Web-based material by Joyce McDonough
Research Interests Phonetic fieldwork, phonetic documentation and analyses of phonetic field data... more Research Interests Phonetic fieldwork, phonetic documentation and analyses of phonetic field data. Word and pattern morphology. Speech processing in the brain. Two areas of current research are the phonetic structure of endangered languages, especially complex morphological structures, and, second, the representation of speech in the mid brain with neuroscientist Laurel Carney.
A tutorial screencast, in 7 sections, on the structure of the Young and Morgan dictionary
Books by Joyce McDonough
Papers by Joyce McDonough
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2012
Bardi is the northernmost language of the Nyulnyulan family, a non-Pama-Nyungan family of the Wes... more Bardi is the northernmost language of the Nyulnyulan family, a non-Pama-Nyungan family of the Western Kimberley region of northwestern Australia. Currently about five people speak the language fluently, but approximately 1,000 people identify as Bardi. The region was settled by Europeans in the 1880s and two missions were founded in Bardi country in the 1890s. Use of the language began declining in the 1930s. Many Bardi people were moved several times between 1940 and 1970, both to other missions dominated by speakers of other Indigenous languages and to local towns such as Derby. This community disruption accelerated the decline of language use in the community and first language acquisition. Bardi is the name of the language variety spoken at One Arm Point. There are two other named mutually intelligible varieties apart from Bardi: Baard and Jawi. The extent of dialect diversity within Bardi is unknown, but does not seem to have been particularly high compared to that between name...
Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 2019
Studies of vowel systems regularly appeal to the need to understand how the auditory system encod... more Studies of vowel systems regularly appeal to the need to understand how the auditory system encodes and processes the information in the acoustic signal. The goal of this study is to present computational models to address this need, and to use the models to illustrate responses to vowels at two levels of the auditory pathway. Many of the models previously used to study auditory representations of speech are based on linear filter banks simulating the tuning of the inner ear. These models do not incorporate key nonlinear response properties of the inner ear that influence responses at conversational-speech sound levels. These nonlinear properties shape neural representations in ways that are important for understanding responses in the central nervous system. The model for auditory-nerve (AN) fibers used here incorporates realistic nonlinear properties associated with the basilar membrane, inner hair cells (IHCs), and the IHC-AN synapse. These nonlinearities set up profiles of f0-related fluctuations that vary in amplitude across the population of frequency-tuned AN fibers. Amplitude fluctuations in AN responses are smallest near formant peaks and largest at frequencies between formants. These f0-related fluctuations strongly excite or suppress neurons in the auditory midbrain, the first level of the auditory pathway where tuning for low-frequency fluctuations in sounds occurs. Formant-related amplitude fluctuations provide representations of the vowel spectrum in discharge rates of midbrain neurons. These representations in the midbrain are robust across a wide range of sound levels, including the entire range of conversational-speech levels, and in the presence of realistic background noise levels.
eNeuro
Current models for neural coding of vowels are typically based on linear descriptions of the audi... more Current models for neural coding of vowels are typically based on linear descriptions of the auditory periphery and fail at high sound levels and in background noise. These models rely on either auditory-nerve (AN) discharge rates or phase-locking to temporal fine-structure. However, both discharge rates and phase-locking saturate at moderate to high sound levels, and phase-locking is degraded in the central nervous system at mid to high frequencies. The fact that speech intelligibility is robust over a wide range of sound levels is problematic for codes that deteriorate as level increases. Additionally, a successful neural code must function for speech in background noise at levels that are tolerated by listeners. The model presented here resolves these problems and incorporates several key response properties of the nonlinear auditory periphery, including saturation, synchrony capture, and phase-locking to both fine-structure and envelope temporal features. The model also includes the properties of the auditory midbrain, where discharge rates are tuned to amplitude fluctuation rates. The nonlinear peripheral response features create contrasts in the amplitudes of low-frequency neural rate fluctuations across the population. These patterns of fluctuations result in a response profile in the midbrain that encodes vowel formants over a wide range of levels and in background noise. The hypothesized code is supported by electrophysiological recordings from the inferior colliculus of awake rabbit. This model provides information for understanding the structure of cross-linguistic vowel spaces and suggests strategies for automatic formant detection and speech enhancement for listeners with hearing loss.
Journal of the international Phonetic Association, v42.3, 2012
Laboratory Phonology 2012, V3.1
Using the framework of Articulatory Phonology, we offer a phonological account of the allophonic ... more Using the framework of Articulatory Phonology, we offer a phonological account of the allophonic variation undergone by the velar fricative phoneme in Navajo, a Southern or Apachean Athabaskan language spoken in Arizona and New Mexico. The Navajo velar fricative strongly co-articulates with the following vowel, varying in both place and manner of articulation. The variation in this velar fricative seems greater than the variation of velars in many well-studied languages. The coronal central fricatives in the inventory, in contrast, are quite phonetically stable. The back fricative of Navajo thus highlights 1) the linguistic use of an extreme form of coarticulation and 2) the mechanism by which languages can control coarticulation. It is argued that the task dynamic model underlying Articulatory Phonology, with the mechanism of gestural blending controlling coarticulation, can account for the multiplicity of linguistically-controlled ways in which velars coarticulate with surrounding vowels without requiring any changes of input specification due to context. The ability of phonological and morphological constraints to restrict the amount of coarticulation argues against strict separation of phonetics and phonology.
IEEE-CISS, 2012
Neural information for encoding and processing temporal information in speech sounds occurs over ... more Neural information for encoding and processing temporal information in speech sounds occurs over different time-courses. We are interested in temporal mechanisms for neural coding of both pitch and formant frequencies of voiced sounds such as vowels. In particular, in this study we will describe a strategy for quantifying the ability to discriminate changes in spectral peaks, or formant frequencies, based on the responses of neural models. Previous studies have explored this question based on responses of computational models for the auditory periphery, that is, responses of the population of auditory-nerve (AN) fibers (e.g. [1]-[2]). In this study we quantify formant-frequency discrimination based on the responses of models for auditory midbrain neurons at the level of the inferior colliculus (IC). These neurons are tuned to both audio frequency and to low-frequency amplitude modulations, such as those associated with pitch.
Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 427–449, 2008
The Athabaskan languages have a particularly rich series of stop contrasts, plain stops and affri... more The Athabaskan languages have a particularly rich series of stop contrasts, plain stops and affricates, each exhibiting a three-way laryngeal contrast, unaspirated, aspirated and ejective. Several aspects of this inventory are interesting to phonetic and phonological studies, among them the length and ‘heaviness’ of the releases on the aspirated plain stops, the temporal properties of the ejectives, and the richness of the stop contrast set, approximately 21 distinct segments. This paper is an investigation of the phonetic realization of the stops in five Athabaskan languages: Dene Suline (CL), Dene Suline (FC), Dogrib, North Slavey, and Tsilhqut’in, compared with data from Navajo from McDonough (2003). Based on the phonetic patterns in the data, we argue that, among the consonants, the primary organizing feature of the contrasts is a temporal distinction, which we model as simplex-complex contrast, based on Laver (1994), in which the temporal properties of medial phase of the segment’s articulation play a significant role in the contrast. This classification represents a major divide in the inventory between the unaspirated plain stops (orthographically (b), d, g, (q)) and the rest of the stops in the inventory. These data suggest first, that aspirated plain stops, (orthographically t, k) are mislabeled. Instead, in keeping with much of the early literature on the Athabaskan languages, the t and k phonemes are the affricates /tx, kx/. Second, related to this, long release periods are a characteristic feature of all but the unaspirated stops in the inventory. As such they represent a feature of a larger grouping in the Athabaskan inventory, realized in a temporal domain and persistent in the family, in a pattern likely inherited from the parent language. We model this temporal distinction as a simplex-complex distinction, which separates out the ‘unaspirated’ plain stops, as simplex segments with short offsets, from the rest of the stops, including the plain ‘aspirated’ stops and ejectives, which have complex medial phases with long release periods. Furthermore, the proposal suggests that the languages have exploited the sets of simplex stops and fricatives to build their rich inventories of complex segments, as several linguists have observed. The analysis serves as a basis for understanding sound change and alternation patterns in the family.
A model of the polysynthetic Dene or Athabaskan verb is elucidated by providing evidence for its ... more A model of the polysynthetic Dene or Athabaskan verb is elucidated by providing evidence for its internal structure based on phonotactic distributions and phonetic properties which implicate a type of internal structure best accounted for in a word-and-paradigm model in which paradigms are organizational principles in lexicon, with implications for lexical access and learning. Evidence for this structure is presented using data from Navajo. The data underscores the importance of phonetic documentation especially in understudied/resourced languages. * Contact information: [email protected]. 1 That the template doesn't work as a word formation device in Athabaskan has been acknowledged for a couple decades. In an attempt to use the template as a word formation device, for instance,
University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences (WPLS: UR) Volume 4:1. P 45-56, 2011
University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences (WPLS: UR) Volume 5:1., 2009
The goal of the presented study was to investigate the use of coarticulatory vowel nasalization i... more The goal of the presented study was to investigate the use of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in lexical access by native speakers of American English. In particular, we compare the use of coarticulatory place of articulation cues to that of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. Previous research on lexical access has shown that listeners use cues to the place of articulation of a postvocalic stop in the preceding vowel. However, vowel nasalization as cue to an upcoming nasal consonant has been argued to be a more complex phenomenon. In order to establish whether coarticulatory vowel nasalization aides in the process of lexical access in the same way as place of articulation cues do, we conducted two perception experiments: an off-line 2AFC discrimination task and an on-line eyetracking study using the visual world paradigm. The results of our study suggest that listeners are indeed able to use vowel nasalization in similar ways to place of articulation information, and that both types of cues aide in lexical access.
Formal Approaches to Functional Phenomena, eds. Carnie, Harley and Willie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins., 2002
Anthropological linguistics, 1999
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Web-based material by Joyce McDonough
Books by Joyce McDonough
Papers by Joyce McDonough