Investigating dialectal differences using articulography
Publication date: November 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 59 Author(s): Martijn Wieling, Fabian Tomaschek, Denis Arnold, Mark Tiede, Franziska Bröker, Samuel Thiele, Simon N. Wood, R. Harald Baayen The present study uses electromagnetic articulography, by which the position of tongue and lips during speech is measured, for the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze the articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation of dozens of speakers. Our results show that ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 4, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Language experience, speech perception and loanword adaptation: Variable adaptation of English word-final plosives into Korean
This study examines the influence of experience with the source language for loanwords on loanword adaptation, asking whether the influence can be attributed to listener-borrowers’ perception of the source language. The study focuses on variable insertion of /ɨ/ after word-final plosives in novel English words borrowed into Korean. Korean participants who differ in the extent of their English experience are asked to borrow English non-word stimuli ending on a coda plosive into Korean by attaching appropriate Korean case-markers to the stimuli. Korean case-marker allomorphy determines whether the participants insert /ɨ/...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 27, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Breathy voice during nasality: A cross-linguistic study
In this study, we test whether nasal consonants and vowels are also produced with breathier voice quality than their oral counterparts in three Yi (Loloish) languages: Bo, Luchun Hani, and Southern Yi. We analyzed oral vs. nasal vowels and consonants using electroglottographic and acoustic measures of phonation. Results indicate that nasal consonants are often breathier than laterals, as are vowels following nasals when compared to vowels following oral consonants. These findings support the assumption that at least some of these nasal-breathy sound changes involve a stage in which the two articulations co-occur. We claim ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 24, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Social categories are shared across bilinguals ׳ lexicons
Publication date: November 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 59 Author(s): Anita Szakay, Molly Babel, Jeanette King Dialects and languages are socially meaningful signals that provide indexical and linguistic information to listeners. Are the indexical categories that are shared across languages used in cross-linguistic processing? To answer this question English (L1)-Māori (L2) bilingual New Zealanders participated in a priming experiment which included English-to-Māori and Māori-to-English translation equivalents, and within-language repetition priming for Māori and English. Half of the English words were...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 20, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Gradual or abrupt? The phonetic path to morphologisation
Publication date: November 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 59 Author(s): Patrycja Strycharczuk, James M. Scobbie While some sound changes occur in environments defined in purely phonological terms, others may become sensitive to morphological boundaries. In this paper, we investigate the phonetic nature of this latter diachronic development: does it happen through small gradient increments, or is there a categorical shift from one allophone to another? We focus on goose-fronting and /l/-darkening in Southern British English, the interaction of which is sensitive to morphological boundaries. Relatively retracte...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 19, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
A study on coarticulatory resistance and aggressiveness for front lingual consonants and vowels using ultrasound
Publication date: November 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 59 Author(s): Daniel Recasens, Clara Rodríguez A new method for quantifying contextual variability at different regions of the tongue using ultrasound spline data reveals that tongue body coarticulatory resistance for Catalan consonants and vowels in VCV sequences decreases in the progression [ʎ, ɲ, ʃ] > [s, r] > [l, ɾ, t, n] > [ð] and [i, e] > [a] > [o] > [u]. These consonant and vowel hierarchies support the degree of articulatory constraint model of coarticulation according to which coarticulatory resi...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 13, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Individual differences in categorical perception of speech: Cue weighting and executive function
This study examined individual differences in categorical perception and the use of multiple acoustic cues in the perception of the stop voicing contrast. Goals were to investigate whether gradiency of speech perception was related to listeners’ differential sensitivity to acoustic cues and to individual differences in executive function. The experiment included two speech perception tasks (visual analogue scaling [VAS] and anticipatory eye movement [AEM]) administered to 30 English-speaking adults in two separate experimental sessions. Stimuli were a /ta/ to /da/ continuum that systematically varied VOT and f0. Findings...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 23, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Inconspicuous coarticulation: A complex path to sound change in the tone system of Hanoi Vietnamese
Publication date: November 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 59 Author(s): Marc Brunelle, Kiều Phương Hạ, Martine Grice In Hanoi Vietnamese, the rising and falling tones are frequently confused before the (high) level tone, even though they are clearly distinct in other contexts. In this paper, we conduct production and perception experiments designed to assess the source of this confusion. We argue that the peak of the rising tone is normally delayed onto the initial portion of the following tone, but that this peak delay lacks acoustic and perceptual salience when this following tone is a level tone. As...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 13, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Aspects of Arrernte prosody
This study presents duration data for six female speakers of Central Arrernte, based on continuous read speech. The vowels of Arrernte are treated separately in the durational analyses, and it is found that the vowel /a/ is much more "elastic" than the vowel /ə/ and the (relatively infrequent) vowel /i/, which are comparatively "non-elastic". The elastic vowel /a/ is lengthened considerably under stress, and also shows great durational variability when preceding or following consonant clusters – it is lengthened following the cluster, and slightly shortened before the cluster. By contrast, the non-elastic vowels /ə/ an...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 12, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Closure duration as an acoustic correlate of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay
In this study, we conduct an acoustic phonetic analysis of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) in order to explore the extent to which closure duration marks such a contrast in this Malay variety. KM is particularly unusual among the world׳s languages in that the contrast is restricted to word-initial position. A corpus of elicited materials consisting of singleton/geminate voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants were produced in words in isolation (i.e., utterance-initial position) and in a carrier sentence (i.e., utterance-medial position) by sixteen native speakers of KM. R...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 28, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The phonetic origins of /s/-retraction: Acoustic and perceptual evidence from Australian English
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Mary Stevens, Jonathan Harrington In contemporary spoken English, /s/ can resemble a post-alveolar fricative when it occurs in /str/ clusters e.g. street. /s/-retraction in /str/ is known to be widespread in North American English, but the question of how this sound change comes about has attracted only a very small amount of empirical research. This paper investigates the phonetic pre-conditions for /s/-retraction based on the results of two experiments conducted with Australian English. Study 1 shows that the first spectral moment (M1)...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 24, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Classification of regional dialects, international dialects, and nonnative accents
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Tessa Bent, Eriko Atagi, Amal Akbik, Emma Bonifield Talkers׳ regions of origin and native languages will significantly shape their speech production patterns. Previous results suggest that listeners are highly sensitive to whether a talker is a native or nonnative speaker of the language. Listeners also have some ability to categorize or classify talkers by regional dialect or nonnative accent. However, most previous studies have included variability in only one of these categories (many nonnative accents or many regional dialects). T...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 24, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Variation in the strength of lexical encoding across dialects
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Cynthia G. Clopper, Terrin N. Tamati, Janet B. Pierrehumbert Lexical processing is slower and less accurate for unfamiliar dialects than familiar dialects. The goal of the current study was to test the hypothesis that dialect differences in lexical processing reflect differences in lexical encoding strength across dialects. Lexical encoding (i.e., updating the cognitive lexical representation to reflect the current token) was distinguished from lexical recognition (i.e., mapping the incoming acoustic signal to the target lexical ca...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - July 29, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
L2 immersion causes non-native-like L1 pronunciation in German attriters
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Christopher Bergmann, Amber Nota, Simone A. Sprenger, Monika S. Schmid According to Flege׳s Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual׳s languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters in Anglophone North America (i.e., long-term emigrants in L2 immersion). These speakers were compared to a contro...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - July 29, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The influence of vowel laryngealisation and duration on the rhythmic grouping preferences of Zapotec speakers
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Megan J. Crowhurst, Niamh E. Kelly, Amador Teodocio Some studies of human rhythmic grouping biases (RGBs) have found that listeners tend to perceive greater duration as marking group endings, a “long-last” RGB that has been related to preboundary lengthening in languages. Accumulating evidence from adult and infant studies now suggests that duration-based RGBs are variable, learned, and sensitive to language input. If RGBs can be influenced by language background, then phonologically important features other than duration shoul...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - July 24, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
