Abstract Harvesting electricity from ubiquitous atmospheric moisture has drawn growing research attention. Despite great advances, generators still suffer performance decay during long‐term service. Recently, self‐oscillating actuators driven by humidity gradience have attracted interests, which may give a clue to harvest energy persistently via electromagnetic induction. In order combine high ...

This chapter reviews contemporary approaches to the morphological influences on stress in certain Pama-Nyungan languages, including Diyari, Dyirbal, and Warlpiri. To account for the variation found in these languages, nine different theories are developed that differ in the constraints responsible for edge effects in stress and the alignment of morphological and prosodic structure. The factoria...

This acoustic study has investigated contextual tonal variations in 125 disyllabic words produced by six native speakers of Nanjing Chinese, with five phonemic tones. Three types of tonal variation were observed in the data: neutralizing sandhi, nonneutralizing sandhi and tonal coarticulation. Comparison between the three types of tonal variation suggests that tone sandhi may be rooted in phone...

A multitude of factors characterizes bi- and multilingual compared to monolingual language acquisition. Two of the most prominent viewpoints have recently been put in perspective and enriched by a third (Tsimpli, 2014): age of onset of children's exposure to their native languages, the role of the input they receive, and the timing in monolingual first language development of the phenomena exam...

Chinese tone has played an important role in the development of phonological theory from distinctive features and autosegmental phonology to Optimality Theory and its various adaptations. This article reviews some past and current issues in the analysis of Chinese tone and points out how the development of theoretical phonology has shaped the highs and lows of this research enterprise. To fruit...

Brief course description This seminar deals with the linguistic and sociolinguistic sources of variation in speech and their formal treatment in theories of phonetics and phonology. Variation is here broadly construed to encompass both low-level phonetic variation (often referred to as gradience) and sociolinguistically-related variation (such as the existence of alternant forms). Similarly, “f...

Probabilistic and stochastic methods have been fruitfully applied to a wide variety of problems in grammar induction, natural language processing, and cognitive modeling. In this paper we explore the possibility of developing a class of combinatorial semantic representations for natural languages that compute the semantic value of a (declarative) sentence as a probability value which expresses ...

Over the past several decades, an increasing number of empirical studies have documented the interaction of information across the traditional linguistic modules of phonetics, phonology, and lexicon. For example, the frequency with which a word occurs influences its phonetic properties of its sounds; high frequency words tend to be reduced relative to low frequency words. Lexicalist Exemplar Mo...

It is argued that the principles needed to explain linguistic behavior are domain-general and based on the impact that specific experiences have on the mental organization and representation of language. This organization must be sensitive to both specific information and generalized patterns. In addition, knowledge of language is highly sensitive to frequency of use: frequently-used linguistic...

Phonological patterns often have phonetic bases. But whether phonetic substance should be encoded in synchronic phonological grammar is controversial. We aim to test the synchronic relevance of phonetics by investigating native Mandarin speakers’ applications of two exceptionless tone sandhi processes to novel words: the contour reduction 213→21/__T (T≠213), which has a clear phonetic motivatio...