This study examines variables influencing vowel duration of French spoken in Windsor, Ontario, in order to see whether their respective effects on vowel duration are organised hierarchically. We first consider the data distribution of four female speakers before carrying out a statistical principal components analysis. Our results show that the variables are classified into three underlying fac...

Raddoppiamento (Fono-) Sintattico (RS) is a phenomenon found in Central and Southern varieties of Italian, by which an oxytone word1 lengthens the initial consonant of word2. One possible interpretation is that RS is a resyllabification process, depending on the same constraints on syllable structure as within-word gemination. If this is correct, we also expect both phenomena to be signaled by ...

Myanmar language and script are unique and complex. Up to our knowledge, considerable amount of work has not yet been done in describing Myanmar script using formal language theory. This paper presents manually constructed context free grammar (CFG) with “111” productions to describe the Myanmar Syllable Structure. We make our CFG in conformity with the properties of LL(1) grammar so that we ca...

This paper shows how phonological structures can be culturally selected so as to become learnable and adapted to the ecological niche formed by the brains and bodies of speakers. A computational model of the cultural formation of syllable systems illustrates how general learning and physical biases can influence the evolution of the structure of vocalization systems. We use the artificial life ...

Background: Tone has been claimed to play an active role in stress assignment in Standard Chinese: 1) a syllable with tone constitutes the head of a foot, hence is stressed, and a syllable without tone is unstressed (Yip 1980); 2) the intrinsic prominence of tone determines the stressability of a syllable, syllables with the Falling and the High-level tones are stressed, whereas syllables with ...

The research presented here examines the proposal that orthographic processing in reading polysyllabic words takes place via an analysis of the word into an orthographic/morphological structure called the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure or BOSS. This structure includes the largest possible coda in the first component (e.g., the THUND of THUNDER) and, as such, it cuts across the phonologic...

The control of sequenced behaviors, including human speech, requires that the brain coordinate the production of discrete motor elements with their concatenation into complex patterns. In birdsong, another sequential vocal behavior, the acoustic structure (phonology) of individual song elements, or "syllables," must be coordinated with the sequencing of syllables into a song. However, it is unk...

In 1968, Ernst Pulgram began his classic monograph on the syllable with the wise words, “conscience, courtesy, and caution require that anyone wishing to concern himself with the syllable read all, or at least most, of the enormous literature on it.” The years since his study have only magnified the challenge of this suggestion. Yet life is short, and space shorter still, and so in these few pa...

Two production experiments were conducted to establish the anchor point for the beginning of the final rise in Dutch falling-rising pitch contours. We systematically varied the prosodic structure of the post-nuclear words by including the stress level (primary or secondary) of the penultimate syllable and the distance of the last stressed syllable to the utterance end as factors. None of the sy...

Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman member spoken in North East India (NEI), has twenty consonant phonemes and six vowel with four contrastive tones. Three stops three nasals permitted at the end of syllable all consonants occurs beginning syllable. A voiceless libio-dental fricative which is rare other NEI languages major consonant. Vowel system several diphthongs. The close central unrounded /ɨ/ can ap...