Kirkpatrick claimed that French keyboard music sounded like French. Hall (1953) talked about a resemblance of Elgar’s Music and the intonation of British speech. Both discussed instrumental music...Show moreKirkpatrick claimed that French keyboard music sounded like French. Hall (1953) talked about a resemblance of Elgar’s Music and the intonation of British speech. Both discussed instrumental music and a likeness with the speech, which has remained controversial. This thesis investigates the robustness of the metrics used for the two experiments in rhythm and melody to provide information about their linguistic origins. To this end, this thesis replicates the two experiments of Patel et al. (2006) regarding the rhythm and melody of British English and French speech and instrumental music. In addition, a third parameter labelled as “slope” was tested to investigate if melody, when taking into consideration the durational property of the melodic interval, provides the same results as the two previous replicated experiments. We replicated the findings for rhythm and melody reported in Patel et al. (2006). The slope parameter, however, showed a reverse pattern raising some critical questions about the validity of the metrics to portray statistical evidence of national characteristics in speech and music.Show less
Experimental approaches to sentence processing focus on localizing areas responsible for language comprehension in the brain oftentimes disregarding the role of time in both the construction and...Show moreExperimental approaches to sentence processing focus on localizing areas responsible for language comprehension in the brain oftentimes disregarding the role of time in both the construction and deconstruction of linguistic structure. Inspired by predictive coding and cue integration, this thesis proposes a theoretical framework for sentence processing where the hierarchical structure of language and its evolution over time profoundly influences its processing leading to time-contingent weighted integration of information. Essential to this theory is the assumption that the reliability of the internal representations generated by each level of linguistic analysis influences the gain of the predictions formulated by the other levels. Multivariate Pattern Analysis was used to compare the gain of semantic and phonological processing at two different timepoints in a sentence. Experiment 1 was the design of an EEG Multivariate Pattern Classification experiment where the classification accuracy of a phonological and semantic classifier for words in early and late positions in a sentence would be compared. We expected classification accuracy of the phonological classifier to be constant regardless of word position and a higher classification accuracy for the semantic classifier at later time points relative to the phonological classifier. Experiment 2 was a Representational Similarity Analysis of nouns in early and late positions from MEG audiobook data. When correlating Phonological and Semantic models with the data, no significant time windows were found. However, the presence of uncorrected clusters suggests the implementation of nested timescales as variations in temporal integration frequency.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
2022-02-01T00:00:00Z
Much of the literature on heritage language phonology finds heritage speakers to show some influence from their dominant language compared to homeland speakers, but heritage speakers still perform...Show moreMuch of the literature on heritage language phonology finds heritage speakers to show some influence from their dominant language compared to homeland speakers, but heritage speakers still perform more accurately in their heritage language than do naïve speakers. Yet, research on heritage language phonology is limited compared to that on heritage language syntax and morphology. This is even more so the case for research on heritage speakers’ suprasegmental phonology: for instance, very little is known about heritage speakers’ perception of lexical tone. The present study used an ABX task to investigate perceptual segment-tone integration in heritage speakers of Vietnamese in the Netherlands, compared to monolingually raised Dutch and Vietnamese speakers in the homeland, respectively. Heritage speakers were found to have a stronger segment-tone integration than the monolingually raised Dutch, whereas the homeland Vietnamese showed a slightly stronger integration than the heritage speakers. Moreover, the groups’ integrations were asymmetrical: heritage speakers considered both tones and segments in word identification but had a clear preference for segments; the Dutch controls almost exclusively considered segments and the Vietnamese controls had a slight preference for tone-based word identification. The findings thus conform to previous literature on heritage language phonology: the heritage speakers performed intermediately between monolinguals of their heritage and dominant languages.Show less
Previous studies have indicated that native and non-native listeners’ attention to differences in segments and lexical tones is heightened when language context is removed. Do they also display...Show morePrevious studies have indicated that native and non-native listeners’ attention to differences in segments and lexical tones is heightened when language context is removed. Do they also display greater sensitivity to intonational differences in the absence of language context? To examine this question, this thesis tests the ability of Dutch and Mandarin listeners to identify Mandarin questions and statements that differ only in intonation in three different levels of language context: no language context, a neutral language context, and a constraining language context. All listeners were found to identify questions and statements better with each increasing level of language context. This suggests that the presence of a meaningful semantic context facilitates the perception of intonational meaning. Moreover, Mandarin listeners were better at identifying questions and statements than non-native listeners in sentences with language context. But the difference between Mandarin and Dutch listeners’ abilities was minimal in sentences without language context. This result suggests that the effect of language experience on intonation perception is diminished at the lower auditory processing level.Show less
The phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning...Show moreThe phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning? This thesis describes an exploratory elicitation experiment in which the effects of two pragmatic dimensions on the production of Dutch intonation is examined within three core meanings: “testing”, “selection”, “selection plus”. The productions of native speakers – realised on two-syllable proper names – were recorded in four pragmatic dimension combinations: default or vocative (orientation), and formal or informal (politeness). The meanings and pragmatic dimensions were embodied in situational contexts that served to elicit individual intonation contours for each meaning configuration. Additionally, the effect of word length was considered in a secondary experiment by employing one- and three-syllable proper names in a constant pragmatic environment. Results show a main effect of orientation across core meanings caused by different contextual variables. Politeness yielded only one main effect as a result of the configuration of speaker-hearer relations. Productions were found to be consistent across word lengths. The effects of the pragmatic dimensions are of definite influence on the production of Dutch intonation contours, but they could not be generalised across core meanings due to context discrepancies, indicating the importance of situational background.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
closed access
The current study is an acoustic investigation of the three-way obstruent contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiced stops in the medial position of tone sandhi domains...Show moreThe current study is an acoustic investigation of the three-way obstruent contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiced stops in the medial position of tone sandhi domains in Lili Wu Chinese, a language that has an aspiration-induced tonal split in lexical tones. The main focus of the thesis was to examine the acoustic realizations of the three-way stop contrast. By analyzing acoustic data from twenty old-generation Lili Wu native speakers, we found that f0 perturbation was employed by speakers to contrast phonological voicing: voiced stops introduced lower f0 contours to the following vowels than the voiceless ones. Durational data on consonant release (c/v ratio) and difference in phonation types (H1*-H2*) were adopted as two cues to contrast aspiration: voiceless aspirated stops tend to be associated with greater c/v ratio and H1*-H2* differences than voiceless unaspirated ones.Show less
This research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production...Show moreThis research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production task. The first produced word from the utterances is analysed to give an answer of the research question: how to plan an utterance during online vs reading-aloud speech production? It turned out that at syntactic planning the phrase for both experiments is the preferred unit of planning. Speech onset latencies and initial F0 peaks form evidence for this planning process. Within the first phonological word of the utterances no main effect was found for onset latencies in the reading- aloud task, while this was found in the online speech production task. Furthermore, no main effect was found for the initial F0 peaks in the online speech production task, while this was found for the reading- aloud task. Thus, the planning at phonological level seems to be different for both speech productions tasks.Show less
To get hands on Dutch fricative devoicing and to find the insides of the devoicing process, it is useful to take a sharper look at child’s language acquisition. How do children acquire their...Show moreTo get hands on Dutch fricative devoicing and to find the insides of the devoicing process, it is useful to take a sharper look at child’s language acquisition. How do children acquire their fricatives in a dialect with voicing fricatives counterparts and with fricatives that nearly stand alone in their place of articulation, like the post-velar fricative? Are these fricatives acquired similarly? To answer these questions, one needs to find out first whether children make a distinction at all between fricatives, and moreover what acoustics they use to distinguish these sounds. In order to learn more about the development of fricative acquisition, an apparent time research including different age groups will be described. In this way, it can be determined whether young and old children use the same acoustic characteristics, and whether there is a development trajectory detectable in the voicing distinction. As has been known from the literature (Hermans & Van Oostendorp 2011), the occurrence of voiced and voiceless fricatives in Dutch is not only determined lexically, but it has very much to do with the phonological context as well. Do children use this context and is there a development in the use of this phonological rule? To gain insights into the above issues, this study attempts to discover how Dutch children cope with the production of the distinction between the fricative counterparts of three different places of articulation. It seems that children first learn to produce different fricatives and, unexpectedly, after a few years they change their use of the voicing counterparts of fricatives. This thesis shows the fricative phonetics of children in kindergarten and children around ten years of age, and suggests a possible explanation for their phonetics at different stages of their childhood.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Different speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different...Show moreDifferent speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different reduction patterns in the consonant cluster /st/ and that consequently, phonetic detail of reduced word forms is stored in the mind of the speaker. This was tested by a production experiment in which spontaneous speech and read speech are compared and a perception experiment in which participants had to perform a lexical decision task. Results showed that different dialects indeed show different frequencies and patterns of cluster reduction. Specifically, the Ede dialect reduced and deleted /s/ more frequently than the dialect Roosendaal. Reaction times of the third experiment showed that reduced word forms are not stored next to the canonical form. However, response data revealed that phonetic detail was influential when recognising reduced forms. I propose a hybrid model of the episodic and abstract model of storage of word forms in that phonetic detail of variants is stored next to the canonical form.Show less
