BibTeX

@article{themistocleous-2017-effects-259668,
	title        = {Effects of Two Linguistically Proximal Varieties on the Spectral and Coarticulatory Properties of Fricatives: Evidence from Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek},
	abstract     = {Several studies have explored the acoustic structure of fricatives, yet there has been very little acoustic research on the effects of dialects on the production of fricatives. This article investigates the effects of two linguistically proximal Modern Greek dialects, Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek on the temporal, spectral, and coarticulatory properties of fricatives and aims to determine the acoustic properties that convey information about these two dialects. Productions of voiced and voiceless labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, and velar fricatives were extracted from a speaking task from typically speaking female adult speakers (25 Cypriot Greek and 20 Athenian Greek speakers). Measures were made of spectral properties, using a spectral moments analysis. The formants of the following vowel were measured and second degree polynomials of the formant contours were calculated. The findings showed that Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek fricatives differ in all spectral properties across all places of articulation. Also, the co-articulatory effects of fricatives on following vowel were different depending on the dialect. Duration, spectral moments, and the starting frequencies of F1, F2, F3, and F4 contributed the most to the classification of dialect. These findings provide a solid evidence base for the manifestation of dialectal information in the acoustic structure of fricatives.},
	journal      = {Frontiers in Psychology},
	author       = {Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2017},
	volume       = {8},
	number       = {1945},
	pages        = {1--19},
}

@article{grohmann-etal-2017-acquiring-252175,
	title        = {Acquiring Clitic Placement in Bilectal Settings: Interactions between Social Factors},
	abstract     = {This paper examines the development of object clitic placement by children acquiring Cypriot Greek. Greek-speaking Cyprus is sociolinguistically characterized by diglossia between two varieties of Greek, the local Cypriot Greek and the official Standard Modern Greek. Arguably as a result of this situation, clitics may be placed post- (enclisis) or preverbally (proclisis) in the same syntactic environment; while the former is a property of Cypriot Greek, the latter is typically considered an effect of the standard language. The following issues are investigated here: (a) how such bilectal speakers distinguish between the two Greek varieties with respect to clitic placement; (b) how the acquisition of clitics develops over time; (c) how, and which, sociolinguistic factors determine clitic placement; and (d) how schooling may affect clitic placement. To address (a)–(d), a sentence completion task was used to elicit clitic productions, administered to 431 children around Cyprus ranging from 2;8 to 8;11. The C5.0 machine-learning algorithm was employed to model the interaction of (socio-)linguistic factors on the development of clitic placement. The model shows that speakers acquire the relevant features very early, yet compartmentalization of form and function according to style emerges only as they engage in the larger speech community. In addition, the effects of sociolinguistic factors on clitic placement appear gradually.},
	journal      = {Frontiers in Communication},
	author       = {Grohmann, Kleanthes and Papadopoulou, Elena and Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2017},
	volume       = {2},
}

@article{themistocleous-2017-classifying-254040,
	title        = {Classifying linguistic and dialectal information from vowel acoustic parameters},
	abstract     = {This study provides a classification model of two Modern Greek dialects, namely Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek, using information from formant dynamics of F1, F2, F3, F4 and vowel duration. To this purpose, a large corpus of vowels from 45 speakers of Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek was collected. The first four formant frequencies were measured at multiple time points and modelled using second degree polynomials. The measurements were employed in classification experiments, using three classifiers: Linear Discriminant Analysis, Flexible Discriminant Analysis, and C5.0. The latter outperformed the other classification models, resulting in a higher classification accuracy of the dialect. C5.0 classification shows that duration and the zeroth coefficient of F2, F3 and F4 contribute more to the classification of the dialect than the other measurements; it also shows that formant dynamics are important for the classification of dialect.},
	journal      = {Speech Communication},
	author       = {Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2017},
	volume       = {92},
	pages        = {13--22},
}

@article{themistocleous-2017-nature-251205,
	title        = {The Nature of Phonetic Gradience across a Dialect Continuum: Evidence from Modern Greek Vowels.},
	abstract     = {This study investigates the acoustic properties of vowels in 2 Modern Greek varieties: Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG). Both varieties contain in their phonetic inventories the same 5 vowels. Forty-five female speakers between 19 and 29 years old participated in this study: 20 SMG speakers and 25 CG speakers, born and raised in Athens and Nicosia, respectively. Stimuli consisted of a set of nonsense CVCV and VCV words, each containing 1 of the 5 Greek vowels in stressed and unstressed position. Gaining insights from the controlled experimental design, the study sheds light on the gradient effects of vowel variation in Modern Greek. It shows that (1) stressed vowels are more peripheral than unstressed vowels, (2) SMG unstressed /i a u/ vowels are more raised than the corresponding CG vowels, (3) SMG unstressed vowels are shorter than CG unstressed vowels, and (4) SMG /i·u/ are more rounded than the corresponding CG vowels. Moreover, it shows that variation applies to specific subsystems, as it is the unstressed vowels that vary cross-varietally whereas the stressed vowels display only minor differences. The implications of these findings with respect to vowel raising and vowel reduction are discussed.},
	journal      = {Phonetica},
	author       = {Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2017},
	volume       = {74},
	number       = {3},
	pages        = {157--172},
}

@inProceedings{fyndanis-etal-2017-time-260585,
	title        = {Time reference and aspect in agrammatic aphasia: Evidence from Greek},
	abstract     = {Time reference, which has been found to be selectively impaired in agrammatic aphasia (e.g., Bastiaanse et al., 2011), is often interwoven with grammatical aspect. Dragoy and Bastiaanse (2013) investigated the relationship between time reference/tense and aspect focusing on Russian aphasia and found that the two interact: past reference was less impaired when tested within perfective aspect (compared to when tested within imperfective aspect), and reference to the nonpast was less impaired when tested within imperfective aspect (compared to when tested within perfective aspect). To account for this pattern, Dragoy and Bastiaanse (2013: 114) claimed that “perfectives primarily refer to completed, past events while imperfectives prototypically describe ongoing, non-past events”.
This study explores the relationship between time reference and aspect focusing on Greek aphasia. In Greek, verb forms referring to the past and future encode the perfective-imperfective contrast. Dragoy and Bastiaanse (2013) would make predictions PR1–PR4 for Greek. 
(PR1) past reference within perfective aspect > past reference within imperfective aspect;
(PR2) future reference within perfective aspect < future reference within imperfective aspect;
(PR3) perfective aspect within past reference > imperfective aspect within past reference;
(PR4) perfective aspect within future reference < imperfective aspect within future reference.

Methods
Eight Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and eight controls were administered a sentence completion task consisting of 128 experimental source sentence (SS)-target sentence (TS) pairs. There were eight subconditions, each of which consisted of 16 items: past reference within perfective aspect; past reference within imperfective aspect; future reference within perfective aspect; future reference within imperfective aspect; perfective aspect within past reference; imperfective aspect within past reference; perfective aspect within future reference; imperfective aspect within future reference. Participants were auditorily presented with a SS and the beginning of the TS, and were asked to orally complete the TS producing the missing Verb Phrase. We fitted generalized linear mixed-effect models and employed Fisher’s exact tests to make within-participant comparisons.

Results
Overall, the aphasic group fared significantly worse than the control group (p < 0.001). At the group level, none of the four relevant comparisons (see PR1–PR4) yielded significant differences for PWA (Table 1). Four PWA (P1, P3, P7, P8) exhibited dissociations, with three of them making up a double dissociation: P1 performed better on imperfective aspect-future reference than on perfective aspect-future reference (p < 0.001), and P7 and P8 exhibited the opposite pattern (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001 for P7 and P8, respectively). 

Discussion
Results are not consistent with Dragoy and Bastiaanse’s (2013) findings, which challenges the idea of prototypical and non-prototypical associations between time reference and aspect. The double dissociation that emerged in the aspect condition indicates that a given time reference-aspect combination may be relatively easy to process for some PWA but demanding for some others. Thus, studies investigating tense/time reference in aphasia should ensure that this grammatical/semantic category is not confounded by aspect.
},
	booktitle    = { Front. Hum. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia, 55th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, United States, 5 Nov - 7 Nov, 2017. },
	author       = {Fyndanis, Valantis and Themistocleous, Charalambos and Christidou, Paraskevi},
	year         = {2017},
}

@inProceedings{bernardy-themistocleous-2017-modelling-258661,
	title        = {Modelling prosodic structure using Artificial Neural Networks},
	abstract     = {The ability to accurately perceive whether a speaker is asking a question or is making a statement is crucial for any successful interaction. However, learning and classifying tonal patterns has been a challenging task for automatic speech recognition and for models of tonal representation, as tonal contours are characterized by significant variation. This paper provides a classification model of Cypriot Greek questions and statements. We evaluate two state-of-the-art network architectures: a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a convolutional network (ConvNet). The ConvNet outperforms the LSTM in the classification task and exhibited an excellent performance with 95% classification accuracy.},
	booktitle    = {ExLing 2017. Proceedings of 8 th Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, 19-22 June 2017, Heraklion, Crete, Greece},
	editor       = {Antonis Botinis},
	author       = {Bernardy, Jean-Philippe and Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2017},
	publisher    = {University of Athens},
	address      = {Athens},
	ISBN         = {978-960-466-162-6},
}