In this paper unification and transduction mechanisms are applied in a new approach to phonological parsing. It is shown that unification in the sense of Kay as used in unification grammars, and transduction, a process deriving from automata theory, are both valuable tools for use in computational phonology. By way of illustration, a brief outline of the allophonic parser by Church is given. Then a linear unification parser for English syllables is introduced. This parser takes phonetic input in the form of feature bundles and uses phonological rules represented by networks of transduction relations together with unification, and an iterative finite-state process to produce phonemic output with marked syllable boundaries. A fundamental distinction is made between two domains: the representations at the phonetic and phonological levels, and the processing of these representations. On this basis, a distinction is made between networks of transduction relations (e.g. between allophones an...

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony, disharmony, dissimilation, and elision in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), and (ii) an account of morpheme-specific alternations within this framework. I will argue that harmony, or assimilation in general, surfaces due to a Faithfulness constraint family, 'Syntagmatic Identity', which establishes a correspondence relation between segmental or prosodic entities of the same type within one representation.

What is the relationship between syntax, prosody and phonetics? This paper argues for a declarative constraint-based.theory, in which each step in a derivation adds diverse constraints to a pool. Some of these describe well formed objects in the feature structure domain, in terms of both syntactic and prosodic features. Some characterise the relative prominence of constituents as a partial order over some discrete domain (playing the role of metrical grid). Some are simultaneous equations in the reals, whose solutions represent the pitch level of phonetic objects - high and low tones. The elements of such a theory are illustrated with a treatment of prosodic phrasing and tone scaling in Tokyo Japanese, and the theory is compared to Selkirk and Tateishi's analysis based on the Strict Layer Hypothesis.

Traditional linguistic models are categorical. Recently, though, a number of researchers have begun to study non-categorical human linguistic knowledge (e.g. Bender 2000, Pierrehumbert 2000, Frisch 2001). This new empirical focus has posed significant difficulties for categorical models, which cannot account for many non-categorical phenomena. Rather than trying to fit the non-categorical complexities of language into categorical models, a number of researchers have begun to treat non-categoriality in probabilistic terms (Jurafsky 1996, Abney 1996, Bod 1998). This dissertation demonstrates experimentally that language users have knowledge of non-categorical correlations between phonology and other grammatical, semantic, and social knowledge and that they apply this knowledge to the task of language perception. The thesis also proposes neural explanations for the behavior exhibited in the experiments, and develops neurally plausible, probabilistic computational models to this end. This first half of this dissertation presents new evidence of the non-categoriality of human linguistic knowledge through two case studies. The first addresses the relation between sound and meaning, though an experimental investigation of the psychological reality of English phonaesthemes, and shows that these non-categorical sub-morphemic sound-meaning pairings are psychologically real. A second, larger study addresses the multiple factors that non-categorically affect a particular morpho-phonological process in French, called liaison. These two studies provide evidence that language users access noncategorical relations between phonological patterns and their phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and social correlates. An additional result of the liaison study is the finding that language users exhibit unconscious knowledge of non-categorical interactions between factors that influence this morpho-phonological process. While there are general neural explanations for the ability to learn and represent the knowledge suggested by these studies, a formal model can only be produced in a computational architecture. Therefore, in the dissertation's second half, I develop a computational model of non-categorical, cross-modal knowledge using a probabilistic architecture used in Artificial Intelligence research, known as Belief Networks (Pearl 1988). In addition to capturing the generalizations about non-categorical knowledge evidenced by the two case studies, Belief Networks are neurally plausible, making them a sound architecture for a bridging model between neural structure and cognitive and linguistic behavior.

This paper proposes an analysis of different phonological phenomenon that occur in the Spanish spoken in the Andean highland region of South America, with reference to the influence of the Inca language, Quechua.

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this paper we will speak of movement of an articulator (e.g. tongue tip movement) which should be understood as referring to movement in the midsagittal plane of the transducer placed on that articulator.) The movement data were sampled at 625 Hz with low-pass filtering at 300 Hz before voltage-to-distance conversion. After voltage to distance conversion (with a filter cutoff of 17 Hz), correction for head movement (using the nose and maxillary reference transducers), and rotation to the occlusal plane, the position signals underwent 25 point smoothing by a triangular filter. The upper lip and tongue tip vertical position signals were differentiated to yield velocity signals, also smoothed at 25 points

The segmentation of the acoustic speech signal is a fundamental for the processing of spoken language. The paper at hand provides a survey of studies conducted in our lab concerning the detection of segmentation cues in the speech signal and associated perception of prosodic boundaries.

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this handout and some of the references quoted at www.unice.fr/dsl/tobias.htm