Marina Nespor
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 434959 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Marina Nespor |
| PRENOMES | Marina |
| SOBRENOME | Nespor |
| ASSINATURA | NESPOR M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Amsterdam |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 97 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1976 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Prosody facilitates learning the word order in a new language
Twelve to 24-month-olds can understand the meaning of morphological regularities in their language
To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition…
Bias for Vocalic Over Consonantal Information in 6‐Month‐Olds
Human languages rely on the ability to learn and produce an indefinite number of words by combining consonants and vowels in a lawful manner. The categorization of speech representations into consonants and vowels is evidenced by the tendency of adult speakers, attested in many languages, to use consonants and vowels for different tasks. Consonants are favored in lexical tasks, while vowels are favored to learn structural regularities. Recent res…
Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages
Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first invest…
Transition Probabilities and Different Levels of Prominence in Segmentation
A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of the relative importance of lexical stress, phrasal prominence, and transitional probabilities (TP) b…
Can prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech
Acoustic Markers of Prominence Influence Infants’ and Adults’ Segmentation of Speech Sequences
Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs of syllables with constant pitch and duration and were asked whether the syllables had appeared adjace…
Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream
We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploi…
What Infants Know and What They have to Learn about Language
The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies…
Prosodic Phonology
Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is now available again. "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic P…
An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech
Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Computations
Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, la…
Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition
We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6–12‐week‐old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and its prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish)…
From focus to syntax
Signal-Driven Computations in Speech Processing
Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included …
Pre-lexical Setting of the Head
Prosody in Israeli Sign Language
This is a study of the interaction of phonology with syntax, and, to some extent, with meaning, in a natural sign language. It adopts the theory of prosodic phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986), testing both its assumptions, which had been based on data from spoken language, and its predictions, on the language of the deaf community in Israel. Evidence is provided to show that Israeli Sign Language (ISL) divides its sentences into the prosodic consti…
Morphology–phonology interface
Les As. examinent un cas d'interaction morphologie-phonologie : l'accent dans la composition grecque. Ils montrent que deux types de mots composes peuvent etre distingues en ce qui concerne la procedure d'accentuation : a) les composes [radical + radical], soumis a l'application de la regle de l'accent antepenultieme, et b) les composes [radical + mot] et [mot + mot], gouvernes par la conservation de l'accent. En se basant sur cette analyse, ils …
Grammar in Progress
Vowel Deletion in Italian
On clashes and lapses
In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languages is that the overall rhythmic pattern tends to be organised such that there is an alternation of strong and weak syllables (cf. among others, Hayes 1980, 1984; Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984). In other words, languages tend to avoid strings of adjacent strong syllables, as well as strings of adjacent weak syllables. These generalisations are expressed by…
Vowel degemination and fast speech rules
In the last two years, two very interesting books about the interaction of phonology and syntax, Selkirk (1984 a ) and Kaisse (1985), have addressed the problem of characterising fast speech processes and made interesting proposals about the status of fast speech rules (FSRs) and their place in the grammar. Essentially, Kaisse's proposal is that fast speech rules belong to a separate subcomponent of the phonology, which is ordered after the sandh…
Comparative Structures in Italian
Comparatives of inequality in Italian are introduced by di or che , have a degree or an absolute negative interpretation, and have a modifying or a balancing function. Comparative di phrases are PP's generated as daughters of VP's or of AP's with a degree interpretation; like other PP's, they can modify or balance two items. Comparative che is a coördinator. When it introduces daughters of VP's or AP's, it has a degree interpretation; when it int…
Italian Syntax
The Syntax of Word-Initial Consonant Gemination in Italian
Word-initial consonants may be lengthened in Italian under certain phonological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic conditions. This phenomenon is known in the literature as Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS). The syntactic conditions on RS for two principal varieties of Italian are examined here, and it is proposed that RS is sensitive to the syntactic notion of ‘left branch’. Thus RS is a phonological rule which has access to surface tree-structure. Th…
Prosody in Israeli Sign Language
This is a study of the interaction of phonology with syntax, and, to some extent, with meaning, in a natural sign language. It adopts the theory of prosodic phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986), testing both its assumptions, which had been based on data from spoken language, and its predictions, on the language of the deaf community in Israel. Evidence is provided to show that Israeli Sign Language (ISL) divides its sentences into the prosodic consti…
Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Computations
Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, la…
Acoustic Markers of Prominence Influence Infants’ and Adults’ Segmentation of Speech Sequences
Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs of syllables with constant pitch and duration and were asked whether the syllables had appeared adjace…
The Syntax of Word-Initial Consonant Gemination in Italian
Word-initial consonants may be lengthened in Italian under certain phonological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic conditions. This phenomenon is known in the literature as Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS). The syntactic conditions on RS for two principal varieties of Italian are examined here, and it is proposed that RS is sensitive to the syntactic notion of ‘left branch’. Thus RS is a phonological rule which has access to surface tree-structure. Th…
Negatives in Comparatives
The negative element non appears in Italian comparatives when the speaker presupposes that his statement contradicts someone else's or his own previously held belief. Though this non appears in the comparative clause in the surface, it originates in a higher abstract S in embedded position. By proposing an abstract S in embedded position, we can account in a unified way for many sets of facts which would go unrelated in either a presupposition-de…
Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages
Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first invest…
Transition Probabilities and Different Levels of Prominence in Segmentation
A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of the relative importance of lexical stress, phrasal prominence, and transitional probabilities (TP) b…
From focus to syntax
Comparative Structures in Italian
Comparatives of inequality in Italian are introduced by di or che , have a degree or an absolute negative interpretation, and have a modifying or a balancing function. Comparative di phrases are PP's generated as daughters of VP's or of AP's with a degree interpretation; like other PP's, they can modify or balance two items. Comparative che is a coördinator. When it introduces daughters of VP's or AP's, it has a degree interpretation; when it int…
Vowel degemination and fast speech rules
In the last two years, two very interesting books about the interaction of phonology and syntax, Selkirk (1984 a ) and Kaisse (1985), have addressed the problem of characterising fast speech processes and made interesting proposals about the status of fast speech rules (FSRs) and their place in the grammar. Essentially, Kaisse's proposal is that fast speech rules belong to a separate subcomponent of the phonology, which is ordered after the sandh…
Negatives in Comparatives
The negative element non appears in Italian comparatives when the speaker presupposes that his statement contradicts someone else's or his own previously held belief. Though this non appears in the comparative clause in the surface, it originates in a higher abstract S in embedded position. By proposing an abstract S in embedded position, we can account in a unified way for many sets of facts which would go unrelated in either a presupposition-de…
Italian Syntax
The Syntax of Word-Initial Consonant Gemination in Italian
Word-initial consonants may be lengthened in Italian under certain phonological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic conditions. This phenomenon is known in the literature as Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS). The syntactic conditions on RS for two principal varieties of Italian are examined here, and it is proposed that RS is sensitive to the syntactic notion of ‘left branch’. Thus RS is a phonological rule which has access to surface tree-structure. Th…
Comparative Structures in Italian
Comparatives of inequality in Italian are introduced by di or che , have a degree or an absolute negative interpretation, and have a modifying or a balancing function. Comparative di phrases are PP's generated as daughters of VP's or of AP's with a degree interpretation; like other PP's, they can modify or balance two items. Comparative che is a coördinator. When it introduces daughters of VP's or AP's, it has a degree interpretation; when it int…
Vowel degemination and fast speech rules
In the last two years, two very interesting books about the interaction of phonology and syntax, Selkirk (1984 a ) and Kaisse (1985), have addressed the problem of characterising fast speech processes and made interesting proposals about the status of fast speech rules (FSRs) and their place in the grammar. Essentially, Kaisse's proposal is that fast speech rules belong to a separate subcomponent of the phonology, which is ordered after the sandh…
On clashes and lapses
In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languages is that the overall rhythmic pattern tends to be organised such that there is an alternation of strong and weak syllables (cf. among others, Hayes 1980, 1984; Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984). In other words, languages tend to avoid strings of adjacent strong syllables, as well as strings of adjacent weak syllables. These generalisations are expressed by…
Grammar in Progress
Vowel Deletion in Italian
Morphology–phonology interface
Les As. examinent un cas d'interaction morphologie-phonologie : l'accent dans la composition grecque. Ils montrent que deux types de mots composes peuvent etre distingues en ce qui concerne la procedure d'accentuation : a) les composes [radical + radical], soumis a l'application de la regle de l'accent antepenultieme, et b) les composes [radical + mot] et [mot + mot], gouvernes par la conservation de l'accent. En se basant sur cette analyse, ils …
Prosody in Israeli Sign Language
This is a study of the interaction of phonology with syntax, and, to some extent, with meaning, in a natural sign language. It adopts the theory of prosodic phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986), testing both its assumptions, which had been based on data from spoken language, and its predictions, on the language of the deaf community in Israel. Evidence is provided to show that Israeli Sign Language (ISL) divides its sentences into the prosodic consti…
Pre-lexical Setting of the Head
Signal-Driven Computations in Speech Processing
Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included …
Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition
We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6–12‐week‐old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and its prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish)…
From focus to syntax
Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Computations
Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, la…
An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech
Prosodic Phonology
Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is now available again. "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic P…
Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream
We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploi…
What Infants Know and What They have to Learn about Language
The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies…
Can prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech
Acoustic Markers of Prominence Influence Infants’ and Adults’ Segmentation of Speech Sequences
Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs of syllables with constant pitch and duration and were asked whether the syllables had appeared adjace…
Transition Probabilities and Different Levels of Prominence in Segmentation
A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of the relative importance of lexical stress, phrasal prominence, and transitional probabilities (TP) b…
Bias for Vocalic Over Consonantal Information in 6‐Month‐Olds
Human languages rely on the ability to learn and produce an indefinite number of words by combining consonants and vowels in a lawful manner. The categorization of speech representations into consonants and vowels is evidenced by the tendency of adult speakers, attested in many languages, to use consonants and vowels for different tasks. Consonants are favored in lexical tasks, while vowels are favored to learn structural regularities. Recent res…
Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages
Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first invest…
Twelve to 24-month-olds can understand the meaning of morphological regularities in their language
To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition…
Linguistics (22 obras) · Computer Science (19 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (14 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (14 obras) · Natural language processing (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Speech recognition (10 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (8 obras) · Mathematics (7 obras)