Anne Pycha

Lengthened affricates as a test case for the phonetics–phonology interface

Many phonetic and phonological processes resemble one another, which has led some researchers to suggest that phonetics and phonology are essentially the same. This study compares phonetic and phonological processes of consonant lengthening by analyzing duration measurements collected from Hungarian speakers (n=14). Affricates, which crucially possess a two-part structure, were placed in target positions. Results show that affricates regularly undergo phonetic lengthening at phrase boundaries, and the affected portion of the affricate is always that which lies closer to the boundary. Affricates also regularly undergo phonological lengthening when next to a geminating suffix, but the affected portion of the affricate is always the stop closure. Thus, while phonetic lengthening observes a strict respect for locality, phonological lengthening does not, and we conclude that the two processes are in fact quite different from one another.

Nonsyntactic ordering effects in noun incorporation

Abstract Despite the importance of ordering phenomena in typology and the visibility of Bakers analysis (1988, 1996) of noun incorporation in generative syntax, his prediction (1996: 25–30) that in syntactic incorporation the incorporated noun will always precede the verb root has yet to be tested typologically. Here we fill this gap and survey the known cases of object noun incorporation. The predicted order proves to be strongly preferred crosslinguistically and warrants recognition as a strong statistical universal. However, it is strongest in unproductive and fossilized contexts, the opposite of what is expected if the position of the incorporated noun is determined solely by principles of syntactic movement. The universal must therefore be nonsyntactic, perhaps morphological, in nature and appears to involve a preferred position for heads and/or for noun and verb roots within words. The same principle also shapes other noun-verb combinations in addition to noun incorporation.

Co-articulatory Cues for Communication: An Investigation of Five Environments:

We hypothesized that speakers adjust co-articulation in vowel–consonant (VC) sequences in order to provide listeners with enhanced perceptual cues to C, and that they do so specifically in those situations where primary cues to C place of articulation tend to be diminished. We tested this hypothesis in a speech production study of American English, measuring the duration and extent of VC formant transitions in five conditioning environments – consonant voicing, phrasal position, sentence accent, vowel quality, and consonant place – that modulate primary cues to C place in different ways. Results partially support our hypothesis. Although speakers did not exhibit greater temporal co-articulation in contexts that tend to diminish place cues, they did exhibit greater spatial co-articulation. This finding suggests that co-articulation serves specific communicative goals.

A test case for the phonetics- phonology interface: gemination restrictions in Hungarian*

Despite di!erences in parsimony and philosophical orientation, physical and abstract theories of phonology often make similar empirical predictions. This study examines a case where they do not: gemination restrictions in Hungarian. While both types of theory correctly prohibit the lengthening of a consonant when flanked by another consonant, they make di!erent predictions regarding both the relative duration changes within a target consonant and the applicability of restrictions to lengthening processes besides gemination. In two speech- production experiments, these predictions are evaluated by measuring stop and frication durations within a!ricates. Results show that relative duration changes occur, and that the restriction holds only for gemination, supporting an abstract theory. Yet results also indicate that gemination exhibits sensitivity to inherent durational di!erences between a!ricates, providing some support for a physical theory. Thus I argue that an adequate theory of phonology must include abstract constituents, alongside a limited, principled set of physical landmarks.

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Speaking in Clicks

The article reports that according to the biomechanical models created by researchers, that simulated clicks in vocal tracts with alveolar ridges of varying sizes, tracts with large ridges allows less air to be trapped in mouth, requiring more muscular force to produce a click.

False memories for varying and non-varying words in American English

ABSTRACT Certain types of variation are licenced by phonotactics. For example, the American English phoneme /t/ varies word-finally (ba[t] ∼ ba[ʔ]), but not word-initially. We used a Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory paradigm to pursue the hypothesis that, given comparable information in the speech stream, varying words (such as bat) activate less strongly than non-varying words (such as tip). We presented listeners with lists of phonological neighbours, such as rat, ban, bet, etc. (neighbours of bat), and lip, tin, type, etc. (neighbours of tip), followed by recall and recognition tasks. Results showed that participants often “remembered” the unheard words bat and tip, replicating previous work indicating that activation from neighbours can produce false memories. Most importantly, false memory rates were significantly lower for bat compared to tip, suggesting that the presence of phonotactic conditions for variability affected the lexical activation of a word, compared to the absence of such conditions.

Are suffixed words different? Evidence from a modified lexical decision task

We investigated whether listeners process suffixed words differently than prefixed words. We presented primes that combined a clear-speech root plus degraded-speech affix (such as kin-xx, where xx refers to degraded speech), and measured lexical decision RTs to subsequent clear targets (kin-ship). Degradation used low-pass filtering (< 500 Hz), such that affixes were speech-like but incomprehensible. Thus, the prime kin-xx sounds like a complete suffixed word, yet it is compatible with the target kin-ship and should not compete with it for activation. The crucial comparison was between prefixed (re-group) versus suffixed (kin-ship) targets, which were matched for frequency, familiarity, probability of phonotactic transition across morpheme boundary, and affix type-parsing ratio (Hay & Baayen, 2002). On each trial, participants heard a prime, a 1000 ms ISI, then a target to which they made a speeded decision. Pilot results (n = 5) suggest that comparable speech input activated suffixed roots less strongly ...

Mechanisms for remembering roots versus affixes in complex words

Previous research has demonstrated that listeners remember low-frequency words (fob) through explicit recollection, but high-frequency words (money) through implicit familiarity (Joordens & Hockley 2000). We hypothesize that a similar asymmetry in remembering occurs in morphologically complex words (bleakish), where root frequency (bleak) is always low relative to affix frequency (ish). In our experiment, which modifies a technique developed by Goldinger, Kleider & Shelley (1999), participants hear both complex and simple words at study. At test, they hear old and new words in which a portion of the stimulus is overlaid with background noise. For complex words, the masked portion is either the root or the affix; for simple words (polish), it is the corresponding pseudo-morpheme. Participants rate the subjective loudness of the noise on a five-point scale. Results do not indicate any difference in ratings between old and new words, although participants did give significantly softer ratings to root noise f...

The behavior of affricates under restricted lengthening conditions

This study uses affricates as a test case for lengthening processes in speech. In general, consonants can lengthen as the result of phonological factors, such as a geminating suffix, or as the result of phonetic factors such as position within a phrase (Keating et al. 2003, Byrd et al. 2000, 2005). In Hungarian and many other languages, however, the presence of an additional consonant restricts phonological lengthening because CCC clusters containing geminates are ill‐formed (Kenesei et al. 1998). Acoustic duration measurements were used to examine whether this restriction also holds for phonetic lengthening. Initial results from three male Hungarian speakers indicate that it does not. Consonants in phrase‐final position are significantly longer than their counterparts in phrase‐medial position, whether they stand alone or in a cluster. A focus on lengthened affricates, however, reveals that the ‘‘shape’’ of lengthening differs in these two conditions. Affricates in the stand‐alone condition lengthen in a lopsided fashion, showing increases primarily in frication duration; those in the cluster condition lengthen more symmetrically, with increases in both stop closure and frication durations. These findings provide new support for the idea that affricates possess different structures at different levels of analysis (Lombardi 1990, Clements 1999).