Searching segments within words

Layers in APLS have different scopes: span, phrase, word, and segment. You may notice that these are the column names at the top of the layer picker!

The searches discussed on previous documentation pages have been in the first three scopes (span, phrase, and word). This is because the search page looks for matches word-by-word, so span and phrase layer searches give results at the word level even though span and phrase scopes are larger than word scope.

For instance, if you did a search to find all the overlaps in APLS using the overlap layer, you would get results for each individual word that occurs in a stretch of overlapped speech, even though the actual overlap annotation might be longer than a single word.

Some word layers, like syllables, may seem like they would be segment layers, but they are actually sub-interval word annotations. These are also called horizontal peers, which are explained on the Layer typology documentation page.

segment and foll_segment are the two segment layers in APLS. These segment layers can be used to find matches for individual speech sound segments and to create within-word segment patterns.

On this page
  1. Searching for a single segment
  2. Searching for multiple segments within a word

Searching for a single segment

The difference between matching to segments and matching to words is that segments don’t need to have their surrounding context defined.

For instance, if you wanted to search for every instance of /j/ using the phonemes layer, you would need to enter the regex .*j.* to find words containing /j/. With the segment layer, you would only to search j because the search is looking at individual speech sounds to find matching segments.

To find matches for every instance of /ɔɪ/:

  1. Go to the search page.
  2. Select the segment layer in the selection menu to make the segment pattern input field appear.
  3. Click the drop-down menu button () and select ɔɪ from the DIPHTHONGS section.
  4. Click the Search button.

Searching for multiple segments within a word

Next to the the drop-down menu button () for the segment and foll_segment layers is a + button. Clicking on the right side of the segment input field adds another input field for the segment that immediately follows the previous segment. This allows you to construct patterns that search for a sequence of segments within a word.

It is strongly recommended to not attempt within-word searches for segment and foll_segment at the same time. Because of how these searches look for matches, specifying within-word patterns for both segment and foll_segment will most likely return no results or result in an error message.

To find matches for every instance of /l/ followed by /t/:

  1. Go to the search page.
  2. Select the segment layer in the selection menu to make the segment pattern input field appear.
  3. Click inside of the segment box to make another segment input field appear.
  4. Enter l in the first segment field and t in the second segment field.
  5. Click the Search button.

You can designate one of the segments in your within-word search as your “token of interest” by clicking the target for that segment. This will not affect the number of matches that are found, but it will affect what information is included when exporting data.