This study provides an acoustic phonetic analysis of some of the vowels in an endangered language with little phonetic documentation, Scottish Gaelic. It tests previous mainly impressionistic analyses which claim Scottish Gaelic has phonemic vowel length, and contrasts four high back vowels /u  o /. Results suggest four vowels are indeed contrasted, and that phonemic /u/ is divided into two p...

This study examined the relationship between phonemic and semantic (category) verbal fluency and cognitive status in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP), a longitudinal cohort enriched for family history of Alzheimer's disease. Participants were 283 WRAP subjects (age 53.1[6.5] years at baseline); who had completed three waves of assessment, over ∼6 years and met psychometr...

We present an automatic approach to tree annotation in which basic nonterminal symbols are alternately split and merged to maximize the likelihood of a training treebank. Starting with a simple Xbar grammar, we learn a new grammar whose nonterminals are subsymbols of the original nonterminals. In contrast with previous work, we are able to split various terminals to different degrees, as approp...

Two phonemes that may induce minimal pairs constitute a phonemic contrast. Some phonemic contrasts may disappear for various reasons, which, nevertheless, does not seem to seriously impede linguistic communication. Does it mean that the disappeared phonemic contrasts are unimportant? In our study, we calculated the proportions (here termed degree of contrast) of minimal pairs to the words in wh...

An approach to automate knowledge acquisition from natural signals, such as speech, is presented. The knowledge is extracted in the form of context-sensitive production rules that can be used to map a signal or a sequence of events into another one, e.g., for correction or enhancement purposes. The rules are constructed automatically from examples by using a concept of Dynamically Focusing Cont...

Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) is a surgical technique to treat motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Studies have shown that STN-DBS may cause a decline in verbal fluency performance. We aimed to verify the effects of STN-DBS on the performance of phonemic verbal fluency in Brazilian PD patients. Sixteen participants were evaluated on the Unified Parki...

Recent advances in modeling early language acquisition are due not only to the development of machine-learning techniques, but also to the increasing availability of data on child language and child-adult interaction. In the absence of recordings of child-directed speech, or when models explicitly require such a representation for training data, phonemic transcriptions are commonly used as inpu...

This paper focuses on a method for automatically dividing speech utterances into phonemic segments, which are used for constructing synthesis unit inventories for speech synthesis. Here, we propose a new segmentation parameter called, “dynamics of fundamental frequency (DF0).” In the fine structures of F0 contours, there exist phonemic events which are observed as local dips at phonemic transit...