Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels from a production study of native speakers of English and White Hmong. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal...

In this paper, we propose an online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, positive negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations then projected into feature space. Therein, learning respectively conducted in row column space by maximizing simil...

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

The present paper argues that multilingual generation must be considered as a kind of multilingual communication requiring similar resources as translation. One of the central resources necessary is that of contrastive knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. We will show what this contrastive knowledge comprises and make a proposal of how to construct it employing the approach used in the...

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or topic accent) is realized differently when signaling...

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fal...

Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate and nouns, may instead over-rely on noun when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Baumgartner, Fernald, 2006). This disjointed has implications pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives making c...

The concept of Contrastive Learning (CL) is developed as a family of possible learning algorithms for neural networks. CL is an extension of Deterministic Boltzmann Machines to more general dynamical systems. During learning, the network oscillates between two phases. One phase has a teacher signal and one phase has no teacher signal. The weights are updated using a learning rule that correspon...

Narrowly defined, contrastive linguistics can be regarded as a branch of comparative linguistics that is concerned with pairs of languages which are ‘socio-culturally linked’. Two languages can be said to be socio-culturally linked when (i) they are used by a considerable number of bior multilingual speakers, and/or (ii) a substantial amount of ‘linguistic output’ (text, oral discourse) is tran...