The importance of vowel formant frequencies and proximity in vowel space to the perception of foreign accent
This study used speech resynthesis to manipulate vowel formant frequencies in natural speech stimuli to examine the influence of magnitude and direction of spectral deviation from native norms, as well as the proximity of adjacent categories, on foreign-accentedness ratings, comprehensibility ratings and vowel identification. Experiment 1 contrasted the impact of spectral deviation on peripheral and non-peripheral vowels by shifting the first and second formant center frequencies in English vowels /ɔ/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/, /ɑ/, and /æ/ toward the acoustically closest vowel, and either the next-closest vowel, or unoccupied vowel ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 28, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Third-language learning affects bilinguals’ production in both their native languages: A longitudinal study of dynamic changes in L1, L2 and L3 vowel production
This study examined the impact of a study abroad (SA) English program on English and native vowel production. Basque-Spanish bilingual adolescents were assessed on their vowel production in English, Basque and Spanish before the SA program, the day after the program was completed, and four months later. The results revealed that after the SA program, participants’ English vowels were acoustically closer to English norms, revealing the effectiveness of SA programs in improving English vowel pronunciation. Yet, four months later, these benefits had faded, showing that regular input and active language use are required to m...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 27, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects under contact
This study examines the phonetic variation of the word-initial liquid in two dialects of Korean, Northern Hamkyeong Korean of North Korea and Seoul Korean of South Korea. The goals of the study are two-fold: to provide a thorough description of the phonetic variation in the word-initial liquid in these two dialects and to examine the acquisition of Seoul Korean features by North Koreans residing in Seoul. The participants were prompted to produce initial liquids by reading a list of Sino-Korean words in North Korean orthography and loanwords that begin with a liquid. We found that in addition to tap, the presumed default v...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 24, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Exemplar-theoretic integration of phonetics and phonology: Detecting prominence categories in phonetic space
This article explores an exemplar-theoretic approach to the integration of phonetics and phonology in the prosodic domain. In an exemplar-theoretic perspective, prominence categories, here specifically, pitch-accented syllables and unaccented syllables, are assumed to correspond to accumulations of similar exemplars in an appropriate perceptual space. It should then be possible, as suggested for instance by Pierrehumbert (2003), to infer the (phonological) prominence categories by clustering speech data in this (phonetic) space, thus modeling acquisition of prominence categories according to an exemplar-theoretic account. ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 24, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 21, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Publisher Note
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 21, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Learning a new sound pair in a second language: Italian learners and German glottal consonants
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Nikola Anna Eger, Holger Mitterer, Eva ReinischAbstractThe present study investigated Italian learners’ production and perception of German /h/ and /Ɂ/ – two sounds that lack obvious linguistic counterparts in Italian. Critically, of these sounds only /h/ is explicitly known to learners from instruction and orthography. We therefore asked whether this awareness would lead to better acquisition of /h/ than /Ɂ/, and whether any differences would depend on the explicitness of the task. In production, learners of a medium proficiency level p...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 21, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Infant perception of VOT and closure duration contrasts
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Muna Schönhuber, Nathalie Czeke, Anja Gampe, Janet GrijzenhoutAbstractPrevious research suggests that infant perception of phonetic contrasts undergoes a reorganisation during the first year of life with universal sound discrimination from birth that adapts to the native phoneme contrasts around 12 months of age. This paper focuses on two closely related languages that crucially differ in the realisation of stop contrasts: (Standard High) German and Swiss German. The first employs a VOT contrast for tense/lax stops, the latter uses a length...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 21, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Exploiting the speech-gesture link to capture fine-grained prosodic prominence impressions and listening strategies
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): Petra Wagner, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Barbara SamlowskiAbstractIn this paper, we explore the possibility to gather perceptual impressions of prosodic prominence by exploiting the strong prosody-gesture link, i.e., by having listeners transform a perceptual impression into a motor movement, namely drumming, for two domains of prominence: word-level and syllable-level. A feasibility study reveals that such a procedure is indeed easily and speedily mastered by naïve listeners, but more difficult for word-level prominences. We furthermore examine whe...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - September 1, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Stress, pitch accent, and beyond: Intonation in Maltese questions
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): Martine Grice, Alexandra Vella, Anna BruggemanAbstractMaltese question word interrogatives are shown to have an alternation in the association of postlexical tones with the question word. Tones associate with the left edge of the question word in direct questions, and with the lexically stressed syllable in indirect questions and when quoted. This alternation holds regardless of the metrical structure of the word. Maltese is thus the first language with lexical stress to be described as having a pragmatically conditioned alternation between f...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 30, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Prosodic encoding in Mandarin spontaneous speech: Evidence for clause-based advanced planning in language production
This study reports the cross-boundary f0 shifting of prosodic units (PU) in Mandarin conversational speech by analyzing the PU-initial and PU-final f0 heights as a function of its semantic structure. Initial and final f0 heights were defined as the f0 values extracted at the energy max of the first and the last syllable of the PU. The semantic structure of the PU was defined based on its co-extensiveness with a semantic unit in discourse (DU), i.e., a proposition, often encoded by a clause. Our analysis shows significant relationships between the cross-boundary f0 heights and the PU-DU co-extensiveness. PU-DU left alignmen...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 27, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): Georgia Zellou, Delphine DahanAbstractWhile the fact that phonetic information is evaluated in a non-discrete, probabilistic fashion is well established, there is less consensus regarding how long such encoding is maintained. Here, we examined whether people maintain in memory the amount of vowel nasality present in a word when processing a subsequent word that holds a semantic dependency with the first one. Vowel nasality in English is an acoustic correlate of the oral vs. nasal status of an adjacent consonant, and sometimes it is the only d...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 17, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Does infant speech perception predict later vocabulary development in bilingual infants?
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76Author(s): Leher SinghAbstractOne of the most significant transitions reported in infant psychological development is perceptual narrowing whereby infants orient towards their native language. In monolingual infants, the progress made by infants in perceptual narrowing positively predicts later vocabulary size. The relationship between infant speech perception and later language development has not been thus far reported in bilingual populations. The present study investigated infant speech perception in relation to later vocabulary development in a pro...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - August 14, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: July 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 75Author(s): (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - July 16, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Sound, structure and meaning: The bases of prominence ratings in English, French and Spanish
This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners’ perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure—English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-aco...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - June 22, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
