Katherine Crosswhite’s research while affiliated with Rice University and other places

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Publications (10)


Effects of prosodically modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition
  • Article

December 2007

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53 Reads

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67 Citations

Cognition

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Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., Put the cap next to the square) or utterance-final position (e.g., Now click on the cap). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a monosyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a cat), a polysyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a captain) and a distractor (e.g., a beaker). The relative proportion of fixations to the two types of competitor pictures changed as a function of the position of the target word in the utterance, demonstrating that lexical competition is modulated by prosodically conditioned phonetic variation.


Gradient alternations and gradient attraction

May 2006

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43 Reads

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Many phonological alternations have been shown to be sensitive to lexical ‘‘gradient attraction,’’ defined by Burzio [‘‘Surface‐to‐surface morphology: When your representations turn into constrainsts,’’ Rutgers Optimality Archive ♯341‐0999 (http://roa.rutgers.edu) (1998)] as follows: (A) The overall structure of a word W (in both phonological and semantic components) is influenced by that of other words in the lexicon to which W is independently similar, and which are thought of as ‘‘attractors’’ of W. (B) Attraction is stronger where independent similarity is greater. Since most strong attractors will be morphologically related to W, this results in a limitation on phonological alternations that would produce allomorphy. So far, gradient attraction has been studied for categorical alternations, such as stress placement in English (cf. compArable versus cOmparable). However, many alternations previously believed to be categorical are in fact gradient [as reviewed in, e.g., Port and Leary, ‘‘Against formal phonology,’’ Language 81, 927–964 (2005)]. This study documents the influence of lexical attraction on two gradient phenomena of English: polysyllabic shortening and flapping. Attractor strength was varied in two manners. First, each base used in the study was paired with both derivational and inflectional derivatives (i.e., rose‐roses‐rosy for polysyllabic shortening, and wait‐waiting‐waiter for flapping), and second by analyzing the effect of between‐item variation in semantic relatedness for the derivationally related forms (cf. ice‐icy versus nose‐nosy).


Vowel reduction

August 2004

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1,832 Reads

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68 Citations

Background on vowel reduction Vowel reduction is a well-known phonological phenomenon; the idea that certain vowels might undergo qualitative changes in unstressed positions is likely to be familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory phonology course. Because this phenomenon can be so succinctly described – that is, ‘unstressed vowels undergo neutralisation’ – it is often assumed that vowel reduction is a unitary phenomenon, with a single formal analysis. In this chapter, I take the contrary position that vowel reduction has two different mechanisms. Acknowledging the bipartite nature of vowel reduction is key to explaining what I refer to as ‘reduction paradoxes’ – cases in which vowel reduction patterns indicate that one and the same vowel is both highly marked (i.e. tends to be subject to reduction cross-linguistically) and highly unmarked (i.e. often serves as a reduction vowel, replacing other vowel qualities that are subject to reduction). This sort of paradox can be resolved by recognising two types of constraints that focus on unstressed vowel qualities, but that have separate teleologies. One type of constraint is based on the idea of prominence, and is implemented using prominence reduction constraints (Prince and Smolensky 1993). With respect to prominence-reducing vowel reduction, unstressed /a/is disfavoured, being a highly sonorous vowel. The other is based on the idea of contrast, and is implemented using licensing constraints; specifically, licensing constraints focusing on avoiding unstressed noncorner vowels. In this sort of vowel reduction, unstressed /a/is favoured, since /a/is one of the three corner vowels /i, u, a/. In what follows, I will lay out the constraints motivating these two types of reduction, their phonetic motivations, and examples of how they work.


Avoiding Boundaries: Antepenultimate Stress in a Rule-Based Framework

July 2003

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35 Reads

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7 Citations

Linguistic Inquiry

This article is part of a larger study investigating antepenultimate stress and final nonparsing (extrametricality). Here we examine the rulebased implementation of final nonparsing in Idsardi 1992. We present an in-depth analysis for Macedonian, a language well known for antepenultimate stress. We argue that nonparsing does not account for all the data, and we propose enriching the inventory of avoidance constraints to directly derive peripheral ternarity. This analysis allows us to account for several details that are not addressed by previous analyses (Idsardi 1992, Halle and Kenstowicz 1991).We also consider crosslinguistic ramifications and suggest that some cases of ternarity result from generalized boundary avoidance.


A documentation of phonetic detail in onset‐embedded words

May 2001

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24 Reads

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

As part of a study of online processing of onset‐embedded words, we documented phonetic‐level properties of speech production, such as duration differences, that may cue for word identification, segmentation and/or lexical access. Forty nouns (20 pairs like cap/captain, doll/dolphin) were placed in sentences in three frames (nuclear, prenuclear, and utterance‐final position). Each sentence was read, then pronounced from memory by eight speakers randomly ordered. In keeping with previous research, instrumental analyses revealed strong effects of syllable count on vowel duration [Klatt, J. Phonetics 7, 279–312 (1979)] and initial consonant VOT [Lisker and Abramson, Lang. Speech 10, 1–28 (1967)]. A similar effect on initial consonant duration was also found. These effects were stable across speakers, words and contexts, suggesting they may be available as cues to overall word length in online segmentation. To test this, the noun pairs of one speaker were cross spliced to produce congruous and incongruous tokens, and presented to listeners in a ‘‘visual world’’ eyetracking paradigm [Allopenna et al., J. Mem. Lang. 38, 419–439 (1998)]. We will report on whether beneficial durational cues of congruous tokens and/or potentially misleading incongruous cues had more influence on online word segmentation of our subjects. [Work supported by NIH and NSF.]



Vowel Reduction in Russian: A Unified Accountof Standard, Dialectal, and "Dissimilative" Patterns

January 2000

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139 Reads

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23 Citations

This paper provides an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of a number of Russian vowel reduction patterns. In particular, the analysis presented here relies on a non-unitary approach (Crosswhite 1999) to two-pattern vowel reduction systems, such as those typically seen in Russian dialects. Furthermore, a particularly complex dialectal pattern, traditionally referred to as "dissimilative" reduction, is analyzed here without use of direct featural dissimilation. Instead, constraints on sonority, lengthening under stress, and foot form conspire to allow the quality of the stressed vowel of some word to indirectly affect the surface quality of the preceding unstressed vowel.


Intra-paradigmatic homophony avoidance in two dialects of Slavic

November 1999

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33 Reads

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41 Citations

In this paper, I examine cases of homophony-avoidance, one occurring in the Trigrad dialect of Bulgarian, and the other occurring in Contemporary Standard Russian. In both cases, a productive phonotactic phenomenon of the language (vowel reduction) is either completely or totally blocked just in case its application would cause two morphologically-related forms to become homophonous. Vowel reduction can create homophones in cases where the words involved are not morhpologically related. My analysis of these two cases rests on Correspndence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1996, McCarthy 1995). In particular, the morphological limitations placed on Correspondence predict that honophony-blocking cannot affect non-related words.



Effects of prosodically-modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical neighborhoods
  • Article
  • Full-text available

57 Reads

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5 Citations

Download

Citations (8)


... Reduction, or weakening, of vowels in lexically unstressed syllables is a universal phenomenon observed in typologically different languages including Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Russian and other languages [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Phonetically, vowel reduction implies a change in the formant values causing a shrinkage of the vowel space. ...

Reference:

Prosodic Factors Influencing Vowel Reduction in Russian
Vowel reduction
  • Citing Article
  • August 2004

... momentary degree of overall support for this word as a lexical candidate ( Allopenna et al., 1998). The visual world paradigm with pictures or with printed words can capture the time course of phonological (segmental) competition among lexical candidates (e.g., Huettig & McQueen, 2007;McQueen & Viebahn, 2007;Poellmann, Mitterer, & McQueen, 2014;Reinisch, Jesse, & McQueen, 2011a;Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010) and is sensitive to how prosodic information alters online spoken-word recognition in various languages (e.g., Ito & Speer, 2008;Reinisch et al., 2010;Salverda et al., 2003Salverda et al., , 2007). Most relevant to the present study, in a visual world paradigm with printed words, Dutch listeners used suprasegmental information associated with the primary-stressed syllable of accentuated words to speed up spoken-word recognition and to resolve lexical competition before the target words became segmentally unique ( Reinisch et al., 2010). ...

Effects of prosodically-modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical neighborhoods

... In the first pretonic syllable, a limited inventory of "full" vowels ([a], [i], [u], and not [o], [e]) is attested (the so-called first, or moderate, degree of reduction). In all other unstressed syllables (except onsetless syllables), all vowels except /u/ are phonetically realised as schwa (second, or radical, degree) (for details and phonological analysis see, among others, Avanesov, 1968;Crosswhite, 2000;Iosad, 2012;Molczanow, 2015;and Timberlake, 2004). Most significantly for this study, several papers report the first pretonic vowel as being comparable or even longer in duration than the stressed vowel (Barnes, 2006;Brok, 1916;Kasatkina, 2005;Knyazev, 2006;Rozanova, 1988;Vysotskij, 1973), or at least significantly longer than all other unstressed vowels in most consonantal contexts (Padgett & Tabain, 2005). ...

Vowel Reduction in Russian: A Unified Accountof Standard, Dialectal, and "Dissimilative" Patterns
  • Citing Article
  • January 2000

... Firstly, some languages target the third position from an edge. For example, in Macedonian strings of three or more syllables, stress falls on the third syllable from the right (Beasley and Crosswhite 2003), as in (1). We mark syllable boundaries with full stops. ...

Avoiding Boundaries: Antepenultimate Stress in a Rule-Based Framework
  • Citing Article
  • July 2003

Linguistic Inquiry

... Vowels in these positions reduce to schwa after nonpalatalised consonants and to a high central vowel after palatalised consonants. Building on Crosswhite (2001) and de Lacy (2006), the author proposes that this type of reduction can be understood as reduction in sonority in prosodically nonprominent positions. That is, prosodic nonheads (atonic positions) prefer vowels of low sonority. ...

Vowel reduction in optimality theory /
  • Citing Article
  • January 1999

... In addition to the indispensable role prosody plays in spoken language (Eckstein & Friederici, 2005, 2006Li et al., 2008;Salverda et al., 2007;Zhang & Zhang, 2019), ample research has also demonstrated its impact in silent reading (Ashby & Martin, 2008;Breen, 2014;Fodor, 1998Fodor, , 2002Huestegge, 2010;Rayner et al., 2012). Prosody influences syntactic analysis and comprehension during silent reading by marking prosodic boundaries (Hwang & Schafer, 2009;Hwang & Steinhauer, 2011;Jun & Bishop, 2015;Luo et al., 2013;Steinhauer, 2003), accent placement (Bader, 1998;Stolterfoht et al., 2007), and intonation (Abramson, 2007). ...

Effects of prosodically modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition
  • Citing Article
  • December 2007

Cognition