Allophonic Variation Research Articles

Acoustic differentiation of allophones of /aɪ/ in Chicagoland English: Statistical comparison of formant trajectories

Diphthongs have a dynamic formant structure. Nevertheless, many quantitative studies of diphthongs are based on measurements at only two points, somewhere in the nucleus and somewhere in the glide. The question arises as to whether analyses based on values at only two points provide an adequate understanding of the dynamics of diphthongs. Wieling (2018) mentions the analysis of /aɪ/ raising in Chicago English in Hualde, Luchkina & Eager (2017) as one of several examples of recent studies where potentially interesting patterns may have been missed because of limited sampling of formant values, and proposes using Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMM) to allow a more complete understanding of diphthong dynamics. In this paper, we examine the acoustic nature of the (quasi-)phonemic differentiation between two originally allophonic variants of the diphthong /aɪ/ in the US English of Chicago and the surrounding area. We offer an acoustic analysis based on full formant trajectories of diphthongs with data obtained from a group of 53 speakers. The results of a GAMM analysis are then compared with those obtained in Hualde et al. (2017), which considered values at only two points and from a smaller set of speakers (17). We also discuss the main advantages of GAMM analysis over other techniques that have being proposed for the analysis of differences in vowel formant dynamics.

Automatic phonetic classification of vocalic allophones in Tol

The aim of the present study involving automatic phonetic classification of /e/ and /u/ tokens in Tol is two-fold: first, I test existing claims about allophonic variation within these vowel classes, and second, I investigate allophonic variation within these vowel classes that has yet to be documented. The acoustic phonetic classifications derived in the present study contribute to a more detailed understanding of the allophonic systems operating within the Tol language. Operationalizing machine learning algorithms to investigate under-resourced, indigenous languages has the potential to provide detailed insights into the acoustic phonetic dynamics of a diverse range of vocalic systems.

Phonetic accommodation in interaction with a virtual language learning tutor: A Wizard-of-Oz study

We present a Wizard-of-Oz experiment examining phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction. Forty-two native speakers of German engaged in dynamic spoken interaction with a simulated virtual tutor for learning the German language called Mirabella. Mirabella was controlled by the experimenter and used either natural or hidden Markov model-based synthetic speech to communicate with the participants. In the course of four tasks, the participants’ accommodating behavior with respect to wh-question realization and allophonic variation in German was tested. The participants converged to Mirabella with respect to modified wh-question intonation, i.e., rising F0 contour and nuclear pitch accent on the interrogative pronoun, and the allophonic contrast [ɪç] vs.[ɪk] occurring in the word ending 〈-ig〉. They did not accommodate to the allophonic contrast [ɛː] vs.[eː] as a realization of the long vowel 〈-ä-〉. The results did not differ between the experimental groups that communicated with either the natural or the synthetic speech version of Mirabella. Testing the influence of the “Big Five” personality traits on the accommodating behavior revealed a tendency for neuroticism to influence the convergence of question intonation. On the level of individual speakers, we found considerable variation with respect to the degree and direction of accommodation. We conclude that phonetic accommodation on the level of local prosody and segmental pronunciation occurs in users of spoken dialog systems, which could be exploited in the context of computer-assisted language learning.

How many vowels are there in Lhasa Tibetan?

Abstract Lhasa Tibetan is described in a number of independent research traditions which give different accounts of its phonology. To what extent do these discrepancies reflect real dialectal or idiolectal differences? To what extent do they reflect different analyses of the same system? In this paper, we examine one aspect of Lhasa Tibetan phonology on which different descriptions show substantial discrepancies: vowels. Different descriptions of Lhasa Tibetan transcribe from 8 to more than 16 vowel qualities, ascribing to them different degrees of phonemicity. A detailed comparison of the transcription systems shows that all reflect the same underlying system of 12 vowel sounds, which agrees with the transcription conventions of the Seattle Tibetanists. The discrepancies among the systems mostly concern four vowels, namely ɔ, ə, ɪ and ʊ. These vowels, which started as allophonic variants of other vowels, later appear in a set of words which cannot be explained as allophony, and hence are unambiguous phonemes in contemporary Lhasa Tibetan.

Phonetic accommodation to natural and synthetic voices: Behavior of groups and individuals in speech shadowing

The present study investigates whether native speakers of German phonetically accommodate to natural and synthetic voices in a shadowing experiment. We aim to determine whether this phenomenon, which is frequently found in HHI, also occurs in HCI involving synthetic speech. The examined features pertain to different phonetic domains: allophonic variation, schwa epenthesis, realization of pitch accents, word-based temporal structure and distribution of spectral energy. On the individual level, we found that the participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features, while they maintained their baseline behavior in other cases or, in rare instances, even diverged from the model voices. This shows that accommodation with respect to one particular feature may not predict the behavior with respect to another feature. On the group level, the participants of the natural condition converged to all features under examination, however very subtly so for schwa epenthesis. The synthetic voices, while partly reducing the strength of effects found for the natural voices, triggered accommodating behavior as well. The predominant pattern for all voice types was convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction.

Intra-regional differences in the social perception of allophonic variation: The evaluation of [tʃ] and [ʃ] in Huelva and Lepe (Western Andalucía)

AbstractThis study examines the social perceptions of the traditional Andalusian feature [ʃ] and the Castilian feature [tʃ] in the city of Huelva and the town of Lepe in Western Andalucía, Spain. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve Western Andalusian speakers, varying only in word-medial syllable-initial [tʃ] and [ʃ] for <ch> in disyllabic words. Based on 221 listeners from Huelva and Lepe, mixed effects linear regression models indicate that listeners evaluated speakers with [tʃ] guises as being of higher status, more cosmopolitan, and less friendly than speakers with [ʃ] guises. These findings interacted with speaker and listener gender, listener educational level, and listener origin. The implications are twofold: the traditional Andalusian feature is evaluated as less overtly prestigious than the supra-local Castilian feature; and, that two nearby communities of the same dialect variety may share similar language attitudes, but demonstrate nuanced differences in attitudes due to their unique historical and socioeconomic developments.

Cognitive biases on the social perception of the allophonic variation of coda /S/ in Brazilian Portuguese

The allophonic variation of coda /S/ in the Florianopolitan variety of Brazilian Portuguese shows explicit associations between [ʃ] and the local stereotype of native resident – one who was raised in Florianopolis whose parents were also raised in the area. We hypothesize that the aforementioned explicit association is an implicit association, that is, an unconscious and automatic one. We argue that an implicit association towards the native resident stereotype is a cognitive bias that affects how Florianopolitans perceive the speech of other Florianopolitans. The strength of the associations was verified in terms of participants’ linguistic background. In order to do so, an Implicit Association Test and an explicit task pairing the [ʃ]/[s] variants with the native/non-native resident stereotypes were applied to 30 Florianopolitans whose parents were native, non-native, or mixed-origin residents. We found that an implicit association is at play in a moderate fashion. However, linguistic background only predicted the explicit association. More important, the fact that Florianopolitans explicitly chose the guise containing [ʃ] as the most representative of the speech of the native resident – even though some participants reported that non-existent prosodic elements differentiated the guises – reinforces the role of implicit cognitive biases on the social perception of coda /S/.

The Impact of Free Allophonic Variation on the Perception of Second Language Phonological Categories

When learning the phonological categories of a second language (L2), learners have to deal with phonetic variation. For instance, allophonic variant forms have to be recognized as the same phoneme. A minimal pair identification task was used to assess how late Spanish learners of German perceive the phonological /r/-/h/ contrast. German /r/ was realized as one of three allophones ([r], [ʀ], [ʁ]) that vary in phonetic similarity to /h/ as well as to the typical phonetic form of Spanish /r/ (i.e., [r]). Results showed that learners were very good at identifying all German variant forms (>90% correct). However, [ʁ], which is phonetically closest to German /h/ and furthest from Spanish /r/, was identified significantly worse than [r] and [ʀ]. Relating these results to a cross-language perception task where learners were asked to map the German allophones of /r/ and the phoneme /h/ to different L1 phonological categories further showed that those learners were best at identifying words with [ʁ] who consistently matched it to a single L1 category. Surprisingly this category did not always have to be the phonologically matching Spanish [r]. We conclude that phonological and phonetic relations between the learners' L1 and L2 are important in identifying allophones of the same L2 category.

Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through speech planning effects: A case study on coronal stop realizations

Predictability has been shown to be associated with many dimensions of variation in speech, including durational variation and variable omission of segments. However, the mechanism or mechanisms that underlie these effects are still unclear. This paper presents data on a new aspect of predictability in speech, namely how it affects allophonic variation. We examine two coronal stop allophones in English, flap and glottal stop, and find that their relationship with predictability is quite different from what is expected under current theories of probabilistic reduction in speech. Flapping is more likely when the word that follows is more predictable, but is not influenced by the frequency of the word itself, while glottal stops are more likely in words that are less predictable. We propose that the crucial distinction between these two allophones is how they are conditioned by phonological context. This, we argue, interacts with online speech planning processes and gives rise to variability for context-dependent allophones. This hypothesis offers a specific, testable mechanism for certain predictability effects, and has the potential to extend to other factors that contribute to variability in speech.

Os sons do português: Uma introdução prática à fonética e à pronúncia da língua portuguesa by André Zampaulo

Reviewed by: Os sons do português: Uma introdução prática à fonética e à pronúncia da língua portuguesa by André Zampaulo Fernanda Ferreira Zampaulo, André. Os sons do português: Uma introdução prática à fonética e à pronúncia da língua portuguesa. Routledge, 2019. Pp. 279. ISBN 978-1-138-22551-0. As noted by the title, this book is written in Portuguese on the topic of Portuguese phonetics and pronunciation. It is an indispensable addition to the library of any academic in the field of Portuguese linguistics. There are few such books written with a view towards didactics and practical activities. Some comparable examples are ¡Qué bien suena! (Stokes 2004) and Sonidos en contexto (Morgan 2010). Zampaulo follows the format of the latter, a popular textbook used in college-level Spanish phonetics and dialectology courses. Aside from an introduction, Os sons do português: Uma introdução prática à fonética e à pronúncia da língua portuguesa includes a chapter on orthography and sounds and another on syllables and accents. Those are followed by a more theoretical section on phonemes and allophones, a chapter on vowels and then another one on Portuguese consonants. The last part of the book is a final summary. Additionally, the book includes an appendix and a bibliography organized by topics. There is also a useful, albeit very short, back-of-the-book index. Each chapter title starts with the phonetic transcription of the word capítulo and the corresponding number in Portuguese, which is a nice touch. The last two content chapters include the contextual pronunciation, also known as allophonic variation, of each associated phoneme. For each of those phonemes, the author includes its principal dialectal variation and the drawing of the articulatory features. The dialect maps of Brazil describe the variation of consonants such as /s/ and /r/ and mid vowels /e/ and /o/, which can be a source of confusion for many learners. Despite some pages dedicated to the origin of the variation of certain phonemes, it would have been useful to have a brief section on the history of key phonological changes in the language. This is a common section in comparable Spanish phonetics books. The intended audience for this textbook is students of Portuguese, from the intermediate to the advanced level. Since many of these students are often speakers of Spanish, the accompanying audio files help them better understand the subtle differences between these closely-related [End Page 638] languages. It is beneficial for students to read the learning objectives for each section, expressed as "can-do" statements. These goals can be easily included by instructors in a proposed syllabus for a Portuguese phonetics course. With any book about a global language such as Portuguese, it is essential to address the vast linguistic diversity of the Portuguese-speaking world. Because it is spoken by a larger number of people, the author decided to use the Brazilian dialect as a starting point for its initial descriptions. Specifically, he opts for the dialect spoken in the urban center of São Paulo, Brazil. However, the author also gives some attention to the standard variety spoken in Lisbon, Portugal. Zampaulo provides significant phonological insights for speakers of Spanish, as well as native speakers of English, which are clearly labeled throughout the text. Due to an increased ease of acquiring music videos and lyrics online, the author wisely decided not to include those as a paid portion of the textbook. That said, there are lists of applicable songs related to specific phonemes that accompany tasks in the book, which are easily searchable on the internet. In addition, the reader has online access to narrated texts. In fact, more than one hundred audio files come with the book in selected práticas. These are clearly designated by a music symbol icon. Some of the most stimulating and useful characteristics of the book are the drawings of objects that contain similar phonological sounds. Students are required to name or transcribe those objects, which invariably leads them to repeat the same sounds. Many exercises require students to transcribe words or texts, but they are always metacognitive and interesting, such as the...

Allophonic Variation in the Polish Vowel /ɨ/: Results of a 3D Ultrasound Study and their Phonological Implications

Allophonic Variation in the Polish Vowel /ɨ/: Results of a 3D Ultrasound Study and their Phonological Implications

Pronunciation Problems among Palestinian English Major Students in Hebron University

The purpose of this research is to identify few common pronunciation mistakes among Palestinian English major students in Hebron University and the factors that cause these problems. The paper discusses selected phonetic and phonological problems related to specific consonants and vowels besides problems related to pronunciation of consonant sequences. The participants of this study were 120 English major students from Hebron University. The researchers used a questionnaire and a recorded pronunciation test to collect the data. In addition to the previous instruments, interviews were conducted with eight students and two instructors. The findings of the study revealed that Hebron University English major students have difficulties in pronouncing English consonants that are not part of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) such as (ŋ), (p),(ɫ), (ɹ),(ʒ),(tʃ) (though some consider (ŋ),(ɫ), (ʒ),(tʃ) as allophonic variants and are used in the different dialects of Arabic), problems in consonant clusters(epenthesis), silent letters, and vowels that have more than one pronunciation. During the interviews, the interviewees pointed various reasons for their errors and suggested some solutions to some of these pronunciation problems. Among the mispronunciation reasons mentioned are: interference from Arabic and the lack of correct models, exposure to native speakers, and practice. The researchers concluded that learners' errors are caused by several linguistic factors, such as the disparity between Arabic and English sound systems, the effect of spelling on pronunciation, the influence of the first language (L1) on the second language (L2), and English vowel inconsistency. Finally, ideas to overcome some of the pronunciation problems are suggested..

Mechanisms of tone sandhi rule application by tonal and non-tonal non-native speakers

This study is the first comprehensive acoustic study to examine the acquisition of two Mandarin tone sandhi rules: the third tone sandhi and the more phonetically motivated, half-third sandhi rule by both tonal (Cantonese) and non-tonal (American English) speakers using a Wug Test. Participants were asked to form disyllables from two monosyllabic morphemes. To test for the operation of the lexical versus the computation mechanisms in sandhi rule application, both real and various types of wug (nonsense) morphemes were included. Functional data analysis revealed that Cantonese and American speakers apply the two rules similarly on both real words and wug words, suggesting that the sandhi forms are stored as part of the representation of the abstract Tone 3 (T3) category, and computation of allophonic variants is likely to be involved during production. However, in their computation of tone sandhi rules, L2 learners showed less detailed and less accurate production of tonal contours compared to native speakers, due, perhaps, to less detailed phonological representations of allophonic variants. In general, Cantonese speakers performed better than American speakers. Perceptual mapping between Mandarin sandhi T3 to existing Cantonese tone categories may be responsible for the observed pitch contours among Cantonese speakers. Finally, no phonetic bias was found in the application of the two sandhi rules among these groups of L2 learners, which is likely due to more variability in L2’s speech, obscuring any differences that may exist.

Articulatory characterization of English liquid-final rimes

Articulation of liquid consonants in onsets and codas by four speakers of General American English was examined using real-time MRI. Midsagittal tongue posture was compared for laterals and rhotics produced in each syllable margin, adjacent to 13 different vowels and diphthongs. Vowel articulation was examined in words without liquids, before each liquid, and after each liquid, to assess the coarticulatory influence of each segment on the others. Overall, nuclear vocalic postures were more influenced by coda rhotics than onset rhotics or laterals in either syllable margin. Laterals exhibited greater temporal and spatial independence between coronal and dorsal gestures. Rhotics were produced with a variety of speaker-specific postures, but were united by a greater degree of coarticulatory resistance to vowel context, patterns consistent with greater coarticulatory influence on adjacent vowels, and less allophonic variation across syllable positions than laterals.

Phonetics of Polish "soft"-"hard" vowel allophony.

This paper reports on the results of a three-dimensional ultrasound study of Polish vowels in consonant-vowel sequences. It was found that allophonic variation in vowels in the context of "soft" consonants is consistently implemented phonetically by means of tongue root advancement, which effectively expands the pharyngeal cavity and reduces the volume of the oral cavity. The tongue root is also consistently advanced in the soft consonants that trigger vowel allophony and retracted (or neutral) in the "hard" sounds, which do not trigger allophony, suggesting that tongue root advancement is part of the phonological representation of the "softness" (or palatalization) contrast. In parallel to this allophony, the same tongue root mechanism was found to underlie the phonotactic distribution of the phonemic vowels /i/ and /ɨ/, yielding an entirely symmetric system with consonant-vowel sequences always obligatorily compatible in terms of the position of the tongue root.

The development of abstract representations of tone sandhi.

Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that Mandarin-learning 3-year-olds were able to productively apply tone sandhi processes in novel compounds, correctly using the allophonic variants of T3 in appropriate tone sandhi contexts (Tang et al., 2018, 2019). However, it remains unclear how these variants are represented in children's mental lexicon. This study, therefore, examined Mandarin-learning children's perceptual representation of allophonic variants of T3. Ninety-four 3- to 5-year-olds and 29 adults were tested. Sensitivity to allophonic mispronunciations of T3 syllables in novel tone sandhi compounds was measured using a visual fixation procedure. The results showed that children, like adults, treated tone sandhi mispronunciations as target-like. Thus, in recognizing novel tone sandhi words, Mandarin-speaking children exhibit flexibility in accommodating the allophonic variants of T3, suggesting that they have developed an abstract T3 category in their mental lexicon. The findings reveal the effect of phonological processes in shaping children's phonological representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Perception of American English Allophonic Variant /ɾ/ by Arabic Speakers in an EFL Context

This study investigates Saudi university students' perception of the allophonic variant /ɾ/ in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. It attempts to identify the influence of this perception on the students' spoken word recognition and examine the correlation between perception and production of flapping on the one hand, and academic achievement on the other. It also seeks to provide solutions to help Arab students improve their perception of connected speech features. To achieve its objectives, the study carried out experimental tests and interviews. The results of the study show that the ability to produce the allophonic variant /ɾ/ in one's own speech has a positive correlation with its perception. In contrast, academic achievement does not significantly correlate with the perception of the allophone. Keywords : Allophonic variants; Flapping; Perception; Spoken word recognition; Pronunciation instruction; Listening skill

Yeísmo in Majorcan Spanish: phonetic variation in a bilingual context

Abstract This article addresses a particular characteristic of the variety of Spanish spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain): the /ʎ/-/j/ merger (yeísmo). This island is home to a Catalan-Spanish bilingual community, meaning that Spanish speakers are in close contact with a system (Balearic Catalan) which is supposed to largely retain the /ʎ/-/j/ contrast. Given this context, our focus is to acoustically verify whether there is an interference from Balearic Catalan to Spanish in the sense of inhibiting yeísmo or, at least, favouring phonetic realisations other than those found in mainland Spanish. Our study concludes that a transfer in terms of allophonic variation does exist: in Majorcan Spanish lenited sounds ([i̯], [j]) are more common than in mainland Spanish.

Error Patterns of Dorsal Rhotics: Evidence from Hebrew-Speaking Children

Objective: The aim of this paper was to describe the error patterns of the dorsal rhotic /ʁ̞/ in the speech of typically developing Hebrew-speaking children and to examine the prosodic effect (i.e., position in the word and stress pattern) of its production. Method and Participants: The participants included 50 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6–3;3 years. The children performed an articulation task in which they were asked to articulate 18 disyllabic words composed of vowel-adjacent rhotics in initial, medial, and final word positions in both stressed and unstressed syllables. Results: The results revealed that dorsal rhotics were produced correctly in 78.7% of the target words. The main error patterns were rhotic deletion and devoicing. There were fewer correct productions in initial word positions than in both medial and final word positions. No stress effect was found. In addition, 76% of the children produced the consonant correctly in over half of their productions. Conclusions: The result demonstrating a higher rate of errors in initial word positions may be due to the relatively late acquisition of the initial onset position in multisyllabic Hebrew words. Alternatively, this finding may result from the greater degree of allophonic variation found in this position. The finding that languages with dorsal rhotics have unique error patterns compared to other rhotics strengthens the evidence that rhotic error patterns are dependent on the rhotics’ phonetic characteristics.

A Closer Look at the Short Front Vowel Shift in Canada

This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.