Consonant Duration Research Articles

Temporal Variability and Stability in Infant-Directed Sung Speech: Evidence for Language-specific Patterns

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song.This is explored crosslinguistically in German - a language that exhibits a potential vocalic quantity distinction - and the non-quantity languages French and Russian. Songs by non-professional singers, i.e. parents that sang to their infants aged 2 to 13 months in a non-laboratory setting, were recorded and analyzed.Vowel and consonant durations at syllable contacts of trochaic word types with CVCV or CV:CV structure were measured under varying rhythmical conditions. Evidence is provided that in German non-professional singing, the two syllable structures can be differentiated by two distinct temporal variability patterns: vocalic variability (and consonantal stability) was found to be dominant in CV:CV structures whereas consonantal variability (and vocalic stability) was characteristic for CVCV structures. In French and Russian, however, only vocalic variability seemed to apply.Additionally, findings suggest that the different temporal patterns found in German were also supported by the stability pattern at the tonal level. These results point to subtle (supra) segmental timing mechanisms in sung speech that affect temporal targets according to the specific prosodic nature of the language in question.

Perception of temporally modified speech in auditory neuropathy

Objective: Disrupted auditory nerve activity in auditory neuropathy (AN) significantly impairs the sequential processing of auditory information, resulting in poor speech perception. This study investigated the ability of AN subjects to perceive temporally modified consonant-vowel (CV) pairs and shed light on their phonological awareness skills. Design: Four Arabic CV pairs were selected: /ki/-/gi/, /to/-/do/, /si/-/sti/ and /so/-/zo/. The formant transitions in consonants and the pauses between CV pairs were prolonged. Rhyming, segmentation and blending skills were tested using words at a natural rate of speech and with prolongation of the speech stream. Study sample: Fourteen adult AN subjects were compared to a matched group of cochlear-impaired patients in their perception of acoustically processed speech. Results: The AN group distinguished the CV pairs at a low speech rate, in particular with modification of the consonant duration. Phonological awareness skills deteriorated in adult AN subjects but improved with prolongation of the speech inter-syllabic time interval. Conclusions: A rehabilitation program for AN should consider temporal modification of speech, training for auditory temporal processing and the use of devices with innovative signal processing schemes. Verbal modifications as well as visual imaging appear to be promising compensatory strategies for remediating the affected phonological processing skills.SumarioObjetivo: En la neuropatía auditiva (AN) la disrupción de la actividad del nervio auditivo impide significativamente el procesamiento secuencial de la información auditiva con la consecuente pobre percepción del habla. Este estudio investiga la habilidad de los sujetos con neuropatía auditiva para percibir pares temporalmente modificados de consonante vocal (CV) y nos da luz sobre sus habilidades en el reconocimiento fonológico. Diseño: Se seleccionaron cuatro pares de CV en árabe: /ki/-/gi/, /to/-/do/, /si/-/sti/ y /so/-/zo/. La transición de la formante en las consonantes y las pausas entre los pares de CV fueron prolongados. Se probaron las habilidades de rima, segmentación y combinación utilizando palabras a una tasa normal del habla y con prolongación del flujo del habla. Muestra: Se compararon catorce adultos con neuropatía auditiva con un grupo pareado en su percepción del habla acústicamente procesada, de pacientes con implante coclear. Resultados: El grupo de AN distinguió los pares CV a tasa de velocidad baja, en particular con modificaciones en la duración de las consonantes. Las habilidades de reconocimiento fonológico se deterioraron en los adultos con AN pero mejoraron con la prolongación del intervalo de tiempo inter-silábico. Conclusiones: Un programa de rehabilitación auditiva debe considerar las modificaciones temporales del lenguaje, el entrenamiento del procesamiento auditivo temporal y el uso de equipos con esquemas innovadores de procesamiento de la señal. Las modificaciones verbales así como las imágenes visuales parecen ser prometedoras estrategias compensatorias para remediar las afecciones en las habilidades del procesamiento fonológico.

On the relation between overlap and release.

This study is about the relation between gestural overlap and acoustic release. The aim is to define a set of different temporal relations from which the presence/absence of release in between two consecutive gestures can be predicted. The overlap of two consecutive gestures is here defined as the co-occurrence in time of their articulatory closure intervals. In this study, however, what is measured is the acoustic closure duration of stop consonants. In this context, an acoustic index of overlap—closure duration ratio—and release percent in every binary combination of the voiceless stop consonants—p, t, k— have been measured at word and sentence boundary and at two different vowel contexts, /a/ and /e/. Stop release does not have a phonologically contrastive function, yet languages systematically differ from one another in whether stops are released or not at specific contexts. Resulting from this fact, the argument in this study is that release is a result of specific temporal relations between two consecutive gestures, and these relations are part of the phonological representation.

Differentiating Impairment Levels in Temporal Versus Spatial Aspects of Linguopalatal Contacts in Friedreich’s Ataxia

Electropalatography (EPG) was used to describe the pattern of linguopalatal contact and the consonant phase durations exhibited by a group of seven individuals with dysarthria associated with Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA). A group of 14 non-neurologically impaired individuals served as controls. The Reading Electropalatograph (EPG3) system was used to record linguopalatal contact during production of the target consonants (/t/, /l/, /s/, /k/) elicited in five words of CV and CVC construction, with the target consonants in word initial position. These words were embedded into short sentences and repeated five times by each participant. The FRDA group exhibited significantly increased consonant durations compared with the controls while maintaining normal linguopalatal contact patterns. These findings suggest that the articulatory impairment in FRDA manifests as a temporal rather than spatial disturbance.

Kinematic analysis of lingual function in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease: An electromagnetic articulograph study

Dysarthria in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) has been widely studied. However, a limited number of studies have investigated lingual function during speech production in this population. This study aimed to investigate lingual kinematics during speech production using electromagnetic articulography (AG-200 EMA). The PD group consisted of eight dysarthric speakers with PD and was matched with a group of eight controls. The tongue tip and tongue back movements of all participants during sentence production were recorded by EMA. Results showed that, perceptually, the participants with PD were mildly dysarthric. Kinematic results documented comparable (for alveolar sentence production) and increased (for velar sentence production) range of lingual movement in the PD group when compared to the control group. Lingual movement velocity, acceleration, and deceleration were also increased in the PD group, predominantly for the release phase of consonant production during sentence utterances. The PD group had longer duration in the production of alveolar consonant and comparable duration in the production of velar consonant. The results of the present study suggest the presence of impaired lingual control in individuals with PD. Increased range of articulatory movement, primarily in the release phase of consonant production, may account for articulatory imprecision in this population.

What and where in speech recognition: Geminates and singletons in spoken Italian

Four cross-modal repetition priming experiments examined whether consonant duration in Italian provides listeners with information not only for segmental identification (“what” information: whether the consonant is a geminate or a singleton) but also for lexical segmentation (“where” information: whether the consonant is in word-initial or word-medial position). Italian participants made visual lexical decisions to words containing geminates or singletons, preceded by spoken primes (whole words or fragments) containing either geminates or singletons. There were effects of segmental identity (geminates primed geminate recognition; singletons primed singleton recognition), and effects of consonant position (regression analyses revealed graded effects of geminate duration only for geminates which can vary in position, and mixed-effect modeling revealed a positional effect for singletons only in low-frequency words). Durational information appeared to be more important for segmental identification than for lexical segmentation. These findings nevertheless indicate that the same kind of information can serve both “what” and “where” functions in speech comprehension, and that the perceptual processes underlying those functions are interdependent.

Phonetic Description of a Three-way Stop Contrast in Northern Paiute

This paper presents the phonetic description of a three-way phonemic contrast in the medial stops (lenis, fortis, and voiced fortis stops) of a southern dialect of Northern Paiute. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of VOT, closure duration, and voice quality was performed on field recordings of a female speaker from the 1950s. The findings include that: 1) voiced fortis stops are realized phonetically as voiceless unaspirated stops; 2) the difference between fortis and voiced fortis and between voiced fortis and lenis in terms of VOT is subtle; 3) consonantal duration is a robust acoustic characteristic differentiating the three classes of stops; 4) lenis stops are characterized by a smooth VC transition, while fortis stops often exhibit aspiration at the VC juncture, and voiced fortis stops exhibit occasional glottalization at the VC juncture. These findings suggest that the three-way contrast is realized by combination of multiple phonetic properties, particularly the properties that occur at the vowel-consonant boundary rather than the consonantal release.

Potential information predicts sentence intelligibility better than vowels, consonants, or duration.

Speech sounds are typically divided into consonants and vowels. When either vowels or consonants, as delineated in TIMIT sentences, are replaced by noise, listeners are more accurate understanding sentences in which consonants are replaced relative to sentences in which vowels are replaced. From such data, vowels have been suggested to be more important for understanding sentences; however, interpretation of these data is unclear because consonant segments are roughly one-third shorter than vowels as marked within TIMIT. We report two experiments that demonstrate listener performance is better predicted by simple acoustic measures of spectral change, not duration or consonant/vowel distinction. First, listeners identified sentences in which consonants, vowels, C-V transitions, or V-C transitions were replaced by speech-shaped noise. Contrary to previous work, performance suffered most when consonants were replaced by noise. In a second experiment, portions of sentences were replaced based on cochlea-scaled spectral entropy (change across time). Speech segments having relatively high, medium, or low change over 80-ms (consonant duration) or 112-ms (vowel duration) intervals were replaced with noise. Intelligibility decreased linearly as amount of replaced spectral entropy increased independent of duration. Spectral change (entropy) is more important than consonant/vowel distinctions and duration. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Segmental Duration in Parkinsonian French Speech

Objectives: The present study had 2 main objectives: (1) examine the effect of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on vowel and consonant duration in French read speech and (2) investigate whether the durational contrasts of consonants and vowels are maintained or compromised. Results: The data indicated that the consonant durations were shortened in Parkinsonian speech (PS), compared to control speech (CS). However, this shortening was consonant dependent: unvoiced occlusives and fricatives were significantly shortened compared to other consonant categories. All vowels were slightly longer in PS than in CS, however, the observed differences were below the level of significance. Despite significant shortening of some consonant categories, the general pattern of intrinsic duration was maintained in PS. There was slightly less agreement for vowels with the normal contrast of intrinsic durations, possibly because vowel durational contrasts are more sensitive to PD disorders. Conclusion: Most PD patients tended to maintain the intrinsic duration contrasts of both vowels and consonants, suggesting that low-level articulatory constraints operate in a similar way and with the same weight in PS and CS.

Contextual effects on the perception of duration

In the experiments reported here, listeners categorized and discriminated speech and non-speech analogue stimuli in which the durations of a vowel and a following consonant or their analogues were varied orthogonally. The listeners’ native languages differed in how these durations covary in speakers’ productions of such sequences. Because auditorist and autonomous models of speech perception hypothesize that the auditory qualities evoked by both kinds of stimuli determine their initial perceptual evaluation, they both predict that listeners from all the languages will respond similarly to non-speech analogues as they do to speech in both tasks. Because neither direct realist nor interactive models hypothesize such a processing stage, they predict instead that in the way in which vowel and consonant duration covary in the listeners’ native languages will determine how they categorize and discriminate the speech stimuli, and that all listeners will categorize and discriminate the non-speech differently from the speech stimuli. Listeners’ categorization of the speech stimuli did differ as a function of how these durations covary in their native languages, but all listeners discriminated the speech stimuli in the same way, and they all categorized and discriminated the non-speech stimuli in the same way, too. These similarities could arise from listeners adding the durations of the vowel and consonant intervals (or their analogues) in these tasks with these stimuli; they do so when linguistic experience does not influence them to perceive these durations otherwise. These results support an autonomous rather than interactive model in which listeners either add or apply their linguistic experience at a post-perceptual stage of processing. They do not however support an auditorist over a direct realist model because they provide no evidence that the signal's acoustic properties are transformed during the hypothesized prior perceptual stage.

Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English fricatives

Speakers can adopt a speaking style that allows them to be understood more easily in difficult communication situations, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of clearly produced consonants in detail. This study attempts to characterize the adaptations in the clear production of American English fricatives in a carefully controlled range of communication situations. Ten female and ten male talkers produced fricatives in vowel-fricative-vowel contexts in both a conversational and a clear style that was elicited by means of simulated recognition errors in feedback received from an interactive computer program. Acoustic measurements were taken for spectral, amplitudinal, and temporal properties known to influence fricative recognition. Results illustrate that (1) there were consistent overall style effects, several of which (consonant duration, spectral peak frequency, and spectral moments) were consistent with previous findings and a few (notably consonant-to-vowel intensity ratio) of which were not; (2) specific acoustic modifications in clear productions of fricatives were influenced by the nature of the recognition errors that prompted the productions and were consistent with efforts to emphasize potentially misperceived contrasts both within the English fricative inventory and based on feedback from the simulated listener; and (3) talkers differed widely in the types and magnitude of all modifications.

Cues to perception of reduced flaps

Natural, spontaneous speech (and even quite careful speech) often shows extreme reduction in many speech segments, even resulting in apparent deletion of consonants. Where the flap ([inverted J]) allophone of /t/ and /d/ is expected in American English, one frequently sees an approximant-like or even vocalic pattern, rather than a clear flap. Still, the /t/ or /d/ is usually perceived, suggesting the acoustic characteristics of a reduced flap are sufficient for perception of a consonant. This paper identifies several acoustic characteristics of reduced flaps based on previous acoustic research (size of intensity dip, consonant duration, and F4 valley) and presents phonetic identification data for continua that manipulate these acoustic characteristics of reduction. The results indicate that the most obvious types of acoustic variability seen in natural flaps do affect listeners' percept of a consonant, but not sufficiently to completely account for the percept. Listeners are affected by the acoustic characteristics of consonant reduction, but they are also very skilled at evaluating variability along the acoustic dimensions that realize reduction.

Tonal Contrasts and Initial Consonants: A Case Study of Tamang, a ‘Missing Link’ in Tonogenesis

Tamang (Bodic division of Tibeto-Burman) is spoken at the edge of the East Asian ‘tone-prone’ zone, next to the almost tone-free Indian linguistic area, and is, chronologically, at the late end of the tone multiplication wave which has swept through East Asia in the course of the last two millennia. It can be regarded as a ‘missing link’ in tonogenesis: following the loss of voicing contrasts on syllable-initial consonants, Tamang has four tonal categories instead of its earlier two-tone system; the present state of the prosodic system is typologically transitional, in that these four tonal categories are realised by several cues which include fundamental frequency (F0), phonation type, and allophonic variation in the realisation of consonants. Acoustic and electroglottographic recordings of 131 words in two carrier sentences by 5 speakers were conducted (total number of target syllables analysed: n = 1,651). They allow for a description in terms of F0, glottal open quotient, duration, and realisation of consonants. The results confirm the diversity of cues to the four tonal categories, and show evidence of laxness on tones 3 and 4, i.e. on the two tones which originate diachronically in voiced initials. The discussion hinges on the phonological definition of tone.

Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Japanese: The effect of consonant duration

This paper examines vowel-to-vowel lingual coarticulation in sequences of vowel-bilabial consonant-vowel, where the duration of the oral closure for the consonant is either long or short. Native speakers of Japanese served as subjects. The linguistic material consisted of Japanese word pairs that only differed in the duration of the labial consonant, which was either long or short. Recordings were made of lip and tongue movements using a magnetometer system. It was hypothesized that there would be greater vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in the context of a short consonant, since a long consonant would allow the tongue more time to move. The overall results do not show any strong support for this hypothesis, however. Subjects modulate the speed of the tongue movement between the two vowels, making it slower during the long than during the short consonant.

Consonant duration processing measured in MMN-paradigm in 9-year-old children with and without familial dyslexia

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Investigating the consonant‐vowel boundary. II. Perceptual contributions of glimpse windows.

Discrete segmental units do not occur in fluent speech because of coarticulation. However, separation of the meaningful sounds in language into the categories of consonants and vowels is one of the most fundamental principles of how sound is structured. Our previous research has shown that for sentence presentations, vowels have a distinct perceptual advantage over consonants in determining sentence intelligibility. TIMIT sentences were used to investigate perceptual contributions of consonants and vowels across the consonant‐vowel (CV) boundary, by shifting the CV boundary by specific proportions of the vowel, such that consonant duration increased while vowel duration decreased. Glimpse windows are defined as the speech signal preserved between noise replacements. The perceptual effect of windows either locked to specific segmental information or placed randomly was examined. Results from glimpse windows locked to segmental information confirmed a 2‐to‐1 vowel advantage for intelligibility at the traditional CV boundary and suggest that vowel contributions remain robust against deletions of the signal. When glimpses were presented randomly, summed duration of glimpses predicted performance. However, performance remained lower than when glimpse windows of equivalent duration were locked to vowels. Specific segmental information appears to differentiate performance between consonant and vowel conditions. [Work supported by the NIH.]

The influence of different tones of Mandarin Chinese on the temporal characteristics of nasalization.

This study was designed to investigate whether the four different tones in Mandarin Chinese would influence the temporal characteristics of nasalization. Seven female and seven male subjects were enrolled in this study. Four nasal syllables/ma mi na ni/ in all four tones were embedded in two syllables with initial pressure consonants to form the stimuli. Then the nasal onset intervals, nasal consonant durations, nasal offset intervals, and the whole nasalization durations were segmented in the speech samples. The corresponding durations and ratios for the same syllable were compared pairwisely among the four tones by paired means t‐test. Multiple statistically significant differences did exist among the four tones in both the durations and the ratios. The most important differences were as follows: Tone 3 has shorter nasal consonant durations than Tones 1 and 4, and shortest nasal offset intervals and whole nasalization durations among the four tones; it also has a larger nasal onset and nasal consonant duration ratios but least nasal offset ratios among all four tones. Different tones of Mandarin Chinese can influence the temporal characteristics of nasalization, and they may serve as extra cues that can help improve perception.

The role of consonant duration and amplitude processing on speech intelligibility in noise

The effects of hearing loss on speech intelligibility have led researchers to search for methods to ameliorate these effects. Clear speech has been studied extensively to determine the specific acoustic and phonetic differences between speech spoken in a conversational versus a clear-speech mode. Two characteristics of clear speech, increased consonant duration and selective-consonant amplification were investigated. These components were applied individually to Hearing-in-Noise Test sentences and consonant-vowel (CV) pairs. Stimuli were presented in sound field to hearing-impaired and normal-hearing individuals in the presence of speech-shaped noise. Percent correct was measured for HINT sentences and confusion matrices were developed for the CV pair intelligibility tests. An information transmission analysis was performed. During HINT sentence presentations, subjects benefited most from lengthening the duration of the consonant, maximally in the 30 ms condition, beyond which significant degradation in intelligibility was observed. Consonant specific amplification of 10 dB resulted in improved intelligibility for sentences. These data suggest that the two processing components are viable to improve speech intelligibility and they, however, also suggest that there is a limit to the processing whereby benefits are no longer observed.

The role of combined consonant duration and amplitude processing on speech intelligibility in noise

Reduced speech intelligibility in noise, especially consonant perception, is a well documented phenomenon. Research in clear speech has revealed many acoustic and phonetic differences between speech spoken in a conversational versus clear-speech mode. In the present study two components were tested in combination, namely increases in consonant duration (and respective decreases in adjacent vowel duration) and selective-consonant amplification. Conditions in which intelligibility improvements were observed for the individual processing of duration and amplitude modifications were chosen and tested in combination. The components were applied to Hearing-in-Noise Test sentences and consonant-vowel (CV) pairs. Stimuli were presented in sound field to normal-hearing individuals in the presence of speech-shaped noise. Percent correct was measured for HINT sentences and confusion matrices were developed for the CV pair intelligibility tests. An information transmission analysis was performed. Results will be discussed with regard to the greater body of research in clear speech.

Rhythmic characteristics of prose and verse in varieties of Portuguese

Whether varieties of Portuguese differ in their rhythmic classification is not entirely clear. European Portuguese is generally considered to employ stress‐based rhythm whereas the rhythmic classification of Brazilian Portuguese is disputed. Acoustically‐based measures of rhythm have usually employed spoken prose passages for language samples. Possibly, the apparent rhythmic characteristics of language varieties may be clarified by employing different types of language materials. We selected spoken prose and traditional verse for investigation. Five native speakers of European Portuguese and five native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese recorded a sonnet consisting of 154 syllables and a short prose passage consisting of 270 syllables. From these recordings, acoustically based rhythm metrics, as suggested by Ramus, et al. [Cognition 73, 1999, 265‐292] and Ling, et al. [Language and Speech 43, 2000, 377‐401] were calculated. Measures of consonantal duration variability increased from spoken prose to spoken verse, suggesting that the talkers employed slower, more clearly articulated speech in reading the poem than in reading the prose passage. However, the two tasks did not clearly distinguish between the two varieties of Portuguese.