Variation and gradience in a noisy harmonic grammar with lexically indexed constraints: the case of Spanish -s deletion and aspiration Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 21, 2019
- Creator
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Griffin, Jennifer
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics
- Abstract
- This thesis presents a new way of modeling variation in production and perception within and across lexical categories. By adding lexical indexes to both the input and relevant faithfulness constraints in a Noisy Harmonic Grammar model, I will show that production frequencies be used to predict well-formedness judgments of variable forms. First I show that by using this model, an artificial learner in Praat (Version 5.1.43) can learn the appropriate production frequencies of variants showing -s deletion and aspiration in Spanish. In Experiment 1 I show that Puerto Rican Spanish speakers choose sentences with aspirated adjectives as more well-formed than sentences with aspirated nouns. In Experiment 2, participants' perception of ambiguous phonemes along a continuum from [h] to [s] is significantly influenced by the lexical category of the root to which the ambiguous fricative is attached. These results support the predictions made about perception judgments based on variable production frequencies.
- Date of publication
- December 2011
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in the Department of Linguistics."
- Advisor
- Moreton, Elliott
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Language
- Publisher
- Place of publication
- Chapel Hill, NC
- Access
- Open access