Datasets on the production and perception of underlying and epenthetic glottal stops in Maltese

Holger Mitterer,Taehong Cho,Sahyang Kim

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2020.105543

Holger Mitterer, Taehong Cho + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2020.105543

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Abstract

This article provides some supplementary analysis data of speech production and perception of glottal stops in the Semitic language Maltese. In Maltese, a glottal stop can occur as a phoneme, but also as a phonetic marker of vowel-initial words (as in the case with Germanic languages like English). Data from four experiments are provided, which will allow other researchers to reproduce the results and apply their own data-analysis techniques to these data for further data exploration. A production experiment (Experiment 1) investigates how often the glottal marking of vowel-initial words occurs (causing vowel-initial words to be ambiguous with words starting with a glottal stop as a phoneme) and whether the glottal gesture for this marking can be differentiated from an underlying (phonemic) glottal stop in its acoustic properties. Experiments 2 to 4 investigate how and to what extent Maltese listeners perceive glottal markings as lexical (phonemic) or epenthetic (phonetic), using a two-alternative forced choice task (Experiment 2), a visual-world eye tracking task with printed target words (Experiment 3) and a gating task (Experiment 4). A full account of theoretical consequences of these data can be found in the full length article entitled “The glottal stop between segmental and suprasegmental processing: The case of Maltese” [1].

Highlights

This article provides some supplementary analysis data of speech production and perception of glottal stops in the Semitic language Maltese
A production experiment (Experiment 1) investigates how often the glottal marking of vowel-initial words occurs and whether the glottal gesture for this marking can be differentiated from an underlying glottal stop in its acoustic properties
Raw and processed Production Data (Experiment 1): The target word is vowel-initial versus glottal stop initial; and the preceding word ends on a vowel or a consonant (=hiatus or not)

Summary

Data description

The data files (raw UTF8 text) linked to this article contain trial level data for four experiments reported in [1]. Each line has information about the level of both the experimental factors (e.g., lengthening or no lengthening of the preceding word in the variable “case” and the amount of glottalization in the variable “step”) and the dependent variable of whether or not the participant heard a lexical (phonemic) glottal stop (in the variable “heardQ”). For Experiment 4, the data file contains trial level data on the independent variables (type of word, length of preceding word) and the dependent variable (whether the participants indicated to hear the word with a lexical (phonemic) glottal stop or not). It contains additional variables such as the exact item used on this trial as well as reaction time (see provided meta-data for details).

Apparatus

Findings

Materials and procedure