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The present work is a compilation of three original research articles submitted (or already published) in international peer-reviewed venues of the field of speech science. These three articles address the topics of fundamental motor laws in speech and dynamics of corresponding speech movements:
1. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (2019). "The speed-curvature power law in tongue movements of repetitive speech". PLOS ONE 14(3). Public Library of Science. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213851.
2. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (In press). "Fitts' law in tongue movements of repetitive speech". Phonetica: International Journal of Phonetic Science. Karger Publishers. doi: 10.1159/000501644
3. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (submitted). "Distinct phase space topologies of identical phonemic sequences". Language. Linguistic Society of America.
The present work introduces a metronome-driven speech elicitation paradigm in which participants were asked to utter repetitive sequences of elementary consonant-vowel syllables. This paradigm, explicitly designed to cover speech rates from a substantially wider range than has been explored so far in previous work, is demonstrated to satisfy the important prerequisites for assessing so far difficult to access aspects of speech. Specifically, the paradigm's extensive speech rate manipulation enabled elicitation of a great range of movement speeds as well as movement durations and excursions of the relevant effectors. The presence of such variation is a prerequisite to assessing whether invariant relations between these and other parameters exist and thus provides the foundation for a rigorous evaluation of the two laws examined in the first two contributions of this work.
In the data resulting from this paradigm, it is shown that speech movements obey the same fundamental laws as movements from other domains of motor control do. In particular, it is demonstrated that speech strongly adheres to the power law relation between speed and curvature of movement with a clear speech rate dependency of the power law's exponent. The often-sought or reported exponent of one third in the statement of the law is unique to a subclass of movements which corresponds to the range of faster rates under which a particular utterance is produced. For slower rates, significantly larger values than one third are observed. Furthermore, for the first time in speech this work uncovers evidence for the presence of Fitts' law. It is shown that, beyond a speaker-specific speech rate, speech movements of the tongue clearly obey Fitts' law by emergence of its characteristic linear relation between movement time and index of difficulty. For slower speech rates (when temporal pressure is small), no such relation is observed. The methods and datasets obtained in the two assessment above provide a rigorous foundation both for addressing implications for theories and models of speech as well as for better understanding the status of speech movements in the context of human movements in general.
All modern theories of language rely on a fundamental segmental hypothesis according to which the phonological message of an utterance is represented by a sequence of segments or phonemes. It is commonly assumed that each of these phonemes can be mapped to some unit of speech motor action, a so-called speech gesture.
For the first time here, it is demonstrated that the relation between the phonological description of simple utterances and the corresponding speech motor action is non-unique. Specifically, by the extensive speech rate manipulation in the herein used experimental paradigm it is demonstrated that speech exhibits clearly distinct dynamical organizations underlying the production of simple utterances. At slower speech rates, the dynamical organization underlying the repetitive production of elementary /CV/ syllables can be described by successive concatenations of closing and opening gestures, each with its own equilibrium point. As speech rate increases, the equilibria of opening and closing gestures are not equally stable yielding qualitatively different modes of organization with either a single equilibrium point of a combined opening-closing gesture or a periodic attractor unleashed by the disappearance of both equilibria. This observation, the non-uniqueness of the dynamical organization underlying what on the surface appear to be identical phonemic sequences, is an entirely new result in the domain of speech. Beyond that, the demonstration of periodic attractors in speech reveals that dynamical equilibrium point models do not account for all possible modes of speech motor behavior.
This dissertation is concerned with the relation between qualitative phonological organization in the form of syllabic structure and continuous phonetics, that is, the spatial and temporal dimensions of vocal tract action that express syllabic structure. The main claim of the dissertation is twofold. First, we argue that syllabic organization exerts multiple effects on the spatio-temporal properties of the segments that partake in that organization. That is, there is no unique or privileged exponent of syllabic organization. Rather, syllabic organization is expressed in a pleiotropy of phonetic indices. Second, we claim that a better understanding of the relation between qualitative phonological organization and continuous phonetics is reached when one considers how the string of segments (over which the nature of the phonological organization is assessed) responds to perturbations (scaling of phonetic variables) of localized properties (such as durations) within that string. Specifically, variation in phonetic variables and more specifically prosodic variation is a crucial key to understanding the nature of the link between (phonological) syllabic organization and the phonetic spatio-temporal manifestation of that organization. The effects of prosodic variation on segmental properties and on the overlap between the segments, we argue, offer the right pathway to discover patterns related to syllabic organization. In our approach, to uncover evidence for global organization, the sequence of segments partaking in that organization as well as properties of these segments or their relations with one another must be somehow locally varied. The consequences of such variation on the rest of the sequence can then be used to unveil the span of organization. When local perturbations to segments or relations between adjacent segments have effects that ripple through the rest of the sequence, this is evidence that organization is global. If instead local perturbations stay local with no consequences for the rest of the whole, this indicates that organization is local.
Of Trees and Birds
(2019)
Gisbert Fanselow’s work has been invaluable and inspiring to many researchers working on syntax, morphology, and information structure, both from a theoretical and from an experimental perspective. This volume comprises a collection of articles dedicated to Gisbert on the occasion of his 60th birthday, covering a range of topics from these areas and beyond. The contributions have in common that in a broad sense they have to do with language structures (and thus trees), and that in a more specific sense they have to do with birds. They thus cover two of Gisbert’s major interests in- and outside of the linguistic world (and perhaps even at the interface).
This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.
Connective-Lex
(2019)
In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).