Kevin Tang

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf | HHU · Department of English and American Studies

[Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14716] The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend to occur in less predictable environments. One account of the in...

A deep learning Phonet model was evaluated as a method to measure lenition. Unlike quantitative acoustic methods, recurrent networks were trained to recognize the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish. When applied to intervocalic and post-nasal voiced and voiceless stops, the ap...

This paper presents our submission to the SIGMORPHON 2023 task 2 of Cognitively Plausible Morphophonological Generalization in Korean. We implemented both Linear Discriminative Learning and Transformer models and found that the Linear Discriminative Learning model trained on a combination of corpus and experimental data showed the best performance...

Introduction Automatic recognition of stutters (ARS) from speech recordings can facilitate objective assessment and intervention for people who stutter. However, the performance of ARS systems may depend on how the speech data are segmented and labelled for training and testing. This study compared two segmentation methods: event-based, which delim...

African American Language (AAL) is a marginalized variety of American English that has been understudied due to a lack of accessible data. This lack of data has made it difficult to research language in African American communities and has been shown to cause emerging technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to perform worse for Afri...

Linguistic accommodation refers to the process of adjusting one’s language, speech, or communication style to match or adapt to that of others in a social interaction. It is known to be vital to effective health communication. Despite this evidence, there is little scientific guidance on how to design linguistically adapted health behavior interven...

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate lenition, a phonological process involving consonant weakening, as a diagnostic marker for differentiating Parkinson’s Disease (PD) from Atypical Parkinsonism (APD). Early diagnosis is critical for optimizing treatment outcomes, and lenition patterns in stop consonants may provide valuable insights into the d...

The present paper evaluates the learning behaviour of a transformer-based neural network with regard to an irregular inflectional paradigm. We apply the paradigm cell filling problem to irregular patterns. We approach this problem using the morphological reinflection task and model it as a character sequence-to-sequence learning problem. The test c...

Objective: This study investigated the degrees of lenition, or consonantal weakening, in the production of Spanish stop consonants by native English speakers during a study abroad (SA) program. Lenition is a key phonological process in Spanish, where voiced stops (/b/, /d/, /ɡ/) typically weaken to fricatives or approximants in specific phonetic en...

We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: All types of...

Predictions of gradient degree of lenition of voiceless and voiced stops in a corpus of Argentine Spanish are evaluated using three acoustic measures (minimum and maximum intensity velocity and duration) and two recurrent neural network (Phonet) measures (posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features). While mixed and inc...

Belonging to a university shapes wellbeing and academic outcomes for first-year students, yet this belongingness is harder to achieve for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This study delved into the flexible construct of status—the individual’s perceived position within the university’s social hierarchy and the strategy they adopt to ach...

Phonological neighbours are based on the one-edit distance of a word's phonemic segmentation. Basing phonological neighbours on other segmentation units (eg. codas, or whole rimes) changes the size such neighbourhood. This may be relevant for languages such as Mandarin Chinese where the proximate units for speech production seems to be based on who...

The predictability of a word modulates its acoustic duration. Such probabilistic effects can compete across linguistic domains (segments, syllables and adjacent-word contexts e.g., frequent words with infrequent syllables) and across local and aggregate contexts (e.g., a generally unpredictable word in a predictable context). This study aims to tea...

This report provides a summary of the E-learning project titled ``Interactive web-based review units for phonetics and phonology'' conducted from April 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023. This initiative was funded by the E-Learning Förderfonds at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany.

This study investigates the gradient phonetic variations in the lenition of Spanish voiced and voiceless stops among second language (L2) learners with different levels of proficiency (beginning, intermediate, and advanced). The degree of lenition is measured using posterior probabilities of the continuant and sonorant phonological features, estima...

African American English (AAE) has received recent attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Efforts to address bias against AAE in NLP systems tend to focus on lexical differences. Whenever the structural uniqueness of AAE is considered, the solution is often to remove or neutralize the differences. This work leverages knowledge...

African American English (AAE) has received recent attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Efforts to address bias against AAE in NLP systems tend to focus on lexical differences. Whenever the structural uniqueness of AAE is considered, the solution is often to remove or neutralize the differences. This work leverages knowledge...

Linguistic alignment, the tendency of speakers to share common linguistic features during conversations, has emerged as a key area of research in computer-supported collaborative learning. While previous studies have shown that linguistic alignment can have a significant impact on collaborative outcomes, there is limited research exploring its role...

Book chapter to be published: Ratree Wayland, Kevin Tang & Rahul Sengupta. In press. Acquisition of similar versus different speech rhythmic class. In Lars Meyer & Antje Strauss (eds.), Rhythms of Speech and Language: Culture, Cognition, and the Brain , Chapter 39. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Does shared rhythmic class in L1 (English and...

The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for iden...

UNSTRUCTURED Linguistic accommodation refers to the process of adjusting one’s language, speech, or communication style to match or adapt to that of others in a social interaction. It is known to be vital to effective health communication. Despite this evidence, there is little scientific guidance on how to design linguistically adapted health beha...

Linguistic alignment, the tendency of speakers to share common linguistic features during conversations, has emerged as a key area of research in computer-supported collaborative learning. While previous studies have shown that linguistic alignment can have a significant impact on collaborative outcomes, there is limited research exploring its role...

Background Non‐word repetition (NWR) tests are an important way speech and language therapists (SaLTs) assess language development. NWR tests are often scored whilst participants make their responses (i.e., in real time) in clinical and research reports (documented here via a secondary analysis of a published systematic review). Aims The main aim...

This study investigates the effects of Parkinson's disease (PD) and various linguistic factors on the degree of lenition in Spanish stops. The lenition is estimated from posterior probabilities calculated by recurrent neural networks trained to recognize sonorant and continuant phonological features. First, individuals with PD exhibit a higher degr...

This study investigates the gradient phonetic variations in the lenition of Spanish voiced and voiceless stops among second language (L2) learners with different levels of proficiency (beginning, intermediate, and advanced). The degree of lenition is measured using posterior probabilities of the continuant and sonorant phonological features, estima...

Naturally-occurring misperception [1] can help establish the ecological validity of laboratory findings of speech perception and generate new hypotheses. In this study, we report on a corpus of misheard German sung speech which contains instances of misperception reported by individuals. We validated the corpus by examining segmental confusions, an...

Alcohol is known to impair fine articulatory control and movements. In drunken speech, incomplete closure of the vocal tract can result in deaffrication of the English affricate sounds /tʃ/ and /ʤ/, spirantization (fricative-like production) of the stop consonants and palatalization (retraction of place of articulation) of the alveolar fricative /s...

Alcohol intoxication facilitates inhibition of one's first language (L1) ego, which may lead to reduced individual differences among second language (L2) speakers under intoxication. This study examined whether, compared to speaking while sober, speaking while intoxicated would reduce individual differences in the acoustic compactness of vowel cate...

This paper presents our submission to the SIG-MORPHON 2023 task 2 of Cognitively Plausible Morphophonological Generalization in Korean. We implemented both Linear Discrim-inative Learning and Transformer models and found that the Linear Discriminative Learning model trained on a combination of corpus and experimental data showed the best performanc...

Recent work has shown that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced, a phenomenon referred to as "leaky prosody". Focusing on pitch patterns in Mandarin, we show that leaky prosody can be derived from a flat (i.e., non-transformational, non-optimizing) model of spee...

Alcohol is known to impair fine articulatory control and movements. In drunken speech, incomplete closure of the vocal tract can result in deaffrication of the English affricate sounds /tʃ/ and /ʤ/, spirantization (fricative-like production) of the stop consonants and palatalization (retraction of place of articulation) of the alveolar fricative /s...

Naturally-occurring misperception [1] can help establish the ecological validity of laboratory findings of speech perception and generate new hypotheses. In this study, we report on a corpus of misheard German sung speech which contains instances of misperception reported by individuals. We validated the corpus by examining segmental confusions, an...

Artificial language learning research has become a popular tool to investigate universal mechanisms in language learning. However, often it is unclear whether the found effects are due to learning, or due to artefacts of the native language or the artificial language, and whether findings in only one language will generalise to speakers of other la...

Spanish voiced stops /b, d, ɡ/ surfaced as fricatives [β, ð, ɣ] in intervocalic position due to a phonological process known as spirantization or, more broadly, lenition. However, conditioned by various factors such as stress, place of articulation, flanking vowel quality, and speaking rate, phonetic studies reveal a great deal of variation and gra...

Intoxication has a well-known effect on speech production. Lester and Skousen (1974) reported that the place of articulation for /s/ is retracted and /tʃ/ and /ʤ/ are deaffricated (i.e., substituted by a non-affricate segment) in drunken speech. Zihlmann (2017) further established the robustness of deaffrication as it cannot be consciously suppress...

Recent studies have provided evidence that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced (e.g., Seyfarth 2014; Sóskuthy & Hay 2017; Tang & Shaw 2021). For example, words that tend to attract a high degree of prosodic prominence are produced with relatively high pitch, ev...

This study investigates the Turkish partial reduplication phenomenon, in which the reduplicant is derived by prefixing C 1 VC 2 syllable, where C 1 V are identical to the word-initial CV of the base and the C 2 ends in one of the four linking consonants:-p,-m,-s,-r. This study reexamines the factors conditioning the choice of the linking consonant...

We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: all types of...

No PDF available ABSTRACT This study compared a new approach of lenition measure to traditional acoustic-based methods. In this new approach, degrees of lenition are estimated from posterior probabilities generated by recurrent neural networks trained to recognize the sonorant and continuant phonological features. These two phonological features ca...

This study investigates the Turkish partial reduplication phenomenon, in which the reduplicant is derived by prefixing C1_V_C2 syllable, where C1_V are identical to the word-initial CV of the base and the reduplicant C2 ends in one of the four consonants: -p, -m, -s, -r, known as linking consonants. This study re-examines the factors conditioning t...

Alcohol intoxication is known to affect pitch variability in non-tonal languages. In this study, intoxication's effects on pitch were examined in tonal and non-tonal language speakers, in both their native language (L1; German, Korean, Mandarin) and nonnative language (L2; English). Intoxication significantly increased pitch variability in the Germ...

Recent research has highlighted that natural language processing (NLP) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. The bias errors are often caused by poor representation of linguistic features unique to African American English (AAE), due to the relatively low probability of occurrence of many such features in training data. We prese...

Recent research has highlighted that natural language processing (NLP) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. The bias errors are often caused by poor representation of linguistic features unique to African American English (AAE), due to the relatively low probability of occurrence of many such features in training data. We prese...

With rates of young-onset colorectal cancer (<50) on the rise, this research explores potential differences in message preferences that might require the adaptation of screening messages and interventions delivered using web-based technology.

A phonologically informed neural network approach, Phonet, was compared to acoustic measurements of intensity, duration and harmonicity in estimating lenition degree of voiced and voiceless stops in a corpus of Argentine Spanish. Recurrent neural networks were trained to recognize phonological features [sonorant] and [continuant]. Their posterior p...

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend to occur in less predictable environments. One account of the informativity effect on duration is that the ac...

This report examines the current interaction points between humans and autonomous systems, with a particular focus on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), the requirements for human-machine interfaces as imposed by human perception, and finally, the progress being made to close the gap. Autonomous technology has the potential to benefit perso...

Procedures were designed to test for the effects of working-memory training on children at risk of fluency difficulty that apply to English and to many of the languages spoken by children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) in UK schools. Working-memory training should: (1) improve speech fluency in high-risk children; (2) enhance non-word...

Recent research has highlighted that state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. In this research, we investigate the underlying causes of this racially based disparity in performance , focusing on a unique morpho-syntactic feature of African American English (AAE), namely habitual "...

Forced alignment methods have recently seen great progress in the fields of acoustic-phonetics studies of low-resource languages. Code-mixed speech however, presents complex challenges to forced-alignment techniques, because of the longer phonemic inventory of bilingual speakers, the nature of ac-cented speech, and the confounding interaction of tw...

Artificial language learning research (ALL) has become a popular tool in investigations of language learning. Learning behaviour can be characterised with limited time and effort and bring insights into real language learning. Mechanisms are uncovered and tested, for instance, for universality with learner groups with different L1s. Designing cross...

Classic linguistic theory ascribes language change and diversity to population migrations, conquests, and geographical isolation, with the assumption that human populations have equivalent language processing abilities. We hypothesize that spectral and temporal characteristics make some consonant manners vulnerable to differences in temporal precis...

Forced alignment, a technique for aligning segment-level annotations with audio recordings, is a valuable tool for phonetic analysis. While forced alignment has great promise for phonetic fieldwork and language documentation, training a functional, custom forced alignment model requires at least several hours of accurately transcribed audio in the...

The probability is one of the many factors which influence phonetic variation. Contextual probability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production (the probabilistic reduction effect). In this pa...

This paper investigates the relationship between speech perception and linguistic experience in Kaqchikel, a Guatemalan Mayan language. Our empirical focus is the perception of plain, ejective, and implosive stops. Drawing on an AX discrimination task, a corpus of spoken Kaqchikel, and a text corpus, we make two claims. First, we argue that speech...

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/04/10/1710472115 (open access) DCDC2 is a gene strongly associated with components of the phonological processing system in animal models and in multiple independent studies of populations and languages. We propose that it may also influence population-level variation in language component usage. To test this...

Background Stuttering and word-finding difficulty (WFD) are two types of communication difficulty that occur frequently in children who learn English as an additional language (EAL), as well as those who only speak English. The two disorders require different, specific forms of intervention. Prior research has described the symptoms of each type o...

Children who have word-finding difficulty can be identified by the pattern of disfluencies in their spontaneous speech; in particular whole-word repetition of prior words often occurs when they cannot retrieve the subsequent word. Work is reviewed that shows whole-word repetitions can be used to identify children from diverse language backgrounds w...

This thesis presents a new corpus containing ≈ 5,000 instances of naturally occurring misperception of conversational English, which is the result of a standardised format for the orthographic and phonetic transcriptions and meta-data of existing naturalistic corpora. I examined top-down phonetic/phonological factors and bottom-up lexical factors f...

It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative constitutes a natural class with the present subjunctive paradigm for the purposes of stem selection (Maiden 2005), thus forming a kind of ‘diagonal syncretism’, as the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former. The existence of such patterns has been taken to b...

Slips of the ear are generally agreed to be speech misperceptions of an intended speech signal (Bond 1999). The word “intended” is important here, as slips of the ear are not speech misproductions where the mismatch lies between the intended utterance and the actual utterance: the mismatch lies between the produced utterance (by a speaker) and the...

In this paper, we address the unproductivity of irregular verbal "L"-patterns in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish diachronically in a corpus linguistic study. Using openly available corpora, we answer two questions systematically: firstly whether the size of an active lexicon of a speaker/community remains constant, and secondly, whether the product...

This work documents the motivation and development of a subtitle-based corpus for Brazilian Portuguese, SUBTLEX-PT-BR, available at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-pt-br/. While the target language was Brazilian Portuguese, the methodology can be extended to any other languages with subtitles. A preliminary corpus comparison with a large conversational...