COSMO ( “Communicating about Objects using Sensory–Motor Operations”): A Bayesian modeling framework for studying speech communication and the emergence of phonological systems
We present realistic simulations of phonological system emergence showing that COSMO is able to predict the main regularities in vowel, stop consonant and syllable systems in human languages. (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 17, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Accounting for variability in North American English / ɹ/: Evidence from children's articulation
Publication date: January 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 54 Author(s): Lyra Magloughlin This acoustic and articulatory pilot study examines the North American English /ɹ/ productions of English-speaking children during acquisition, and compares their early- and later-stage productions with /ɹ/ allophony patterns reported in previous studies with adults. Ultrasound imaging is used to investigate the articulatory behavior of four children, aged 3–6 years, during production of familiar lexical items containing prevocalic, post-vocalic, and syllabic /ɹ/. Shape analysis of the tongue is conducted using a te...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 17, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Velar –vowel coarticulation in a virtual target model of stop production
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Stefan A. Frisch, Sylvie M. Wodzinski Velar–vowel coarticulation in English, resulting in so-called velar fronting in front vowel contexts, was studied using ultrasound imaging of the tongue during /k/ onsets of monosyllabic words with no coda or a labial coda. Ten native English speakers were recorded and analyzed. A variety of coarticulation patterns that often appear to contain small differences in typical closure location for similar vowels was found. An account of the coarticulation pattern is provided using a virtual target model o...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 17, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Marianna Nadeu, Margaret E.L. Renwick In some Romance languages with two pairs of mid vowel phonemes, it is acknowledged that these contrasts are somewhat unstable. We analyze the distribution and realization of the anterior and posterior mid vowels in Catalan to test claims (mostly based on anecdotal evidence) that these contrasts exhibit inter- and intraspeaker variability. Participants produced target words containing stressed mid vowels and, later, judged vowel height (/e/ vs. /ɛ/; /o/ vs. /ɔ/) in the same words. The results in...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 17, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The influence of gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience on word recognition
Publication date: September 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 58 Author(s): Vincent Porretta, Benjamin V. Tucker, Juhani Järvikivi The present article examines lexical processing of foreign-accented speech, specifically as it relates to gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience. In two experiments, we investigate the effect of accentedness and experience on the strength of lexical activation and the time-course of word recognition utilizing native- and Mandarin-accented English words. Gradient and non-linear patterns emerged for both accentedness and experience. Experiment 1 employed cross-mod...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 16, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Erratum to “Characterization of laryngealization as irregular vocal fold vibrations and interaction with prosodic prominence” [J. Phon. 54 (2016) 80–97]
Publication date: July 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 57 Author(s): Leonardo Lancia, Daniel Voigt, Georgy Krasovitskiy (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 15, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The development of sex/gender-specific /s/ and its relationship to gender identity in children and adolescents
Publication date: July 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 57 Author(s): Fangfang Li, Drew Rendall, Paul L. Vasey, Melissa Kinsman, Amanda Ward-Sutherland, Giancarlo Diano A growing body of literature has revealed sex/gender differences in the acoustics of the sibilant fricative /s/. It has been suggested that some of this sex/gender-related variation might be socially motivated and acquired. However, the necessary developmental research to corroborate this proposal is absent from the literature. To address this, we examined sex/gender differences in the production of /s/ acoustics in relation to child...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 8, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives
Publication date: July 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 57 Author(s): Laura Spinu, Jason Lilley In this paper we explore two methods for the classification of fricatives. First, for the coding of the speech, we compared two sets of acoustic measures obtained from a corpus of Romanian fricatives: (a) spectral moments and (b) cepstral coefficients. Second, we compared two methods of determining the regions of the segments from which the measures would be extracted. In the first method, the phonetic segments were divided into three regions of approximately equal duration. In the second method, Hidden Markov Mo...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 8, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Mutual influences between native and non-native vowels in production: Evidence from short-term visual articulatory feedback training
We examined relationships between the production of French and non-native vowels before training, and the effects of training with non-native vowels on the production of French ones. We assessed for each participant the acoustic position and compactness of the trained vowels, and of the French /o/, /ø/, /y/ and /i/ vowels, which are acoustically closest to the trained vowels. Before training, the compactness of the French vowels was positively related to the accuracy and compactness in the production of non-native vowels. After training, French speakers’ accuracy and stability in the production of the two trained vowels...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - May 25, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The effect of phonetic context on the dynamics of intrusions and reductions
Publication date: July 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 57 Author(s): Anneke W. Slis, Pascal H.H.M. Van Lieshout Recent studies have described speech errors as articulatory movements intruding during target constrictions as well as reduced movements of these target constrictions. These errors were hypothesized to originate from self-organizing mechanisms underlying context-free gestural coordination. The current study investigates whether such self-organizing mechanisms and resulting speech errors are influenced by coproduction constraints, which are introduced by phonetic context. Speakers repeated CVC–C...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 21, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
A spatial gradient in phonetic recalibration by lipread speech
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Mirjam Keetels, Jeroen J. Stekelenburg, Jean Vroomen Exposure to ambiguous speech combined with clear lipread speech can recalibrate auditory speech identification, a phenomenon known as phonetic recalibration (Bertelson, Vroomen, & De Gelder, 2003). Here, we examined whether phonetic recalibration is spatially specific. Participants were presented an ambiguous auditory sound halfway between /b/ and /d/ (A?) combined with lipread /b/ or /d/ at either the left or right ear/side, and were subsequently tested with auditory-only test...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 6, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
What are the letters of speech? Testing the role of phonological specification and phonetic similarity in perceptual learning
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Holger Mitterer, Taehong Cho, Sahyang Kim Recent studies on perceptual learning have indicated that listeners use some form of pre-lexical abstraction (an intermediate unit) between the acoustic input and lexical representations of words. Patterns of generalization of learning that can be observed with the perceptual learning paradigm have also been effectively examined for exploring the nature of these intermediate pre-lexical units. We here test whether perceptual learning generalizes to other sounds that share an underlying or a phone...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - April 1, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Complex prosodic focus marking in Finnish: Expanding the data landscape
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Anja Arnhold By investigating prosody beyond pitch and duration, this article provides a detailed and multifaceted picture of focus marking in a language that differs substantially from more extensively studied languages like English. A production study examined prosodic focus marking in Finnish based on acoustic analyses of 947 short SVO sentences spoken by 17 native speakers. The results indicated effects of information structure on five acoustic measures: f0, duration, intensity, the use of pauses and non-modal voice quality. Words in nar...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 22, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Influences of selective adaptation on perception of audiovisual speech
We examined how selective adaptation to audio and visual adaptors shift perception of speech along an audiovisual test continuum. This test-continuum consisted of nine audio-/ba/-visual-/va/ stimuli, ranging in visual clarity of the mouth. When the mouth was clearly visible, perceivers “heard” the audio-visual stimulus as an integrated “va” percept 93.7% of the time (e.g., McGurk & MacDonald, 1976). As visibility of the mouth became less clear across the nine-item continuum, the audio-visual “va” percept weakened, resulting in a continuum ranging in audio-visual percepts from /va/ to /ba/. Perception of...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 20, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Audiovisual perceptual learning with multiple speakers
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Aaron D. Mitchel, Chip Gerfen, Daniel J. Weiss One challenge for speech perception is between-speaker variability in the acoustic parameters of speech. For example, the same phoneme (e.g. the vowel in “cat”) may have substantially different acoustic properties when produced by two different speakers and yet the listener must be able to interpret these disparate stimuli as equivalent. Perceptual tuning, the use of contextual information to adjust phonemic representations, may be one mechanism that helps listeners overcome obstacles th...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - March 15, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
