Breathy voiceA type of phonation in which the pattern of vocal fold vibration allows the escape of relatively large amounts of air in each cycle of vibration, producing audible noise along with voicing. Sometimes referred to as murmur. |
Broca’s aphasiaAn aphasia characterized by deficits in language production. Also called expressive aphasia. |
Broca’s areaA brain region in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Damage to this region leads to Broca’s aphasia. |
CandidateSee Optimality Theory. |
CanonicalTypical, most representative, e.g. a canonical iamb. |
Cardinal vowelsA set of agreed vowel qualities, first defined by Daniel Jones, that can be used as a language-independent reference for the purpose of describing vowels encountered in speech. |
Carrier sentenceIn phonetic or psycholinguistic research, a short sentence in which the target word is embedded. Example: "I said X two times", where X is the target word. Among other things, the goal is to ensure consistent focus, and avoid assimilation across word boundaries as well as list intonation. |
CaseA morphological category that encodes information about a word’s grammatical role, e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor. |
Categorical perceptionA characteristic of the perception of speech sounds. Sounds are said to be perceived categorically if there is a sharp cross-over from one perceptual category (e.g. /t/) to another (e.g. /d/) and if, in addition, human listeners are unable to distinguish between acoustically different sounds that fall in the same category. |
CausativeA morphological process which turns the meaning of a verb x into a verb 'make, cause x'. E.g. English 'to lay' is an old causative derived from 'to lie'. |