Doctoral Dissertation Research: Articulatory and Corpus Study of Relative Timing among Consonants, Vowels, and Tones

博士论文研究：辅音、元音和声调之间相对时序的发音和语料库研究

• 批准号: 1928750
• 负责人: Jason Shaw
• 金额: $ 1.02万
• 依托单位: Yale University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2022-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1928750&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Articulatory; Corpus

A core topic of study in linguistics is the tacit knowledge that speakers have about their language. For all spoken languages, part of this knowledge includes how the speech organs, including the lips, tongue, and velum, are coordinated in time to produce speech. Additionally, many languages also distinguish words from each other using different pitch patterns, called tones. This project investigates whether tones interact with the coordination of other speech organs, drawing together several types of data from the understudied Tibetan language. Methodologically, the project integrates experimental measurements on the physical movement of articulators with audio data gathered in Nepal, harnessing the variation found between speakers in the diaspora Tibetan community to understand basic principles of how tones, consonants and vowels are coordinated in time. Broader impacts include the publicly available deposit of audio recordings to enable future work by linguists and community members, capturing a snapshot of a language undergoing rapid change. The Co-PI, a doctoral student at Yale University, will analyze acoustic and articulatory data of Tibetan as spoken in its diaspora, an understudied language with significant variation between speakers. One aspect of the variation is that some speakers have retained tone while others speakers have lost tone contrasts. The main hypothesis is that the presence of lexical tone alters the coordination of articulatory gestures, with articulatory and acoustic consequences resulting from the balance of competing demands of laryngeal and supralaryngeal aspects of speech production. This study extends analysis of acoustic data collected by the co-PI in Nepal to a corpus of spontaneous speech. The corpus analysis is crucially informed by an experiment on the articulatory kinematics of Tibetan. The experiment uses electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to track the movement of the tongue and lips together with acoustic recordings. Besides providing a test of the main hypothesis in laboratory speech, analysis of co-registered acoustic and kinematic signals will establish acoustic measures of relative timing that can be used in the corpus analysis. The corpus study will evaluate hypotheses in naturalistic speech data, allow consideration of a wider range of factors influencing timing, further assess variability within and across speakers, and provide a valuable resource for future research. This project will contribute to scientific understanding of the mental representation of tone and the timing relations among oral, laryngeal, and tonal gestures, combine corpus and articulatory methods, draw evidence from variation, and advance research on a less-studied language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

语言学研究的核心主题是说话者对他们的语言的默契知识。对于所有口语语言，这些知识的一部分包括语音器官，包括嘴唇，舌头和丝绒的如何及时协调以产生语音。此外，许多语言还使用不同的音调模式（称为音调）彼此区分单词。该项目调查了音调是否与其他语音器官的协调相互作用，从藏语的藏语中绘制了几种类型的数据。从方法论上讲，该项目将有关枢纽器的物理运动的实验测量与尼泊尔收集的音频数据相结合，利用散居藏人社区中的说话者之间发现的变化，以了解音调，辅音和元音如何在时间协调的基本原理。更广泛的影响包括录音的公开存款，以实现语言学家和社区成员的未来工作，从而捕捉经历了快速变化的语言的快照。耶鲁大学的一名博士生，Co-Pi将分析藏传中的藏族的声学和发音数据，这是一种研究的语言，这是一种研究的语言，在说话者之间具有很大的差异。变体的一个方面是，有些说话者保留了语气，而另一些说话者则失去了语调对比度。主要的假设是，词汇音的存在改变了关节姿态的协调，这是由于喉咙和言语产生术的竞争需求平衡而产生的发音和声学后果。这项研究扩展了对尼泊尔的Co-Pi收集的声学数据的分析，以对自发语音的语料库进行分析。关于藏族的关节运动学的实验，语料库分析至关重要。该实验使用电磁关节摄影（EMA）来跟踪舌头和嘴唇的运动以及声学记录。除了提供实验室语音中的主要假设的测试外，对共同注册的声学和运动学信号的分析还将建立可用于语料库分析中的相对时机的声学测量。语料库的研究将评估自然主义语音数据中的假设，允许考虑影响时机的更广泛的因素，进一步评估说话者内部和跨扬声器内部的可变性，并为未来的研究提供宝贵的资源。该项目将有助于科学理解口头，喉部和音调手势之间的心理表述以及结合语料库和旋转方法，从变化中获取证据，并提高对语言较低的语言的研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过评估范围来进行评估，并反映了基金会的范围和宽广的基础，并反映了基金会的范围。