Ian Maddieson

Stops in the world's languages.

This account of the great variety of stops in the worlds languages shows that, apart from their place of articulation, these sounds can be described principally in terms of the activities that occur at three phases: onset, closure, and release. Other potentially contrastive features discussed include length, and the use of the glottalic airstream mechanism (other airstream mechanisms are not considered here). Phonologically only two phases--closure and release--are exploited; independent distinctions of features such as phonation type or articulatory manner cannot be found in the onset phase. We examine the combinatorial possibilities of the features that are used and discuss implications for phonological feature systems.

PHONETICS OF PARTIALLY NASAL CONSONANTS

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the phonetic structure of partially nasal consonants and it reviews the types of such consonants known to occur, and presents some interpretations of the ways that the phonetic patterns relate to phonological structures. The phrase, partially nasal consonants, is intended to describe only segments that contain a part that is a nasal in the traditional phonetic use of that term. The class of segments discussed in the chapter is the one that consists of an interval of time that is considered to be a single consonantal element but which contain a subpart during which the velopharyngeal port is open and the oral escape of air is blocked. The chapter presents the distinctions between underlying and derived prenasalized stops. The prenasalized stops are persuasively analyzed as single segments from the phonological point of view. There are stops of two types, voiceless oral and voiced prenasalized. These two types of stop have the same distributional patterns.

Primate feedstock for the evolution of consonants

The evolution of speech remains an elusive scientific problem. A widespread notion is that vocal learning, underlined by vocal-fold control, is a key prerequisite for speech evolution. Although present in birds and non-primate mammals, vocal learning is ostensibly absent in non-human primates. Here we argue that the main road to speech evolution has been through controlling the supralaryngeal vocal tract, for which we find evidence for evolutionary continuity within the great apes.

Testing the Universality of Phonological Generalizations with a Phonetically Specified Segment Database: Results and Limitations

Linguistic universals are prevalent patterns attributed to natural factors, either arising directly from human biology or from the ecology of language use. Phonological universals relating to segments can be studied using the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID). The nature of the data in this resource is described and some issues in interpreting cross-language uniformities and areal disparities are discussed. As an illustration, the modal number of vowel qualities in language inventories is shown to differ for the set of African languages in UPSID from those of other continents. This difference might be explicable as resulting from different ways of balancing various properties of phonological systems. But the correlation of this distribution with likely patterns of dispersion of ‘modern’ humans leaves open the possibility that the modal number of vowels in non-African languages reflects an inherited property of the parent of these languages.

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

Significance Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to an underlying level of conceptual structure. To what degree this conceptual structure is universal or is due to properties of cultural histories, or to the environment inhabited by a speech community, is still controversial. Meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize, for quantitative comparative studies. Using cross-linguistic dictionaries across languages carefully selected as an unbiased sample reflecting the diversity of human languages, we provide an empirical measure of semantic relatedness between concepts. Our analysis uncovers a universal structure underlying the sampled vocabulary across language groups independent of their phylogenetic relations, their speakers’ culture, and geographic environment. How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. The methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.

Prenasalized stops and speech timing.

Prenasalized stops, that is, homorganic nasal+stop elements that behave as single phonological segments, raise a number of interesting questions concerning the relationship between phonological units and timing in speech. Do complex phonetic elements of this kind occupy the same duration as simpler elements, such as plain stops or nasals? Do prenasalized stops have the same timing pattern as a phonological sequence of nasal plus stop? How do prenasalized stops act with respect to rules which adjust the duration of neighboring segments? For example, would a vowel before a prenasalized stop be shortened by the widespread rule which shortens a vowel in a closed syllable (Maddieson 1985)? It has been argued that the status of prenasalized stops as single segments is directly related to their duration. They have been defined as nasal+stop sequences with the duration typical of other single segments (Herbert 1986). He, and Sagey (1986), in her dissertation on complex segments, both indicate that they would expect phonological consonant sequences to have longer durations than single segments regardless of whether the single segments are phonetically simple or complex. On the other hand, Ladefoged and Maddieson (1986) suggest that there is no demonstrated phonetic difference in timing between nasal+stop sequences and prenasalized stops. Purported language-internal contrasts between these elements actually involve a difference between geminate and single nasals before stops (as in Sinhalese), or between syllabic and non-syllabic nasals before stops. They suggest that deciding if a nasal+stop element is a prenasalized stop is not a phonetic issue but one which concerns solely the phonology of the language in question.

Geographical distribution of phonological complexity

Atkinson’s intriguing article in Science suggests that there is a signal to be found in the global distribution of the richness of phonological contrasts across a large sample of languages which reflects the process of the spread of anatomically modern humans across the habitable areas of our planet from an origin in Africa. In our commentary we will focus on three principal issues. The first has to do with what the signal is based on and whether it seems to be reliable. The second has to do with whether the concept of a serial founder effect is a persuasive explanation for the global patterns found. The third has to do with considering whether there are alternative explanations which might account for the patterns found.1

Human spoken language diversity and the acoustic adaptation hypothesis

Bioacousticians have argued that ecological feedback mechanisms contribute to shaping the acoustic signals of a variety of species and anthropogenic changes in soundscapes have been shown to generate modifications to the spectral envelope of bird songs. Several studies posit that part of the variation in sound structure across spoken human languages could likewise reflect adaptation to the local ecological conditions of their use. Specifically, environments in which higher frequencies are less faithfully transmitted (such as denser vegetation or higher ambient temperatures) may favor greater use of sounds characterized by lower frequencies. Such languages are viewed as “more sonorous.” This paper presents a variety of tests of this hypothesis. Data on segment inventories and syllable structure is taken from LAPSyD, a database on phonological patterns of a large worldwide sample of languages. Correlations are examined with measures of temperature, precipitation, vegetation, and geomorphology reflecting the...

Measuring Larynx Movement in Standard Thai Using the Cricothyrometer

Vertical movement of the larynx during connected speech was investigated in Standard Thai - a language that has five phonologically contrastive tones. The effects of pitch, consonant phonation-type, vowel quality, tonal categories, and position in the utterance were determined. Utterance position was found to be the factor most clearly associated with variations in larynx movement. The occurrence of an overall rise-fall pattern of larynx movement distributed over utterances of varying pitch patterns leads to the conclusion that larynx height is not a principal factor regulating pitch in connected speech. Implications for models of pitch production, distinctive features for tone, theories on the historical development of tone and the role of larynx movements in the production of consonants and vowels are discussed.

An inverse filtering study of Burmese creaky voice

A systematic study of the glottal characteristics of creaky voice in a language which uses it for linguistic contrast has not yet been done. In Burmese, syllables can contrast plain and creaky phonation. The characteristics of these phonation types were studied using inverse filtering [R. L. Miller, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 31, 667–677 (1959); G. Fant, Q. Prog. Status Rep. Speech Transmission Lab. No. 1, 85–107 (1979)]. A Burmese speaker was recorded in a sound‐treated booth using a high‐quality condenser microphone and an FM tape recorder. The recording was analyzed through an analog multi‐formant inverse filter. An Oscillomink was used to graph (1) the speech wave, (2) the output of the inverse filter (representing the differentiated glottal flow), and (3) the inverse filter output integrated to represent glottal flow. The differences between creaky and normal phonation can be described in terms of peak flow, the asymmetry between the rate of rise and fall of flow in each glottal pulse, as well as F0. [Work ...