Unpredictable grammatical choices are not harder than predictable ones

Language variation (specifically: optionality between different ways of saying the same thing, as in check out the places vs check the places out) tends to be considered abnormal, suboptimal, short-lived, dysfunctional and needlessly complex, especially in functional or cognitive linguistic circles. In this contribution, we are assessing these assumptions: does grammatical optionality increase the relative complexity (or: difficulty) of language production? We use a corpus-based psycholinguistics research design with a variationist twist and analyse SWITCHBOARD, a corpus of conversational spoken American English. We ask if and how grammatical optionality correlates with two symptoms of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). Our dataset covers 108,487 conversational turns in SWITCHBOARD, 22 grammatical alternation types yielding 57,032 optionality contexts, 589,124 unfilled pauses and 43,801 filled pauses. Analysis shows that overall optionality contexts do not make speech production more dysfluent – regardless of how many language-internal probabilistic constraints are in operation, or how many variants there are to choose from. With that being said, we show how some alternations in the grammar of English are more prone to attract or repel production difficulties than others. All told, our results call into question old dogmas in theoretical linguistics, such as the Principle of Isomorphism or the Principle of No Synonymy.

This study strengthens the validation of learner speech assessment in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) by analyzing the quantitative variables related to fluency and accuracy across four CEFR levels (A2, B1, B2, and C1). Drawing on a learner corpus approach, we examine 500,000 tokens from the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and its extensions, supplemented by post hoc rater evaluations. Three task types-a semi-monologic topic discussion, a dialogic interaction, and a monologic picture description-are used to elicit variation in speech production. The analysis focuses on speech rates, the frequency of filled and unfilled pauses, and error rates to unveil developmental trends in learner speech. The results reveal strong correlations between these fluency and accuracy metrics and CEFR levels, with speech rate emerging as the most reliable indicator of proficiency. The frequency of unfilled pauses decreases as proficiency increases, while filled pauses, although less critical to fluency assessment, offer insights into speech planning mechanisms. Error rates similarly decline with higher proficiency, reflecting greater accuracy in speech production. Exemplary instances for each CEFR level are presented, offering practical metrics for teaching, assessment, and rater training. While the study's limitations include an overrepresentation of Mandarin Chinese learners and the exclusion of pronunciation errors, these gaps highlight avenues for future research. This study provides empirical, task-sensitive evidence to enrich CEFR can-do descriptors, enhance rater training, and refine speaking assessments, contributing to more effective language teaching, learning, and assessment practices.

Realization of the English postvocalic [voice] contrast in F1 and F2

This paper presents part of the results of a learner corpus study of English oral and written production by a large number of Japanese native speakers. Each participant was asked to perform two tasks, namely spoken and written narratives, using a picture book titled “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer, 1969) containing 24 wordless pictures. For the analyses in the current study, the data from 80 learners, focusing on audio-recorded and transcribed spoken narratives, was used. The Japanese learners’ speech production was examined based on Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005; Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015) as well as on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001). Results show that there is a correlation between second language (L2) proficiency levels and L2 developmental stages in a learner corpus of L2 spoken English. On the other hand, the dispersion is found to increase at higher stages as shown in previous studies (e.g., Granfeldt & Ågren, 2013; Hagenfeld, 2017).

Evidence has been accumulating that speakers adjust their speech production to account for conditions of signal transmission to an interlocutor, in addition to speaker- and listener-related influences. This study manipulated acoustic transmission conditions between speakers and a researcher while they completed dyadic cooperative puzzle tasks. Speakers heard evidence of four transmission perturbations (intensity increase/decrease, pitch increase/decrease) only indirectly, i.e., via changes in the researcher's voice. Analysis of speakers' conversational turns across conditions (baseline + four partner-voice manipulations) showed significant group-level imitation of transmission manipulations of partner voice intensity, with no general response to shifts in partner voice pitch. Significant voice alterations were also observed for individual speakers in intensity, with substantial inter-talker variability in responses. Thirteen of 29 speakers exclusively imitated the manipulation of partner intensity, 4/29 speakers exclusively opposed the transmission manipulation, and 4/29 speakers showed both response types. The presence of opposition responses coupled with a relatively low-magnitude group-level convergence suggests the possibility of a compensatory force at work in at least some speakers, adjusting for changes made during signal transmission despite their lack of direct experience with the transmission manipulation effects.

In this paper, we operationalize register differences at the intersection of formality and mode, and distinguish four broad register categories: spoken informal (conversations), spoken formal (parliamentary debates), written informal (blogs), and written formal (newspaper articles). We are specifically interested in the comparative probabilistic/variationist complexity of these registers – when speakers have grammatical choices, are the probabilistic grammars regulating these choices more or less complex in particular registers than in others? Based on multivariate modeling of richly annotated datasets covering three grammatical alternations in two languages (English and Dutch), we assess the complexity of probabilistic grammars by drawing on three criteria: (a) the number of constraints on variant choice, (b) the number of interactions between constraints, and (c) the relative importance of lexical conditioning. Analysis shows that contrary to theorizing in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic complexity differences between registers are not quantitatively simple: formal registers are consistently the most complex ones, while spoken registers are the least complex ones. The most complex register under study is written-formal quality newspaper writing. We submit that the complexity differentials we uncover are a function of acquisitional difficulty, of on-line processing limitations, and of normative pressures.

Reductions in articulatory working space and vocal intensity have been linked to intelligibility deficits in children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. However, few studies have examined the outcomes of behavioral treatments aimed at these underlying impairments or investigated which treatment cues might best facilitate improved intelligibility. This study assessed the effects of cues targeting clear speech (i.e., "Speak with your big mouth") and greater vocal intensity (i.e., "Speak with your strong voice") on acoustic measures of speech production and intelligibility. Eight children with spastic dysarthria due to cerebral palsy repeated sentence- and word-level stimuli across habitual, big mouth, and strong voice conditions. Acoustic analyses were conducted, and 48 listeners completed orthographic transcription and scaled intelligibility ratings. Both cues resulted in significant changes to vocal intensity and speech rate although the degree of change varied by condition. In a similar manner, perceptual analysis revealed significant improvements to intelligibility with both cues; however, at the single-word level, big mouth outperformed strong voice. Children with dysarthria are capable of changing their speech styles differentially in response to cueing. Both the big mouth and strong voice cues hold promise as intervention strategies to improve intelligibility in this population. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5116843.

The transitive out of -ing pattern, as in Duffy talked the council out of adopting any resolution… (COHA), has often been neglected in work on sentential complementation in recent English, but COHA, the new Corpus of Historical American English, affords an excellent opportunity to examine the incidence of the pattern and its syntactic and semantic properties on the basis of a large corpus of recent English. It is observed that the pattern was attested in the nineteenth century, but that its frequency was very low. Larger numbers of tokens are found from about the middle of the twentieth century onwards. It is argued that an analysis of the pattern as a type of the caused motion construction is helpful in explaining its semantics in that it makes it possible to invoke two subevents in analyzing sentences involving the pattern. Two force dynamic schemas are identified for the more specific interpretation of the construction. The analysis of the pattern as a construction is also helpful from a syntactic point of view in that it accounts for the occurrence of the pattern with verbs independently selecting different types of argument structures. For instance, the verb laugh generally occurs with only one argument, but is also attested with out of -ing, as in I was laughed out of giving the place a fair trial(COHA). In this case the construction supplies two of the arguments.

This paper deals with the early stages of an evolving Australian English (henceforth AusE). The time frame is from 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived, until 1900, the year of the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia. The author collected and edited a COrpus of Oz Early English (COOEE) which contains about two million words. The corpus is structured on chronological lines and takes into account various registers and text types. Relevant texts include court minutes, parliamentary proceedings, private letters and diaries, reports, memoirs, narratives, legal texts and petitions. COOEE is currently used as the basis for the author’s PhD on the history of AusE. One characteristic spelling difference between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be found in words of the hono(u)r type. AusE lies in between the standards followed by the two other varieties. The author shows that this is not due to an increasing influence of AmE on AusE, but that it is the result of the historical development from English in Australia to Australian English. The education and the origin of the author, as well as the semantics of a particular word and the period when it was written, all play significant roles in determining the choice between –or and –our.

In Autosegmental-Metrical models of intonational phonology, different types of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones concatenate to create a set of phonologically distinct phrase-final nuclear tunes. This study asks if an eight-way distinction in nuclear tune shape in American English, predicted from the combination of two (monotonal) pitch accents, two phrase accents, and two boundary tones, is evident in speech production and in speech perception. F0 trajectories from a large-scale imitative speech production experiment were analyzed using bottom-up(k-means) clustering, neural net classification, GAMM modeling, and modeling of turning point alignment. Listeners’ perception of the same tunes is tested in a perceptual discrimination task and related to the imitation results. Emergent grouping of tunes in the clustering analysis, and related classification accuracy from the neural net, show a merging of some of the predicted distinctions among tunes whereby tune shapes that vary primarily in the scaling of final f0 are not reliably distinguished. Within five emergent clusters, subtler distinctions among tunes are evident in GAMMs and f0 turning point modeling. Clustering of individual participants’ production data shows a range of partitions of the data, with nearly all participants making a primary distinction between a class of High-Rising and Non-High-Rising tunes, and with up to four secondary distinctions among the non-Rising class. Perception results show a similar pattern, with poor pairwise discrimination for tunes that differ primarily, but by a small degree, in final f0, and highly accurate discrimination when just one member of a pair is in the High-Rising tune class. Together, the results suggest a hierarchy of distinctiveness among nuclear tunes, with a robust distinction based on holistic tune shape and poorly differentiated distinctions between tunes with the same holistic shape but small differences in final f0. The observed distinctions from clustering, classification, and perception analyses align with the tonal specification of a binary pitch accent contrast {H*, L*} and a maximally ternary {H%, M%, L%} boundary tone contrast; the findings do not support distinct tonal specifications for the phrase accent and boundary tone from the AM model. 

We present MRI-TIMIT: a large-scale database of synchronized audio and real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) data for speech research. The database currently consists of speech data acquired from two male and two female speakers of American English. Subjects’ upper airways were imaged in the midsagittal plane while reading the same 460 sentence corpus used in the MOCHA-TIMIT corpus [1]. Accompanying acoustic recordings were phonemically transcribed using forced alignment. Vocal tract tissue boundaries were automatically identified in each video frame, allowing for dynamic quantification of each speaker’s midsagittal articulation. The database and companion toolset provide a unique resource with which to examine articulatory-acoustic relationships in speech production. Index Terms: speech production, speech corpora, real-time MRI, multi-modal database, large-scale phonetic tools

A comparative analysis of the time variables in the production of speech and sign reveals that signers modify their global physical rate primarily by altering the time they spend articulating, whereas speakers do so by chaning the time they spend pausing. When signers increase or decrease their pause time, however little they do so, they alter the number and the length of the pauses equally, whereas speakers primarily alter the number of pauses and leave their pause durations relatively constant. An analysis of the durations of signs reveals that signs are longer at the end of sentences than within sentences and that the first occurrence of a sign is longer than the second when syntactic location is controlled (both these findings have already been reported for spoken language). The inherent duration of a sign can be accounted for almost totally by the movement characteristic; handshape, location, and number of hands in a sign are of little importance. Finally, signers retain their regular "quiet-breathing" respiratory pattern across signing rates and inhale at locations independent of syntactic importance. In this they are quite unlike speakers, who breathe at syntactic breaks.

n/a

Effects of dialect on merger perception: ERP and behavioral correlates

This study examines 10 new combining forms (CFs) in American English from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and the News on the Web, as well as seven dictionaries. Through the lens of corpus and dictionary data alongside the construction­alisation approach, it is found that all the CFs are partially schematised and partly inherit their meanings from their source words. The constructional changes and constructionalisation of the CFs are accompanied by varying degrees of schematic extensions. The distinctions between their schemas are reflected in the semantic categories of the preceding elements, the differences in the appearance dates of these categories, and the word classes to which the preceding elements belong. This study further confirms that the formation of contemporary CFs may involve analogy and other word-formation schemas in addition to compounding and blending.