structure: a case study of Moroccan Arabic consonant clusters. Phonology, 28(3), 455-490.

Shaw, J. A., & Kawahara, S. (2018). The lingual articulation of devoiced /u/ in Tokyo Japanese. Journal of Phonetics, 66, 100-119. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2017.09.007

2019 ICPHS proceedings papers are now available online: https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/

Mine are also below as pdfs.

Shaw, J. A., Durvasula, K., & Kochetov, A. 2019. The temporal basis of complex segments. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 676-680). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.  pdf

+Zhang, M., +Geissler, C., & Shaw, J. A. (2019). Gestural representations of tone in Mandarin: Evidence from timing alternations. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 1803-1807). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.  pdf

Shaw, J. A., Best, C. T., Docherty, G., Evans, B., Foulkes, P., Hay, J., & Mulak, K. (2019). An information theoretic perspective on perceptual structure: cross-accent vowel perception. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 582-586). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. pdf

New paper published open access in:  Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. The full text can be accessed through the DOI at the citation listed below.

Title: Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation

Abstract: In two categorization experiments using phonotactically legal nonce words, we tested Australian English listeners’ perception of all vowels in their own accent as well as in four less familiar regional varieties of English which differ in how their vowel realizations diverge from Australian English: London, Yorkshire, Newcastle (UK), and New Zealand. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that amongst the vowel differences described in sociophonetic studies and attested in our stimulus materials, only a small subset caused greater perceptual difficulty for Australian listeners than for the corresponding Australian English vowels. We discuss this perceptual tolerance for vowel variation in terms of how perceptual assimilation of phonetic details into abstract vowel categories may contribute to recognizing words across variable pronunciations. Experiment 2 determined whether short-term multi-talker exposure would facilitate accent adaptation, particularly for those vowels that proved more difficult to categorize in Experiment 1. For each accent separately, participants listened to a pre-test passage in the nonce word accent but told by novel talkers before completing the same task as in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous studies showing rapid adaptation to talker-specific variation, our listeners’ subsequent vowel assimilations were largely unaffected by exposure to other talkers’ accent-specific variation.

How to Cite: Shaw, J. A., Best, C. T., Docherty, G., Evans, B. G., Foulkes, P., Hay, J., & Mulak, K. E. (2018). Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology,9(1), 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.87

Talk (with Wei-rong Chen) at LabPhon16 – Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology
June 19-22, 2018, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

Title: Variation in the spatial position of articulators influences the relative timing between consonants and vowels: evidence from CV timing in Mandarin Chinese

Link to abstract

A new paper, ”Effects of Suprisal and Entropy on vowel duration in Japanese”, is now available online at Language and Speech. The abstract and full citation are below.

Abstract: Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant-vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

Citation: Shaw, J. A., & Kawahara, S. (2017). Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on vowel duration in Japanese. Language and speech, 0023830917737331, 1-35. pdf

“The lingual articulation of devoiced/u/in Tokyo Japanese” is now available online at Journal of Phonetics and slated to appear in the January 2018 issue. Abstract and full citation are below:

In Tokyo Japanese, /u/ is typically devoiced between two voiceless consonants. Whether the lingual vowel gesture is influenced by devoicing or present at all in devoiced vowels remains an open debate, largely because relevant articulatory data has not been available. We report ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA) data that addresses this question. We analyzed both the trajectory of the tongue dorsum across VC1uC2V sequences as well as the timing of C1 and C2. These analyses provide converging evidence that /u/ in devoicing contexts is optionally targetless—the lingual gesture is either categorically present or absent but seldom reduced. When present, the magnitude of the lingual gesture in devoiced /u/ is comparable to voiced vowel counterparts. Although all speakers produced words with and without a vowel height target for /u/, the frequency of targetlessness varied across speakers and items. The timing between C1 and C2, the consonants flanking /u/ was also effected by devoicing but to varying degrees across items. The items with the greatest effect of devoicing on this inter-consonantal interval were also the items with the highest frequency of vowel height targetlessness for devoiced /u/.

Shaw, J. A., & Kawahara, S. (2018). The lingual articulation of devoiced/u/in Tokyo Japanese. Journal of Phonetics, 66, 100-119.

I gave a talk (with Shigeto Kawahara) at the Annual Meeting on Phonology at New York University entitled “Consequences of high vowel deletion for syllabification in Japanese” The abstract is available here.

Our paper, A comparison of acoustic and articulatory methods for analyzing vowel differences across dialects: Data from American and Australian English, appeared as part of the special issue of The Journal of Acoustical Society of America focused on Advancing Methods for Analyzing Dialect Variation. Cynthia Clopper’s introduction to the special issue is available here. Ours was one of a handful of contributions to the special issue arguing for the importance of articulatory data in interpreting differences in formant values across dialects.

Abstract: In studies of dialect variation, the articulatory nature of vowels is sometimes inferred from formant values using the following heuristic: F1 is inversely correlated with tongue height and F2 is inversely correlated with tongue backness. This study compared vowel formants and corresponding lingual articulation in two dialects of English, standard North American English, and Australian English. Five speakers of North American English and four speakers of Australian English were recorded producing multiple repetitions of ten monophthongs embedded in the /sVd/ context. Simultaneous articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography. Results show that there are significant correlations between tongue position and formants in the direction predicted by the heuristic but also that the relations implied by the heuristic break down under specific conditions. Articulatory vowel spaces, based on tongue dorsum position, and acoustic vowel spaces, based on formants, show systematic misalignment due in part to the influence of other articulatory factors, including lip rounding and tongue curvature on formant values. Incorporating these dimensions into dialect comparison yields a richer description and a more robust understanding of how vowel formant patterns are reproduced within and across dialects.

Blackwood-Ximenes, A., J.A. Shaw, C. Carignan. 2017. A comparison of acoustic and articulatory methods for analyzing vowel differences across dialects: Data from American and Australian English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142, 363-377; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4991346. pdf

Abstract for my poster (with Shigeto Kawahara) at the Chicago Linguistic Society Workshop on Dynamic Modeling in Phonetics and Phonology coming up on May 24th:

Modelling articulatory dynamics in the frequency domain

We explore a new approach to modelling articulatory dynamics in terms of frequency components. Our data comes from fleshpoint tracking using Electromagnetic Articulography. Using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), we decomposed tongue dorsum movement trajectories over VCu̥CV and VCuCV sequences in Japanese into cosine components of differing frequency and amplitude. We demonstrate that four such components represent the signal with high precision. Making use of these compact representations, we evaluate whether the devoiced vowel in Japanese is specified for a lingual articulatory gesture or whether it is targetless. We evaluated these competing hypotheses through simulation. Tongue dorsum trajectories were simulated from DCT components with either zero amplitude for the frequency component corresponding to [u̥] or with the amplitude for this component found for the voiced counterpart [u]. The simulated data were then used to classify the experimental data. On a token-by-token basis, we assessed the posterior probability of a lingual gesture for [u̥]. Results revealed that, under some conditions, Japanese speakers produce transitions between consonants without an intervening vowel. More broadly, we see promise in using frequency spaces to link low dimensional phonological hypothesis to time-dependent articulatory data.

I’ll be giving a talk at the Phonetics and Experimental Phonology lab at New York University on Friday, April 28th.