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A system for the lateral transfer of information from end-to-end neural networks recognizing articulatory feature classes to similarly structured networks recognizing phone tokens is here proposed. The system connects recurrent layers of feature detectors pre-trained on a base language to recurrent layers of a phone recognizer for a different target language, this inspired primarily by the progressive neural network scheme. Initial experiments used detectors trained on Bengali speech for four articulatory feature classes—consonant place, consonant manner, vowel height, and vowel backness—attached to phone recognizers for four other Asian languages (Javanese, Nepali, Sinhalese, and Sundanese). While these do not currently suggest consistent performance improvements across different low-resource settings for target languages, irrespective of their genealogic or phonological relatedness to Bengali, they do suggest the need for further trials with different language sets, altered data sources and data configurations, and slightly altered network setups.
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On latent nasals in Samogo
Languages in the Samogo group display a phenomenon referred to as “floating” or “latent” nasals. Though belonging to the end of a word (either synchronically or diachronically) in coda position, latent nasals more often appear as mutations or modifications to either the initial consonant of the following morpheme or the preceding vowel. This paper draws together extant descriptive data on Samogo nasals and considers them in the broader typology of consonant and vowel nasality in Mande. Finally, the question of phonological representation vs. phonetic realization is considered with preliminary acoustic data from Seenku [sos]; the weak surface realization of the nasal raises questions about an analysis in which it is floating and suggests that recent developments in Gradient Symbolic Representation (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016) may be applicable to the data.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1664335
- PAR ID:
- 10166949
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mandenkan
- Volume:
- 63
- ISSN:
- 2104-371X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 68 - 88
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Tiede, Mark; Whalen, Doug; Gracco, Vincent (Ed.)This paper investigates the relative timing of onset consonant and vowel gestures in Tibetan as spoken in the Tibetan diaspora. According to the coupled oscillator model of articulatory timing (Browman & Goldstein 2000, Nam & Saltzman 2003), the most readily-available coupling modes among gestures are in-phase (synchronous) or anti-phase (sequential) timing, with competition among these modes also giving rise to a stable timing pattern. The model predicts that other timing relations, i.e. ”eccentric timing”, are possible but not as readily available. Data gathered using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) shows relative C-V timing consistent with either competitive coupling or eccentric timing. Competitive coupling is a plausible explanation for CV syllables in a tone language (Gao 2008), but acoustic analysis showed that some speakers do not produce a pitch contrast corresponding to tone. In the apparent absence of a tone gesture, we conclude that these speakers exhibit eccentric C-V timing.more » « less
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Tiede, Mark; Whalen, Doug; Gracco, Vincent (Ed.)This paper investigates the relative timing of onset consonant and vowel gestures in Tibetan as spoken in the Tibetan diaspora. According to the coupled oscillator model of articulatory timing (Browman & Goldstein 2000, Nam & Saltzman 2003), the most readily-available coupling modes among gestures are in-phase (synchronous) or anti-phase (sequential) timing, with competition among these modes also giving rise to a stable timing pattern. The model predicts that other timing relations, i.e. ”eccentric timing”, are possible but not as readily available. Data gathered using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) shows relative C-V timing consistent with either competitive coupling or eccentric timing. Competitive coupling is a plausible explanation for CV syllables in a tone language (Gao 2008), but acoustic analysis showed that some speakers do not produce a pitch contrast corresponding to tone. In the apparent absence of a tone gesture, we conclude that these speakers exhibit eccentric C-V timing.more » « less
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Abstract While research in heritage language phonology has found that transfer from the majority language can lead to divergent attainment in adult heritage language grammars, the extent to which language transfer develops during a heritage speaker's lifespan is understudied. To explore such cross-linguistic transfer, I examine the rate of glottalization between consonant-to-vowel sequences at word junctures produced by child and adult Spanish heritage speakers (i.e., HSs) in both languages. My results show that, in Spanish, child HSs produce greater rates of vowel-initial glottal phonation than their age-matched monolingually-raised Spanish counterparts, suggesting that the Spanish child HSs’ grammars are more permeable to transfer than those of the adult HSs. In English, child and adult HSs show similarly low rates of glottal phonation when compared to their age-matched monolingually-raised English speakers’ counterparts. The findings for English can be explained by either an account of transfer at the individual level or the community level.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Purpose The experiment reported here compared two hypotheses for the poor statistical and artificial grammar learning often seen in children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment). The procedural learning deficit hypothesis states that implicit learning of rule-based input is impaired, whereas the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis states that poor performance is only seen when learners must implicitly compute sequential dependencies. The current experiment tested learning of an artificial grammar that could be learned via feature activation, as observed in an associatively organized lexicon, without computing sequential dependencies and should therefore be learnable on the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis, but not on the procedural learning deficit hypothesis. Method Adults with DLD and adults with typical language development (TD) listened to consonant–vowel–consonant–vowel familiarization words from one of two artificial phonological grammars: Family Resemblance (two out of three features) and a control (exclusive OR, in which both consonants are voiced OR both consonants are voiceless) grammar in which no learning was predicted for either group. At test, all participants rated 32 test words as to whether or not they conformed to the pattern in the familiarization words. Results Adults with DLD and adults with TD showed equal and robust learning of the Family Resemblance grammar, accepting significantly more conforming than nonconforming test items. Both groups who were familiarized with the Family Resemblance grammar also outperformed those who were familiarized with the OR grammar, which, as predicted, was learned by neither group. Conclusion Although adults and children with DLD often underperform, compared to their peers with TD, on statistical and artificial grammar learning tasks, poor performance appears to be tied to the implicit computation of sequential dependencies, as predicted by the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.4000/mandenkan.2314
