Technical Programme

This is the final programme for this session. For oral sessions, the timing on the left is the current presentation order, but this may still change, so please check at the conference itself. If you have signed in to My Schedule, you can add papers to your own personalised list.

Tue-Ses1-O2:
Phonology and Phonetics

Time:	Tuesday 10:00	Place:	Leonardo - Pala Affari - Ground Floor	Type:	Oral
Chair:	Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

10:00	Laryngealization and Breathiness in Persian Vahid Sadeghi (Imam Khomeini International University) Persian has sequences of two vowels separated by an intervening glottal consonant (/h/ or /?/). The VG(lottal)V sequence becomes reduced in certain occurrences, with the perceptual effect of the loss of the glottal consonant. The purpose of this study is to provide an acoustic description of VGV sequences in reduced forms. A production study examined three acoustic measurements of phonation types: H1-H2, H1-F1, and F0. The measurements were made at 15 ms time intervals throughout the second vowel to determine the time course of phonation effect. The issue of interest is what properties of VGV remain where G is lost. It is shown that /?/ will be preserved as vowel laryngealization and /h/ as breathiness.
10:20	Age-dependent differences in the neutralization of the intervocalic voicing contrast: Evidence from an apparent-time study on East Franconian Viola Müller (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany) Jonathan Harrington (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany) Felicitas Kleber (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany) Ulrich Reubold (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany) The main aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which East Franconian speakers neutralize the voicing opposition in intervocalic stops when they produce a variety of Standard German. A second aim was to test whether young and old speakers differ in their extent of neutralization and tend to a more standard-like pronunciation. We analyzed contrast maintenance by means of the vowel-to-stop duration ratio. An acoustic analysis of leiden-leiten revealed that old East Franconian speakers neutralized the voicing contrast either completely or to a greater extent than young East Franconian speakers. Young East Franconian speakers preserved the voicing contrast, although to a lesser extent than the Standard German speakers. A forced choice perception experiment showed that young but not old East Franconians perceived the lenis/fortis contrast. The results point to a sound change in progress in which a phonemic [± voice] stop distinction is developing in East Franconian.
10:40	Comparing syllable frequencies in corpora of written and spoken language Barbara Samlowski (Division of Language and Speech Communication, University of Bonn, Germany) Bernd Möbius (Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Germany) Petra Wagner (Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany) In this study, various German language corpora were compared in order to discover the extent to which syllable frequencies remain stable across different contexts and modalities. Although considerable differences in relative frequency were found among the more common syllables, rank numbers proved to be more robust. Variation across corpora was mostly due to vocabulary characteristics of particular corpus domains rather than to systematic differences between spoken and written language. The results indicate that syllable frequencies in written corpora can be taken as a rough estimate for their frequency in spoken language.
11:00	Sylli: Automatic Phonological Syllabification for Italian Iacoponi Luca (University of Pisa) Savy Renata (University of Salerno) We will present a complete syllabifier for Italian (Sylli), that is based on phonological principles, flexible and easy to adapt for other uses, alphabets and languages. Crucial concepts regarding syllabification principles in modern phonological theory will be discussed (§1.1); specific issues concerning Italian syllabification will then be summarised (§1.2) and an overview of the available automatic syllabification models will be provided (§1.3). We will then move on to describe the program structure, the syllabification algorithm and two particular issues concerning syllabification in Italian (§2). Finally, we will illustrate the results of a manual syllabification test carried out by linguists to verify the accuracy of the algorithm (§3).
11:20	A preliminary study on the production of signs in Brazilian Sign Language when one of the manual articulators is unavailable André Nogueira Xavier (State University of Campinas) Plinio Almeida Barbosa (State University of Campinas) This paper aims at discussing the realization of some Brazilian Sign Language signs, articulated with both hands, when one of them is unavailable. As will be discussed, this unavailability is caused by extra-linguistic factors, as well as by a linguistic one. The data considered here were collected through the observation of spontaneous signing and discussed with three subjects. Their analysis revealed that the production of two-handed signs when one of the hands is not available does not simply consist of realizing them with only one hand, but alternatively employing other strategies, such as using a one-handed sign equivalent in meaning. Index terms: sign language, manual articulators, dynamical system
11:40	Electroglottograph and Acoustic Cues for Phonation Contrasts in Taiwan Min Falling Tones Ho-hsien Pan (National Chiao Tung University, TAIWAN) Mao-hsu Chen (National Chiao Tung University, TAIWAN) Shao-ren Lyu (National Chiao Tung University, TAIWAN) This study explored the effective articulatory and acoustic parameters for distinguishing Taiwan Min falling unchecked tones 53 and 31 and checked tones 5 and 3. Data were collected from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and mixed accents in northern, central, and southern Taiwan. Results showed that EGG parameters, Contact Quotients (CQ) and Peak Increase in Contact (PIC) were not effective in distinguishing checked from unchecked tones across speakers. In contrast, f0 contour and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) consistently distinguished checked tones from unchecked tones across speakers. The f0 onset was highest for tone 53, followed in order by tone 3, 5 and 31. The f0 contours of tone 5 were the highest in the later half of the vowels. CPP measures of checked tones were higher than those of unchecked tones in the latter portion of vowels.