Ternary stress is a unique challenge to constraint-based metrical stress theories: how to model ternarity without ternary feet (Halle & Vergnaud 1987; Levin 1988; Dresher & Lahiri 1991; Rice 1992) or ternaryspecific constraints that prohibit adjacent feet (Kager 1994; Houghton 2008). While ternary rhythm exists, we propose that ternary feet do not, not even indirectly by means of recursion (pac...

Developing correct Grapheme-to-Phoneme (GTP) conversion method is a central problem in text-tospeech synthesis. Particularly, deriving phonological features which are not shown in orthography is challenging. In the Amharic language, geminates and epenthetic vowels are very crucial for proper pronunciation but neither is shown in orthography. This paper describes an architecture, a preprocessing...

The current study focuses on optimization of Levenshtein algorithm for the purpose of computing the optimal alignment between two phoneme transcriptions of spoken utterance containing sequences of phonetic symbols. The alignment is computed with the help of a confusion matrix in which costs for phonetic symbol deletion, insertion and substitution are defined taking into account various phonolog...

Hindko is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Hazara and Azad Kashmir regions. The current research aims to analyze interlanguage syllabification of English by Pakistani-Hindko speakers under optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). study argues that syllabify syllables influenced L1. uses elicitation method collect data. was analyzed framework. analyses markedness alignment constrain...

ABSTRACT This study examines L2 Portuguese speech produced by eight native Cantonese speakers from Macao, China. The aims of this are to investigate (1) whether the rhythm in is more source-like (more similar Cantonese) or target-like Portuguese), and (2) differs across three different tasks: a reading task, retelling an interpreting task. Seven metrics, i.e., %V, ΔC, ΔV, VarcoC, VarcoV, rPVI_C...

In American Sign Language (ASL) the structure of signed sentences is conveyed by grammatical markers which are represented by facial feature movements and head motions. Without recovering grammatical markers, a sign language recognition system cannot fully reconstruct a signed sentence. However, this problem has been largely neglected in the literature. In this paper, we propose to use a 2-laye...

In Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), elements of two strings (S , S ) belonging to designated representational levels such as (input, output) may become associated through an arbitrary correspondence relation, while constraints like MAX, DEP evaluate such string pairs relative to the set of elementwise correspondences they find. Using some elementary calculations, I show that the ...

In many languages, a voiceless obstruent cannot occur after a nasal. In some languages such a sequence is avoided through voicing assimilation, but in others through deletion of the nasal or of the obstruent, or changing the nasal into an oral stop. This variety of responses can be expressed in OT through different constraint rankings. Other ways of avoiding such a sequence, such as epenthesis ...