Gisela Tomé Lourido

University of Leeds · Department of Linguistics and Phonetics

The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in parts of the Gulf and East Af...

This paper examines pre-aspirated sonorants in the Central and Eastern varieties of Shehret, an endangered Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken by c. 50,000 speakers in Dhofar, southern Oman. We assume pre-aspirated sonorants fall in the class of breathy sonorants, acknowledged to be typologically rare [1], [2], and phonotactically tightly r...

This paper presents a theoretical and quantitative analysis of epenthesis and vowel intrusion in Central Dhofari Mehri. One of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia, Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in diasporic commun...

Shehret (aka Jibbali, or Shahri) is a Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken in southern Oman by approximately 50,000 people. Among its 36 consonant phonemes are three voiceless-voiced-emphatic (pharyngealized) triads of fricatives at the interdental, alveolar and alveolar-lateral places of articulation (Rubin, 2014): /θ ð θˤ, s z sˤ, ɬ ɮ ɬˤ/....

This paper presents an acoustic and auditory analysis of the short vowels of Mehri, a Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken in Dhofar (southern Oman), eastern Yemen and parts of southern Saudi Arabia. Interest in Mehri vowels lies in the fact that phonologically distinct vowels are often phonetically extremely close: a fact of significance bo...

An acoustic investigation of intrusive and epenthetic vowels in Mehri of Central Dhofar, with a look at intrusive vowels in Shehret

The inclusion of European minority languages in public spaces such as education, administration and the media has led to the emergence of a new profile of speakers, “new speakers”, who typically acquire a minority language through education, but vary in terms of their language experience and use. The present study investigated whether a distinctive...

This paper examines the vowel productions of three groups of adult Galician-Spanish bilinguals: Spanish-dominant (SD) bilinguals, Galician-dominant (GD) bilinguals, and Dual Switch (DS) bilinguals who had early experience with Galician in the home, predominantly used Spanish upon school entry, but in adolescence/adulthood switched to Galician for i...

As a result of complex international migration patterns, listeners in large urban centres such as London, UK, likely encounter large amounts of variation in spoken language. However, although dealing with variation is crucial to communication, relatively little is known about how the ability to do this develops. Still less is known about how this m...

It has long been debated whether speech production and perception remain flexible in adulthood. The current study investigates the effects of language dominance switch in Galician new speakers (neofalantes) who are raised with Spanish as a primary language and learn Galician at an early age in a bilingual environment, but in adolescence, decide to...

It has long been debated whether speech processing remains flexible in adulthood. This thesis contributes to our understanding of this question by investigating bilingual speech development in a naturalistic setting. Galician ‘new speakers’ (neofalantes) are unbalanced bilinguals raised with Spanish as a primary language, who learn Galician at an e...

Mimicry and laughter are two social signals displaying affiliation among people. To date, however, their relationship remains uninvestigated and relatively unexploited in designing the behaviour of robots and virtual characters. This paper presents an experiment aimed at examining how laughter and mimicry are related. The hypothesis is that hand mo...

In minority language communities, language choice may be related to identity. In the bilingual community of Galicia, some speakers switch language dominance at a late stage in development, normally during adolescence. These 'new speakers', neofalantes, are originally dominant in Spanish but switch to Galician for cultural or ideological reasons. Th...