The Gestural organization of North American English /r/ : a study of timing and magnitude
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The syllable-based allophonic variation in the relative timing and magnitude of two gestures which has been observed for a number of complex segments, including /l/, /w/ and nasal consonants (Sproat and Fujimura, 1993; Browman and Goldstein, 1995; Krakow, 1999; Gick, 2003), provides the generalization that more anterior gestures tend to appear at syllable peripheries. However, because only two gestures are examined it is not clear how to characterize the gestures involved, nor whether timing offsets are categorical or gradient. North American English /r/ is a particularly variable and complex segment with three constrictions - tongue root (TR), tongue tip/blade/body (TB), and lips (Lip), perhaps the reason it has been the subject of numerous studies (Delattre and Freeman, 1968; etc.). That said, technological limitations have hindered the ability of articulatory studies to accurately examine the timing and magnitude of all three gestures of /r/ (Gick and Campbell, 2003). With the object of better understanding the nature and role of timing offsets within phonetics and articulatory phonology, this thesis reports the results of an experiment examining productions of /r/ by nine speakers of Canadian English. The present study uses a novel combination of M-mode ultrasound to measure lingual gestures and Optotrak to measure lip gestures - a significant improvement over previous methods, particularly with respect to temporal resolution (Campbell, Gick, & Namdaran, 2004). Despite variable tongue position/shapes across subjects, cross-subject results show a position-based reduction in gestural magnitude similar to that observed in previous studies (see Krakow, 1999); the Lip and TB gestures were reduced in syllable-final position and the TR gesture was reduced in syllable-initial position. Results also indicate that there is a pattern of front-to-back timing in syllable-initial position, with the Lip occurring before the TB, which occurs before the TR. In syllable-final position the order observed was TR and Lip, followed by TB. These findings are not wholly consistent with any of the theories advanced thus far to explain syllable-based allophonic variation. It is proposed that the relative magnitude of gestures is a better predictor of timing than the relative anteriority of a gesture or an assigned phonological classification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".