VOWEL CATEGORY COMPACTNESS

1. (Phonetics We obtained the compactness of each vowel category in the F1–F2 vowel space in two steps.
   1. The F1 and F2 (Hz) of all vowel tokens were fitted to a customised MatLab script (Kartushina and Frauenfelder 2014), which calculated the area of an ellipse (Hz²) for each vowel category, participant, and register (ellipse_area).
   2. For the sake of clarity and ease of interpretability, the largest ellipse in the sample was then used as a reference point (max_ellipse_area), and the vowel category compactness was computed as a ratio score against the reference point for each participant, category and register with the formula:

      vowel category compactness = max_ellipse_area ÷ ellipse_area

    Therefore, a high vowel category compactness score indicated more compact vowel categories with respect to the reference area, whereas a low vowel category compactness score indicated looser vowel categories. | Audun Rosslund, Julien Mayor, Gabriella Óturai, et al., 2021
2. (Examples)
    ○ There is evidence that more proficient L2 speakers may have more compact L2 and L1 categories. Kartushina and Frauenfelder (2014) examine L1 and L2 vowel category compactness and L2 French front vowel accuracy in Spanish middle school students who had studied French for four years and were judged to be intermediate level speakers of French. They find that learners with more native-like L2 French front mid rounded vowels tended to have more compact L1 Spanish vowel categories, as measured with F1 and F2 formant data. Specifically, when L1 vowel space variability is assessed with a compound measure (a sum of individual compactness scores for all five Spanish vowels), they find that learners with more compact L1 vowel spaces had more accurate L2 French /œ/ and /ø/. In addition, speakers with a more compact L1 Spanish /e/ category showed more native-like production of L2 French /e/ and /ɛ/. | Marie K. Huffman and Katharina S. Schuhmann, 2020
    ○ We argue that not only are individuals with various L1s equipped differently for the task of non-native perception, but also individuals with the same L1 vary in how their native phonological categories are represented in the perceptual space. Such variability is observable in measures of compactness of L1 phonetic categories, and its effects on non-native perception can be assessed by relating the degree of compactness to the perceived dissimilarity between novel contrasting sounds. We hypothesized that compact L1 categories give an initial advantage in distinguishing non-native contrasts. | Vita Kogan, 2020

VOWEL CATEGORY DISTINCTIVENESS
(Phonetics) We measured how distinct participants' vowel categories were from each other in the F1–F2 vowel space. Vowel category distinctiveness was computed as the between-vowel category Sum of Squares (the squared distances of category cluster centroids from the overall vowel space centroid) divided by the total Sum of Squares (squared distances of individual vowel tokens from the overall vowel space centroid), for each participant and register, for eight vowel categories (we omitted the category /y/, as it fully overlaps with the Norwegian /i/ in the F1–F2 space, as the distinguishing feature is F3). Thus, vowel category distinctiveness can be thought of as a clustering performance quotient, indexing the proportion of variance in F1 and F2 explained by the vowel category identity, ranging from 0 (cluster/category membership explains no variance) to 1 (cluster/category membership explains all variance). | Audun Rosslund, Julien Mayor, Gabriella Óturai, et al., 2021

VOWEL COPY EPENTHESIS

1. (Phonology) it has been hypothesized that the phenomena of epenthetic vowel copy (i.e., when the epenthetic vowel shares quality with neighboring vowels) is due to a transfer of phonological features from neighboring vowels and/or consonants towards an undeterminate epenthetic vowel (Rose and Demuth 2006, Uffmann 2006). | Adriana Guevara-Rukoz, 2018
2. (Examples)
    ○ The language isolate Huave as spoken in San Francisco del Mar, Oaxaca State, Mexico, has a process of vowel-copy epenthesis across an intervening consonant (V₁CV₂), where V₂ is epenthetic. The examples in (1) show vowel epenthesis with the 3PL suffix (Kim 2008):
   1. a.
      

      uC-u
      

      a-ʃum-uhw
      TV-find-3PL

      'they find (it)'
      

      [aʃumuh]
      
      b.
      

      uC^j-i
      

      a-mbuʎ-ihw
      TV-burn-3PL

      'they burn (it)'
      

      [ambuʎjʊɸ]
      
   
    | Yuni Kim, 2024
    ○ We focus on perceptual vowel epenthesis following /h/. This case is ideally suited for our objective as in Japanese loanwords these fricatives are typically adapted by adding a "copy" of the preceding vowel when they occur in a syllable coda. For instance, Bach, (van) Gogh, and Ich-Roman are adapted as /bahːa/, /gohːo/, and /ihːiroman/. In work on loanword adaptations, cases of vowel copy in epenthesis have been explained as a result of the spreading of phonological features from the preceding vowel onto the epenthetic vowel (i.e., vowel harmony), for instance in Shona (Niger-Congo; Zimbabwe, Zambia), Sranan (English-based creole; Suriname), and Samoan (Austronesian; Samoa) (Uffmann 2006), and Sesotho (Niger-Congo; Lesotho) (Rose and Demuth 2006). | Adriana Guevara-Rukoz, 2018
    ○ In some cases, epenthetic segments are copies of nearby elements:
   Selayarese (Malayo-Polynesian; South Sulawesi) (Mithun and Basri 1985)
   Copy Epenthesis
   1. a. /sahal/ → [sahala] 'profit'
      b. /potol/ → [potolo] 'pencil'
      c. /lamber/ → [lambere] 'long'
   
    | Catherine Kitto and Paul da Lacy, 1999

VOWEL DEVOICING
(Example)
 ○ Vowel Devoicing in Tokyo Japanese (Fujimoto 2015)

ʃu̥taiseː
ʃi̥sen
ɸu̥soku
tʃi̥kai
katsu̥toki
aʃi̥ka

'individuality'
'eye gaze'
'shortage'
'pledge'
'win time'
'sea lion'

 
 
 
 
 
 

ʃudaika
ʃizen
ɸuzoku
tʃigai
katsudoː
saʃiga

'theme song'
'nature'
'affiliated'
'difference'
'life activities'
'inserted picture'

VOWEL DISHARMONY
(Examples)
 ○ In Finnish, front vowels (ä, ö, and y [/æ/, /ø/, /y/]) cannot appear in the same lexeme as back vowels (a, o, and u [/a/, /o/, /u/]). Finnish also has two "neutral" vowels (e, i [/e/, /i/]) that can accompany either back or front vowels. For instance, the word pouta /pouta/ 'dry weather' is composed of three back vowels and the word pöytä /pøytæ/ 'table' is composed of three front vowels—items like poyta or pöutä that combine front and back vowels (i.e., vowel disharmony) could not possibly be native words in Finnish. | Manuel Perea, Jukka Hyönä, and Ana Marcet, 2022
 ○ The diversity of disharmonic vowel sequences in Seto Estonian:

1. Stem-Internal
    [ ä a ]
    [ e a ]
    [ i a ]

    
   impossible
   marked
   unmarked

    
    
    
    
    

   Stem + Ending
    [ ä ] a
    [ e ] a
    [ i ] a

    
   impossible
   impossible
   impossible

• Optional application.
• Pre-specified segments (including loanwords).
• Consonant interference.
• Morphological conditioning.
• Transparency.
• Co-articulation.
• Abstractness (arising from vowel shift).
• Opacity (including opacity arising from harmony shift).
• Prosodic blocking of harmony.

VOWEL HARMONY

1. (Phonology) Assimilation of all vowels in a word to a subsegmental feature like [±back] or [±round]. Applies to all words in a language. Ignores consonants.
    On the surface:
   1. All vowels have the same feature value.
   2. Or, opaque, with blocking vowels.
   3. Or, transparent, where the vowels require the harmonic feature value on both sides.
      a. Example
       [+back] [-back] [-back] [+back]
   
    | Eileen Blum, 2022
2. (Phonology) Traditionally considered an assimilatory process that changes the underlying form of a word into a surface form with a restricted set of vowel feature combinations. Assimilation describes a type of input-output mapping in which an input form contains one segment that is associated to a feature and that feature is then shared with, copied, or spread onto other segments. Vowel harmony includes a variety of patterns in which vowels assimilate in a specific feature. For example, a language might have patterns in which vowels assimilate to a round, advanced tongue root (ATR), or height feature. Natural languages can also combine more than one vowel harmony pattern. In transformational analyses the vowels that undergo assimilation are called targets and the one that they assimilate to is called the trigger. In the case of vowel harmony the trigger and target segments are only vowels, and assimilation ignores all consonants. So the output surface AR of a word that has undergone vowel harmony assimilation contains more than one vowel with the same feature as the trigger. I use "word" here to mean the phonological word. | Eileen Blum, 2023
3. (Phonology) Defined by Nevins (2010) as "a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word," requires every vowel occurring in one phonological word to share the same feature value in terms of language-specific harmonic constraints. | Yuki Asahi, 2012
4. (Example)
    ○ Consider the word formed by adding the following thirteen suffixes to the root Avrupa 'Europe':
   Turkish
   1. Avrupa-
      Europe-

      lı-
      from-

      laş-
      become-

      tır-
      CAUS-

      a-
      ABIL-

      ma-
      NEG-

      yacak-
      FUT-

      lar-
      PL-

      ımız-
      1PL-

      dan-
      ABL-

      mı-
      Q-

      y-
      COP-

      dı-
      PAST-

      nız
      2PL

      'Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Europeans?'
   
    Avrupa has vowels in which the tongue is pulled back, and owing to harmonization, all thirteen suffixes have the tongue body pulled back as well. By contrast, if the last vowel in the root is a front vowel, like the /i/ in Akdeniz 'Mediterranean', all thirteen suffixes have front vowels.
   Akdeniz-
   Mediterranean
   li-
   from-
   leş-
   become-
   tir-
   CAUS-
   e-
   ABIL-
   me-
   NEG-
   yecek-
   FUT-
   ler-
   PL-
   imiz-
   1PL-
   den-
   ABL-
   mi-
   Q-
   y-
   COP-
   di-
   PAST-
   niz
   2PL
   'Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Mediterraneans?'
   
    | Andrew Nevins, 2010

VOWEL HIATUS

1. (Phonology) The term vowel hiatus is commonly used to refer to a sequence of adjacent vowels belonging to separate syllables. | Roderic F. Casali, 2011
2. (Phonology) Many languages do not tolerate vowel hiatus. Where hiatus would arise in such languages through morphological or syntactic concatenation, it is typically eliminated. One very common means of resolving hiatus is to elide one of the adjacent vowels. In Etsako (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), for example, a word-final vowel is often elided before a following word-initial vowel, as in (1) (data from Elimelech 1976).
   1. a.
       
      b.
       
      c.
       
      d.
       

      /dɛ
      buy
      /ukpo
      cloth
      /owa
      house
      /umhele
      salt

      akpa/
      cup
      ɛnodɛ/
      yesterday
      ɔda/
      different
      ɔtsomhi/
      some

      →
       
      →
       
      →
       
      →
       

      [dakpa]
       
      [ukpɛnodɛ]
       
      [owɔda]
       
      [umhelɔtsomhi]
       

      'buy a cup'
       
      'yesterday's cloth'
       
      'a different house'
       
      'some salt'
       
   
    Although elision of the first of two adjacent vowels is more common cross-linguistically, elision of the second vowel is also attested. | Roderic F. Casali, 1997
3. (Phonology) Or, diaeresis (/daɪˈɛrəsəs, -ˈɪər-/) or dieresis. Describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant. When two vowel sounds instead occur together as part of a single syllable, the result is called a diphthong.
    Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case for Nuosu (Sino-Tibetan; China), Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages like Swahili (macrolanguage; East Africa), and Lakota (Siouan-Catawban; USA, Canada). An example is Swahili eua 'purify' with three syllables.
    Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus and avoid it by deleting or assimilating the vowel sound or by adding an extra consonant sound. | Wikipedia, 2025
4. (Examples)
    ○ In Axininca Campa (Maipurean; Peru) hiatus is tolerated with -DIM (no epenthesis!) (Payne 1981)
   1. /hito-iriki/ → hito-iriki 'little spiders' * hito-tiriki
   2. /mapi-iriki/ → mapi-iriki 'little rock' * mapi-tiriki
   3. /ana-iriki/ → ana-iriki 'little black dye plant' * ana-tiriki
   
    | Kate Mooney, 2025
    ○ When two identical vowels meet in hiatus, one is deleted (Leslau 1995). Word-final -ä is generally truncated on allä, especially when encliticized (Leslau 1995).
   Amharic (Afro-Asiatic; Ethiopia)
   1. a. Underlying Form: sabrä-^w-allä-ä
      b. Vowel Hiatus Resolution: sabrä-^w-allä
      c. Truncation: sabrä-^w-all
   
    | Matt Hewett and Ruth Kramer, 2024
    ○ I also observe that no language has consonant copy epenthesis that targets a non-adjacent consonant (following Kawahara 2007). For instance, there is no language that routinely avoids vowel hiatus by reduplicating the preceding consonant.
   1. Hypothetical example of the unattested pattern:
      /pata-i/
      /pata-i-a/

      →
      →

      [pata-ti]
      [pata-ti-ta]

        
        

      /okor-i/
      /okor-i-a/

      →
      →

      [okor-i]
      [okor-i-ra]
   
    | Kate Mooney, 2023

VOWEL INHERENT SPECTRAL CHANGE

1. (Phonetics) It has been traditional in phonetic research to characterize monophthongs using a set of static formant frequencies, i.e., formant frequencies taken from a single time-point in the vowel or averaged over the time-course of the vowel. However, over the last twenty years a growing body of research has demonstrated that, at least for a number of dialects of North American English, vowels which are traditionally described as monophthongs often have substantial spectral change. Vowel inherent spectral change has been observed in speakers' productions and has also been found to have a substantial effect on listeners perception. In terms of acoustics, the traditional categorical distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs can be replaced by a gradient description of dynamic spectral patterns. | Geoffrey Stewart Morrison and Peter F. Assmann, 2015
2. (Phonetics) Nearey and Assmann (1986) coined the term vowel inherent spectral change to refer to change in spectral properties inherent to the phonetic specification of vowels. Although such change includes the relatively large formant changes associated with acknowledged diphthongs, the term was explicitly intended to include reliable (but possibly more subtle) spectral change associated with vowel categories of North American English typically regarded as monophthongs. | Terrance M. Nearey, 2012
3. (Example)
    ○ While it has long been established that diphthongs are characterized by changing formant frequencies over time, there is a growing volume of research that shows traditional monophthongs in English may be diphthongized in the sense that they too show vowel inherent spectral changes (VISC; Nearey and Assmann 1986, Hillenbrand et al. 1995). This VISC has been shown to be essential in vowel identification and discrimination.
    Three hypotheses of how VISC is detected by listeners have been proposed (Nearey and Assmann, 1986, Gottfried et al. 1993, Morrison and Nearey 2007). All three are in agreement that the initial formant frequency is important in identifying vowels, but they differ in what other information is necessary.
   1. The onset-offset hypothesis suggests that formant frequencies at the beginning and the end of the vowel are the important spectral properties in perception.
   2. The slope hypothesis claims that perceptual cues are based on the rate of change over time for the formant frequencies irrespective of offset frequencies.
   3. Similar to the slope hypothesis, the direction hypothesis suggests that the direction of formant movement is the relevant piece of information irrespective of vowel duration.
   
    | Kathleen Chiddenton and Michael Kiefte, 2013

VOWEL PLACEMENT
(Examples)
 ○ The first distinction that can be made when discussing vowel placement in the oral cavity is a high/low dimension, corresponding to the height of the body of the tongue during the articulation of a vowel (Sundberg 1969). Using this height distinction vowels can be plotted within the vowel space as high, mid or low, as seen in (1) below. The second distinction is a front/back dimension which refers to the extent to which the body of the tongue lies towards the front, middle or back of the vowel space (Sundberg 1969). Using this backness distinction, vowels can be plotted within the vowel space as front, mid or back, as seen in (1).

1. English Vowel Chart

	Front	Central	Back
High	/i/, /ɪ/		/u/, /ʊ/
Mid	/e/, /ɛ/	/ə/, /ʌ/	/o/
Low	/æ/		/ɑ/

Temiar Syllabification (Itô 1989)
1. a. /slɔg/ səlɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT PERF)'
   b. /snlɔg/ senlɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT PERF NOMINALIZED)'
   c. /snglɔg/ səneglɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT CONT NOMINALIZED)'

VOWEL PLACEMENT RULE

1. (Phonology) 

   Vowel Placement Rule
   Syllables are formed around vowel sounds; each vowel typically forms the nucleus of a syllable.

    | HyphenateIt, ?
2. (Phonology) Tradition has it that a syllable consists of a vowel, usually preceded by one or more consonants, and sometimes followed by one or more consonants. | John Goldsmith, 2009

VOWEL REDUCTION
(Phonetics) Any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
 Vowels which have undergone "vowel reduction" may be called reduced or weak. In contrast, an unreduced vowel may be described as full or strong. | Wikipedia, 2022

VOWEL SPACE AREA

1. (Phonetics) Vowel Space Area (VSA) measures spectral dimensions of formant frequencies, which are comprised of the vowel height or first formant (F1) and the degree of "backness", of the tongue, or second formant (F2), (Fant 1973, Gimson/Cruttenden 1962/2008). | Arum Perwitasari, Marian Klamer, and Niels O. Schiller, 2016
2. (Examples)
    ○ This paper examines variation in vowel space area and its use in social meaning making. Among adolescents at a California high school, patterns of difference in vowel space correlate to social practices of exclusion in the partying scene, albeit alongside explicit discourses of high school social life as inclusive and fluid. I treat vowel space as a sociolinguistic sign, that is, a holistic semiotic resource at play in addition to (or in tandem with) individual segments. | Teresa Pratt, 2023
    ○ Vowel space measurements can provide objective information on formant distribution and act as a proxy for vowel production. There are a number of proposed ways to quantify vowel production clinically, including vowel space area, formant centralization ratio, and vowel articulation index. | Marja W. J. Caverlé and Adam P. Vogel, 2020
    ○ The effects of first language (L1) vowel systems in second language (L2) acquisition have been cross-linguistically assessed. In production tasks, if an L1 has a complex vowel system, the vowel space area in their speaking is predicted to be crowded (Flege 1995, 2003). Such crowded vowel space creates less room for new a vowel category and brings disadvantages in learning L2 vowels. This prediction, however, seems to be unresolved for an L1 vowel system with a small number of categories (Meunier et al. 2003). If an L1 has a small vowel system, the vowel space area may be less crowded as the L2 vowel sounds would easily adjust into the same L1 category (Iverson and Evans 2007). The current study seeks to contribute to this assumption by examining the vowel space area between two regional languages in Indonesia, namely, Javanese and Sundanese. So far, the vowel space area in L2 vowel production by native speakers of Javanese and Sundanese has never been well investigated. | Arum Perwitasari, Marian Klamer, and Niels O. Schiller, 2016

VOWEL SPREADING
(Examples)
 ○ To illustrate, take the metathesis of Uab Meto (Austronesian; Indonesia) /kokɪs-e/ → [ko͡ɪks-e] 'the bread'. Under metathesis, the [ɪ] vowel spreads across the intervening [k], overlapping it entirely. The core precedence relations among features are unchanged, because the offset of [ɪ] still follows all portions of [k]. If this were a VC sequence with no line-crossing, we would expect for the [ɪ] offset to precede the [k] offset. | Kate Mooney, 2023
 ○ In a number of languages the laryngeal consonants /ʔ, h/ are transparent to vowel spread. For instance, in Kashaya, vowels must be identical in morpheme-internal /VʔV/ and /VhV/ sequences.

Kashaya (Pomoan; USA) (Buckley 1994)
siʔi
heʔen
ʔaha
maʔa
'flesh'
'how'
'mouth'
'food; eat'
 
 
 
 
nihin
behe
ʔoho
yuhu
'to oneself'
'bay nut'
'fire, light'
'pinole'

VOWEL-TO-VOWEL COARTICULATION
(Phonetics; Phonology) A central goal of research in speech production has been the description and prediction of coarticulatory effects, defined as the articulatory or acoustic influence of one segment or phoneme on another, and resulting in the absence of a one-to-one mapping between phonemes and their output in production. One important type of evidence for this absence of one-to-one mapping is that coarticulatory effects extend from one vowel to another across one or more intervening consonants, a phenomenon referred to as vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.
 Acoustic data on vowel-to-vowel lingual coarticulation in VCV utterances have shown that the transitions into and out of the consonant are influenced by the quality of the transconsonantal vowel (Öhman 1966), presumably indicating tongue movement for the second vowel beginning before consonant closure and tongue movement for the first vowel continuing after consonant release. Palatographic data (Butcher and Weiher 1976) and physiological data (Perkell 1969, Kent 1972; Kent and Moll 1969/1972) have also shown this effect. More recently, studies on various languages have shown lingual vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects not only in transitions but extending into the steady-state period of the transconsonantal vowel both in palatographic data (German: Butcher and Weiher 1976, Catalan: Recasens 1984, 1987, Spanish: Recasens 1987) and in acoustic data (Bantu Languages: Manuel 1990, Japanese: Magen 1984, English: Fowler 1981, Magen 1985, Whalen 1990).
 While there is ample evidence of the existence of vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects, factors have been cited which affect the extent of these effects. For instance, these effects may be constrained by intervocalic palatals and velars, whose production requires use of the tongue body in conflict with the production of vowels, thereby restricting vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (Russian: Öhman 1966, Purcell 1979, German: Butcher and Weiher 1976, Catalan: Recasens 1984). Effects may also be limited by the phonological system of the language; less coarticulation is allowed when more, rather than fewer, vowels are fitted into a vowel space (Manuel and Krakow 1984, Manuel 1990). | Harriet S. Magen, 1997

VP ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) The name given to instances of anaphora in which a missing predicate, like that marked by "Δ" in (1b), is able to find an antecedent in the surrounding discourse, as (1b) does in the bracketed material of (1a).
   1. a. Holly Golightly won't [ eat rutabagas ].
      b. I don't think Fred will Δ, either.
    | Kyle Johnson, 2001
2. (Syntax) VPE refers to the phenomenon whereby the main predicate of a clause—typically in combination with its internal arguments—is missing. Two representative examples:
   1. John is sleeping, and Bill is __ too.
   2. Shorty couldn't see Rihanna, but I could __.
    The second conjunct in these sentences is interpreted as 'Bill is sleeping too' and 'I could see Rihanna', respectively, even though the strings sleeping and see Rihanna are not overtly expressed. VPE has garnered the interest of generative syntacticians from the very early days and has dominated the research on ellipsis for several decades. Key publications include Sag (1976), Hankamer and Sag (1976), Williams (1977), Zagona (1982), Hardt (1993), Fiengo and May (1994), Lobeck (1995), Kennedy (1994/2008), and Johnson (2001). | Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, 2014
3. (Syntax) Typically involves non-pronunciation of the verb phrase. This phenomenon, which has already been widely discussed for English in the literature, is illustrated in (1). The second conjunct of this sentence is interpreted as "... and Peter was hassled by the police, too", but the verb phrase is omitted because there is a salient antecedent in the first conjunct that renders the verb phrase in the second conjunct recoverable for the hearer (in fact, repetition of the full verb phrase often feels redundant).
   1. Betsy was hassled by the police, and Peter was, too.
    | L. Aelbrecht and W. Harwood, 2015
4. (Syntax) A constituent containing the main predicate of a clause can go unpronounced, as in Mary will leave before John will [ – ], when certain syntactic, semantic, and discourse conditions are met. This process has come to be known as "VP Ellipsis" (VPE), but this term is misleading: it implies that non-verbal predicates cannot be omitted in the same fashion (they can be), and that VP is the constituent undergoing the operation in question elsewhere (it isn't). | Craig William Turnbull-Sailor, 2014

VP RECYCLING HYPOTHESIS
(Syntax) Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a "VP recycling hypothesis," which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand.
 We claim that the grammatical resolution of an elided verb phrase requires the presence of a syntactically parallel antecedent. However, in the absence of such an antecedent, the processor may recycle materials at hand and create a suitable syntactic structure (see Tanenhaus, Carlson, and Seidenberg 1985 for a similar hypothesis). We consider recycling to be a performance repair strategy for a structure that is, strictly speaking, ungrammatical. As such, it carries with it varying degrees of difficulty, and results in different levels of acceptability.
 According to the recycling hypothesis, the construction of a verb phrase antecedent depends on grammatical properties of the input and the recycling process follows paths that are made available by grammar. The acceptability of the outcome will depend on the steps needed to create a suitable antecedent. It should be relatively easy to create an antecedent if only one or a small number of grammatically defined operations must be performed on the actual verb phrase to create a verb phrase of the appropriate syntactic shape. If there is clear evidence concerning these operations or concerning the shape of the target verb phrase, then the recycling should be easy and the examples should be judged acceptable, at least relative to examples requiring more operations or examples where less evidence points to the need for these operations. On the other hand, if the processor does not have adequate material to work with in creating the target verb phrase antecedent, then the example should be relatively unacceptable. In particular, if the actual antecedent does not even contain the verb required to head the antecedent verb phrase, the creation of an appropriate verb phrase should be expected to fail and the example should be judged to be unacceptable.
 The VP-recycling hypothesis predicts that finding an antecedent should be easier if the antecedent of the verb phrase ellipsis has the canonical properties of a verb phrase, i.e., it looks like a verb phrase and it occupies a position (e.g., post-subject) that is characteristic of verb phrases. | Ana Arregui, Charles Clifton Jr, Lyn Frazier, and Keir Moulton, 2006

WAVEGRAM

1. (Phonetics) A method for analyzing and displaying electroglottographic (EGG) signals and their first derivative (DEGG) is introduced: the electroglottographic wavegram. To construct a wavegram, the time-varying fundamental frequency is measured and consecutive individual glottal cycles are identified. Each cycle is locally normalized in duration and amplitude, the signal values are encoded by color intensity, and the cycles are concatenated to display the entire voice sample in a single image, similar as in sound spectrography. The wavegram provides an intuitive means for quickly assessing vocal fold contact phenomena and their variation over time. Variations in vocal fold contact appear here as a sequence of events rather than single phenomena, taking place over a certain period of time, and changing with pitch, loudness and register. Multiple DEGG peaks are revealed in wavegrams to behave systematically, indicating subtle changes of vocal fold oscillatory regime. As such, EGG wavegrams promise to reveal more information on vocal fold contacting and de-contacting events than previous methods. | Christian T. Herbst, W. Tecumseh S. Fitch, and Jan G. Švec, 2010
2. (Phonetics) Recently, endoscopic high-speed laryngoscopy has been established for commercial use as a state-of-the-art technique to examine vocal fold kinematics. Since modern cameras provide sampling rates of several thousand frames per second, a high volume of data has to be considered for visual and objective analysis. A method for visualizing endoscopic high speed videos in three-dimensional cycle-based graphs combining and extending the approaches of phonovibrograms and electroglottographic wavegrams is presented. To build a phonovibrographic wavegram, individual cycles of a phonovibrogram are segmented, normalized in cycle duration, and concatenated over time. For analyzing purposes, the emerging three-dimensional scalar field is visualized with different rendering techniques providing information of different aspects of vocal fold kinematics. The phonovibrographic wavegram incorporates information about the glottal closure type, size, and location of the amplitudes, symmetry, periodicity, and phase information. The potential of the approach to visualize the characteristics of vocal fold vibration in a compact and intuitive way is demonstrated within two healthy and three pathologic subjects. The phonovibrographic wavegram allows a comprehensive analysis of vocal fold kinematics and reveals information that remains hidden with other visualization techniques. | Jakob Unger, Tobias Meyer, et al., 2013

WEAK HIGHER-ORDER ABSTRACT SYNTAX
WHOAS tries to solve the problems of HOAS by turning the negative occurrences of the type of terms in the definition of a data-type into a parameter. In the case of the λ-calculus, the abstraction operator has type:

abs : (Var → Λ) → Λ.

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