Consonantal Context Research Articles

The Identification of High-pitched Sung Vowels in Sense and Nonsense Words by Professional Singers and Untrained Listeners

High-pitched sung vowels may be considered phonetically "underspecified" because of (i) the tuning of the F1 to the f0 accompanying pitch raising and (ii) the wide harmonic spacing of the voice source resulting in the undersampling of the vocal tract transfer function. Therefore, sung vowel intelligibility is expected to decrease as the f0 increases. Based on the literature of speech perception, it is often suggested that sung vowels are better perceived if uttered in consonantal (CVC) context than in isolation even at high f0. The results for singing, however, are contradictory. In the present study, we further investigate this question. We compare vowel identification in sense and nonsense CVC sequences and show that the positive effect of the context disappears if the number of legal choices in a perception test is similar in both conditions, meaning that any positive effect of the CVC context may only stem from the smaller number of possible responses, i.e., from higher probabilities. Additionally, it is also tested whether the training in production (i.e., singing training) may also lead to a perceptual advantage of the singers over nonsingers in the identification of high-pitched sung vowels. The results show no advantage of this kind.

Dynamic acoustic properties of monophthongs and diphthongs in Western Sydney Australian English.

This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a variety of phonetic contexts by young adult speakers from Western Sydney. The 18 vowels are well separated by duration and dynamic formant trajectory information. Vowel durations and formant trajectories were affected by the consonantal context in which the vowels were produced, particularly those produced in the /hVd/ context. Finally, the results indicate that capturing aspects of vowel inherent spectral change may be useful in future cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic studies.

Vowel reduction across tasks for male speakers of American English.

This study examined acoustic variation of vowels within speakers across speech tasks. The overarching goal of the study was to understand within-speaker variation as one index of the range of normal speech motor behavior for American English vowels. Ten male speakers of American English performed four speech tasks including citation form sentence reading with a clear-speech style (clear-speech), citation form sentence reading (citation), passage reading (reading), and conversational speech (conversation). Eight monophthong vowels in a variety of consonant contexts were studied. Clear-speech was operationally defined as the reference point for describing variation. Acoustic measures associated with the conventions of vowel targets were obtained and examined. These included temporal midpoint formant frequencies for the first three formants (F1, F2, and F3) and the derived Euclidean distances in the F1-F2 and F2-F3 planes. Results indicated that reduction toward the center of the F1-F2 and F2-F3 planes increased in magnitude across the tasks in the order of clear-speech, citation, reading, and conversation. The cross-task variation was comparable for all speakers despite fine-grained individual differences. The characteristics of systematic within-speaker acoustic variation across tasks have potential implications for the understanding of the mechanisms of speech motor control and motor speech disorders.

Cumulative context effects and variant lexical representations: Word use and English final t/d deletion

AbstractWord production variability is widespread in speech, and rates of variant production correlate with many factors. Recent research suggests mental representation of both canonical word forms and distinct reduced variants, and that production and processing are sensitive to variant frequency. What factors lead to frequency-weighted variant representations? An experiment manipulated following context and word repetition for final t/d words in read, narrative English speech. Modeling the experimentally generated data statistically showed higher final-segment deletion in tokens followed by consonant-initial words, but no evidence of increased deletion with repetition, regardless of context. Deletion rates were also higher the greater a word's cumulative exposure to consonant contexts (measured from distributional statistics), but there was no effect of word frequency. Token effects are interpreted in terms of articulation processes. The type-level context effect is interpreted within exemplar and usage-based models of language to suggest that experiences with word variants in contexts register as frequency-weighted representations.

F2 slope as a Perceptual Cue for the Front-Back Contrast in Standard Southern British English.

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].

Predicting segmental substitution errors in aphasic patients with phonological and phonetic encoding impairments

This paper analyses the factors that predict substitution errors produced by four Broca’s and four conduction aphasic subjects, all native speakers of Spanish, in reading and repetition tasks. Errors were elicited using a list of words where type of consonant, lexical stress and phonetic context were controlled for and where variables related to frequency of occurrence (word and syllable) and phonological neighbourhood characteristics were assigned using available online corpora. 675 substitution errors were obtained and preferential tendencies to devoice, occlusivise or spirantise were identified. Logistic regression mixed-effect models were performed on these three types of substitution errors to identify the predictors depending on the aphasic profile. While our results lent support to the hypothesis of a concomitant phonetic deficit in fluent aphasia, contrary to the classical claim, it also revealed differential patterns in the phonic behaviour of patients regarding the access to mental syllabary or syllabic position effects. Our results are discussed in relation to the phonetic vs. phonological impairments dimension in aphasia and the seriality/ interactivity axis in speech architectures.

Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels

Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a greater degree of carryover than anticipatory nasalization. Nasality in carryover contexts is nonetheless restricted: the oral–nasal contrast is neutralized for high back vowels in this context and realized for three of the six speakers in low vowels. In the absence of nasal consonant context, contrastive vowel nasalization is generally greatest late in the vowel. Low nasal vowels in carryover contexts parallel this pattern (despite the location of the nasal consonantbeforethe vowel), and low nasal vowels in anticipatory contexts are most nasal at the start of the vowel. We relate the synchronic patterns of coarticulation in Lakota to both its system of contrast and diachronic processes in the evolution of nasality in Lakota. These data reflect that coarticulatory patterns, as well as contrastive patterns, are grammatical and controlled by speakers.

Modeling consonant-context effects in dialectal variation in a large database of spontaneous speech recordings

Given recent interest in the analysis of naturally produced spontaneous speech, we collected, processed, and analyzed a large database of speech samples from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia with the primary aim of examining regional variation in vowel-formant patterns. Although the actual collection of audio recordings is relatively straightforward, the analysis of spontaneous speech suffers from several disadvantages relative to that of laboratory, citation speech: Different vowels have different frequencies of occurrence, surrounding consonants have a large influence on formant peak frequencies, and the distribution of consonant contexts across different vowels is highly unbalanced. To overcome these problems, we developed a statistical procedure inspired by that of Broad and Clermont [1987, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 81, 155] to estimate the specific effects of both onset and coda consonant-context effects on vowel formant frequencies. However, in contrast to their procedure, both vowel formant frequenc...

The phonological function of vowels is maintained at fundamental frequencies up to 880 Hz.

In a between-subject perception task, listeners either identified full words or vowels isolated from these words at F0s between 220 and 880 Hz. They received two written words as response options (minimal pair with the stimulus vowel in contrastive position). Listeners' sensitivity (A') was extremely high in both conditions at all F0s, showing that the phonological function of vowels can also be maintained at high F0s. This indicates that vowel sounds may carry strong acoustic cues departing from common formant frequencies at high F0s and that listeners do not rely on consonantal context phenomena for their identification performance.

The realization of word-final, preconsonantal /s/ in the Spanish of Mexico City

AbstractThe current study provides detailed, acoustic analyses of coda /s/realization in the Spanish of Mexico City. Linguistic variables studied include stress placement and following consonant context and the social factors that were included are gender and speaker age. Overall, the participants exhibited more variation than expected, including deletion of coda /s/, particularly before sonorants. The results of the study indicate that both linguistic and social factors affect the realization of coda /s/ in this dialect. The findings have practical implications for the L2 language and phonetics classrooms, as well as theoretical implications for phonological accounts of voicing assimilation in Spanish.

Impact of the LSVT on vowel articulation and coarticulation in Parkinson’s disease

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT®) on vowel articulation and consonant–vowel (C–V) coarticulation in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Nine Quebec French speakers diagnosed with idiopathic PD underwent the LSVT®. Speech characteristics were compared before and after treatment. Vowel articulation was measured using acoustic vowel space and calculated with the first (F1) and second formant (F2) of the vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. C–V coarticulation was measured using locus equations, an acoustic metric based on the F2 transitions within vowels in relation to the preceding consonant. The relationship between these variables, speech loudness and vowel duration was also analysed. Results showed that vowel contrast increased in F1/F2 acoustic space after administration of the LSVT®. This improvement was associated with the gain in speech loudness and longer vowel duration. C–V coarticulation patterns between consonant contexts showed greater distinctiveness after the treatment. This improvement was associated with the gain in speech loudness only. These results support the conclusions of previous studies investigating the relationship between the LSVT®, speech loudness and articulation in PD. These results expand clinical understanding of the treatment and indicate that loud speech changes C–V coarticulation patterns. Clinical applications and theoretical considerations are discussed.

Intelligibility of Sung Vowels: The Effect of Consonantal Context and the Onset of Voicing

Studies addressing the identification of sung vowels concern mainly the effect of the fundamental frequency (f0) and conclude that correct vowel identification decreases with increasing pitch. In one experiment, the impact of consonantal environment on the intelligibility of the vowels in high-pitched singing was also studied. The results of that experiment showed positive effect of the consonantal environment. This finding is in line with results that had been reported for speech in an earlier study. However, the data on singing are not as transparent as the authors suggest, and there are some conditions in the experiment that could also be controlled for more strictly. Therefore, the effect of the dynamic acoustic information encoded in the formant transitions at high fundamental frequencies is still an open question. The aim of the present study was to redesign and extend the above-mentioned experiment to test whether the phonetic context and the onset of the vowel uttered in isolation (namely the onset of voicing) have a positive effect on vowel identification. For this purpose, a vowel identification test was carried out. The stimuli included three Hungarian vowels /aː iː uː/ in three conditions (in /bVb/ context, in isolation and with eliminated onset) at seven different fundamental frequencies from 175 to 988 Hz (F3, B3, F4, B4, F5, B5, and speech). The stimuli were produced by one professional soprano singer. The results show that consonantal context does not specify vowel identity in singing as clearly as it has been demonstrated for spoken utterances. In addition, no effect of vowel onset (ie, the onset of voicing) was found. Recognition percentages seemed only to be dependent on f0 and vowel quality. The unexpected results lend themselves to two possible explanations: the reduction of the consonants and the undersampling of the formant transitions.

Phonetic environment of disfluencies in children with stuttering

AbstractPhonological contributions to stuttering have been discussed with increased attention in the recent years. The present study is aimed to analyze the effect of phonological environment during the instances of stuttering. The study included 10 monolingual children with stuttering (CWS) in the age range of 6–8 years, who spoke Kannada (south Indian language) as their mother tongue. Conversation, topic narration, story narration, and picture description tasks were carried out in Kannada language. The relative difficulty of individual syllables for each participant was determined. Further, the effect of phonetic environment (succeeding syllable) during the instances of stuttering was calculated. The results revealed a rank order of relative occurrence of succeeding consonantal contexts. Most of the time, the phonetic environment included voiceless consonants, nasals, and plosives compared to others. This indicated that CWS may have difficulties in the transition of articulatory movement from oral to nasal and from voiced to voiceless consonants during speech production. Findings also revealed variability in the occurrence of phonetic context within and between CWS, which supports the disturbances occurring across various time domains. It is hoped that the findings of the current study will support theorists, researchers, and clinicians in arriving at a more comprehensive understanding of stuttering and phonetic behavior in CWS.

Changes in vowel articulation with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease.

Purpose. To investigate changes in vowel articulation with the electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods. Eight Quebec-French speakers diagnosed with idiopathic PD who had undergone STN DBS were evaluated ON-stimulation and OFF-stimulation (1 hour after DBS was turned off). Vowel articulation was compared ON-simulation versus OFF-stimulation using acoustic vowel space and formant centralization ratio, calculated with the first (F1) and second formant (F2) of the vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/. The impact of the preceding consonant context on articulation, which represents a measure of coarticulation, was also analyzed as a function of the stimulation state. Results. Maximum vowel articulation increased during ON-stimulation. Analyses also indicate that vowel articulation was modulated by the consonant context but this relationship did not change with STN DBS. Conclusions. Results suggest that STN DBS may improve articulation in dysarthric speakers with PD, in terms of range of movement. Optimization of the electrical parameters for each patient is important and may lead to improvement in speech fine motor control. However, the impact on overall speech intelligibility may still be small. Clinical considerations are discussed and new research avenues are suggested.

Projekt akustycznej bazy danych gwar mazowieckich

A project of an acoustich data base of Mazovian dialects
 The paper presents a project of an acoustic data base of Mazovian dialects, and shows how modern research methods of acoustic phonetics can be employed in dialectological practice. The projected data base is going to contain objective data, independent of the researcher’s hearing, in the form of target values of the first two formants for both stressed and unstressed oral vowels in various consonant contexts. The base is going to contain about 60,000 realizations. It is also going to be supplied with rich metadata, such as dialect, subdialect, place of birth of the speakers, their age, gender and education, the date and source of the recording. The base is going to be accessed through a search engine capable of executing complex queries, and it is going to contain a library of graphs and statistical data illustrating the informants’ pronunciation. These data will allow for automated comparisons to be performed between the dialectal and the general Polish realizations of vowels, thus revealing the contemporary state of the vocalism of Mazovian dialects, and making it possible to verify the previous findings.

Modeling of vowel-inherent spectral change in spontaneous and elicited speech

A database of speech samples was collected to examining vowel formant patterns in spontaneous and read speech. Recordings were made from 220 long-time residents of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in two separate tasks: Participants read a series of sentences in several phonetic contexts and also provided a monologue of at least 10 min duration resulting in approximately 36 h of spontaneous speech. Vowel formant frequencies were measured for all stressed vowels in non-function words surrounded by obstruents. Speakers were divided among eight geographic regions. Consonant contexts were modelled via nonlinear regression based on a model inspired by Broad and Clermont (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 81,155). Spontaneous speech was characterized by retraction of front vowels, fronting of /u/, backing of /æ/, and greater diphthongization of /ɒ/. Older speakers were less likely to show a merger between /ɒ/ and /ɔ/. There was also some evidence of a partial Canadian Shift whereby /æ/ and /ɛ/ are lowered following merger of /ɒ/ and /ɔ/. Results from alternate models currently under development, which may better accommodate vowel-inherent formant movement, will be discussed. [Work supported by SSHRC.]

The Effect of the Arabic Syllabic Prosodic Features on the Production of English CV Sequences

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of the Arabic minimal prosodic unit (the syllable) on the production of English L2 CV sequences. To study the influence of phonetic context upon a given segment and the overall effect the Arabic syntagmatic features on the Arab learner's ability to reorganize in terms of English patterns, samples of conversational exchanges of some native speakers of adult/child Jordanian Arabic were recorded over a two month period. The syllable patterns that regulate the phonological organization of the conversational exchanges were described. To study the effect of the preceding and following consonants on the adjacent vowel sounds, two sets of consonantal contexts were examined: 'emphatic' vs. 'non-emphatic'. The objectives of this study are the following: (i) to identify prosodic features which span the internal structure of the Arabic word templates, e.g. the vocalic melody of frontness vs. backness (ii) to explore the Arabic language-specific phonological constraints and to determine their effect on the production of English sound patterns (iii) to study the Arabic templates which are similar in shape to English equivalents, because contrastive linguistics studies, to date, have so far focused on phonological negative interlingual transfer to the effective exclusion of positive interlingual transfer . (vi) to demonstrate how English utterances are restructured so that the constituent syllables follow typical Arabic syllabication.

Early Sound Symbolism for Vowel Sounds

Children and adults consistently match some words (e.g., kiki) to jagged shapes and other words (e.g., bouba) to rounded shapes, providing evidence for non-arbitrary sound–shape mapping. In this study, we investigated the influence of vowels on sound–shape matching in toddlers, using four contrasting pairs of nonsense words differing in vowel sound (/i/ as in feet vs. /o/ as in boat) and four rounded–jagged shape pairs. Crucially, we used reduplicated syllables (e.g., kiki vs. koko) rather than confounding vowel sound with consonant context and syllable variability (e.g., kiki vs. bouba). Toddlers consistently matched words with /o/ to rounded shapes and words with /i/ to jagged shapes (p < 0.01). The results suggest that there may be naturally biased correspondences between vowel sound and shape.

Dialectal and age-related acoustic variation in vowels in spontaneous speech

Our knowledge of the acoustic characteristics of vowels is based mainly on productions obtained under fine experimental control (e.g., [hVd] tokens produced in isolation). Analyzing spontaneous speech data has its obvious challenges because the vowels of interest occur in various segmental and prosodic contexts and are additionally affected by sudden changes in speech tempo. These variations may compromise the accuracy of interpretation of linguistic phenomena such as sound change. In this study we examine if more natural productions of vowels in two dialects (as compared to those produced in citation form and read speech) show evidence of the existence of cross-generational vowel changes—including corresponding changes in spectral dynamics. A subset of vowels from a large corpus of spontaneous conversations was analyzed. The vowels occurred in variable consonantal contexts in both mono- and polysyllabic words. The obtained patterns of vowel change were consistent with those in read and citation form speech. Although the measured spectral changes were smaller due to shorter vowel durations, the dialect-specific nature of formant dynamics was maintained. These results demonstrate that the patterns of vowel change, including variation in formant dynamics, do not diminish under the circumstances of greater contextual/prosodic variability found in spontaneous speech.

Stressed Vowel Duration and Phonemic Length Contrast

It has been generally accepted that greater vowel/syllable duration is a reliable correlate of stress and that absolute durational differences between vowels underlie phonemic length contrasts. In this paper we shall demonstrate that duration is not an independent stress correlate, but rather it is derivative of another stress correlate, namely pitch. Phonemic contrast, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative.&#x0D; These findings are based on the results of an experiment in which four speakers of SBrE read 162 mono-, di- and trisyllabic target items (made of CV sequences) both in isolation and in carrier phrases. In the stressed syllables all Southern British English vowels and diphthongs were represented and each vowel was placed in 3 consonantal contexts: (a) followed by a voiced obstruent, (b) voiceless obstruent and (c) a sonorant. Then, all vowels (both stressed and unstressed) were extracted from target items and measured with PRAAT.&#x0D; The results indicate that stressed vowels may be longer than unstressed ones. Their durational superiority, however, is not stress-related, but follows mainly from vowelintrinsic durational characteristics and, to some extent, from the prosodic context (i.e. the number of following unstressed vowels) in which it is placed. In CV1CV2 disyllables, when V1 is phonemically short, the following word-final unstressed vowel is almost always longer. It is only when V1 is a phonemically long vowel that V2 may be shorter. As far as diphthongal V1 is concerned, the durational V1~V2 relation is variable. Interestingly, the V1~V3 relation in trisyllables follows the same durational pattern. In both types of items the rare cases when a phonemically short V1 is indeed longer than the word-final vowel involve a stressed vowel which is open, e.g. [æ,o], and whose minimal execution time is longer due to a more extensive jaw movement. These observations imply that both in acoustic and perceptual terms the realisation of word stress is not based on the durational superiority of stressed vowels over unstressed ones. When it is, it is only an epiphenomenon of intrinsic duration of the stressed vowel and extra shortness of nonfinal unstressed vowel.&#x0D; As far as phonemic length contrast is concerned, we observe a high degree of durational overlap between phonemically long and short vowels in monosyllabic CVC words (which is enforced by a greater pitch excursion), whereas in polysyllables the differences seem to be perceptually non-salient (&gt;40 ms, cf. Lehiste 1970). This suggests that the differences in vowel duration are not significant enough to underlie phonological length contrasts.