marcnaom amondo arnett
Lorrine Hatala
Malayalam is one of the four major Dravidian languages of South India. It is spoken in Kerala and Lakshadweep and has approximately 36 million speakers worldwide. Malayalam is historically connected to both Tamil and Sanskrit, incorporating grammar and vocabulary from the two languages. UT-Austin has one of the few regular programs in Malayalam anywhere outside of Kerala.
Supervised individual study of selected problems in Malayalam language or literature. Conference course. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: Malayalam 312L and written consent of instructor on form obtained from the undergraduate adviser.
Malayalam is the language of Kerala, the southernmost state in India. Over 35,000,000 people speak this language. Malayalam, one of the Dravidian languages in India, has its own alphabet and grammar. It originally developed from Tamil and uses many Tamil words. It also has adapted many words from Sanskrit, other India languages and English.
Malayalam is extraordinarily rich in every genre of literature. Every year numerous books and publications are produced in Malayalam. In Kerala alone 170 daily papers, 235 weekly and 560 monthly periodicals are published in Malayalam. The most circulated daily paper in India is in Malayalam. This language is presently taught in many Universities outside Kerala including some in the United States.
Course Descriptions
See the current semester roster for times and room numbers
Beginning Malayalam:MLYM-408
Instructor: Dr. James Kurichi
Email: drku...@gmail.com
This course is designed to develop skills in reading, writing and speaking Malayalam. The course will focus on the study of the alphabet, basic vocabulary, nouns (case, gender and number), verbs and their basic tenses, numerals, rules of joining words, adjectives, adverbs, and the structure of sentences. Guided conversation will be a part of every class. Students will receive considerable training in speaking and writing their own sentences and paragraphs.
Intermediate Malayalam:MLYM-428
Instructor: Dr. James Kurichi
The course is designed to enhance and further the language skills learned in Beginning Malayalam. Direct and indirect speach, passive voice, post positions, rules of joining words, etc. will be included in the course. Reading and discussion of texts from current Malayalam literature (essays, narration, short stories, and poems) will be the major portion of the course. Students will be required to use Malayalam dictionaries and present different samples of Malayalam writing.
The Department of Asian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin is proud to offer courses, sponsor events, and promote research in the Malayalam language and Kerala studies. For more than forty years, students have taken beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses in Malayalam. In addition to courses and events for UT students, we work closely with other university programs and community schools to promote the study of the language of Kerala.
In what follows, we describe this study and its outcome. Section 2 provides background information on the Malayalam and English consonants of interest and their respective phonetic and phonological properties. This section outlines a feature-based proposal for the consonants. Sections 3 and 4 report the experimental design and the results, respectively. Section 5 provides a discussion of the results and Section 6 briefly concludes.
Our experimental design focused on the labial stops and fricatives (obstruents) of Malayalam and English. Malayalam, sometimes referred to as Kairali, is an Indic language of the Dravidian family, speculated to be philologically related to 6th Century Sen-Tamil (Middle-Tamil) (Asher 1985). For labial obstruents, Malayalam phonology employs a four-way voicing-aspiration contrast with stops, but it lacks fricatives at the labial place of articulation. English is a Germanic language that has a two-way laryngeal contrast between its two labial stops /p, b/ and its two labio-dental fricatives /f, v/. Table 1 illustrates the complementary gaps in the phonological inventories of English and Malayalam labials. English has fricatives, Malayalam lacks them; Malayalam makes full use of a 4-way stop voicing aspiration contrast, English uses only a 2-way laryngeal contrast.
We anticipate that both phonetic and phonological similarity of the consonants in Table 1 may play a role in intrusions. Acoustic distinctions between voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives can be captured by the measure we focus on in the present study, the ratio of periodic (harmonic) to aperiodic noise, also referred to as harmonics to noise ratio (HNR), as measured during the consonantal period. Voiced fricatives have a higher HNR value (expressed in dB) than voiceless fricatives. For stops, the ratio should again be higher for voiced than voiceless ones. However, because stops involve much more rapidly changing acoustic properties within a shorter time window than fricatives (brief release burst followed by pre-vocalic voicing, silence or aspiration) the magnitude of the HNR difference between voiced and voiceless stops is smaller than seen in fricative voicing contrasts. Moreover, aspiration, which involves turbulent airflow, would also be expected to affect the ratio, thus lowering HNR scores for aspirated relative to unaspirated stops. In the following section, we present HNR comparisons for the stops and fricatives used in our experiment; the comparisons confirm the coarse-grained expectations stated here.
Our feature-based proposal, shown in Table 2, makes use of three features to differentiate the labial stops and fricatives relevant to this study. The Malayalam voiceless stop /p/ is underspecified for all three features, which is indicated by gray shading. In our experimental design this Malayalam consonant is paired with its dichotic competitor, the English voiceless fricative /f/, which is specified for one feature ([continuant]). In a similar fashion, in the voiced stimulus pairing, we find that the Malayalam voiced stop /b/ bears a single specification ([voice]), whereas its competitor, the English voiced fricative /v/, bears two specifications ([voice] and [continuant]), the latter again being the feature that differentiates the English from the Malayalam item.
We configured our methodological choices so as to enable us to create an environment where listeners receive simultaneous auditory input from both of their languages, in separate ears, but are required to attend to only one language and attempt to ignore the other language.
The audio target and response choice stimuli, displayed in Table 3, were ˈCVCV nonce words with the phonological properties of Malayalam and English but meaningless in both languages. They were designed with attention to syllable structure and consonant realizations in stress-initial positions of the two languages (see Table 1 above). For English there were two labio-dental fricatives contrasting in [voice], /f/ and /v/; for Malayalam, there were two bilabial stops contrasting in [voice], /p/ and /b/. In the dichotic trials, nonce words from English always began with one of the two fricatives /f, v/ in the initial stressed syllable, while nonce words from Malayalam always began with one of the two unaspirated stops /p, b/ in the initial stressed syllable. While the participants in the study only ever heard Malayalam unaspirated stops /p, b/, and English fricatives /f, v/, we also recorded and calculated the HNR of every labial phoneme from Malayalam and English that were provided as a target response choice (as we explain below, there were also coronal response choices included as distractors; these however are irrelevant for the HNR analysis).
To record our stimulus materials, we recruited a Malayali-Australian male bilingual (age: 27 years) from the Sydney Malayali-Australian community, who produced all stimuli for the experiment including those with the English labial stops and the Malayalam aspirated stops, which were not used in the dichotic selective attention experiment but were measured for HNR comparisons. He was born in Australia to Malayalam-speaking parents, and acquired Malayalam as his L1 in the home within the first few years of life. However, all of his formal education was in Australia in English, thus he was a fluent speaker of Australian English, which had become his dominant language (L2-dominant), although he used Malayalam regularly and remained fluent in his L1 as well. We recorded him at MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University in the anechoic chamber using a Roland UA 25-EX sound card on a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop running Windows 7. He produced 10 or more tokens of each of the eight nonce stimulus types (the four Malayalam stops; the two English stops and two English fricatives) in citation form, with a constant intonation contour. We selected the 8 tokens of each category that were best-matched in duration, loudness, and pitch to use as the audio stimuli in the dichotic task (described in Procedure), as well as in the HNR analyses we conducted (described next).
In order to ascertain the acoustic phonetic nature of the phonological differences represented in our stimulus materials, we derived HNR scores for all tokens of each labial phoneme presented either as auditory stimuli in the dichotic task (English /f, v/; Malayalam /p, b/) or as response choices in the task (English /p, b, f, v/; Malayalam /p, ph, b, bh/). For the stops, we calculated HNR over the temporal window starting with stop-release and ending at vowel onset. For the pre-voiced Malayalam /b/, we excluded the pre-voicing temporal window from the measure. For the fricatives we measured the entire duration, starting with beginning of frication and ending at vowel onset.
Stimuli were presented to the bilingual listeners via Sennheiser M2200X isolated headphones, using a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop computer and a Roland UA 25-EX audio card. They were presented dichotically, with the listener being instructed to attend to a given language in a given ear in 4 blocks of trials, one each for Malayalam-attend right ear and Malayalam-attend left ear, and the corresponding two blocks for English-attend. Within each block, there were 128 trials. These consisted of 8 tokens of each of the four stimulus categories (shown in Table 3) combined with one of two distractors. On each trial, one ˈCVCV item from each language set (matched for voice quality, speaking rate and pitch) was presented to the two ears simultaneously. The two items presented on any trial differed in manner but matched in the voicing of the initial consonant in the first (stressed) syllable (see Table 3). All participants completed four blocks in which they attended to L1 and to L2, each in the right ear vs. the left ear, with order of blocks counterbalanced across participants.
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