Benjamin V Tucker
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 76256 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Benjamin V Tucker |
| NOMBRES | Benjamin V |
| APELLIDO | Tucker |
| FIRMA | TUCKER B V |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8965-7890 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 23 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2008 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Morphological effects in Estonian spontaneous speech
This study investigates the role of morphological structure and paradigmatic information in the perception of Estonian inflected forms in spontaneous speech. Using a large-scale online word-typing task, we examine how segment deletion in the base or suffix, realized inflectional paradigm size, and whole-word frequency affect typing accuracy, speed, and duration. Our results indicate that reduced words are more difficult and take longer to identif…
From Script to Sound
This study investigated the role orthographic information plays in the lexical learning of consonant length distinction by monolingual English speakers. It manipulated two key variables: orthographic systematicity (whether the target contrast is systematically represented in spelling) and orthographic familiarity (Roman vs. Arabic orthography). Across two experiments comprising five groups ( N = 125; n = 25 per group), participants learned 12 pse…
Non-Native Listeners' Use of Information in Parsing Ambiguous Casual Speech
During conversation, speakers produce reduced speech, and this can create homophones: 'we were' and 'we're' can both be realized as [ɚ], and 'he was' and 'he's' can be realized as [ɨz]. We investigate the types of information non-native listeners (Dutch L1-English L2) use to perceive the tense of such verbs, making comparisons with previous results from native listeners. The Dutch listeners were almost as successful as natives (average percentage…
A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions
In this study, we propose an operationalization of the concept of emergence which plays a crucial role in usage-based theories of language. The abstractions linguists operate with are assumed to emerge through a process of generalization over the data language users are exposed to. Here, we use two types of computational learning algorithms that differ in how they formalize and execute generalization and, consequently, abstraction, to probe wheth…
Orthographic influence in the distributional learning of non-native speech sounds
This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic familiarity (whether the native and target languages share the same orthography). Ten groups of learners w…
Computational Modeling of an Auditory Lexical Decision Experiment Using Diana
We present an implementation of DIANA, a computational model of spoken word recognition, to model responses collected in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) project. DIANA is an end-to-end model, including an activation and decision component that takes the acoustic signal as input, activates internal word representations, and outputs lexicality judgments and estimated response latencies. Simulation 1 presents the process of creating aco…
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech
Recent evidence indicates that a word’s paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on En…
Voiceless nasals in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan
Voiceless nasal consonants are typologically rare in the world’s languages. The present study investigates the acoustic realization of reported voiceless nasals in the Miyako Ryukyuan dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals in Ikema occur word-initially and word-medially as part of a geminate or consonant cluster, and are phonemically distinct from modal voiced nasals. Initial observation of collected recordings revealed many instances of the voiceless p…
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
Context effects on the acoustic realization of stops and affricates in Northern Pwo Karen
Studies have shown that the voice onset time (VOT) of alveolo-palatal affricates is the longest, followed by velars, dental/alveolars, and bilabials. In a reciprocal pattern, closure duration is the longest for bilabials, followed by dental/alveolars, and then velars. Longer VOT is also associated with high and front vowels and tones with rising components. Moreover, the VOT of voiceless unaspirated stops is reported to be longer and closure dura…
Acoustic properties of vowels in Upper Necaxa Totonac
Upper Necaxa Totonac is a Totonacan language spoken in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. While the Totonacan languages historically have three phonemic vowel qualities, the Upper Necaxa system consists of five vowels that contrast length and laryngealization. With acoustic data from six native speakers from the Totonacan communities of Patla and Chicontla, we explore the phonetic properties of vowels with respec…
Practice makes perfect
Many studies report shorter acoustic durations, more coarticulation and reduced articulatory targets for frequent words. This study investigates a factor ignored in discussions on the relation between frequency and phonetic detail, namely, that motor skills improve with experience. Since frequency is a measure of experience, it follows that frequent words should show increased articulatory proficiency. We used EMA to test this prediction on Germa…
Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects
Finding word boundaries in Indian English-accented speech
An effect of flaps on the fourth formant in English
Very few segments of the world's languages have been shown to have a systematic effect on the fourth formant (F4). We investigate a large drop in F4 which sometimes occurs in conjunction with the flap in American English. The goal of the present work is to document this phenomenon, and to determine what phonological environments coincide with this large drop in F4. We measure data from six speakers producing words with medial flaps in various env…
The influence of gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience on word recognition
Perception of non-native consonant length contrast
The present investigation examines English speakers’ ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g. /hupo/–/huppo/) which were manipulated for intervocalic consonant duration. The results indicate that basic informa…
Mennonite Plautdietsch (Canadian Old Colony)
Mennonite Plautdietsch (ISO 639-3: pdt) is a West Germanic (Indo-European) language belonging to the Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch) subgroup of Eastern Low German (Ostniederdeutsch), a continuum of closely related varieties spoken in northern Poland until the Second World War (Ziesemer 1924, Mitzka 1930, Thiessen 1963). Although its genetic affiliation with these other, now-moribund Polish varieties is uncontested, Mennonite Plautdietsch represen…
The effect of reduction on the processing of flaps and /g/ in isolated words
What it means to be phonetic or phonological
phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ ‘fairy-tale’). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodic boundaries…
Temne
Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639-3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes …
Community collaborations
This article describes a collaborative project for language documentation involving the North American indigenous languages of Mohave and Chemehuevi. We define the essential elements of field methods and of project design while proposing a basic model for collaborative community-based projects in language documentation. Our recommendations apply to community-based projects in North American indigenous communities; however, we anticipate that they…
The influence of gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience on word recognition
Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects
The effect of reduction on the processing of flaps and /g/ in isolated words
Community collaborations
This article describes a collaborative project for language documentation involving the North American indigenous languages of Mohave and Chemehuevi. We define the essential elements of field methods and of project design while proposing a basic model for collaborative community-based projects in language documentation. Our recommendations apply to community-based projects in North American indigenous communities; however, we anticipate that they…
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
Perception of non-native consonant length contrast
The present investigation examines English speakers’ ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g. /hupo/–/huppo/) which were manipulated for intervocalic consonant duration. The results indicate that basic informa…
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
Orthographic influence in the distributional learning of non-native speech sounds
This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic familiarity (whether the native and target languages share the same orthography). Ten groups of learners w…
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech
Recent evidence indicates that a word’s paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on En…
Voiceless nasals in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan
Voiceless nasal consonants are typologically rare in the world’s languages. The present study investigates the acoustic realization of reported voiceless nasals in the Miyako Ryukyuan dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals in Ikema occur word-initially and word-medially as part of a geminate or consonant cluster, and are phonemically distinct from modal voiced nasals. Initial observation of collected recordings revealed many instances of the voiceless p…
Context effects on the acoustic realization of stops and affricates in Northern Pwo Karen
Studies have shown that the voice onset time (VOT) of alveolo-palatal affricates is the longest, followed by velars, dental/alveolars, and bilabials. In a reciprocal pattern, closure duration is the longest for bilabials, followed by dental/alveolars, and then velars. Longer VOT is also associated with high and front vowels and tones with rising components. Moreover, the VOT of voiceless unaspirated stops is reported to be longer and closure dura…
Finding word boundaries in Indian English-accented speech
Mennonite Plautdietsch (Canadian Old Colony)
Mennonite Plautdietsch (ISO 639-3: pdt) is a West Germanic (Indo-European) language belonging to the Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch) subgroup of Eastern Low German (Ostniederdeutsch), a continuum of closely related varieties spoken in northern Poland until the Second World War (Ziesemer 1924, Mitzka 1930, Thiessen 1963). Although its genetic affiliation with these other, now-moribund Polish varieties is uncontested, Mennonite Plautdietsch represen…
Temne
Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639-3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes …
Community collaborations
This article describes a collaborative project for language documentation involving the North American indigenous languages of Mohave and Chemehuevi. We define the essential elements of field methods and of project design while proposing a basic model for collaborative community-based projects in language documentation. Our recommendations apply to community-based projects in North American indigenous communities; however, we anticipate that they…
What it means to be phonetic or phonological
phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ ‘fairy-tale’). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodic boundaries…
Temne
Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639-3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes …
The effect of reduction on the processing of flaps and /g/ in isolated words
Mennonite Plautdietsch (Canadian Old Colony)
Mennonite Plautdietsch (ISO 639-3: pdt) is a West Germanic (Indo-European) language belonging to the Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch) subgroup of Eastern Low German (Ostniederdeutsch), a continuum of closely related varieties spoken in northern Poland until the Second World War (Ziesemer 1924, Mitzka 1930, Thiessen 1963). Although its genetic affiliation with these other, now-moribund Polish varieties is uncontested, Mennonite Plautdietsch represen…
Perception of non-native consonant length contrast
The present investigation examines English speakers’ ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g. /hupo/–/huppo/) which were manipulated for intervocalic consonant duration. The results indicate that basic informa…
An effect of flaps on the fourth formant in English
Very few segments of the world's languages have been shown to have a systematic effect on the fourth formant (F4). We investigate a large drop in F4 which sometimes occurs in conjunction with the flap in American English. The goal of the present work is to document this phenomenon, and to determine what phonological environments coincide with this large drop in F4. We measure data from six speakers producing words with medial flaps in various env…
The influence of gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience on word recognition
Practice makes perfect
Many studies report shorter acoustic durations, more coarticulation and reduced articulatory targets for frequent words. This study investigates a factor ignored in discussions on the relation between frequency and phonetic detail, namely, that motor skills improve with experience. Since frequency is a measure of experience, it follows that frequent words should show increased articulatory proficiency. We used EMA to test this prediction on Germa…
Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects
Finding word boundaries in Indian English-accented speech
Acoustic properties of vowels in Upper Necaxa Totonac
Upper Necaxa Totonac is a Totonacan language spoken in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. While the Totonacan languages historically have three phonemic vowel qualities, the Upper Necaxa system consists of five vowels that contrast length and laryngealization. With acoustic data from six native speakers from the Totonacan communities of Patla and Chicontla, we explore the phonetic properties of vowels with respec…
Context effects on the acoustic realization of stops and affricates in Northern Pwo Karen
Studies have shown that the voice onset time (VOT) of alveolo-palatal affricates is the longest, followed by velars, dental/alveolars, and bilabials. In a reciprocal pattern, closure duration is the longest for bilabials, followed by dental/alveolars, and then velars. Longer VOT is also associated with high and front vowels and tones with rising components. Moreover, the VOT of voiceless unaspirated stops is reported to be longer and closure dura…
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
Voiceless nasals in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan
Voiceless nasal consonants are typologically rare in the world’s languages. The present study investigates the acoustic realization of reported voiceless nasals in the Miyako Ryukyuan dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals in Ikema occur word-initially and word-medially as part of a geminate or consonant cluster, and are phonemically distinct from modal voiced nasals. Initial observation of collected recordings revealed many instances of the voiceless p…
A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions
In this study, we propose an operationalization of the concept of emergence which plays a crucial role in usage-based theories of language. The abstractions linguists operate with are assumed to emerge through a process of generalization over the data language users are exposed to. Here, we use two types of computational learning algorithms that differ in how they formalize and execute generalization and, consequently, abstraction, to probe wheth…
Orthographic influence in the distributional learning of non-native speech sounds
This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic familiarity (whether the native and target languages share the same orthography). Ten groups of learners w…
Computational Modeling of an Auditory Lexical Decision Experiment Using Diana
We present an implementation of DIANA, a computational model of spoken word recognition, to model responses collected in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) project. DIANA is an end-to-end model, including an activation and decision component that takes the acoustic signal as input, activates internal word representations, and outputs lexicality judgments and estimated response latencies. Simulation 1 presents the process of creating aco…
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech
Recent evidence indicates that a word’s paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on En…
Non-Native Listeners' Use of Information in Parsing Ambiguous Casual Speech
During conversation, speakers produce reduced speech, and this can create homophones: 'we were' and 'we're' can both be realized as [ɚ], and 'he was' and 'he's' can be realized as [ɨz]. We investigate the types of information non-native listeners (Dutch L1-English L2) use to perceive the tense of such verbs, making comparisons with previous results from native listeners. The Dutch listeners were almost as successful as natives (average percentage…
Morphological effects in Estonian spontaneous speech
This study investigates the role of morphological structure and paradigmatic information in the perception of Estonian inflected forms in spontaneous speech. Using a large-scale online word-typing task, we examine how segment deletion in the base or suffix, realized inflectional paradigm size, and whole-word frequency affect typing accuracy, speed, and duration. Our results indicate that reduced words are more difficult and take longer to identif…
From Script to Sound
This study investigated the role orthographic information plays in the lexical learning of consonant length distinction by monolingual English speakers. It manipulated two key variables: orthographic systematicity (whether the target contrast is systematically represented in spelling) and orthographic familiarity (Roman vs. Arabic orthography). Across two experiments comprising five groups ( N = 125; n = 25 per group), participants learned 12 pse…
Computer Science (19 obras) · Linguistics (18 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (18 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Speech recognition (12 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (9 obras) · Mathematics (7 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (5 obras)