The notion of salience has been singled out as the explanatory factor for a diverse range of linguistic phenomena. In particular, perceptual salience (e.g., visual salience of objects in the world, acoustic prominence of linguistic sounds) and semantic-pragmatic salience (e.g., prominence of recently mentioned or topical referents) have been shown to influence language comprehension and product...

Abstract This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Spanish, nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end word (e.g., Yucatá instead [n]). Since this phenomenon widespread Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown other Spanish-speaking regions, it linked to influence indigenous ...

The photosphere provides an important boundary condition for prominence support. The conservation of pho-tospheric flux (sometimes called line tying) sets a serious constraint on the evolution of coronal magnetic fields. This boundary condition can only be communicated to the prominence by Alfvén and magneto-acoustic waves. As a result, the boundary condition as experienced by the prominence at...

In recent work [1], we have suggested a novel approach for fine-grained and fast prominence annotation by naı̈ve listeners. Our approach relies on annotators’ “drummed” replications of a perceived utterance, modulating their drumming velocity in accordance with the perceptual prominence of consecutive linguistic units (syllables, words). The drumming velocity is then used as a fine-grained opera...

Abstract This article explores the shifting connotations of two key terms in propaganda texts on bilingual education policy Inner Mongolia. The are dumdadu-yin ündüsten (Ch.: Zhonghua minzu , Chinese nation) and ulus-un neidem hereglehü üge hel guojia tongyong yuyan national common language). I examine how meanings these have begun to shift as China strives shed its multinational character buil...

In an experiment reported previously, subjects rated perceived syllable prominence in a Swedish utterance produced by ten speakers at various levels of vocal effort. The analysis showed that about half of the variance could be accounted for by acoustic factors. Slightly more than half could be accounted for by linguistic factors. Here, we report two additional experiments. In the first, we atte...

Context. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), as a large-scale eruptive phenomenon, often reveal some precursors in the initiation phase, e.g., X-ray brightening, filament darkening, etc, which are useful for CME modeling and space weather forecast. Aims. With the SOHO/SUMER spectroscopic observations of the 2000 September 26 event, we propose another precursor for CME eruptions, namely, long-time pr...