Papers by Oana Elena Niculescu
The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in co... more The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in coda position in Romanian, a language that can be considered as less-resourced. Our data show that there are two contexts for devoicing in Romanian: before a voiceless obstruent, which means that there is regressive voicelessness assimilation in the language, and before pause, which means that there is a tendency towards final devoicing proper. The data also show that non-canonical voicing is an instance of voicing assimilation, as it is observed mainly before voiced consonants (voiced obstruents and sonorants alike). Two conclusions can be drawn from our analyses. First, from a phonetic point of view, the two devoicing phenomena exhibit the same behavior regarding place of articulation of the coda, while voicing assimilation displays the reverse tendency. In particular, alveolars, which tend to devoice the most, also voice the least. Second, the two assimilation processes have similaritie...
Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2018
This paper presents an acoustic and articulatory description of the seven standard Romanian vowel... more This paper presents an acoustic and articulatory description of the seven standard Romanian vowels /i, ɨ, u, e, ə, o, a/. By revisiting previous instrumental studies (Avram 1963, Şuteu 1963, Teodorescu 1985, Renwick 2012), we offer a new interpretation of the material, a complementary statistical analysis, and a modern visualization of the data facilitated by R through the ggplot2 package (Wickham 2009). Another key point of this study is the ultrasound experiment conducted at ILPGA on the seven monophthongs. Finally, the acoustic data are correlated with the results obtained from the ultrasound study.
Proceedings of SLTU-CCURL, 2020
The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in co... more The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in coda position in Romanian, a language that can be considered as less-resourced. Our data show that there are two contexts for devoicing in Romanian: before a voiceless obstruent, which means that there is regressive voicelessness assimilation in the language, and before pause, which means that there is a tendency towards final devoicing proper. The data also show that non-canonical voicing is an instance of voicing assimilation, as it is observed mainly before voiced consonants (voiced obstruents and sonorants alike). Two conclusions can be drawn from our analyses. First, from a phonetic point of view, the two devoicing phenomena exhibit the same behavior regarding place of articulation of the coda, while voicing assimilation displays the reverse tendency. In particular, alveolars, which tend to devoice the most, also voice the least. Second, the two assimilation processes have similarities that could distinguish them from final devoicing as such. Final devoicing seems to be sensitive to speech style and gender of the speaker, while assimilation processes do not. This may indicate that the two kinds of processes are phonologized at two different degrees in the language, final devoicing being more sociolinguistically stigmatized than assimilation.
Cette étude concerne les trois aspects suivants : (1) la constitution de corpus-les critères de c... more Cette étude concerne les trois aspects suivants : (1) la constitution de corpus-les critères de collection et le filtrage de données audio, les différents problèmes concernant la segmentation du signal de parole, (2) l'exploration de corpus-l'analyse acoustique et la modélisation statistique de données conversationnelles, la comparaison de méthodes d'extraction manuelles vs. automatiques, et (3) la représentativité du corpus pour illustrer la variation phonétique et phonologique en roumain.
This paper examines the relationship between sound change and human perception errors that can be... more This paper examines the relationship between sound change and human perception errors that can be attributed either to undershoot of an articulatory gesture or, on the contrary, to the intrusion of an articulatory gesture. We discuss how such phenomena that characterize speech variability can lead to misperceptions that in turn can lead to sound change, resulting in the reorganization of a phonological system (cf. [1], [2]). In our study we analyze the acoustic manifestation of variable pronunciations in two modern Romance languages (Spanish and Romanian) that are generally assumed to differ in degree of articulatory undershoot. In all modern-day varieties of Spanish, consonant lenition, a result of undershoot, is pervasive. In Romanian it is relatively rare, whereas consonant deletion is widespread in spontaneous speech. In both languages, adjacent vowels tend to coalesce, and unstressed high vowels [i,u] become glides. Gestural intrusion is less common overall. We compare representative examples encountered in spontaneous speech in the two languages, and discuss them in the light of diachronic changes attested.
Thesis Chapters by Oana Elena Niculescu
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Papers by Oana Elena Niculescu
Thesis Chapters by Oana Elena Niculescu