Scottish Gaelic Experimental Phonology

and Phonetics

Preliminary Results

Celtic Linguistics Conference 6, University College Dublin, Sept 12, 2010

(13 authors listed on next slide)

Authors & Acknowledgements

✦ Authors:✦ PI: Andrew Carnie✦ CoPIs: Diana Archangeli, Muriel Fisher, Michael

Hammond, Natasha Warner✦ Graduate Assistants: Dan Brenner, Micaya Clymer, Andréa

Davis, Colin Gorrie, Lionel Mathieu, Jessamyn Schertz, Jae-Hyun Sung

✦ Undergrad Assistant: Brenna Ward

Special thanks to Boyd Robertson, Maoilios Caimbeul, Anna Bosch, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Columba 1400 Centre, and our 18 native speaker consultants.

Funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation: BCS-0921685 2

Our Foci Today

Not discussed in this presentation; see

appendix slides for some preliminary

results

Project Goals✦ To investigate various properties of Scottish

Gaelic (SG) phonology and phonetics using modern experimental techniques.

✦ Phenomena Investigated:

✦ Preaspiration✦ Broad/slender distinction✦ Tense/lax sonorant distinction✦ Hiatus ✦ Epenthesis (and associated vowel harmony)✦ Nasal fricatives

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Some Details on the Experiments

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Participants✦ 18 native speakers, all spoke monolingually in Gaelic until at

least age 5 or 6.

✦ 8 women, 10 men

✦ Ages ranged from 24 to 80

✦ All still speak Gaelic daily, to various degrees and in various contexts.

✦ 14 from different parts of Skye (Sleat, Duirinish, Strath, Trotternish). One each from Raasay, N. Uist, Lewis, and Vatarsay.

✦ Exhibited various degrees of literacy and lexical knowledge (from illiterate in Gaelic to college language teachers and poets)

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Data Collection✦ Materials were prepared in Tucson Arizona with

a native speaker from Glendale, Skye.

✦ Data was collected in 2 quiet rooms in each of 2 locations (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and at the Columba 1400 Centre in Staffin)

✦ 16 of 18 speakers did all the experiments. All did at least 2.

✦ Doing all the tasks took about 2.5h for each participant. Participants were paid for their time.

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Partial results

reported here

The Studies✦ Acoustic Measures

✦ Spectrographic analysis of recordings

✦ Articulatory/Acoustic Measures✦ Aerodynamics: nasal & oral airflow

✦ Articulatory Measures✦ Ultrasound

✦ Perceptual measures✦ Nonsense word task✦ Gated Stimuli

✦ decision task ✦ lexical access

✦ Psycho-phonological judgment tasks✦ Knocking ✦ Counting ✦ First syllable identification ✦ Last syllable identification

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Selected empirical questions and some preliminary results

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Nasal Fricatives

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Nasal Fricatives✦ Scottish Gaelic has been claimed to have nasal fricatives

✦ mh /ṽ/ vs. bh /v/ (bhean vs. mhean)

✦ Ternes (1973) claimed other fricatives (s, f, etc) in Applecross Gaelic were nasalized in words with nasalization.

a. š̰#n#ṽã% ‘grandmother’b. f ̰%ĩãṽ ‘root’

✦ Nasal fricatives are supposed to be articulatorily impossible (Ohala and Ohala 1994), one is not supposed to be able to get enough air through both the nasal passage and through the mouth to create frication

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mh/bh Acoustic/Articulatory questions

✦ Does “mh” actually have both frication and nasalization?

✦ Could the fricative be an approximant?

✦ Could the nasality really be on the vowels?

✦ Tested using aerodynamic methodology

✦ Note that these questions do not address the phonological question of whether there are underlying nasal fricatives

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Oral Airflow Mask

Nasal Airflow Mask

Word List

Aerodynamics: Details in Appendix A

Nasal Airflow: mh 1✦ Amharc

✦ Most typical outcome: no nasalization during the consonant at all.

✦ The mh/bh distinction is neutralized most of the time.

Waveform

Oral flow

Nasal flow

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Nasal Airflow: mh 2✦ Amharc (different

speakers)

✦ Nasalization, but only during the preceding vowel. Nasal flow stops as consonant (in waveform) starts.

✦ The mh/bh distinction is maintained, but with nasalization in the vowel, not the fricative.

Oral flow

Waveform

Nasal flow

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Nasal Airflow: other frics✦ a dhàn

✦ Slight nasalization during the consonant, but it is an approximant [j] instead of a fricative (oral flow is low, so no frication, exactly during the nasalization).

✦ Nasalization does not conflict with an approximant, because [j] does not require high oral airflow to make fric. noise.

✦ Still to test: f, s, etc.

Oral flow

Waveform

Nasal flow

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mh/bh Perceptual Questions

✦ Can speakers hear the mh/bh distinction?

✦ Anecdotal evidence from nonsense task

✦ Anecdotal evidence from signs

✦ Tested using gated stimuli

✦ If speakers can hear the distinction, what part of the speech stream are they hearing it in?

✦ Tested using gated stimuli.

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Anecdotal Evidence from nonsense task

✦ Participants played 33 nonsense words recorded by a native speaker and asked to write them down in Gaelic Orthography (see appendix B)

✦ Some of the nonsense words have bh in the prompt. It appears as if there is no consistent pattern as to whether the response has mh or bh.

✦ Note there are too few tokens/examples to make a statistical generalization, so this observation is based on researcher perception.

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mh bh other

albh 11 6

ralabh 9 8

fearabh 3 13 1

cearbh 17 0

Ardvasar (signs just around the corner from each other) 18

Gating experiment

✦ What acoustic parts of the sound do listeners use to hear differences between two sounds

✦ Listeners hear manipulated parts of words, see two choices on a computer screen, press a button to say which one they think the sound might be part of.

✦ Participants heard a partial word, and were simultaneously presented with two choices on the laptop screen

✦ One choice was the correct orthography of the spliced word, the other was a foil

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Button box

computer for prompts

Auditory input

Gating: Details in Appendix C20

Gating: mh/bh✦ Camhal vs. cabhagh

✦ Listeners are more likely to say the sound was nasal (e.g. mh) if it was mh, not bh.

✦ But not by much.

✦ They can hear the distinction, just barely.

✦ The preceding vowel seems to provide as much information as any other portion: nasalization may be on the previous vowel.

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Tentative conclusions for Nasalized Fricatives

✦ The nasalized fricative distinction is often simply neutralized to non-nasalization.

✦ This concurs with the road sign spelling variability and the significant but slight perception of nasalization in the gating study.

✦ Nasalization is sometimes maintained in cases where it does not conflict aerodynamically with frication, for example on the preceding vowel or when the consonant is an approximant.

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Epenthesis

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Epenthesis✦ Ladefoged et al 1998

✦ balg ‘blister’ [palˠak] (native speakers identify as monosyllabic)✦ ballag ‘skull’ [palˠ.ak] (native speakers identify as bisyllabic)

✦ Bosch & De Jong 1997✦ epenthetic vowels are longer and have the intonation pattern of

monosyllables

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diagram from Ladefoged et.al.

Psycho-Phonological & Perceptual Questions

✦ Do speakers identify epenthetic vowels as “syllables” (probed various ways)?

✦ What does it mean for something to be a “syllable”?✦ Is the notion of epenthetic vowel really phonological?✦ Or is it an artifact of the spelling (A lot of our speakers seemed to have

metalinguistic awareness of “the dreaded missing svarabhakti vowel”)

✦ Judgment tasks: Counting and knocking, what is first syllable, what is last syllable. (see appendix D for details)

✦ Nonsense word task: Write down aurally presented nonsense words in Gaelic orthography. Are the written results the same as what the speaker read out loud? (see appendix B for details)

✦ Gating Task: Can speakers identify epenthetic vowels when presented in gated form? (see appendix C for details)

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Pre-analytic Observations✦ Participants performed differently on different tasks

✦ eg. 2 knocks, but reporting first syllable = /aram/ or /ara/

✦ often participants would report words with epenthetic vowels as having “1 and a 1/2” syllables in both count and knock tasks.

✦ Our statistical results from counting and knocking are consistent with this. Participants would report for the presence of epenthetic vowels, but not as frequently as for non-epenthetic vowels.

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Judgment Results✦ Difference in syllable count calculated as the difference

between the number of orthographic vowels vs. the number of vowels reported via knocking and counting.

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F1(1,16) = 114.48, p<.001 F1(1,17) = 93.407, p<.001F2(1,16) = 28.682, p<.001 F2(1,16) = 31.394, p<.001

Judgments

✦ Observation: Participants were more likely to report the non-orthographic vowel with a syllable count or a knock, but not as often as they were to report an orthographic vowel. (cf. the pre-analytic observation that speakers often reported words with epenthesis as having “1 and a ½ syllables”)

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Nonsense Task

✦ Could this be an effect of lexical knowledge or orthography?

✦ 33 nonsense items constructed, read from Gaelic orthography, by a native speaker (Muriel Fisher).

✦ All items either have an orthographic vowel or not in the environment for epenthesis in form read by prompting speaker

✦ Recording played for participants. Participants were asked to write down what they heard in Scots Gaelic orthography

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Nonsense Task Results

• Listeners more often write a vowel out if it was read as underlying (spelled in list speaker read from).• Listeners are significantly able to report epenthetic vs.

underlying vowels even without lexical information, and even if attention not drawn to the alternatives.

albh ralabh

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Gating Results: Epenthesis• Meanbh vs. leanabh• Only one portion

presented: (V)CVC• Question is not when

they hear epenthesis, but whether epenthetic V’s are perceptually different from underlying V’s at all.

• Listeners perceive a vowel as epenthetic sig. more often if it came from a word where it was epenthetic.• The distinction between epenthetic and orthographic

Vs is perceptible.

anbh

anabh

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Epenthesis Conclusions✦ The judgment results are consistent with (but not

conclusive proof for) the hypothesis that SG has a distinction between epenthetic and non-epenthetic vowels at both a phonetic and an abstract level.

✦ This is consistent with the results from Gating and Nonsense which show that the effect is probably not lexical or orthographic in nature and that the distinction can actually be perceived by listeners.

✦ A more sophisticated analysis will be made once we analyze the first and last syllable task results.

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Tapadh Leibh!

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Appendices

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Appendix A: Aerodynamics35

Details on Airflow Method✦ Equipment:

✦ Macquirer v. 8.9.5 ✦ Scicon R&D M516 model main system box, ✦ oral airflow mask,✦ nasal airflow mask.

✦ Procedure:✦ Participants received an oral description of the equipment and its function. ✦ After placing the oral and nasal masks with help from a researcher, the

participant was asked to read a few Gaelic words from a list so that the researcher could adjust the oral and nasal airflow gains.

✦ The participant was then asked to read a list of 120 words with the nasal and oral masks in place.

✦ Recording was done in one minute intervals, giving participants the opportunity to pause several times during recording

✦ The oral and nasal airflow pressures were recorded, to determine whether the consonants in question were truly nasal

✦ A recording was made and oral flow analyzed to determine frication

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Appendix B: Nonsense Word TaskA perceptual measure

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Nonsense Task✦ 33 nonsense words created by Carnie and written in Gaelic

orthography

✦ Recorded by Fisher in a sound proof booth

✦ 10 second pauses inserted by Warner.

✦ Played for participants over headphones. Participants were informed that what they were hearing were nonsense words and were asked to write down how they thought the word would be spelled in Gaelic.

✦ Responses were coded for whether a second syllable vowel was written, and for how far they diverged otherwise from stimuli (allowing for legitimate variations in sound-symbol mapping)

✦ Eg: response “morabh” to stimulus “morb” counts as a second-vowel-present response.

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Appendix C: GatingA perceptual measure

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Gating experiment paradigm (decision)

✦ Stimuli are created by extracting intervals from words recorded by a Gaelic speaker (Muriel) in a sound proof booth

✦ Three intervals were extracted: the first segment, the second segment, and the third segment

✦ Interval extraction and sound manipulation were accomplished using Praat software

✦ Stimuli were randomly presented using E-prime on an Eee PC, net book.

✦ Participants were given oral instructions and written instructions were also provided at the beginning of each E-Prime Experiment. 5 practice items were presented before the target items.

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Gating experiment paradigm (decision)

✦ Participants heard a partial word which was simultaneously presented with two orthographic choices on the screen

✦ Participants were encouraged to guess if they did not know the answer

✦ If no response was detected the program advanced automatically after 6 second After a subject responded the next stimulus was presented after a pause of 700 ms.

✦ Subjects responded on a PST serial Response box (subjects 1-11) or on keyboard (subjects 13-18).

✦ We switched input methods after a malfunction of a power converter overloaded the button box.

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Example: baile ‘town’ slender l✦ What tells the listener whether they hear l in

‘baile’ (slender) or l in ‘balach’ (broad)?

Which part contains the information “slender”?

✦ Listener hears gate 1, 2, 3

✦ Sees “...aile...” and “...ala...” on the screen

✦ Chooses which one the sound might go with

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Gating Results: Broad/Slender

•Balach vs. baile

• Listeners are more likely to say the sound was slender if it really was: they can hear the distinction. (All pairs of bars significant.)

• The preceding vowel carries some info.• The consonant itself is the strongest perceptual

cue.43

✦ No voicing distinction in SG, only aspiration.

✦ Syllable/word initially, aspiration is the normal kind

✦ intervocalically/syllable finally, aspiration is primarily pre-aspiration, with a tiny bit of post-aspiration.

Gating: Preaspiration

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Gating Results: Preaspiration• ‘Mic’ vs. ‘an tig’

• More preaspirated responses for p, t, c than b, d, g.

• Except if only preceding V is presented (not sig.).

• Preaspiration is easy to perceive from the consonant.• Even half the preaspiration noise is enough to perceive

it, but the preceding vowel contains no cues.

45See the work of Ian Clayton for more info on the perception of preaspiration

Gating: Hiatus

✦ Vowel Juncture

✦ dubhan ‘hook’ [tu.an]

✦ duan ‘poem’ [tuan]

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Gating Results: Hiatus• ‘adharc’ with responses

‘adhar…’ vs. ‘ar…’• Only hiatus cases

presented• Listeners shift to

reporting hiatus vowels if they hear at least 2/3 of the V

• Hearing the whole vowel doesn’t make them any more sure it’s hiatus than hearing just 2/3.• 2/3 of a long VV is enough to hear hiatus, but just 1/3 of

the vowel is not enough.47

Gating Lexical Access Study

✦ No results yet (data unanalyzed)✦ Stimuli prepared the same was as for the decision task.

✦ Participants again heard spliced portions of words. This time, the sound was followed by a beep.

✦ There were three test items before the target items.

✦ Participants were asked to think of a word that could begin with the sound they heard and write it on the answer sheet.

✦ The item number was also presented on the screen simultaneously with the audio stimuli.

✦ The subject could advance to the next sound by pressing a button; otherwise, the program advanced automatically after ten seconds.

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Judgment TasksPsychophonological measures

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Phonological Judgments✦ 4 passes over a set of 84 words, a mix of real epenthetic/hiatic

words and close pairs that have an orthographic vowel ✦ Participants were asked to give back the Gaelic translation

equivalent of an English word printed on an index card hidden to them.

✦ In cases of hesitation, the sought item was prompted. Items that were still unfamiliar to participants were discarded from future parts of the experiment.

✦ 4 Passes ✦ knock on each syllable✦ what is the first syllable ✦ count of syllables ✦ what is the last syllable.

✦ A break was introduced after participants performed the two parts of the experiment.

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Judgment Results: Hiatus

• Participants unexpectedly treated pseudo-hiatus forms as having an extra syllable as well

• This shows that pseudo-hiatus forms have one more syllable than was previously believed. (contra Ladefoged’s conclusions).

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F1(1,16) = 211.54, p<.001 F1(1,17) = 148.83, p<.001F2(1,16) = 83.571, p<.001 F2(1,12) = 41.41, p <.001

UltrasoundAn Articulatory Measure

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Computer displaying prompts

Recording and mixing Equipment

Ultrasound machineProbe and laser

pointer

Ultrasound Set-up

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Details on Ultrasound Method

✦ Equipment✦ Sonosite Titan ultrasound portable machine with a probe,✦ A dual microphone portable preamplifier/phantom

power,✦ A Sony DV recorder (also used for biofeedback),✦ A head-mounted microphone,✦ A laptop computer,✦ A lockbox connected to the preamplifier/phantom

power, the DV recorder and the Sonosite ultrasound machine.

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Ultrasound Experiment: Method

✦ Participants were asked to pronounce Gaelic words individually presented on a computer screen in front of them while holding the ultrasound probe under their chin.

✦ A laser pointer was attached to the probe to control for head correction. A Post-It note with an X was placed on top of the laptop computer and served as target.

✦ Audio and ultrasound imaging data were collected from each participant.

✦ 6 practice items were presented first, followed by 3 repetitions of 64 experimental items, partitioned in 3 presentation blocks.

✦ Two experimenters supervised the experiment.

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The first step in drawing a linguagram

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Second step in Linguagram

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Third Step in drawing a linguagram

Linguagram

Back of tongue

Front of tongue

red: high

Time

blue: low

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Tense sonorants (L,R,N)

If [+ATR] then [+high]

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Carnie’s Analysis

Tense /L/ in poll63

Ultrasound and Epenthesis Articulatory Questions

✦ Three questions:

✦ Are the epenthetic vowels in our study consistent with descriptions elsewhere re: length and vowel quality (e.g. Bosch 1995)?

✦ Are epenthetic vowels articulated differently than nonepenthetic vowels?

✦ Is the articulation of epenthetic vowels consistent with a harmony analysis?

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Data takes a long time to analyze, stay tuned for answers! What follows are very

very very preliminary results

Preliminary results in linguagrams 1 token of anam vs. arm for 3 speakers:

“anam”  [anam]

Orthographic/non-­‐epenthe5c

“arm”  [aɹVm]Epenthe5c

S3

S6

S7

S3

S6

S7

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anam vs. arm #1: Linguagram

“anam”  [anam] “arm”  [aɹVm]

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To answer harmony question

✦ Linguagram: co-articulation from [r]?

✦ Waveform: different length

✦ Spectrogram: similar formants

Compare V1 & V2 in epenthetic words, e.g. “arm” [aɹVm]

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Summary of very preliminary Ultrasound results

✦ Measure length differences. So far, epenthetic vowels look longer. Measure pitch. (Not done yet.)

✦ Compare epenthetic and non-epenthetic vowels. So far, more back-raising in epenthetic vowels – influence of [r]?

✦ Compare epenthetic vowel to V1 over different V1. (Not done yet.)

✦ Other studies to be done with ultrasound: Broad/slender, tense/lax

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Additional Useful Slides

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Preaspirationapag aʰpak little ape

atadh aʰtəɣ swelling

aca aʰkə at them

not found *aʰpj ---

aiteal aʰtjəlˠ glimpse

taice tʰaʰkje support

abaich apiç ripe

adag atak stook

gagach kakəx stammering

not found *apj ---

aideachadh atjəxəɣ admitting

aigeann akjənˠ abyss

Ladefoged et al 199870

Preaspiration

ht cat, leat, bata, bàta

hp map, tapadh, cupa

hk/xk mac, soc, leac, aca

htj cait, iteag, lite, litir, àite

hpj cipean, suipear

hkj/xkj mic, aice, faic, lice

71Sound files and transcriptions from Akerbeltz.org

Broad vs. Slender

cat kʰaʰt cat cait kʰɛʰtj cats

dùn tu:n fort dùin tu:nj forts

balach palˠəx boy balaich palˠɪç boys

boireannach porjənəx woman boireannaich porjənɪç women

òran ɔ:ran song òrain ɔ:ranj songs

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Sound files and transcriptions from Akerbeltz.org

EpenthesisAlba alˠapə Scotland

marbh marav dead

falbh falˠav go

arm aram army

dorcha tɔrɔxə dark

ainm ɛnɛm name

dearg tjɛrak red

dearbh tjɛrav real

balgam balˠakəm mouthful

doirbh dɤrjɪv difficult

urchar uruxər shot

Sound files and transcriptions

from Akerbeltz.org

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