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 - March 5, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Impoverished acoustic input triggers probability-based tone processing in mono-dialectal Mandarin listeners
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Seth Wiener, Kiwako Ito Previous research on Mandarin spoken word recognition suggests that when processing lexical tone native listeners tune to various acoustic properties of the incoming signal such as f0 height, contour and change. These studies overlook the uneven distribution of tone across the Mandarin lexicon; given a particular string of segments, native listeners may be more likely to anticipate a certain tone due to prior experience with the language. The present study used the gating paradigm to investigate how much of the acou...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 25, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The role of prominence in determining the scope of boundary-related lengthening in Greek
This study aims at examining and accounting for the scope of the temporal effect of phrase boundaries. Previous research has indicated that there is an interaction between boundary-related lengthening and prominence such that the former extends towards the nearby prominent syllable. However, it is unclear whether this interaction is due to lexical stress and/or phrasal prominence (marked by pitch accent) and how far towards the prominent syllable the effect extends. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study of Greek to examine the scope of boundary-related lengthening as a function of lexical stress and pi...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 16, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
Differences in coda voicing trigger changes in gestural timing: A test case from the American English diphthong /aɪ/
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Anne Pycha, Delphine Dahan We investigate the hypothesis that duration and spectral differences in vowels before voiceless versus voiced codas originate from a single source, namely the reorganization of articulatory gestures relative to one another in time. As a test case, we examine the American English diphthong /aɪ/, in which the acoustic manifestations of the nucleus /a/ and offglide /ɪ/ gestures are relatively easy to identify, and we use the ratio of nucleus-to-offglide duration as an index of the temporal distance between these g...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 11, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
The acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Israeli Hebrew
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56 Author(s): Vered Silber-Varod, Hagit Sagi, Noam Amir Lexical stress is an omnipresent phenomenon in spoken language, serving in many cases to disambiguate lexically identical words. Lexical stress in Spoken Israeli Hebrew is usually either penultimate or final, however its prosodic cues have not been measured systematically. In the present study the acoustics of lexical stress were characterized in detail. A list of 34 two-syllable stress-based minimal pairs was collected, where each word form has a different meaning. Each lexical word was embedded...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - February 11, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research
