GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/

Acoustic characteristics of Greek vowels

Five male speakers produced the vowels of Greek at slow and fast tempo, in lexically stressed and unstressed syllables, and in lexically stressed syllables of words appearing in focus position. Duration, fundamental frequency (F0), amplitude, and the frequencies of the first (F1) and second formant (F2) were measured. The effects on these variables of the phonemic category of the vowel, tempo, stress, and focus were examined. The results indicated that the vowel system of Greek follows universal tendencies in terms of duration but not in terms of F0 and amplitude. Vowels in focus position, when plotted by their F1 and F2 frequencies, defined a vowel space larger than that defined by vowels in any other condition. © 1999 S. Karger AG

Acoustic characteristics of Greek fricatives

The present study examined the acoustics of Greek fricative consonants in terms of temporal, spectral, and amplitude parameters. The effects of voicing, speaker's gender, place of articulation, and post-fricative vowel on the acoustic parameters were also investigated. The results indicated that first and second spectral moments (i.e., spectral mean and spectral variance), as well as second formant (F2) onset, and normalized amplitude values are the acoustic parameters most correlated with the Greek fricative place of articulation distinction. F2 onset and spectral mean were the parameters that distinguished all five places of articulation, while normalized amplitude differentiated sibilants from non-sibilants. In addition, normalized duration and normalized amplitude are the parameters that distinguish Greek voiced from voiceless fricatives, with high classification accuracy. © 2014 Acoustical Society of America