Browsing by Author "Winters, Stephen J."

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    Tumʔi: A Phonetic & Phonological Analysis of a Khoisan Variety
    (2020-01) Kilian, Kelly; Bennett, Wm G.; Flynn, Darin; Ritter, Elizabeth; Bennett, Wm G.; Winters, Stephen J.
    As part of a linguistic research team I recorded a Khoisan language currently spoken by a linguistic community of three in the northern cape of South Africa. As the location in which this language was discovered is situated geographically close to varieties of both the Khoekhoe and Tuu language families, the question of genetic affiliation and typological similarity within the Khoisan lineages becomes significant. This will be addressed through the analysis of phonetic, phonological and lexical similarities and oppositions between Tumʔi and representative Tuu and Khoekhoe languages (Beach 1938; Bleek 1930; Ladefoged & Traill 1994; Miller et al. 2007). Overall this project attempts to answer the question, how unique is this undocumented language Tumʔi in comparison to varieties of geographically neighboring Khoisan languages? The analysis is comprised of a detailed description of the vowel and consonant systems, as well as evidence of any contrastive phonetic and phonological features. The clear focus on the analysis of sound contrasts is a consequence of limited data due to speaker competence (Grinevald, 2007). As a result of incomplete acquisition and generational linguistic attrition, the recorded utterances constitute Khoisan content words produced within an Afrikaans framework (Killian 2009). Specific research questions include: • What is the sound inventory of this language? • Are there phonation or glottalization contrasts between vowels? • What click types and accompaniments make up the inventory? • Are there laryngeal contrasts between consonants? Results of the analyses indicate the following; Tumʔi shows traces of a phonation contrast, uvular click accompaniment, and evidence of laryngeally marked stops. The phonological typology shares more similarities with the Southern Khoisan varieties of the Tuu family than with varieties of the central Khoekhoe family. Direct implications for this project include contribution to the current areal typological isoglosses separating the varieties of Khoisan located in southern Africa (Güldemann 2006). The final contribution of this work is the documentation of a moribund Khoisan dialect which has undergone no prior linguistic or anthropological investigation.
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    Vowel Space, Variability, and Lexical Context in Infant Speech Perception
    (2020-06-29) Burkinshaw, Kelly D.; Curtin, Suzanne; Rose, Yvan; George, Angela; White, Katherine; Winters, Stephen J.
    Infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) in a number of phonetic dimensions, including mean pitch, pitch range, and speech rate (Fernald et al., 1989). Studies also find that the vowel space, as defined by centroids of the first and second formants for point vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, is expanded in IDS as compared to ADS (e.g. Burnham et al., 2002; Kuhl et al., 1997; Liu et al., 2003). This expansion, when found in caregivers’ speech, is correlated with improved infant performance on discrimination tasks (Liu et al., 2003) and vocabulary tests (Hartman et al., 2017). Studies also find that individual vowels in IDS are more variable than in ADS, leading to reduced distances between vowel categories in the vowel space (e.g. Cristia & Seidl, 2014; McMurray et al., 2013). In Chapter 2, I explore the speech input of infants learning their first language in terms of the properties of IDS and ADS. I analyze naturalistic speech productions by mothers of 7-month-old or 15-month-old infants to determine whether vowel space expansion in IDS leads to easier categorization of vowels despite increases in variability of individual vowels, and whether this pattern changes depending on addressee age. In Chapter 3, I explore lexical context as a mechanism by which infants might interpret ambiguous vowels in their speech environment. Studies find that adults’ interpretation of ambiguous sounds can be biased by their lexical context, leading to shifted perception of ambiguous sounds outside of that lexical context (e.g. Norris et al., 2003). I expose infants to vowels that are perceptually ambiguous between /i/ and /ɪ/, in familiar words which are intended to bias interpretation of those sounds, in order to determine whether infants can use context as a means to resolve variability in IDS. I find that statistically speaking, there is no advantage of IDS vowels in terms of their categorizability, and that infants do not show a shift in their perception of ambiguous vowels based on context. I discuss the implications of these findings and future directions that could be taken to illuminate them in Chapter 4.