A typological study of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Indo-Iranian languages
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): Qandeel HussainAbstractThe stop consonants of Indo-Iranian languages are categorized into two to maximum five laryngeal categories. The present study investigates whether Voice Onset Time (VOT) reliably differentiates the word-initial stop laryngeal categories and how it covaries with different places of articulation in ten languages (two Iranian: Pashto and Wakhi; seven Indo-Aryan: Dawoodi, Punjabi, Shina, Jangli, Urdu, Sindhi, and Siraiki; and one Isolate: Burushaski). The results indicated that there was a clear VOT distinction between the ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 23, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Quantitative analysis of multimodal speech data
This study presents techniques for quantitatively analyzing coordination and kinematics in multimodal speech using video, audio and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) data. Multimodal speech research has flourished due to recent improvements in technology, yet gesture detection/annotation strategies vary widely, leading to difficulty in generalizing across studies and in advancing this field of research. We describe how FlowAnalyzer software can be used to extract kinematic signals from basic video recordings; and we apply a technique, derived from speech kinematic research, to detect bodily gestures in these kinematic s...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 21, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Strategies for addressing collinearity in multivariate linguistic data
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): Fabian Tomaschek, Peter Hendrix, R. Harald BaayenAbstractWhen multiple correlated predictors are considered jointly in regression modeling, estimated coefficients may assume counterintuitive and theoretically uninterpretable values. We survey several statistical methods that implement strategies for the analysis of collinear data: regression with regularization (the elastic net), supervised component generalized linear regression, and random forests. Methods are illustrated for a data set with a wide range of predictors for segment duration in...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 13, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Obstruent voicing effects on F0, but without voicing: Phonetic correlates of Swiss German lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): D. Robert Ladd, Stephan SchmidAbstractIt is well known that what are commonly called voicing contrasts in many languages are accompanied by effects on the fundamental frequency (F0) of a following vowel: roughly, F0 is higher after ‘voiceless’ and lower after ‘voiced’ obstruents. This is true regardless of how the voicing contrast is manifested in differences of voice onset time (VOT). Such effects potentially provide a window on the nature of voicing itself, but our knowledge is based primarily on typical European two-way voicing cont...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 12, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Prevoicing and prenasalization in Russian initial plosives
This study investigated the production of prevoiced initial plosives in Russian, including examining (i) how closure voicing varies depending on consonantal place, vocal context and speaker gender and (ii) whether Russian speakers rely on prenasalization to produce vocal fold vibration in initial closures, which is one of the mechanisms of reducing supraglottal pressure during oral occlusion. The study analyzed acoustic and airflow data from large samples of speakers and stimulus items, which made it possible to examine group-level patterns. Results for prevoicing duration revealed an effect of consonantal posteriority and...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Temporal coordination between focus prosody and pointing gestures in Cantonese
This study investigates the temporal relationship between focus prosody and co-speech pointing gestures in Hong Kong Cantonese. Previous studies have generally shown a close temporal proximity between prosodic and gestural prominence: Gestural prominence tends to be aligned with stressed syllables or words. However, this finding was based solely on studies of stress and pitch-accent languages, and no study has yet tested the phenomenon in a non-stress tone language. Ten native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese participated in a picture-verification task in which pointing was elicited along with verbal corrections. The acoust...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Experimental evidence on the syllabification of two-consonant clusters in Czech
This study examines syllabification preferences of 30 speakers of Czech in two behavioural experiments using real disyllabic words with 61 intervocalic CC clusters as stimuli. The aim was to evaluate competing theoretical predictions about syllable boundaries in Czech. Participants synchronized individual syllables with metronome pulses in Experiment 1 (induced pause insertion) and produced syllables in reversed order in Experiment 2 (syllable reversal). Logistic regression analyses revealed significant effects of cluster sonority type, phonological length of the preceding vowel and word-edge phonotactics (also in relation...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The effect of long-term second dialect exposure on sentence transcription in noise
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): Abby WalkerAbstractNinety expatriate and non-migrant listeners in the US and England completed a sentence transcription in noise task (−4 dB SNR), transcribing both English and US speakers. Both non-migrant groups are, relatively, more accurate with their own dialect – they have an own-dialect advantage – and comparatively both expatriate groups show a much smaller advantage, doing better with their non-native dialect than the non-migrants, though critically not worse with their native dialect. Additionally, variation within each subca...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Vowel perception by native Media Lengua, Quichua, and Spanish speakers
This study explores mid and high vowel perception in and across Ecuadorian Spanish, Quichua, and Media Lengua (a mixed language containing Quichua systemic elements and Spanish lexicon). Quichua and Media Lengua were originally considered three vowel systems comprised of /i, u, a/. However, recent production results reveal that mid vowels /e, o/ may have entered these languages through Spanish lexical borrowings. The aim of the present study is to test listener perception with minimal pairs containing different mid and high vowels to determine how listeners identify them. A two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) identificati...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Relative cue weighting in production and perception of an ongoing sound change in Southern Yi
This study aims to provide insights to these questions by examining an ongoing change in the tense vs. lax register contrast in Southern Yi. Production and perception experiments were conducted with the same group of speakers to evaluate the relative importance of the source cue (i.e., phonation) and its coarticulated cues (i.e., vowel formants and f0) for this contrast. While speakers of all age groups still maintain the register contrast, our results show that formant differences are overtaking phonation as the primary cues. This sound change is more advanced in non-high vowels than high vowels in both perception and pro...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Bayesian data analysis in the phonetic sciences: A tutorial introduction
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): Shravan Vasishth, Bruno Nicenboim, Mary E. Beckman, Fangfang Li, Eun Jong KongAbstractThis tutorial analyzes voice onset time (VOT) data from Dongbei (Northeastern) Mandarin Chinese and North American English to demonstrate how Bayesian linear mixed models can be fit using the programming language Stan via the R package brms. Through this case study, we demonstrate some of the advantages of the Bayesian framework: researchers can (i) flexibly define the underlying process that they believe to have generated the data; (ii) obtain direct informa...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Oropharygneal articulation of phonemic and phonetic nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese
In this study, real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) is used to study vocal tract configuration in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), a language that arguably has [+nasal] (phonemically nasal) vowels and two classes of [−nasal] vowels (oral and phonetically nasalized). Results show oropharyngeal differences between nasal and oral vowel congeners /a∼ã/, /i∼ĩ/ and /u∼ũ/, which arguably enhance well-known acoustic effects of nasal coupling on vowel height. In addition, nasal coda consonants emerge following nasal vowels. Phonetically nasalized vowels, on the other hand, show no sign of nasal enhancement, including ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 21, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The acquisition of syllable-level timing contrasts by English- and Spanish-speaking bilingual children with normal hearing and English- and Spanish-speaking bilingual children with cochlear implants
We examined the Spanish productions of four syllable-level timing parameters by bilingual English- and Spanish-speaking children with normal hearing (NH group, henceforth) and bilingual English- and Spanish-speaking children with cochlear implants (CI group, henceforth) during the stages of phonological development. The four temporal variables related to syllable structure include: (1) lateral duration in simplex and complex onsets, (2) vowel duration following simplex and complex onsets, (3) voice onset time (VOT, henceforth) for stops in simplex and complex onsets, and (4) interplateau intervals (IPI, henceforth), or the...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 21, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Prosodic-structural modulation of stop voicing contrast along the VOT continuum in trochaic and iambic words in American English
This study explores the phonetic nature of phonological stop voicing contrast in American English by investigating how phonetic implementation of the voicing contrast is modulated by the prosodic structure along the continuum of phonetic voicing. In particular, the present study examines (1) the effects of two kinds of prosodic strengthening that can arise with prosodic structuring, a boundary-related domain-initial strengthening (DIS) and a prominence-induced strengthening, and (2) the possible enhancement types of linguistic contrasts that can underlie prosodic strengthening. The phonetic voicing was estimated using the ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 19, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Perceptual categorization and bilingual language modes: Assessing the double phonemic boundary in early and late bilinguals
Publication date: November 2018Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 71Author(s): Joseph V. Casillas, Miquel SimonetAbstractIn the present study, Spanish-English bilinguals’ perceptual boundaries between voiced and voiceless stops (a /b/-/p/ continuum including pre-voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated tokens) are shown to be modulated by whether participants are “led to believe” they are classifying Spanish or English sounds. In Experiment 1, simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals and beginner second-language learners of Spanish labeled the same acoustic continuum in two experimental sessions (Spani...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
