Egidio Marsico

Approaches to phonological complexity

The proposed volume draws on an interdisciplinary sketch of the phonetics-phonology interface in the light of complexity. Composed of several first-order contributions, it will consequently be a significant landmark at the time of the rise of several projects linking complexity and linguistics around the world.

Hemispheric asymmetries depend on the phonetic feature: A dichotic study of place of articulation and voicing in French stops

Dichotic listening experiments show a right-ear advantage (REA), reflecting a left-hemisphere (LH) dominance. However, we found a decrease in REA when the initial stop consonants of two simultaneous French CVC words differed in voicing rather than place of articulation (Experiment 1). This result suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) is more involved in voicing than in place processing. The voiceless-voiced contrast is realised as short positive vs. long negative VOT in French stop consonants, but as long vs. short positive VOT in English. We tested whether the relative involvement of the LH and RH is governed by their respective putative specialisation for short and long events. As expected, in French, the REA decreased when a voiced stop was presented to the left ear and a voiceless stop to the right ear (+V-V), whereas the REA had been shown to decrease for (-V+V) pairs in English. Additionally, voiced stops were more frequently reported among blend responses when a voiced consonant was presented to the left ear. In Experiment 2, VCV pairs were used to reduce the stimulus dominance effect for voiced consonants, which probably contributed to the low REA for (+V-V) pairs in Experiment 1. The reduction of the REA due to a voicing difference was maintained, which provides evidence for the relative independence of the mechanisms responsible for stimulus dominance and perceptual asymmetries in dichotic listening. The results are discussed in the light of the Asymmetric Sampling in Time (AST) model.

Bridging phonological system and lexicon: Insights from a corpus study of functional load

Abstract In this paper, we propose a functional and cross-language perspective on the organization of phonological systems based on the notion of functional load (FL). Using large corpora, we quantitatively characterize the relationships between phonological components (segments, stress and tones) by estimating their role at the lexical level. In a first analysis, we examine the relative contribution of each phonological subsystem to the pool of lexical distinctions and compare the results between two tonal (Cantonese and Mandarin) and seven non-tonal languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Swahili). The equal weight of vowels and tones in lexical distinction is confirmed as well as the phenomenon of consonantal bias – advocated in several psycholinguistic studies – in five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Swahili), with various corpus configurations in order to assess the influence of morphology and usage frequency. Our results reflect a strong preference toward consonant-based distinctions rather than vowel-based distinctions in a reduced (lemmatized) configuration of the lexicon. This preference is nevertheless modulated when inflectional morphology and usage frequency were considered. A second analysis consists in a cross-language comparison of the internal FL distribution within vocalic and consonantal subsystems in nine languages. We observe uneven FL distributions with only a few salient high-FL contrasts. Shared trends in terms of the mostly employed phonological features are also revealed but a few language-specific patterns are also present. These results are discussed in terms of organization and processing of the mental lexicon.

The status of vowels in Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic: Insights from production and perception

Due to the morphological structure of Arabic, vowels only occur in consonantal environment, never in isolation. The issue addressed here is whether static acoustic cues are sufficient to characterize Arabic vowels or dynamic ones are needed. This study is based on Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic (JA & MA), with eight and four vowels, respectively. Ten speakers per dialect were tested on both production and perception. In production, speakers produced vowels in words, syllables, and in isolation (in alveolar context). In perception, they categorized isolated vowels on an F1/F2 plan. Results from production show that, both in JA and MA, (a) vowels in isolation have greater variation than in syllables or words, (b) vowels in a word context are more centralized (than in syllables or in isolation), and that (c) MA vowels are more centralized than JAs. In perception, a high degree of variability within and between dialects is found. A new experiment of vowel perception in syllable context (CV) (i.e., dynamic traj...