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24Mfm Abstracts Booklet The Twenty-Fourth Manchester Phonology Meeting ABSTRACTS BOOKLET Thursday 26th - Saturday 28th May 2016 Held at Hulme Hall, Manchester Organised by a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, and elsewhere. This booklet contains the abstracts for all the papers presented at the twenty-fourth Manchester Phonology Meeting, held at Hulme Hall, Manchester, in May 2016. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by the surname of the (first named) presenter. If any abstracts are missing from this booklet, it is most likely because the authors did not submit a non-anonymous version of their abstract. The abstracts for the oral paper sessions are presented first, followed by the abstracts for the poster paper sessions, and the booklet concludes with abstracts for the special session. The final programme, included in your registration pack and available on the conference website, gives the details of which papers are in which room, and at which times. Oral papers Modelling the Production and Perception of Kaqchikel Mayan with ‘Small’ Data Ryan Bennett, Yale University, [email protected]; Kevin Tang, Yale University, [email protected] Motivation: No linguistic research is completed without understanding the interplay between production, perception and lexicon. ,e age of ‘big data’ has facilitated large-scale research on the e.ects of lexical statistics on phonological and phonetic patterning. Specially, recent work has shown that lexical factors such as functional load, distributional overlap and context-free/sensitive frequency, play a non- trival role in production and perception (Wedel et al. 2013, Seyfarth, 2014; Currie-Hall & Hume, 2015). However, it remains true that the majority of the world's languages are under-resourced, being spoken by relatively small populations. ,is renders large-scale lexical research extremely di>cult, if not impossible, for most lesser-studied languages (Anand et al. 2011). Using the under-resourced language Kaqchikel (Mayan) as a test case, we provide a proof-of-concept that psycholinguistic and phonetic norms computed from less-than-ideal corpora are su>cient for predicting @ne-grained di.erences in production and perception, such as the confusability of stops and word duration. Methods: To model the lexical inauence on production and perception of Kaqchikel, we compiled two new corpora, one written and one spoken, in order to extract lexical and acoustic variables; furthermore a perception study on stops was conducted. ,e written corpus was constructed from existing religious texts, spoken transcripts, government documents and educational books. ,e resulting corpus contains 1 million word tokens. ,is is far from ideal, in terms of its reliability for estimating low- frequency words (Brysbaert and New 2009), and its register (not speech-like). ,e spoken corpus consists of roughly 4 hours of spontaneous spoken Kaqchikel, collected in Guatemala in 2013 by one of the authors. ,e recordings are free narratives, told as monologues by 16 native speakers of Kaqchikel (19-84 years old, mean=33, median=28; 6 male). ,e corpus is not large: it includes only 40,000 or so word tokens. A subset of the corpus (~1 hour) was submitted to forced alignment (Gorman et al. 2011) for the purposes of acoustic analysis. ,e perception study was designed to focus on stops (plain and ejective stops). Stops are embedded in the CV and VC templates with the vowels [a, i, u], and they were spoken by a native Kaqchikel speaker. Speech-shaped noise was added to the stimuli at SNR of 0dB. ,e stimuli were presented in pairs in an AX-task to ~45 native hearers, and the accuracy and reaction time of each trial were recorded. To the best of our knowledge, these three datasets are the biggest of their kind for Kaqchikel. Analyses: Two analyses were conducted over these three datasets: Perceptual similarity: To model the acoustic inauence on perceptual similarity, we extracted acoustic parameters from the spoken corpus such as phonation and spectral information of the stops and their adjacent vowels. ,ese were then subjected to classi@cation models (e.g. Random Forest) that are suitable for comparing correlated variables. ,is allowed us to identify the relative importance of each acoustic cue in perception. Crucially, we found that in addition to the acoustic inauence, di.erent lexical factors seem to play a role such as functional load, context-free and context-sensitive entropy measures. Word frequency e.ect: We conducted a corpus-based analysis of durational reduction in spontaneous Kaqchikel speech. It has long been observed that words are often reduced in production when they are contextually predictable. ,is reduction takes a range of forms, including word/syllable shortening, segment/syllable deletion, and others (Hooper 1976; Whalen 1991; Aylett and Turk 2006). Focusing on the overall predictability of a word, more frequent words are more predictable than less frequent words, therefore they should also be shorter in duration. Token frequency was extracted from the text corpus. After controlling for word length, phrase-@nal lengthening, speaker- and sentence-level variation, Token Frequency remained a highly signi@cant predictor of word duration (B = -0.104, t = -7.01, p < 0.001). Conclusion: In summary, we established a proof-of-concept for under-resourced languages: it is possible to model the e.ect of lexical factors on phonetic and perceptual variation with less-than-ideal spoken and text corpora. Speci@cally, our analyses of Kaqchikel highlighted that (a) perceptual similarity is a function of acoustic cues as well as lexical statistics; crucially these factors are weighted unequally – that is not all lexical statistics and acoustic cues are used by the perceptual system; (b) the classic word frequency e.ect on duration remains robust even in a sparse corpus, and in a highly-inaecting, morphologically-complex language like Kaqchikel. The typology of voiced spirants and the emergence of [sonorant] Christina Bjorndahl, [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University It is well known that for obstruents, voicelessness is the default, a fact often phrased as an implicational relation: if a language has a voiced obstruent, it has its voiceless counter- part (Maddieson, 1984). For stops and sibilants, the implicational relation is robust: among languages in the UPSID database, only 1.1% have voiced stops without corresponding voice- less stops, and none have a voiced sibilant without a voiceless sibilant. For the non-sibilant fricative pairs [F, B], [f, v], [T, D], [x, G] however, rates of violation are far higher, ranging from 22% for labiodental{ [f, v] to 75% for} bilabial [F, B]. Such high rates of violations within the non-sibilant fricatives (henceforth spirants)suggestthattherelationshipofvoicedto voiceless spirants does not parallel that of other voiced-voiceless obstruent pairs. We argue that the typological facts, phonological patterning, and phonetic character of voiced spirants support an emergent interpretation of the [sonorant] feature (Mielke, 2008). Drawing from a database study of the UPSID languages, our first objective is to show that the typological di↵erences between voiced sibilants and spirants are more profound than previously appreciated. For example, Maddieson (2010) observes that if a language has a voiced fricative, it is likely to have a voiced stop; we show that this implicational relation is driven entirely by the voiced sibilants, and in fact fails for the voiced spirants. Therefore, while voicing in sibilants is, in some sense, parasitic on stop voicing, spirant voicing is not. Moreover, voiced sibilants and spirants show a di↵erent distribution according to inventory size: Lindblom and Maddieson (1988) argue that the likelihood of an inventory containing elaborated articulations, e.g., voiced fricatives, increases proportionally with inventory size; again, this is true for voiced sibilants, but not for voiced spirants. Furthermore, we show that [B, v, D, G] are most likely to occur unpaired (i.e., without [F, f, T, x], respectively) in small inventories, but rarely occur unpaired in large inventories. Due to the phonetic character of voiced spirants, namely, the aerodynamic tensions that arise from maintaining voicing and frication, voiced spirants make for poor obstruents (Ohala, 1983). This fact, combined with their sonorant patterning in various languages, leads Botma and van’t Veer (2013) to conclude that in many cases such segments have been mistran- scribed, and are better classified as sonorants. Such an analysis is attractive because it leaves the implicational relations with respect to obstruent voicing intact. If unpaired [B, v, D, G] are in fact sonorants, then it is not surprising that they surface without voiceless counterparts and independently of whether there are voiced stops in the inventory. How- ever, while a [+sonorant] classification may be appropriate for any given language, we argue that it does not go far enough in elucidating the subtlety in the cross-linguistic identity of the voiced spirants. From a typological perspective, such an analysis does not explain the interaction between implicational relations and inventory size. Phonologically, just as voiced spirants are poor obstruents, they are also ill-suited to sonorant membership: they are rarely syllabic, have restricted phonotactics that do not parallel other sonorants, and often exhibit at least partial phonological pairing with
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