Ling 250 part 2

Question 1

what is a phoneme

Answer 1

Perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish one word
from another in a given language

Question 2

what is an allophone

Answer 2

phonetic variations of
a phoneme, appear in predictable contexts

Question 3

how do you argue that sounds are 2 different phonemes

Answer 3

lexical contrast (minimal pairs), overlapping distribution

Question 4

how do you argue that 2 sounds are 2 allophones of the same phoneme

Answer 4

distribution analysis: what context does the sound appear in, if they are in complementary distribution then they are allophones

Question 5

define minimal pair

Answer 5

pair of words with different meanings and just one sound difference

Question 6

complementary distribution

Answer 6

no overlapping contexts where a set of sounds appear

Question 7

overlapping distribution

Answer 7

minimal pairs exist (2 sounds can appear in the same context)

Question 8

underlying representation

Answer 8

the phoneme with the most simple/broad contexts

Question 9

assimilation

Answer 9

make 2 sounds sound more similar

Question 10

dissimilation

Answer 10

make sounds sound less similar

Question 11

epenthesis

Answer 11

add a sound (insertion)

Question 12

deletion

Answer 12

delete a sound

Question 13

metathesis

Answer 13

reordering of sounds

Question 14

fortition

Answer 14

sounds get stronger

Question 15

lenition

Answer 15

sounds get weaker

Question 16

morphemes

Answer 16

meaningful pieces of a word (prefix, stem, suffix)

Question 17

allomorphs

Answer 17

morpheme variants, same meaning, different forms depending on the context

Question 18

describe the sonority hierarchy

Answer 18

low-high: voiceless stops, voiced stops, voiceless fricatives, voiced fricatives, nasals, liquids, glides, vowels

Question 19

describe the components of a syllable

Answer 19

onset, rhyme (nucleus, coda)

Question 20

what does the mora signify

Answer 20

syllable weight

Question 21

light syllable

Answer 21

one mora

Question 22

heavy syllable

Answer 22

2 moras

Question 23

superheavy syllable

Answer 23

3+ moras

Question 24

what sounds get a mora

Answer 24

vowels -1, diphthongs- 2, stressed syllables with a coda - 1

Question 25

onset

Answer 25

first sound(s) in a syllable

Question 26

nucleus

Answer 26

vowel

Question 27

coda

Answer 27

comes after the nucleus

Question 28

rhyme

Answer 28

made up of the nucleus and coda

Question 29

sonority sequencing principle

Answer 29

the nucleus of a syllable is the sonority peak, usually progressively decreases from the nucleus on both sides (upside down V shape), some violations

Question 30

tone system

Answer 30

the use of pitch for lexical contrast

Question 31

intonation system

Answer 31

the use of pitch to convey a discourse-level meaning

Question 32

tone shift

Answer 32

tone can spread from its segmental anchor and shift to other segments and syllables

Question 33

tone spread

Answer 33

a single tone feature may spread out over a string of successive syllables

Question 34

obligatory tone contour principle

Answer 34

identical tones adjacent to each other are prohibited in some languages

Question 35

tone sandhi

Answer 35

observed in East Asian tone languages, phonological rules that change tone assigned to a syllable depending on tone of adjacent syllable

Question 36

boundary tone

Answer 36

occur at the right edge of a phrase and mark the type of speech act

Question 37

pitch accent

Answer 37

encode the informational status of a word or phrase (highlights new information, broad or contrastive focus)

Question 38

african languages

Answer 38

level tone languages, relative pitch heights

Question 39

asian languages

Answer 39

contour tone languages

Question 40

distributional analysis of language data

Answer 40

determines if 2 sounds are 2 different phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme

Question 41

steps for a distributional analysis

Answer 41

look at what contexts each sound appears in

Question 42

format for writing phonological rules

Answer 42

/x/ --> [y] / [context])

Question 43

response patterns in identification tasks

Answer 43

continuous perception is linear, categorical is non-linear (_/-)

Question 44

response patterns in discrimination tasks

Answer 44

continuous is a flat line around 50, categorical peaks between 4 and 5 but flat around

Question 45

continuous perception

Answer 45

gradient

Question 46

catagorical speech

Answer 46

one or the other

Question 47

origins of perceptual catagorization

Answer 47

temporal response patterns in the auditory cortex (auditory system), and learning!

Question 48

steps in generating speech from text

Answer 48

breaks a word down into pronouncable units, transformed into electronic sound signals by several methods (parametric, concatenative, generative)

Question 49

parametric speech synthesis

Answer 49

define parameters of human speech signal and use this information to generate speech (amplitude and freq of formants)

Question 50

synthesis by rule

Answer 50

computer synthesized sound wave where only f1/f2/f3 frequency and f1/f2/f3 amplitude are manipulated

Question 51

articulatory synthesis

Answer 51

model of the vocal tract, speech is created by digitally simulating air flow through the vt

Question 52

concatenative speech synthesis

Answer 52

synthesize sounds by concatenating short samples of pre-recorded sound

Question 53

steps in automatic speech recognition

Answer 53

speech input, spectral encoding, look-up, output

Question 54

word error rate

Answer 54

number of errors divided by the number of words

Question 55

challenges of automatic speech synthesis and recognition

Answer 55

segmentation (don't know word boundaries), ambiguity (homophones, semantics, pragmatics, syntax), variability (across speakers, speech styles, accents, etc.)

Question 56

identification experiment

Answer 56

what category does a sound belong to, do we find a clear boundary?

Question 57

discrimination experiment

Answer 57

can you discriminate one sound from another