Training-induced pattern-specific phonetic adjustments by first and second language listeners
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): Angela Cooper, Ann Bradlow The current study investigated the phonetic adjustment mechanisms that underlie perceptual adaptation in first and second language (Dutch-English) listeners by exposing them to a novel English accent containing controlled deviations from the standard accent (e.g. /i/-to-/ɪ/ yielding /krɪm/ instead of /krim/ for ‘cream’). These deviations involved contrasts that either were contrastive or were not contrastive in Dutch. Following accent exposure with disambiguating feedback, listeners completed lexical decision a...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 29, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Phonotactic restrictions condition the realization of vowel nasality and nasal coarticulation: Duration and airflow measurements in Qu ébécois French and Brazilian Portuguese
This study examines the nasal airflow and duration patterns of vowels and nasal appendices in Québécois French (QF) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in order to determine if phonotactic restrictions on nasal and nasalized vowels have an influence on the realization of nasality contrasts. Results show that QF nasal vowels in syllables with more possible contrastive structures (Ṽ$ vs. VN$) show less variability than nasal vowels in syllables with more limited contrasts (ṼC$ does not contrast with *VNC$). Furthermore, nasal airflow of VN sequences rises earlier in syllable structures in which the distribution of nasal and ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 29, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Prosodic effects on the planning of inserted / ɹ/ in Australian English
Publication date: July 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 69 Author(s): Ivan Yuen, Felicity Cox, Katherine Demuth V1.V2 hiatus is disallowed in many languages. In several varieties of English, when V1 is non-high, hiatus may be resolved by glottalization or /ɹ/ insertion. However, it is not well understood why speakers choose one over the other. In addition, questions remain about how foot boundary influences the hiatus-breaking strategy and whether perceived /ɹ/ is a phonetic transition or segmental insertion. Using an elicited production task, we investigated the effect of foot boundary on hiatus resolution ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 29, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing
This study examines the phonetic and phonological knowledge of Spanish and English /l/ by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals along a continuum of language dominance. Forty early Spanish-English bilinguals, divided into groups as a function of their immigrant generation (G1.5, G2, G3), and twenty L2 Spanish learners produced word-initial and word-final laterals in three separate sessions: monolingual Spanish session, monolingual English session, and bilingual Spanish/English session. Results indicate that all participants acquired the phonetic and allophonic characteristics of the lateral variants in each language, a...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 29, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A comparison of phonetic convergence in conversational interaction and speech shadowing
Publication date: July 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 69 Author(s): Jennifer S. Pardo, Adelya Urmanche, Sherilyn Wilman, Jaclyn Wiener, Nicholas Mason, Keagan Francis, Melanie Ward Phonetic convergence is a form of variation in speech production in which a talker adopts aspects of another talker’s acoustic–phonetic repertoire. To date, this phenomenon has been investigated in non-interactive laboratory tasks extensively and in conversational interaction to a lesser degree. The present study directly compares phonetic convergence in conversational interaction and in a non-interactive speech shadowing ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 29, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Articulatory dynamics of (de)gemination in Dutch
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): Patrycja Strycharczuk, Koen Sebregts So-called ‘fake’ or derived geminates differ in the extent to which they behave like lexical geminates, both across and within languages. Data that enable us to study the gestural as well as the durational properties of fake geminates can shed light on their status as long consonants or clusters, and on the effects of any degemination rules present in the language. Our focus is on Standard Dutch, which has been said to exhibit categorical degemination of derived identical consonant clusters. The specifi...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 14, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Neurophysiological indices of the effect of cognates on vowel perception in late Spanish-English bilinguals
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): Carol A. Tessel, Erika S. Levy, Martin Gitterman, Valerie L. Shafer It is well established that acquiring a second language (L2) later in life results in less accurate production and perception of speech sounds in the L2. An interesting question is to what extent phonological similarity of translation equivalents across the first (L1) and L2s affects speech-sound processing and lexical access in an L2. The present study examined this question by comparing processing of Spanish-English translation equivalents that either were phonologically s...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 13, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Lexical frequency co-determines the speed-curvature relation in articulation
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): Fabian Tomaschek, Denis Arnold, Franziska Bröker, R. Harald Baayen The relation between speed and curvature provides a characterization of the spatio-temporal orchestration of kinematic movements. For hand movements, this relation has been reported to follow a power law with exponent - 1 / 3 . The same power law has been claimed to govern articulatory movements. We studied the functional form of speed as predicted by curvature using electromagnetic articulography, focusing on three sensors: the tongue tip, the tongue body, and the lower li...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Perceptual attention as the locus of transfer to nonnative speech perception
This study explored the hypothesis that transfer effects in perception come from L1-specific processing strategies, which direct attention to phonetic cues according to their estimated relative functional load (RFL). Using target languages that were either familiar (English) or unfamiliar (Korean), perception of unreleased final stops was tested in L1 English listeners and four groups of L2 English learners whose L1s differ in stop phonotactics and the estimated RFL of a crucial cue to unreleased stops (i.e., vowel-to-consonant formant transitions). Results were, overall, consistent with the hypothesis, with L1 Japanese li...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 26, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The role of segments and prosody in the identification of a speaker ’s dialect
The objective of this study is to investigate the role of segments, rhythm, and rhythm combined with intonation in the identification of a speaker’s dialect. In a between-subjects design using three conditions, we tested 62 listeners (Zurich Swiss German) in a two-alternative-forced choice dialect identification experiment: in condition one, 21 listeners were asked to identify two dialects (Valais and Bern Swiss German) in unmorphed form. In condition two, 20 different listeners had to identify the same two dialects but with swapped speech rhythm, and in condition three, 21 different listeners had to identify the same di...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 22, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The phonetics of information structure in Yolox óchitl Mixtec
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): Christian DiCanio, Joshua Benn, Rey Castillo García Research on speech prosody has shown that higher-level phonological constituents can be examined directly via their influence on low level phonetic processes (Beckman & Edwards, 1990; Fougeron & Keating, 1997). Despite the strong tradition of research in this area, the existing work has focused mainly on languages which lack lexical tone. This contributes to the view that prosodic structures show little influence on tone, i.e. a language may either have lexical tone or lexic...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 21, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The perception and production of British English vowels and consonants by Arabic learners of English
This study investigated the perception of British English vowels and consonants by native Saudi Arabic learners of English from a range of proficiency levels. Twenty-six participants completed consonant and vowel identification tasks in quiet and noise. To investigate if predicted difficulties with vowel perception were also present in production, participants also recorded vowels embedded in words and read a short story. The results demonstrated that all learners were better able to identify consonants than vowels in quiet and noise, with more experienced learners outperforming early learners. Although learners were likel...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 14, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Variability of articulator positions and formants across nine English vowels
Publication date: May 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 68 Author(s): D.H. Whalen, Wei-Rong Chen, Mark K. Tiede, Hosung Nam Speech, though communicative, is quite variable both in articulation and acoustics, and it has often been claimed that articulation is more variable. Here we compared variability in articulation and acoustics for 32 speakers in the X-ray microbeam database (XRMB; Westbury, 1994). Variability in tongue, lip and jaw positions for nine English vowels (/u, ʊ, æ, ɑ, ʌ, ɔ, ɛ, ɪ, i/) was compared to that of the corresponding formant values. The domains were made comparable by creating thr...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 24, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The perception of anticipatory labial coarticulation by blind listeners in noise: A comparison with sighted listeners in audio-only, visual-only and audiovisual conditions
This study investigates the time course of the perception of the /i-y/ contrast by French-speaking blind listeners using a gating paradigm. The performances of the blind listeners in discrimination and identification are compared with the range of performances exhibited by sighted perceivers when stimuli are presented auditorily, visually and audiovisually, whether in acoustically non degraded or in noisy conditions. Results provide evidence in favor of partial compensation for visual deprivation in speech perception. Blind listeners outperformed sighted participants in discriminating between auditorily-presented gated sti...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 7, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
An order effect in English infants ’ discrimination of an Urdu affricate contrast
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 67 Author(s): Mariam Dar, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Marilyn Vihman An order effect was found in English infants’ discrimination of an Urdu contrast. In Experiment 1 7- and 11-month-old English infants were tested on the Urdu contrast between the affricates /tʃʰ/ and /tʃ/. The order of presentation was counterbalanced: At each age half the infants were habituated to the aspirated and tested on the unaspirated affricate, the other half habituated to the unaspirated and tested on the aspirated. As expected, younger infants discriminated the contrast whereas...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - January 17, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
