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1. Word length, proportion of overlap, and phonological competition in spoken word recognition

   Simmons, E. S.; Magnuson, J. S. (July 2018, Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society)

   We examined how phonological competition effects in spoken word recognition change with word length. Cohort effects (competition between words that overlap at onset) are strong and easily replicated. Rhyme effects (competition between words that mismatch at onset) are weaker, emerge later in the time course of spoken word recognition, and are more difficult to replicate. We conducted a simple experiment to examine cohort and rhyme competition using monosyllabic vs. bisyllabic words. Degree of competition was predicted by proportion of phonological overlap. Longer rhymes, with greater overlap in both number and proportion of shared phonemes, compete more strongly (e.g., kettle-medal [0.8 overlap] vs. cat-mat [0.67 overlap]). In contrast, long and short cohort pairs constrained to have constant (2-phoneme) overlap vary in proportion of overlap. Longer cohort pairs (e.g., camera-candle) have lower proportion of overlap (in this example, 0.33) than shorter cohorts (e.g., cat-can, with 0.67 overlap) and compete more weakly. This finding has methodological implications (rhyme effects are less likely to be observed with shorter words, while cohort effects are diminished for longer words), but also theoretical implications: degree of competition is not a simple function of overlapping phonemes; degree of competition is conditioned on proportion of overlap. Simulations with TRACE help explicate how this result might emerge. 

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2. Strident harmony from the perspective of an inductive learner

   https://doi.org/10.3765/pda.v2art8.39  

   Gallagher, Gillian (November 2020, Phonological Data and Analysis)

   null (Ed.)

   In languages with strident harmony, stridents within a particular domain are required to have the same minor place of articulation. Harmony is often required only of stridents within a root or stem morpheme, and doesn't trigger alternations. Harmony is also often quite local, applying exclusively or more strongly between stridents in the same or adjacent syllables. Finally, harmony may be morpheme specific, triggering alternations in some affixes but not others. All of these specifics of a given harmony pattern give rise to exceptions to harmony at the level of the word, and may require a morphologically parsed learning corpus in order to be acquired. This paper explores the learnability of strident harmony in text corpora from three languages: Nkore-Kiga (Bantu), Papantla Totonac (Totonacan) and Navajo (Athapaskan). The analyses show that word level exceptions largely obscure the harmony pattern as an overall phonotactic in a language. The three languages also serve as a test of the Projection Induction Learner (Gouskova and Gallagher 2020), which is found to be successful when the generalizations in the data are strong but may fail in the face of patterned exceptions. 

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3. Quantitative Acoustic versus Deep Learning Metrics of Lenition

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8020098  

   Wayland, Ratree; Tang, Kevin; Wang, Fenqi; Vellozzi, Sophia; Sengupta, Rahul (June 2023, Languages)

   Spanish voiced stops /b, d, ɡ/ surfaced as fricatives [β, ð, ɣ] in intervocalic position due to a phonological process known as spirantization or, more broadly, lenition. However, conditioned by various factors such as stress, place of articulation, flanking vowel quality, and speaking rate, phonetic studies reveal a great deal of variation and gradience of these surface forms, ranging from fricative-like to approximant-like [β⊤, ð⊤, ɣ⊤]. Several acoustic measurements have been used to quantify the degree of lenition, but none is standard. In this study, the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish estimated by a deep learning Phonet model as measures of lenition were compared to traditional acoustic measurements of intensity, duration, and periodicity. When evaluated against known lenition factors: stress, place of articulation, surrounding vowel quality, word status, and speaking rate, the results show that sonorant and continuant posterior probabilities predict lenition patterns that are similar to those predicted by relative acoustic intensity measures and are in the direction expected by the effort-based view of lenition and previous findings. These results suggest that Phonet is a reliable alternative or additional approach to investigate the degree of lenition. 

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4. Comparing Single-Word Insertions and Multi-Word Alternations in Bilingual Speech: Insights from Pupillometry

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040267  

   Johns, Michael A.; Dussias, Paola E. (December 2022, Languages)

   Prominent sociolinguistic theories of language mixing have posited that single-word insertions of one language into the other are the result of a distinct process than multi-word alternations between two languages given that the former overwhelmingly surface morphosyntactically integrated into the surrounding language. To date, this distinction has not been tested in comprehension. The present study makes use of pupillometry to examine the online processing of single-word insertions and multi-word alternations by highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in Puerto Rico. Participants heard sentences containing target noun/adjective pairs (1) in unilingual Spanish, (2) where the Spanish noun was replaced with its English translation equivalent, followed by a Spanish post-nominal adjective, and (3) where both the noun and adjective appeared in English with the adjective occurring in the English pre-nominal position. Both types of language mixing elicit larger pupillary responses when compared to unilingual Spanish speech, though the magnitude of this difference depends on the grammatical gender of the target noun. Importantly, single-word insertions and multi-word alternations did not differ from one another. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphosyntactic integration is not the defining feature of single-word insertions, at least in comprehension, and that the comprehension system is tuned to the distributional properties of bilingual speech. 

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5. A phonetic model of non-native spoken word processing

   Matusevych, Yevgen; Kamper, Herman; Schatz, Thomas; Feldman, Naomi H.; Goldwater, Sharon (April 2021, Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

   null (Ed.)

   Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these difficulties can arise from the non-native speakers' phonetic perception. We train a computational model of phonetic learning, which has no access to phonology, on either one or two languages. We first show that the model exhibits predictable behaviors on phone-level and word-level discrimination tasks. We then test the model on a spoken word processing task, showing that phonology may not be necessary to explain some of the word processing effects observed in non-native speakers. We run an additional analysis of the model's lexical representation space, showing that the two training languages are not fully separated in that space, similarly to the languages of a bilingual human speaker. 

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