MARS
MARS is a repository service of Mason Publishing and the Data and Digital Scholarship Services (DDSS) at the George Mason University Libraries. MARS provides enduring, stable, well-indexed access to a wide range of scholarship from the Mason community, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), articles, presentations, reports, and creative work. Learn more about publishing, sharing, and preserving research data with the George Mason University Institutional Dataverse, and our other repository services.
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Recent Submissions
Culinary Colonialism: Eating the Other and the Role of Food in Enduring Systems of Domination
(2025-06) Jarrouj, Angelina
The Acoustic Properties of Laterals in Southwestern Saudi Arabic
(2025-05-22) Alqarni, Saeed; Kelley, Matthew C.
Lateral consonants exhibit varied acoustic characteristics across languages with distinct realizations ranging from clear to dark. In Arabic dialects, these variations are salient due to their interaction with emphatic consonants, which creates distinct acoustic patterns through their influence on surrounding segments. The present study examines the acoustics of the lateral consonants in Southwestern Saudi Arabic, focusing on how phonetic environment, age, and sex influence their realization. Using generalized additive mixed models, the trajectory of F2−F1 was analyzed across initial, medial and final positions adjacent to emphatic and nonemphatic sounds. By modeling dynamic patterns over time, the study captures non-linear formant dynamics while accounting for phonetic environment as well as age and sex. The findings demonstrate positional effects, with medial laterals adjacent to emphatic sounds exhibiting lower F2−F1 differences compared to those in non-emphatic contexts. Male speakers produced lower F2−F1 values, and older speakers showed greater variability.
Closure duration vs. f0 perturbation as a cue to underlying stops for the American English intervocalic flap
(2024-05) Miklas, Janalyn; Kelley, Matthew C.
Researchers found that there are five main cues for distinguishing the voicing of these intervocalic plosives, preceding vowel duration, following vowel duration, closure duration, semantic context, and f0 perturbation, also known as consonant intrinsic f0. In American English, when /t/ and /d/ occur intervocalically, they are realized as a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ] (e.g., [ɹa͡ɪɾɪŋ] writing/riding, [liɾɚ] liter/leader). The presence of these cues indicates incomplete neutralization of these forms. To address a current gap in the literature, the present study focused on American English native speakers’ perception and use of CF0 and closure duration as independent and combined informative cues for deciding voicing contrast of /t/ and /d/ when neutralized by the flap. Participants engaged in a self-administered online forced-judgement task of a pseudoword in 30 combinations of CF0 and flap closure duration to indicate the underlying representation (/hɑtɑ/ or /hɑdɑ/) of the surface production [hɑɾɑ] they perceived. This study observed that participants are more likely to select /hɑtɑ/ when the CF0 is higher and /hɑdɑ/ elsewhere. These modest findings suggest that CF0 is a useful cue for voicing distinction. The results suggest that models of spoken word recognition and speech perception ought to include CF0 as a cue.
A pilot corpus acoustic analysis on the alveolar tap in Turkish
(2025-05) Miklas, Janalyn; Kelley, Matthew C.
In Turkish, the ‘r’ is pronounced as an alveolar tap as in the word araba [ˈɑ.ɾə.bə] ‘car.’ Impressionistic descriptions of the Turkish tap say that word-initial taps may be fricated as in the word resim [ɾ̌e.ˈsim] ‘painting’ and that word-final taps are devoiced and fricated as in the word bir [biɾ̥̌] ‘one.’ Little previous research has been done to explore these acoustic characteristics and what may predict this frication. This pilot study uses the Turkish dataset from the Mozilla Common Voice corpus to examine if tap duration and segment position are predictors of frication and if the first three mel frequency cepstral coefficients are discriminative for frication on alveolar taps. The data will be analyzed using generalized additive mixed modelling, the results of which will be discussed with relation to the distribution of frication on the tap in Turkish.
Confidence intervals for forced alignment with the Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter
(2025-05) Kelley, Matthew C.
Forced alignment is a common tool in experimental phonetics to align audio with orthographic and phonetic transcriptions. Phonetic segmentation is not a straightforward process, however, and boundaries between phonetic segments cannot be easily determined. Most forced alignment tools provide a single estimate of a boundary based on conditional probabilities of segment categories given some acoustic data. The present project introduces a method of deriving confidence intervals for these boundaries using a neural network ensemble technique with the Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter. Ten different segment classifier neural networks were previously trained, and the alignment process is repeated with each model. The alignment ensemble is then used to place the boundary at the median of the time points, and 97.85% confidence intervals are constructed using order statistics. On the Buckeye and TIMIT corpora, the ensemble boundaries show a slight improvement over using just a single model. The confidence intervals are incorporated into Praat TextGrids using a point tier, and they are also output as a table for researchers to analyze separately.