Mizuki Miyashita

Audio Classification for Blackfoot Language Analysis

Blackfoot is an endangered Native American language. It is important to document this language and with it, the Blackfoot culture. In this paper, an effective subspace-based concept mining framework (SCM) is used to help Blackfoot language analysis via audio classification. The core of SCM is a subspace based modeling, classification and decision fusion mechanism which is applied to the audio features for pattern discovery. It adaptively selects non-consecutive principal dimensions to form an accurate modeling of a representative subspace based on statistical information analysis and refines the training data set via self-learning. After the classification process, a decision fusion process is applied to traverse the results from individual classifiers and to boost classification accuracy.

Diphthongs in Tohono O'odham

This article examines the distribution of diphthongs in Tohono O’odham (Uto-Aztecan), dividing them into two types, light and heavy, on the basis of three characteristics: stress placement (a light diphthong occurs in either stressed or unstressed syllables while a heavy diphthong occurs in only stressed positions); reduplicative processes (a light diphthong undergoes segment-retention reduplication, and a heavy diphthong, segment-skipping reduplication); and restrictions on the phonemes allowed by each type (light diphthongs can contain [i], whereas heavy diphthongs do not). This analysis has implications for the treatment of Tohono O’odham diphthongs in terms of mora theory, for the status of the high front vowel, and for pedagogy.