Conceição Cunha

Albanian comprises two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk, as well as a Tosk-based standard variety. The study was concerned with the extent to which the vocalic system of Southern Gheg, spoken in the capital city Tirana and surrounding rural area, has been shaped in urban versus rural contexts by extensive contact with Tosk and the standard. Through an apparent-time comparison across two groups of adults and first-grade children, one from Tirana and the other from the nearby village of Bërzhitë, we investigated three vocalic features of Southern Gheg: rounding of /a/, vowel lengthening and monophthongization, all of which were expected to be maintained more in the rural community than in the urban one, and also more by adults than by children. Our results showed that rounding was changing in both locations, monophthongization in the urban setting only, while lengthening was well preserved. In general, the changes found for rounding and monophthongization were more advanced in children than adults. The relative complexity of the features is the main factor explored to account for why some features change faster than others. The reasons for a possible increase in the phonological complexity of Southern Gheg are also discussed.

European Portuguese (EP) is characterized by a large number of nasals encompassing five phonemic nasal vowels. One notable characteristic of these sounds is their dynamic nature, involving both oral and nasal gestures, which makes their study and characterization challenging. The study of nasal vowels, in particular, has been addressed using a wide range of technologies: early descriptions were based on acoustics and nasalance, later expanded with articulatory data obtained from EMA and real-time magnetic resonance (RT-MRI). While providing important results, these studies were limited by the discrete nature of the EMA-pellets, providing only a small grasp of the vocal tract; by the small time resolution of the MRI data; and by the small number of speakers. To tackle these limitations, and to take advantage of recent advances in RT-MRI allowing 50 fps, novel articulatory data has been acquired for 11 EP speakers. The work presented here explores the capabilities of recently proposed data-driven approaches to model articulatory data extracted from RT-MRI to assess their suitability for investigating the dynamic characteristics of nasal vowels. To this end, we explore vocal tract configurations over time, along with the coordination of velum and lip aperture in oral and nasal bilabial contexts for nasal vowels and oral congeners. Overall, the results show that both generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) and functional linear mixed models (FLMMs) provide an elegant approach to tackle the data from multiple speakers. More specifically, we found oro-pharyngeal differences in the tongue configurations for low and mid nasal vowels: vowel track aperture was larger in the pharyngeal and smaller in the palatal region for the three non-high nasal vowels, providing evidence of a raised and more advanced tongue position of the nasal vowels. Even though this work is aimed at exploring the applicability of the methods, the outcomes already highlight interesting data for the dynamic characterization of EP nasal vowels.

Technologies, such as real-time magnetic resonance (RT-MRI), can provide valuable information to evolve our understanding of the static and dynamic aspects of speech by contributing to the determination of which articulators are essential (critical) in producing specific sounds and how (gestures). While a visual analysis and comparison of imaging data or vocal tract profiles can already provide relevant findings, the sheer amount of available data demands and can strongly profit from unsupervised data-driven approaches. Recent work, in this regard, has asserted the possibility of determining critical articulators from RT-MRI data by considering a representation of vocal tract configurations based on landmarks placed on the tongue, lips, and velum, yielding meaningful results for European Portuguese (EP). Advancing this previous work to obtain a characterization of EP sounds grounded on Articulatory Phonology, important to explore critical gestures and advance, for example, articulatory speech synthesis, entails the consideration of a novel set of tract variables. To this end, this article explores critical variable determination considering a vocal tract representation aligned with Articulatory Phonology and the Task Dynamics framework. The overall results, obtained considering data for three EP speakers, show the applicability of this approach and are consistent with existing descriptions of EP sounds.