Phonetics

This paper presents a comprehensive phonetic and phonological description of Northern Sangtam, an essentially undescribed Tibeto-Burman language of central Nagaland belonging to the Aoic subgroup. It is a noteworthy language from a number of phonological perspectives, not least because its phoneme inventory contains two of the world's rarest phonemes: a pre-stopped bilabial trill, and a doubly-articulated labial-coronal nasal. These unique segments are described in detail, and an attempt is made to determine how they might have developed their phonemic status. The tone system is also of interest, as it demonstrates evidence of debuccalization resulting in the development of a new high tone. Following a systematic description of the syllable and word structure, the tone system, and the segmental phonology, some observed age-related differences in the phoneme inventory are discussed. The paper is linked to an online repository containing the audiovisual data and transcribed word lists of approximately 900 items, based on the recorded utterances of eight speakers.

La Fonética contrastiva, como parte de la Lingüística contrastiva, tiene por objetivo la comparación de los sistemas de la lengua materna del alumno (L1) y de la lengua meta (L2/LE), en este caso, en el ámbito fonético y fonológico. Dicha comparación permite anticiparse a los errores que mas probablemente cometerá el alumno, y lo que es más importante: conocer sus causas e idear soluciones eficaces.
Este trabajo presenta una serie de aportaciones de la Fonética contrastiva y enumera algunos de los aspectos que deben ser abordados a la hora de realizar un análisis contrastivo, tanto en el ámbito de lo segmental como de lo suprasegmental. Tras dicha exposición, se plantean algunas lineas de actuación recomendadas para sacar el mayor provecho posible de esas contribuciones potenciales.

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster

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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4QKykn2bzqQa0JQRTZtU08yZWs?resourcekey=0-kYz6XS59uRJCKj4YuhaqhQ
Background: This study aimed to introduce a low-cost system measuring nasalance, which can often be performed with high-cost systems, and to present the normative nasalance values for adults using this system.
Materials and Methods: This study included 96 standard native Turkish-speaking literate volunteers who had no hearing and speech problems or nasal obstruction. Nasalance values were measured using the system developed by the principal author, which is called the Praat-Assisted Nasalance Meter, using speech materials and related methods.
Results: The participants were 18-65 (average, 33.7) years old. They were divided into three groups according to their age: 18-25, 26-40, and 41-65. A significant difference was found in the nasalance values between the genders. For nearly all speech materials, higher nasalance values were measured in women than in men.
Conclusion: There is no generally accepted rule to ascertain if a speaker’s resonance is abnormal according to nasalance values. Therefore, the proposed threshold values should not be considered absolute values but should be decided with perceptual evaluation.

Amaç: Bu çalışmanın amacı, genellikle yüksek maliyetli sistemlerle gerçekleştirilebilen nazalans parametresi ölçümü için kullanılabilecek kendi geliştirdiğimiz düşük maliyetli bir sistemi tanıtmak ve bu sistem kullanılarak erişkinler için belirlenen normatif nazalans değerlerini sunmaktır.
Gereç ve Yöntemler: Standart Türkiye Türkçesi konuşan ve okuma yazma bilen 96 gönüllü çalışmaya dahil edildi. Deneklerin işitme ve konuşma problemi, burun tıkanıklığı yapan herhangi bir hastalığının olmamasına dikkat edildi. Birinci yazar tarafından geliştirilen ve Praat Yardımlı Nazalans Ölçer (PYNÖ) adı verilen sistem yardımıyla aşağıda belirtilen konuşma malzemesi ve yöntem kullanılarak nazalans ölçümü yapıldı.
Bulgular: Çalışmaya katılan 96 konuşmacının yaşları 18 ile 65 arasında değişiyordu (ortalama 33,7 yıl). Katılımcılar yaşlarına göre 18-25, 26-40 ve 41-65 şeklinde üç gruba ayrılarak incelendi. Elde edilen değerler cinsiyet grubuna göre karşılaştırıldığında aradaki farkların istatistiksel olarak anlamlı olduğu görüldü. Hemen her konuşma malzemesi için kadınlarda erkeklerden daha yüksek nazalans değerleri elde edildi.
Sonuç: Bir konuşmacı üzerinde ölçülen nazalans ölçüm sonuçlarının anormal olduğunu söylemek için genel kabul gören bir kural yoktur. Bu nedenle, bu çalışmada önerilen eşik değerler mutlak değerler olarak düşünülmemeli, algısal değerlendirmeyle birlikte karar verilmelidir.

In this study, it was postulated that typically developing (i.e., normally developing without incidence of a speech or language delay or disorder) Spanish/Englishspeaking children ages 4 to 5 years old would show different articulation productions and phonological patterns in both languages. Sixteen participants from Florida were tested with Spanish and English articulation and phonology tests. For articulation, two manner or

Time Limit: 1 second In the Marvelous Mountain, there are N attractions. Each attraction is labeled from 1 to N. There are M one-way cable car lines to connect pairs of attractions. The length of a cable car line is a positive integer. As we want most visitors to travel from the attraction S to the attraction T, we should consider possible plans to reduce the length of the shortest path to travel from S to T. We have a list of proposals with K new two-way cable car lines that can be built. Your task is to select one of the K proposed cable car lines to build so that, upon finishing this new cable car line, the length of the shortest path from S to T is minimized. Input The first line contains five integer numbers: N, M, K, S, and T (N ≤ 10 5 , M ≤ 2 × 10 5 , K < 10 5 , 1 ≤ S, T ≤ N, and S ≠ T). The i th line of the following M lines contains 3 positive integer numbers: ai, bi, and li, denoting that the i th cable car line is from the attraction ai to the attraction bi, and has the length of li (li ≤ 10 9). The j th line of the following K lines contains 3 positive integer numbers: uj, vj, qj, denoting that the new possible two-way cable car line can be built from uj to vj (and vice versa), with the length for each way of qj (qj ≤ 10 9). Output Display an integer number that is the minimum length of the shortest path to go from S to T, after building a new two-way cable car line. Print-1 if there is no way to go from S to T, even with any new cable car line in the proposal list.

A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to have a phonological deficit, but indicated impaired multicharacter processing ability for visually presented letter arrays. On the basis of previous research linking multicharacter processing and reading we developed an intervention aimed at improving R.F.’s ability to report letter arrays of increasing length. Following a 9-week programme, improvement was observed, and investigation of R.F.’s reading revealed gains in single word reading speed and accuracy. The findings support the significance of intervention studies for testing hypotheses regarding causal relationships among cognitive processes and the notion of specific profiles of developmental dyslexia/dysgraphia in both opaque and transparent orthographies.

Disponível em: http://www.redalyc.org/src/inicio/ArtPdfRed.jsp?iCve=169320515017 ... Redalyc Sistema de Informação Científica Rede de Revistas Científicas da América Latina o Caribe, a Espanha e Portugal ... Nogueira Gregio, Fabiana; Gama-Rossi, Aglael; Madureira, ...

Biological and cultural factors have been found to have a significant influence on cognitive development and performance in neuropsychological instruments such as verbal fluency tasks (VFT). Variations of traditional VFT, involving unconstrained word production and increased retrieval times, may provide further data regarding the executive, attentional, mnemonic, and linguistic abilities involved in VFT. As such, the aim of this study was to investigate the impact of age and school type on the performance of 6- to 12-year-old children in unconstrained, phonemic, and semantic VFT. The VFT were administered to 460 participants. The effects of age and school type on verbal fluency (VF) performance were analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance, followed by Bonferroni post-hoc tests (p ≤ .05). A repeated-measures analysis was also used to evaluate VF performance over time (p ≤ .05). Main effects of age and school type were identified on all measures (effect sizes ranged from .05 to .32, p ≤ .05). VF scores increased with age and were higher among private school students. The influence of age on VFT may be associated with the development of executive functions. The impact of type of school on VF performance may be explained by the greater availability of cognitive stimulation (semantic knowledge) provided by private schools and families with better socioeconomic levels.

Achieving progress in understanding the cause, nature, and treatment of autism requires an integration of concepts, approaches, and empirical findings from genetic, cognitive neuroscience, animal, and clinical studies. The need for such integration has been a fundamental tenet of the discipline of developmental psychopathology from its inception. It is likely that the discovery of autism susceptibility genes will depend on the development of dimensional measures of broader phenotype autism traits. It is argued that knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language behavior will provide a useful framework for defining such measures. In this article, the current state of knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language impairments in autism is reviewed. Following from this, six candidate broader phenotype autism traits are proposed: (a) face processing, including structural encoding of facial features and face movements, such as eye gaze; (b) social affiliat...

This study investigated the effect of multilingual linguistic experience on the perception of Japanese durational contrast by learners of Japanese as a foreign language at the basic level. Five monolingual and five multilingual learners listened to recorded sentences c)ntaining the utterances /iken/ or /ikken/ and were asked to identify which of the two utterances was employed in each sentence. Amongst the multilingual subjects, some spoke languages that utilize segmental durations phonemically, whilst some spoke languages that did not. Although the results indicated superior perceptual performance by multilingual learners over monolingual learners, there was no significant difference between the two types of multilingual subjects. The results support the hypothesis that not only specific but also non-specific, broadened linguistic experience can result in increased perceptual performance. Other results and their implications are discussed. (Contains 29 references.) (MDM) Reproducti...

Italian roots in Australian soil: coronal obstruents in native dialect speech of Italian-Australians from two areas of Veneto. We will discuss the maintenance of the heritage dialect coronal fricatives in the speech of Italian-Australian trilinguals (dialect/Italian/English) originating from North Veneto, Italy, as compared to the variability found in the productions of comparable Italian-Australian trilinguals originating from Central Veneto. Results on coronal fricatives&#39; distribution based on narrow phonetic trancriptions and on their acoustic characteristics based on spectral moments analysis show that the immigrants have generally maintained the fine-grained features of their dialect. After more than five decades of residence in Australia, traces of interlinguistic influences exerted by L3-English are evident in one speaker only. We consider both internal (linguistic) and external (sociolinguistic) factors for this difference in maintenance of first language speech features...

Young children with Pierre Robin sequence are at considerable risk to develop delayed or disordered communication development. This study investigated the effectiveness of early communication intervention with four young children with Pierre Robin sequence, aged 5 to 28 months. The Proportional Change Index (Wolery, 1983) was used to determine the amount of child progress that took place during the intervention period. The results indicated that regular early communication intervention sessions over an extended period of time produced positive results, especially for expressive language abilities. The presence of a slight hearing loss due to otitis media, seemed to have influenced the effectiveness of early communication intervention. One subject displayed an associated disorder and evidenced the slowest rate of development for receptive and expressive language abilities as well as a limited phonetic repertoire for consonants. All but one subject had limited phonetic repertoires pos...

This study tested the relationship between prelinguistic vocalization and expressive vocabulary 1 year later in young children with mild to moderate developmental delays. Three vocalization variables were tested: rate of all vocalization, rate of vocalizations with consonants, and rate of vocalizations used interactively. The 58 toddlers in the study were 17–34 months old, not sensory impaired, and had Bayley Mental Development Indices (Bayley, 1969; Bayley, 1993) from 35–85. In addition, the children had fewer than 3 words in their expressive vocabularies and during classroom observation each showed at least one instance of intentional prelinguistic communication before testing. Selected sections of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales procedures (CSBS; Wetherby & Prizant, 1993) were administered at the beginning and at the end of the study. The vocal measures were obtained in the initial CSBS session. One measure of expressive vocabulary was obtained in the CSBS session ...

Reading involves phonologic decoding, in which readers ``sound out&#39;&#39; a word; orthographic decoding, in which readers recognize a word visually, as in ``sight reading&#39;&#39;; and comprehension. Because reading can involve multiple processes, dyslexia might be a heterogeneous disorder. This study investigated behavior and gross lobar anatomy in subtypes of dyslexic and control subjects. Subjects aged 18 to 25 years with identified reading problems and a group of healthy controls were given cognitive and behavioral tests and volumetric brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Because atypical cerebral laterality has been proposed as a potential neural risk for dyslexia, dyslexic and control subjects were compared on anatomy of gross lobar regions. On asymmetry quotients, no significant differences were found between groups. Examination of the percentage of total brain volume of each structure revealed that control and dyslexic subjects were significantly different (P = .018)....