Consonant Duration Research Articles

The Effects of Orthographies, Stress and Consonantal Manners on Syllabification and Acoustic Durations of Intervocalic Consonants with Singleton and Geminate Graphemes by Thai L2 Speakers of English

The Effects of Orthographies, Stress and Consonantal Manners on Syllabification and Acoustic Durations of Intervocalic Consonants with Singleton and Geminate Graphemes by Thai L2 Speakers of English

Impact of speech rate on perception of vowel and consonant duration by bilinguals and monolinguals.

The perceptual boundary between short and long categories depends on speech rate. We investigated the influence of speech rate on perceptual boundaries for short and long vowel and consonant contrasts by Spanish-English bilingual listeners and English monolinguals. Listeners tended to adapt their perceptual boundaries to speech rates, but the strategy differed between groups, especially for consonants. Understanding the factors that influence auditory processing in this population is essential for developing appropriate assessments of auditory comprehension. These findings have implications for the clinical care of older populations whose ability to rely on spectral and/or temporal information in the auditory signal may decline.

The Asymmetrical Stop Inventory of Witzapan Nawat

AbstractThe stop inventory of Witzapan Nawat, a critically endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, has been traditionally described as consisting only of a voiceless series /p t k kw/. In this paper, I measure the voice onset time, consonant duration, and percent voicing in stops produced by five L1 Witzapan Nawat speakers. I find that, while /p t kw/ have acoustic characteristics of voiceless stops in practically all contexts, the velar stop in this language is better analyzed as a voiced velar stop /ɡ/ rather than /k/. This results in an asymmetrical and unusual stop system that is not predicted by some theories of phonemic inventory structure. For instance, markedness-based theories propose that /ɡ/ is more marked that /b d/ and predict that, if a language has one voiced stop, it would be /b/ or /d/ rather than /ɡ/. On the other hand, feature-systemic models predict that, if a language has a stop with the [+voice] feature at a given place of articulation, it will also tend to have this feature in stops at other points of articulation to maximize feature economy. The phonemic inventory of Witzapan Nawat contradicts these predictions. I explain the asymmetrical stop inventory of this language as the result of diachronic developments involving sound change and analogy, concluding that language change does not necessarily advance towards symmetry and that phonemic inventories are the reflection of their diachrony, as proposed by Evolutionary Phonology.

Vowel and consonant quantity in two Swiss German dialects and their corresponding varieties of Standard German: effects of region, age, and tempo.

The diglossic situation in German-speaking Switzerland entails that both an Alemannic dialect and a Swiss standard variety of German are spoken. One phonological property of both Alemannic and Swiss Standard German (SSG) is contrastive quantity not only in vowels but also in consonants, namely lenis and fortis. This study aims to compare vowel and plosive closure durations as well as articulation rate (AR) between Alemannic and SSG in the varieties spoken in a rural area of the canton of Lucerne (LU) and an urban area of the canton of Zurich (ZH).In addition to the segment durations, an additional measure of vowel-to-vowel+consonant duration (V/(V+C)) ratios is calculated in order to account for possible compensation between vowel and closure durations. Stimuli consisted of words containing different vowel-consonant (VC) combinations. The main differences found are longer segment durations in Alemannic compared to SSG, three phonetic vowel categories in Alemannic that differ between LU and ZH, three stable V/(V+C) ratio categories, and three phonetic consonant categories lenis, fortis, and extrafortis in both Alemannic and SSG. Most importantly, younger ZH speakers produced overall shorter closure durations, calling into question a possible reduction of consonant categories due to a contact to German Standard German (GSG).

Effects of Gender on Emphasis Production in Jordanian Arabic: A Socio-Phonetic Study

This article investigates the effects of gender on two emphatic sounds, namely [sˤ] and [tˤ], in Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, a sub-dialect of Rural Jordanian Arabic. The study was mainly motivated by the relatively small literature on the bearing(s) of gender on emphasis production in Jordanian Arabic in general and in Ajlouni Jordanian Arabic specifically. To do so, the effects gender has on emphasis productions in this dialect were tested in mono- and bi-syllabic words, with the emphatic sounds occurring both word-initially and word-finally. The vowel qualities which were incorporated in the stimuli of this study include the long low-back vowel [a:], the short low-back vowel [a], the long high-front vowel [i:], the short mid-high front vowel [ɪ], the long high-back vowel [u:] and the short mid-high back vowel [ʊ]. The sample of this study consisted of 12 native speakers of Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, with each speaker producing 48 minimal pairs. The acoustic measurements that were carried out on the data are consonant duration (CD), Voice Onset Time (VOT), and the vowel first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, and F3). The study showed that, relative to gender, only VOT was a reliable acoustic correlate of emphasis where CD, on the one hand, and F1, F2, and F3 in both the target and non-target syllables, on the other hand, showed no significance.

Acoustic characteristics of sibilant fricatives and affricates in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants

The purpose of the study was to examine the acoustic features of sibilant fricatives and affricates produced by prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) in comparison to their age-matched normal-hearing (NH) peers. The speakers included 21 children with NH aged between 3.25 and 10 years old and 35 children with CIs aged between 3.77 and 15 years old who were assigned into chronological-age-matched and hearing-age-matched subgroups. All speakers were recorded producing Mandarin words containing nine sibilant fricatives and affricates (/s, ɕ, ʂ, ts, tsʰ, tɕ, tɕʰ, tʂ, tʂʰ/) located at the word-initial position. Acoustic analysis was conducted to examine consonant duration, normalized amplitude, rise time, and spectral peak. The results revealed that the CI children, regardless of whether chronological-age-matched or hearing-age-matched, approximated the NH peers in the features of duration, amplitude, and rise time. However, the spectral peaks of the alveolar and alveolopalatal sounds in the CI children were significantly lower than in the NH children. The lower spectral peaks of the alveolar and alveolopalatal sounds resulted in less distinctive place contrast with the retroflex sounds in the CI children than in the NH peers, which might partially account for the lower intelligibility of high-frequency consonants in children with CIs.

A Reanalysis of the Voicing Effect in English: With Implications for Featural Specification.

The voicing effect is among the most studied and robust of phonetic phenomena. Yet there remains a lack of consensus on why vowels preceding voiced obstruents should be longer than vowels preceding voiceless obstruents. In this paper we provide an analysis of the voicing effect in a corpus of natural speech, and using production data from a metronome-timed word repetition study. From this evidence, as well as the existing literature, we conclude that vowel duration differences follow from consonant duration differences. The characteristic voicing effect in English is largely limited to words of especially long duration, and preceding vowel duration does not reliably cue obstruent voicing under the following circumstances: when obstruent voicing or duration cues conflict; for lax or unstressed vowels; and for most conversational speech. We show that this behavior can be modeled using a competing-constraints framework, where all segments resist expanding or compressing past a preferred duration. Inherent segment elasticity determines the degree of resistance, but segment duration is ultimately determined by the interaction of these segmental constraints with constraints on the distribution of the lengthening force within the syllable, and how closely target durations are matched. This account of the voicing effect has a number of implications for phonological theory, especially the central role that the concept of prominence plays in the analysis of underlying features.

Speakers monitor auditory feedback for temporal alignment and linguistically relevant duration.

Recent altered auditory feedback studies suggest that speakers adapt to external perturbations to the duration of syllable nuclei and codas, but there is mixed evidence for adaptation of onsets. This study investigates this asymmetry, testing three hypotheses: (1) onsets adapt only if the perturbation produces a categorical error; (2) previously observed increases in vowel duration stem from feedback delays, rather than adaptation to durational perturbations; (3) gestural coordination between onsets and nuclei prevents independent adaptation of each segment. Word-initial consonant targets received shortening perturbations to approximate a different phoneme (cross-category; VOT of /t/ > /d/; duration of /s/ > /z/) or lengthening perturbations to generate a long version of the same phoneme (within-category; /k/ > [khh]; /ʃ/ > [ʃː]). Speakers adapted the duration of both consonants in the cross-category condition; in the within-category condition, only /k/ showed adaptive shortening. Speakers also lengthened all delayed segments while perturbation was active, even when segment duration was not perturbed. Finally, durational changes in syllable onsets and nuclei were not correlated, indicating that speakers can adjust each segment independently. The data suggest that speakers mainly attend to deviations from the predicted timing of motor states but do adjust for durational errors when linguistically relevant.

Adult Cochlear Implant Users Versus Typical Hearing Persons: An Automatic Analysis of Acoustic-Prosodic Parameters.

The aim of this study was to investigate the speech prosody of postlingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users compared with control speakers without hearing or speech impairment. Speech recordings of 74 CI users (37 males and 37 females) and 72 age-balanced control speakers (36 males and 36 females) are considered. All participants are German native speakers and read Der Nordwind und die Sonne (The North Wind and the Sun), a standard text in pathological speech analysis and phonetic transcriptions. Automatic acoustic analysis is performed considering pitch, loudness, and duration features, including speech rate and rhythm. In general, duration and rhythm features differ between CI users and control speakers. CI users read slower and have a lower voiced segment ratio compared with control speakers. A lower voiced ratio goes along with a prolongation of the voiced segments' duration in male and with a prolongation of pauses in female CI users. Rhythm features in CI users have higher variability in the duration of vowels and consonants than in control speakers. The use of bilateral CIs showed no advantages concerning speech prosody features in comparison to unilateral use of CI. Even after cochlear implantation and rehabilitation, the speech of postlingually deaf adults deviates from the speech of control speakers, which might be due to changed auditory feedback. We suggest considering changes in temporal aspects of speech in future rehabilitation strategies. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21579171.

Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals

Abstract This study examines Spanish phonemic stops in the speech of 15 ethnically Bora bilinguals (8 males, 7 females) living in the Peruvian Amazon, within the broader context of examining gender-based phonetic variation in small speech communities. We target pronunciation of intervocalic phonemic /p t k b d g/ extracted from sociolinguistic interviews. The acoustic analysis focuses on consonant duration and relative intensity of each target phoneme. The results reveal clear gender-based variation, with males adopting more lenited variants of certain phonemic stops than females. We discuss these findings in light of gender-based research on phonetic variation in communities undergoing sound change. More generally, our study contributes to the literature on language variation and societal contacts in small speech communities in Amazonia.

On the phonetic realization and variation of consonant geminates in Sakha

This study examines the phonetic realization of geminates of different manners of articulation in an underdocumented Turkic language Sakha using production data from a native speaker. Meanwhile, the temporal compensation between geminates and their surrounding vowels is examined by varying the length of the vowels surrounding the target consonants. Results show that in Sakha, geminates differ from their singleton counterparts mainly by showing a longer overall consonant duration. Regardless, gemination is realized differently for consonants with different manners of articulation. Finally, vowel length is an enhancement cue for the realization of geminates.

АКУСТИЧНИ ОСОБЕНОСТИ НА МЕКИ ВЕЛАРНИ СЪГЛАСНИ ОТ ИЗТОЧНОБЪЛГАРСКИ И ЗАПАДНОБЪЛГАРСКИ ТИП / ACOUSTIC FEATURES OF THE SOFT VELAR CONSONANTS OF THE EASTERN BULGARIAN AND THE WESTERN BULGARIAN TYPE

This pilot study discusses the results of the measurement of the acoustic properties of the soft velar plosives [gj] [kj] of the eastern Bulgarian and the western Bulgarian types of articulation in CVC isolated syllables in comparison with the properties of the hard velar plosives [g] and [k] before the vowel [a] and the front vowel [ɛ]. According to the Bulgarian phonetic literature velar consonants preceding front vowels are realized as allophones of the hard consonants, whose articulation and acoustic features are very similar to those of their soft correlates. For the purposes of this study, we chose several acoustic parameters – consonant duration, formant transition duration (F2), F2 onset and F2 offset (Hz), F3 onset and F3 offset (Hz) – and measured them with the Praat software. The main goal is to establish the degree of differentiation between the eastern Bulgarian and the western Bulgarian articulation with respect to velar plosives. The results show that the F2 transition duration is a distinctive feature that sets apart the eastern and the western types of articulation, as well as hard and soft velar plosives. The type of F3 transition can also be considered as a differrentiator between soft and hard velar plosives. The consonant duration could hardly serve to distinguish between the two types of articulation but is relevant for the differentiation of voiced vs. voiceless plosives. Keywords: velar plosives, soft consonants, acoustic measures, Bulgarian, western articulation, eastern articulation

Extreme stop allophony in Mixtec spontaneous speech: Data, word prosody, and modelling

Word-level prosody plays an important role in processes of consonant lenition. Typically, consonants in word-initial position are strengthened while those in word-medial position are lenited (Keating, Cho, Fougeron, & Hsu, 2003). In this paper we examine the relationship between word-prosodic position and obstruent lenition in a spontaneous speech corpus of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered Mixtecan language spoken in Mexico. The language exhibits a surprising amount of lenition in the realization of otherwise voiceless unaspirated stops and voiceless fricatives in careful speech. In Experiment 1, we examine the relationships between word position, consonant duration, and passive voicing and find that word-medial pre-tonic position is the locus of both consonant lengthening and less passive voicing. Non-pre-tonic consonants are produced with more voicing and shorter duration. We also find that the functional status of the morpheme plays a role in voicing lenition. In Experiment 2, we examine manner lenition and find a similar pattern – word-medial pre-tonic stops are more often realized with complete closure relative to non-pre-tonic stops, which are more often realized with incomplete closure. In Experiment 3, we model these lenition patterns using a series of deep neural networks and find that, even with limited training data, we can achieve reasonably high accuracy in the automatic categorization of lenition patterns. The results of this research both complement recent work on the phonetics of lenition in the world’s languages (Katz and Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020) and provide computational tools for modeling and predicting patterns of extreme lenition.

Listen-and-repeat training in the learning of non-native consonant duration contrasts: influence of consonant type as reflected by MMN and behavioral methods

Phonological duration differences in quantity languages can be problematic for second language learners whose native language does not use duration contrastively. Recent studies have found improvement in the processing of non-native vowel duration contrasts with the use of listen-and-repeat training, and the current study explores the efficacy of similar methodology on consonant duration contrasts. 18 adult participants underwent two days of listen-and-repeat training with pseudoword stimuli containing either a sibilant or a stop consonant contrast. The results were examined with psychophysiological event-related potentials (mismatch negativity and P3), behavioral discrimination tests and a production task. The results revealed no training-related effects in the event-related potentials or the production task, but behavioral discrimination performance improved. Furthermore, differences emerged between the processing of the two consonant types. The findings suggest that stop consonants are processed more slowly than the sibilants, and the findings are discussed with regard to possible segmentation difficulties.

Short-term effect of dopaminergic medication on speech in early-stage Parkinson\u2019s disease

The effect of dopaminergic medication on speech has rarely been examined in early-stage Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the respective literature is inconclusive and limited by inappropriate design with lack of PD control group. The study aims to examine the short-term effect of dopaminergic medication on speech in PD using patients with good motor responsiveness to levodopa challenge compared to a control group of PD patients with poor motor responsiveness. A total of 60 early-stage PD patients were investigated before (OFF) and after (ON) acute levodopa challenge and compared to 30 age-matched healthy controls. PD patients were categorised into two clinical subgroups (PD responders vs. PD nonresponders) according to the comparison of their motor performance based on movement disorder society-unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale, part III. Seven distinctive parameters of hypokinetic dysarthria were examined using quantitative acoustic analysis. We observed increased monopitch (p > 0.01), aggravated monoloudness (p > 0.05) and longer duration of stop consonants (p > 0.05) in PD compared to healthy controls, confirming the presence of hypokinetic dysarthria in early PD. No speech alterations from OFF to ON state were revealed in any of the two PD groups and speech dimensions investigated including monopitch, monoloudness, imprecise consonants, harsh voice, slow sequential motion rates, articulation rate, or inappropriate silences, although a subgroup of PD responders manifested obvious improvement in motor function after levodopa intake (p > 0.001). Since the short-term usage of levodopa does not easily affect voice and speech performance in PD, speech assessment may provide a medication state-independent motor biomarker of PD.

Talker adjustment to perceived communication errors

During conversation, talkers may adapt their speech in a variety of ways. One form of adaptation is clear speech, in which a talker hyperarticulates when faced with specific communication challenges. In this study, we investigated how phonetic adaptation is affected by the nature of apparent miscommunication. To do so, we utilized a common feature of American English dialects, in which intervocalic /t/ is realized as a voiced flap rather than an unvoiced, fully articulated stop before unstressed syllables, causing words like petal and pedal to sound similar. Flapped /t/ may become more distinct compared to /d/ during clear speech. Using a faux-computer training paradigm, we provided artificial feedback on subjects’ speech. When subjects said a word (e.g., petal) the computer would either interpret the word correctly (i.e., it guesses petal) or incorrectly (it guesses pedal, kettle or ???). We measured talkers’ produced word length, initial-syllable vowel length, and medial consonant stop closure or flap consonant duration in both their first and second utterances of each trial. We found that participants produced longer words, vowels, and stop closure durations in response to feedback that contained an error compared to correct feedback. Participants also changed their flapped productions to stops most often and lengthened their stop closures to a greater degree following voicing errors compared to the other error conditions. Our findings indicate that interlocutors’ productions may change along different acoustic dimensions depending on the kind of miscommunication they experience. Broadly, our findings indicate a need to consider how phonetic adaptation in the form of clear speech is affected by the nature of miscommunication during conversational interaction.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of asymmetric processing of consonant duration in fake Mandarin geminates

Unlike languages where consonant duration is used contrastively to distinguish word meanings, long consonants in Mandarin Chinese only occur across morpheme boundaries as a result of concatenation and are referred to as fake geminates. To investigate whether Mandarin speakers employ duration contrast to differentiate fake Mandarin geminates and corresponding singletons as well as the underlying pattern of the processing, two auditory oddball tasks were carried out to measure the component of MMN, an index of the automatic detection of deviant stimulus. Mandarin pseudoword pairs which differ only in the duration of the medial consonant ([an1 an1] ∼ [an1 nan1] vs. [an2 an2] ∼ [an2 nan2]) were used as stimuli. An asymmetric pattern of brain activation was observed where the singleton deviant in the context of geminate words elicited higher MMNs than in the reversed condition. These findings are in line with earlier research suggesting that the singleton is unspecified for a moraic representation, while the geminate is specified. Mandarin speakers can employ duration contrast to distinguish fake geminates and corresponding singletons; furthermore, the processing of fake concatenated geminates in contrast to singletons is similar to that of real geminates and corresponding singletons.

The ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ in Gan Chinese: Random forest classification

The contrast between /l/ and /n/ in syllable-initial position may be absent or not consistently maintained across sub-dialects of Gan Chinese. To see if the /l/ and /n/ contrast is acoustically differentiated among speakers of Gan Chinese, a set of acoustic measurements were extracted from their production of words beginning with /l/ and /n/ and submitted to random forest classification. The extracted acoustic measurements were: (1) consonantal duration; (2) frequency and formant intensity of F2 and F3; (3) H1*-H2*, H1*-A1, and H1*-A2; (4) A1-P0 and A1-P1 measurements (at the 25% point of the following vowel). Post vowel context binary: /i/ and non-/i/. All tokens (/l/: 73%; /n/: 27%) were partitioned into a training set (953 tokens) and a test set (318 tokens). After training with the training set, the final classifier was applied to the test set to evaluate the categorical prediction of /l/ and /n/ with a classification probability. The results obtained indicated that most variants of /n/ would be categorized as /l/, suggesting an ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ that may be influenced by the vowel context.

Exploring phonetic cues to persuasive oral presentation: A study with British English speakers and English L2 learners

Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners’ perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence for phonetic adjustments that native English speakers make to influence listeners, the current study explored the use of consonant prolongation in stressed syllable onsets for emphasis by native British English speakers and English L2 learners. The native speakers’ durations of continuant consonants and voiceless stop consonant voice onset times (VOTs) in (1) neutrally-produced speech and (2) persuasively delivered motivational/shocking/emotional messages were compared to Latvian L2 English speakers’ productions. The results revealed that in persuasive speech, the British speakers’ consonantal durations, particularly those of continuants, got significantly longer relative to the vowels that followed them; for English L2 learners, the duration of consonants did not change as a factor of speech type. This is in line with our previous research with American English speakers and carries implications for L2 speech learning and teaching.

Consonant gemination in Italian: The nasal and liquid case

All Italian consonants affected by gemination, that is affricates, fricatives, liquids, nasals, and stops, were analyzed within a project named GEMMA that lasted over a span of about 25 years. Results of the analysis on stops, as published in (Esposito, A., and Di Benedetto, M. G. (1999). “Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Gemination in Italian Stops,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, ASA, Vol. 30, pp. 175-185) showed that the main acoustic cue to gemination in Italian was closure duration, while frequency and energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by gemination. This paper - the first of a set of two covering all remaining consonants - addresses nasals and liquids; its companion paper addresses affricates and fricatives. Results on nasals and liquids confirm the findings on stops, in particular that the primary acoustic cue to gemination in Italian is durational in nature and corresponds to a lengthened consonant duration. Results also show an inverse correlation between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations which is, however, also present when considering singleton vs. geminate word sets separately, indicating a sort of duration compensation between these segments to eventually preserve rhythmical structures; this inverse correlation is reinforced when considering singleton and geminate sets combined. Classification tests of singleton vs. geminate consonants show that, for both nasals and liquids, best classification scores are obtained when consonant duration is used as a classification parameter. Although slightly less performing, the ratio between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations is also a potential good candidate for automatic classification of geminate vs singleton nasals and liquids in Italian.