Phonological And Phonetic Competence Between Grammar Signal Processing And Neural Activity

The starting point for this Research Topic was a Priority Programme on experimental research in phonology and phonetics which was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 2006 to 2013. Based on this programme, the aim of this Research Topic is to draw together empirical work in the field of segmental and prosodic processing and representation and phonological theory. Contributions are encouraged that focus on the exploration of human cognitive, articulatory and perceptual abilities dealing with all types of phonetic and phonological entities. More specifically, papers are encouraged that address the interface of the speech sound systems investigated in phonology, the representation about articulation, perception, acquisition and processing established in phonetics and psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics. Topics of investigation could be: (1) phonological representations in the mental lexicon – specified minimally in terms of categorical phonological information or as variable phonetic imprint of the occurrences in the input, (2) sounds and sound-changing processes – systemic and functional aspects, (3) prosodic units such as syllables and metrical feet, as well as the phonological phrases that are connected to syntactic units of the sentence – systemic- properties, processing and phonetic consequences, (4) tones as building blocks of the sentence melody – their relation to the level of linguistic expressions on the one hand, their phonetic realisation (e.g., tonal height and contours) and perception on the other hand. Experimental contributions making use of behavioural methods including eye movement studies and methods like EEG, fMRI, MEG and EPA to investigate production and perception of phonetic and phonological entities are particularly welcome. We welcome original research articles, reviews, theory articles, methodological articles, as well as brief commentaries/opinion pieces (for further information see here).

This book positions itself at the intersection of the key areas of the modern humanities. Different authors from a variety of countries take innovative approaches to investigating multimodal communication, adapting pedagogical design to digital environments and enhancing cognitive skills through transformations in teaching and learning practices. The eclectic forms under study require eclectic approaches and methodologies, and the authors cross disciplinary boundaries drawing on philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, computational linguistics, mathematics, cognitive studies and neuroaesthetics. Part I presents methods of analysing multimodal communication in its different displays, covering promotional video in crowdfunding project presentations, multimodal public signs of prohibition and visuals as arguments. Part II explores varied teaching methodologies that have emerged as a result of and in response to modern technological changes and contains some practical hints for educators. It demonstrates the pedagogical potential of video games, virtual worlds, linguistic corpora and online dictionaries. Part III focuses on psychological and cognitive factors influencing success in the classroom, primarily, ways of developing students’ and teachers’ personalities. The volume sits at the intersection between Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Discourse Analysis, Education Theory and Cognitive Studies and is useful to scholars and students of communication, languages, education and other areas of the humanities. This book should trigger scholarly discussions as well as stimulating practitioners’ interest in these fields.

This is the first volume concerned with the phonological typology of syllable and word languages, based on the model of a complex, multi-layered and hierarchically structured phonological system. The main typological claim is that the phonetic and phonological make-up of a language depends on the relevance of the prosodic categories. In previous research, the syllable and the phonological word have already proved to be typologically important. The contributions in this volume discuss theoretical questions and address issues such as the variable structure of the phonological word, the interplay between phonetics and phonology as well as the effect of a language’s phonological make-up on its morphology or lexicon. The volume provides detailed synchronic and diachronic analyses of (Non-)Indo-European languages which will serve as a basis for further typological research.

There is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex segmental sequences from phonetic, phonological and psycholinguistic perspectives. This volume draws from selected contributions to the conference Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity held in Munich in August 2008. Consonant sequences, whether occurring within individual lexical items or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. But contributions also consider the integration of tonal and vocalic elements into syllable structure. The main aim of the volume is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. The book is organized into four main sections entitled ‘Phonology and Typology’, ‘Production: Analysis and Models’, ‘Acquisition’, and ‘Assimilation and reduction in connected speech’.

This comprehensive project has the objective of describing and assessing pronunciation talent with special focus on its psychological and neural correlates. The first part of this undertaking describes the extensive tests necessary to measure phonetic talent in its various dimensions, such as production and perception, the segmental and suprasegmental levels of speech, and different utterance forms such as spontaneous speech, reading and imitation. Subjects are examined in their native language (German), a familiar second language (English) and, to a lesser degree, an unfamiliar language (Hindi). The project also investigates psychological and behavioral influences such as empathy or motivation on pronunciation performance, as well as correlations with general linguistic aptitude. The described measures and correlations allow a reliable classification of proficiency and talent level to be used in the selection of subjects for the neuroimaging studies in the second part of the project. These use functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to observe differences in brain activity between talented and untalented individuals during the performance of phonetic tasks (perception of phonetic differences, imitation, reading).

This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis which was submitted in April 1993. The main extension is a chapter on evaluation of the system de scribed in Chapter 8 as this is clearly an issue which was not treated in the original version. This required the collection of data, the development of a concept for diagnostic evaluation of linguistic word recognition systems and, of course, the actual evaluation of the system itself. The revisions made primarily concern the presentation of the latest version of the SILPA system described in an additional Subsection 8. 3, the development environment for SILPA in Sec tion 8. 4, the diagnostic evaluation of the system as an additional Chapter 9. Some updates are included in the discussion of phonology and computation in Chapter 2 and finite state techniques in computational phonology in Chapter 3. The thesis was designed primarily as a contribution to the area of compu tational phonology. However, it addresses issues which are relevant within the disciplines of general linguistics, computational linguistics and, in particular, speech technology, in providing a detailed declarative, computationally inter preted linguistic model for application in spoken language processing. Time Map Phonology is a novel, constraint-based approach based on a two-stage temporal interpretation of phonological categories as events.

Speech Production: Models, Phonetic Processes and Techniques brings together researchers from many different disciplines - computer science, dentistry, engineering, linguistics, phonetics, physiology, psychology - all with a special interest in how speech is produced. From the initial neural program to the end acoustic signal, it provides an overview of several dominant models in the speech production literature, as well as up-to-date accounts of persistent theoretical issues in the area. A particular focus is on the evaluation of information gleaned from instrumental investigations of the speech production process, including MRI, PET, ultra-sound, video-imaging, EMA, EPG, X-ray, computer simulation - and many others. The research presented in this volume considers questions such as: the feed-back vs. feed-forward control of speech; the acoustic/auditory vs. articulatory/somato-sensory domains of speech planning; the innateness of human speech; the possible architecture of a speech production model; and the realization of prosodic structure in speech. Leaders in speech research from around the world have contributed their most recent work to this volume.

This textbook provides a clear and concise overview of the main schools of linguistic thought and scholarship from the late 18th century to the present day, examining the key tenets and leading figures of each approach and assessing their impact on the field. Combining theory with practice, the author aims to familiarise students with the mechanisms used in analysing language structures, to acquaint them with the history of the discipline, and to demonstrate how different - sometimes competing - approaches can be combined to understand language and linguistics today. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, this textbook is an ideal primer for new students of linguistics at any level, as well as more experienced researchers seeking to understand the history of their field or the arguments and theories of other sub-disciplines.