Bogdan Pricop

The influence of consonant voicing on the fundamental frequency (f0) of following vowels (CF0) has been widely reported cross-linguistically, yet its source remains debated. This study investigates consonant-induced f0 effects in Hungarian, a true-voicing language with singleton and geminate alveolar stops. Using large read and spontaneous speech corpora, we examined onset f0 following /\textipa{t}/, /\textipa{t:}/, /\textipa{d}/, and the nasal /\textipa{n}/. Across both speaking styles, vowels following voiceless stops showed higher onset f0 than those following the voiced stop /\textipa{d}/, demonstrating a robust CF0 effect. By contrast, no reliable onset f0 difference was found between singleton /\textipa{t}/ and geminate /\textipa{t:}/. Voiced and voiceless oral stops also showed higher onset f0 than the nasal /\textipa{n}/, which displayed a comparatively low and stable f0 trajectory. A manually aligned read speech subset replicated these effects from the full corpus while revealing considerable closure and release voicing among phonologically voiceless stops. Nevertheless, onset f0 remained aligned with the underlying phonological voicing contrast rather than the surface realization of phonetic voicing, suggesting that onset f0 is not determined solely by local laryngeal conditions. We use the term \textit{phonological overwriting} to describe this pattern, whereby a phonetic cue remains aligned with an underlying phonological category despite surface articulatory conditions that would predict a different realization. Together, these findings suggest that onset f0 in Hungarian reflects an interaction between biomechanical constraints and phonological organization, supporting the view that f0 can be selectively recruited to cue phonological contrasts rather than being wholly determined by automatic physiological processes.

Gunnink et al. have stated that our study fails to provide evidence of a deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs). Whilst in our original study we discussed in detail the evolutionary processes possibly accounting for the distribution of musical instruments and related terms among CAHG, perhaps we were not explicit enough in the results section addressing lexicon. This appears to have led Gunnink et al. to misinterpret our aims, methodology, and results. Furthermore, they offer a highly unparsimonious alternative to our views that requires several unlikely and independent events simultaneously, and perhaps most importantly, they fail to acknowledge that all farming populations and their languages shared a hunter-gatherer ancestor with extant CAHGs only a few thousand years ago.

Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data from ten CAHG populations, we reveal evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between western and eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. In contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialized lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa.

This paper presents VeLeRo, an inflected lexicon of Standard Romanian which contains the full paradigm of 7297 verbs in phonological form. We explain the process by which the resource was compiled, and how stress, diphthongs and hiatus, consonant palatalization, and other relevant issues were handled in phonemization. On the basis of the most token-frequent verbs in VeLeRo, we also perform a quantitative analysis of morphological predictability in Romanian verbs, whose complexity patterns are presented within the broader Romance context.

This paper presents VeLeCa, a new resource on Catalan verbal inflection containing the phonological form of 174,200 word forms from 3,484 lexemes and their respective lexical and morphosyntactic values and frequencies. We describe the challenges and procedure we followed in the compilation and phonemization of this resource, and conduct a computational analysis of the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem (i.e. morphological predictive complexity) in the system to contrast it with those from related Romance languages.

Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture, and which reflect borrowing from farmers. Based on musical instruments, foraging tools, specialised vocabulary, and genome-wide data from 10 CAHG populations, we revealed evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between Western and Eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. By contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialised lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa.