Doctoral Dissertation Research: Articulatory and Corpus Study of Relative Timing among Consonants, Vowels, and Tones

语言学研究的一个核心课题是说话者对其语言的隐性知识。对于所有口语，部分知识包括语言器官，包括嘴唇、舌头和舌膜，如何及时协调以产生语言。此外，许多语言还使用不同的音调模式来区分单词，称为音调。这个项目研究音调是否与其他语言器官的协调相互作用，从未被充分研究的藏语中收集了几种数据。在方法上，该项目将发声者物理运动的实验测量与在尼泊尔收集的音频数据相结合，利用在散居的藏族社区中发现的说话者之间的差异，了解音调、辅音和元音如何及时协调的基本原则。更广泛的影响包括公开存放录音资料，以便语言学家和社区成员今后开展工作，捕捉正在快速变化的语言的快照。联合项目负责人是耶鲁大学的一名博士生，他将分析散居海外的藏语的声音和发音数据。藏语是一种未被充分研究的语言，使用者之间存在显著差异。这种差异的一个方面是，一些说话者保留了声调，而另一些说话者则失去了声调对比。主要的假设是，词汇音调的存在改变了发音手势的协调，发音和声学的后果是由于语音产生的喉部和喉上方面的竞争需求的平衡而产生的。这项研究扩展了尼泊尔的共同pi收集的声学数据的分析到一个自发语音的语料库。语料库分析对藏语的发音运动学实验有重要的指导意义。该实验使用电磁关节描记术（EMA）来跟踪舌头和嘴唇的运动，并记录声音。除了对实验室语音中的主要假设进行测试外，对声学和运动学信号的共配准分析将建立可用于语料库分析的相对定时声学测量。语料库研究将评估自然主义语音数据中的假设，允许考虑更广泛的影响时间的因素，进一步评估说话者内部和之间的差异，并为未来的研究提供宝贵的资源。本项目将有助于科学地理解声调的心理表征以及口头、喉部和声调手势之间的时间关系，结合语料库和发音方法，从变化中获取证据，并推进对一种研究较少的语言的研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A core topic of study in linguistics is the tacit knowledge that speakers have about their language. For all spoken languages, part of this knowledge includes how the speech organs, including the lips, tongue, and velum, are coordinated in time to produce speech. Additionally, many languages also distinguish words from each other using different pitch patterns, called tones. This project investigates whether tones interact with the coordination of other speech organs, drawing together several types of data from the understudied Tibetan language. Methodologically, the project integrates experimental measurements on the physical movement of articulators with audio data gathered in Nepal, harnessing the variation found between speakers in the diaspora Tibetan community to understand basic principles of how tones, consonants and vowels are coordinated in time. Broader impacts include the publicly available deposit of audio recordings to enable future work by linguists and community members, capturing a snapshot of a language undergoing rapid change. The Co-PI, a doctoral student at Yale University, will analyze acoustic and articulatory data of Tibetan as spoken in its diaspora, an understudied language with significant variation between speakers. One aspect of the variation is that some speakers have retained tone while others speakers have lost tone contrasts. The main hypothesis is that the presence of lexical tone alters the coordination of articulatory gestures, with articulatory and acoustic consequences resulting from the balance of competing demands of laryngeal and supralaryngeal aspects of speech production. This study extends analysis of acoustic data collected by the co-PI in Nepal to a corpus of spontaneous speech. The corpus analysis is crucially informed by an experiment on the articulatory kinematics of Tibetan. The experiment uses electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to track the movement of the tongue and lips together with acoustic recordings. Besides providing a test of the main hypothesis in laboratory speech, analysis of co-registered acoustic and kinematic signals will establish acoustic measures of relative timing that can be used in the corpus analysis. The corpus study will evaluate hypotheses in naturalistic speech data, allow consideration of a wider range of factors influencing timing, further assess variability within and across speakers, and provide a valuable resource for future research. This project will contribute to scientific understanding of the mental representation of tone and the timing relations among oral, laryngeal, and tonal gestures, combine corpus and articulatory methods, draw evidence from variation, and advance research on a less-studied language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.