Experimental and Descriptive Investigation of Gaidhlig Consonant Mutations

多达2000万美国人认为自己是苏格兰人或苏格兰人/爱尔兰人的后裔。作为这个社区的主要传统语言之一，苏格兰盖尔语是丰富的文学、歌曲、诗歌、历史和土著知识体系文化的媒介。它还提供了一个了解苏格兰裔美国社区祖先的世界观和文化的重要窗口。丧失母语人士对这种濒危语言的了解迫在眉睫。苏格兰盖尔语是科学语言学家特别感兴趣的语言。盖尔语在表示单词之间的语法关系方面与英语有很大不同。特别是，它有一种机制，可以通过改变关系中一个单词的第一个辅音来指示语法概念，如时态、性别、体和所有。例如，单词c？‘og’(一个k音)中的声母出现在像mo‘my’这样的所有格单词之后时，它的发音就像德语中的巴赫一样，发音为硬ch。这些变化被称为“声母突变”，是语言语法系统中一个富有成效且至关重要的部分。这种表示语法变化的机制在世界上的语言中极其罕见，人们对此也知之甚少。为了让语言学家正确地理解一种语言的语音系统，他们必须使用工具测量说话者如何发音，并使用心理语言学实验来衡量说话者如何理解和使用声音模式。使用现代语言工具和心理语言学技术。安德鲁·卡尼、戴安娜·阿昌盖利、迈克尔·哈蒙德、娜塔莎·华纳和亚当·乌西什金教授，以及以苏格兰盖尔语为母语的穆里尔·费舍尔将研究发音、模式和对初始辅音突变的感知。例如，这项研究将通过要求说话者在听模糊(或被掩蔽)的语音时识别单词，来确定说话者是否在他们的脑海中存储了突变和未突变的单词。一个相关的实验，人们听到的声音被微妙地人工修改(或“门控”)，将被用来研究声音流中的确切点，在那里听者可以识别单词是突变的还是非突变的。对一组语言(或语料库)中变异和非变异声音的相对统计频率的研究将表明这一过程是多么富有成效，以及它如何与语言的更大语法系统中的声音频率统计相对应。心理语言学技术，包括判断和无意义的单词任务，将被用来调查说话者产生这些突变的心理过程。最后，将使用现代语音工具，如超声波和空气流量来研究这些突变的实际发音情况。该研究项目的成果将是对盖尔语辅音突变的描述，这将有助于完成对该语言的持续描述。此外，在这项研究中，研究生将接受对濒危语言的声音分析技术的培训。这项培训将允许学生对其他濒危语言进行类似的实验研究。这项工作对记录和保护苏格兰和苏格兰裔美国人社区的语言传统具有重要意义。

As many as 20 million Americans identify themselves as Scottish or Scots/Irish in descent. One of the primary heritage languages of this community, Scottish Gaelic is the medium for a rich culture of literature, song, poetry, history and indigenous knowledge-systems. It also provides an important window into the world-view and culture of the ancestors of the Scottish-American community. The loss of native speaker knowledge about this endangered language is imminent. The Scottish Gaelic language is of particular interest to scientific linguists. Gaelic is very different from English in the ways it signals grammatical relationships between words. In particular it has a mechanism for indicating grammatical notions such as tense, gender, aspect, and possession by changing the first consonant of one of the words in the relationship. For example, the initial consonant in the word cù 'dog' (a k sound) is pronounced with a hard ch sound like German Bach when it is appears after possessive words like mo 'my' (written as mo chù). These changes, called "initial consonant mutations," are a productive and critical part of the grammatical system of the language. This mechanism for indicating grammatical inflection is extremely rare in the world's languages and is very poorly understood. In order for linguists to properly understand the sound system of a language, they have to use instrumental measures of how speakers articulate sounds and use psycholinguistic experiments to measure how speakers understand and use the patterns of sounds. Using modern linguistic instrumental and psycholinguistic techniques. Professors Andrew Carnie, Diana Archangeli, Michael Hammond, Natasha Warner and Adam Ussishkin, along with Scottish Gaelic native speaker Muriel Fisher will investigate the articulation, patterning, and perception of initial consonant mutations. For example, this study will determine whether speakers store both the mutated and non-mutated words in their minds by asking them to identify the word while they listen to obscured (or "masked") speech sounds. A related experiment, where the sounds people hear are subtly artificially modified (or "gated"), will be used to study that the exact point in the sound stream at which listeners can identify whether the word is mutated or non-mutated. A study of the relative statistical frequency of sounds in mutated and non-mutated in a collection of language (or corpus) will show how productive the process is and how it corresponds to statistics on the frequency of sounds in the larger grammatical system of the language. Psycholinguistic techniques, including judgments and nonsense word tasks will be used to investigate the mental procedures speakers use to produce these mutations. Finally the actual articulation of these mutations will be investigated using modern phonetic instrumental measures such as ultrasound and airflow volume. The output of this research project will be a description of the Gaelic consonant mutation that will help complete an on-going description of the language. In addition, in doing this research graduate students will be trained in the techniques of sound analysis of an endangered language. This training will allow the students to conduct similar experimental studies on other endangered languages. This work has significant implications for documenting and preserving the linguistic traditions of the Scottish and Scottish-American communities.