Acoustic cues, not phonological features, drive vowel perception: Evidence from height, position and tenseness contrasts in German vowels
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 67 Author(s): Miquel Llompart, Eva Reinisch Phonological features have frequently been singled out as the units of perception, especially for vowels. Evidence of the use of features has been provided for vowel height and vowel position, which have one acoustic correlate only. However, findings on acoustically complex features such as tenseness are less clear. The present study assessed the role of phonological features in perception using the selective adaptation paradigm. Selective adaptation effects on German vowel contrasts differing in vowel height (E...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 30, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
High variability identification and discrimination training for Japanese speakers learning English /r/ –/l/
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Yasuaki Shinohara, Paul Iverson Second-language (L2) learners can benefit from exposure to phonetically variable speech during computer-based training. Moreover, this training can be effective even for L2 learners who have extensive exposure to their L2 in daily life, suggesting that there is something specific about the training task that aids learning. The present study compared traditional identification training with discrimination training to evaluate whether discrimination training could be effective, and whether different types of f...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 16, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
An ultrasound study of coronal places of articulation in Central Arrernte: Apicals, laminals and rhotics
This study presents ultrasound data from six female speakers of Arrernte, a language which has four coronal places of articulation: dental, alveolar, retroflex, and (alveo-)palatal. We present tongue contours for stop, nasal and lateral productions of each of these four coronal places – /t̪ t ʈ c/, /n̪ n ɳ ɲ/ and / l̪ l ɭ ʎ/ – as well as for the two contrastive rhotics of Arrernte, the alveolar trill /r/ and the retroflex glide /ɻ/. Results show that the palatal is characterized by a high and front tongue position, and the dental is characterized by a relatively low and flat tongue in the mid-to-front portion....
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 16, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Tonal and morphophonological effects on the location of perceptual centers (p-centers): Evidence from a Bantu language
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 67 Author(s): Kathryn Franich Perceptual centers (or ‘p-centers’) correspond to the perceptual moment of occurrence of a syllable or word, and are crucial in the perception of speech rhythm. A metronome alignment task was used to investigate how tone and prenasalization—two elements which affect speech timing and which also interact acoustically—influenced p-center location in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language. Plain CV words bearing low tones were found to have p-centers which were later (farther from consonant releases and closer to vowel on...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 16, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A longitudinal study of individual differences in the acquisition of new vowel contrasts
This study explores how individuals’ second language cue weighting strategies change over time and across different contrasts. The study investigates the developmental changes in perceptual cue weighting of two English vowel contrasts (/i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/) by adult and child Korean learners of English during their first year of immersion in Canada. Longitudinal results revealed that adult learners had an initial advantage in L2 perceptual acquisition over children at least for the /i/-/ɪ/ contrast, but after one year some children showed greater improvements especially on the more difficult /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast. Both g...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 16, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Articulatory adjustments in initial voiced stops in Spanish, French and English
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Maria-Josep Solé This work reports cross-languages differences in the voicing of utterance-initial voiced stops, and in the use of active maneuvers to achieve closure voicing, using correlated aerodynamic and acoustic data. Oral pressure, oral and nasal flow, and acoustic data were obtained for utterance-initial /b d p t m/ for 10 speakers of Spanish, 6 speakers of French and 5 speakers of English. Voiced stops were first classified as prevoiced or devoiced. Then they were classified by shape of the oral pressure pulse and/or occurrence of...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 15, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Plosive voicing in Afrikaans: Differential cue weighting and tonogenesis
This study documents the relation between f0 and prevoicing in the production and perception of plosive voicing in Afrikaans. Acoustic data show that Afrikaans speakers differed in how likely they were to produce prevoicing to mark phonologically voiced plosives, but that all speakers produced large and systematic f0 differences after phonologically voiced and voiceless plosives to convey the contrast between the voicing categories. This pattern is mirrored in these same participants’ perception: although some listeners relied more than others on prevoicing as a perceptual cue, all listeners used f0 (especially in the ab...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 9, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Glottalisation as a cue to coda consonant voicing in Australian English
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Joshua Penney, Felicity Cox, Kelly Miles, Sallyanne Palethorpe Recent research has suggested that some long vowels exhibit a constraint on voiceless coda induced shortening in Australian English. This constraint has the potential to compromise the vowel length cue to coda voicing, raising questions about how the coda stop voicing contrast is preserved if vowel duration cues are weakened. One possibility is that glottalisation and vowel duration are exploited in a trading relationship as cues to coda voicelessness. We conducted an apparen...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 8, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Finding word boundaries in Indian English-accented speech
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Kara Hawthorne, Juhani Järvikivi, Benjamin V. Tucker The majority of English nouns, verbs, and adjectives begin with a stressed syllable, and listeners exploit this tendency to help parse the continuous stream of speech into individual words. However, the acoustic manifestation of stress depends on the variety of English being spoken. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we tested if Indian English-accented speech causes Canadian English listeners to make stress-based segmentation errors. Participants heard Canadian- or Indian-a...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 6, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The emergence, progress, and impact of sound change in progress in Seoul Korean: Implications for mechanisms of tonogenesis
This study examines the origin, progression, and impact of a sound change in Seoul Korean where the primary cue to a stop contrast in phrase-initial position is shifting from VOT to f0. Because it shares similarities with the initial phase of tonogenesis, investigating this “quasi-tonogenetic” sound change provides insight into the nature of the emergence of contrastive f0 in “tonogenetic” sound changes more generally. Using a dataset from a large apparent-time corpus of Seoul Korean, we built mixed-effects regression models of VOT and f0 to examine the time-course of change, focusing on word frequency and vowel he...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 6, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Acknowledgements for the 2017 Volumes
Publication date: November 2017 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 65 (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 29, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The lingual articulation of devoiced /u/ in Tokyo Japanese
We report ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA) data that addresses this question. We analyzed both the trajectory of the tongue dorsum across VC1uC2V sequences as well as the timing of C1 and C2. These analyses provide converging evidence that /u/ in devoicing contexts is optionally targetless—the lingual gesture is either categorically present or absent but seldom reduced. When present, the magnitude of the lingual gesture in devoiced /u/ is comparable to voiced vowel counterparts. Although all speakers produced words with and without a vowel height target for /u/, the frequency of targetlessness varied across speakers ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 25, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The influence of varying vowel phonation and duration on rhythmic grouping biases among Spanish and English speakers
This study is the first to establish that creak is perceptually salient for Spanish speakers and to demonstrate that the percept associated with duration can differ depending on whether it is varied singly or together with creak. More generally, the current findings show that grouping effects extend beyond intensity, pitch and duration, the features most often manipulated in rhythmic grouping studies inspired by the Iambic-Trochaic Law. (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 25, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
What infant-directed speech tells us about the development of compensation for assimilation
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Helen Buckler, Huiwen Goy, Elizabeth K. Johnson In speech addressed to adults, words are seldom realized in their canonical, or citation, form. For example, the word ‘green’ in the phrase ‘green beans’ can often be realized as ‘greem’ due to English place assimilation, where word-final coronals take on the place of articulation of neighboring velars. In such a situation, adult listeners readily ‘undo’ the assimilatory process and perceive the underlying intended lexical form of ‘greem’ (i.e. they access the lexical rep...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 25, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Not all geminates are created equal: Evidence from Maltese glottal consonants
Publication date: January 2018 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 66 Author(s): Holger Mitterer Many languages distinguish short and long consonants or singletons and geminates. At a phonetic level, research has established that duration is the main cue to such distinctions but that other, sometimes language-specific, cues contribute to the distinction as well. Different proposals for representing geminates share one assumption: The difference between a singleton and a geminate is relatively uniform for all consonants in a given language. In this paper, Maltese glottal consonants are shown to challenge this view. In pr...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 25, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
