Phonological Contrast Research Articles

Nasal airflow in French spontaneous speech

The goal of this paper is to compare the degree of anticipatory and carryover phenomena in the behaviour of the velum during the production of French spontaneous speech, and to compare the data with the same speech material, but read. Airflows through the nose and the mouth were taken as an indirect indication of the velum behaviour. French is a language of special interest because there is a phonological contrast between oral and nasal vowels. The results show a tendency for nasal airflow to start before the nasal and a strong propensity to spread after the nasal. No differences could be established between speaking styles (spontaneous vs. read speech) regarding nasal airflow anticipation and carryover.

Ken Stevens and cross-linguistic phonetic studies

Many years ago we realized that one person’s pathological voice quality might be a necessary part of another person’s phonological contrast. Some American English speakers may have a very breathy voice, but a Gujarati speaker may need that voice quality to distinguish the word meaning ‘‘outside’’ from the word meaning ‘‘twelve.’’ It was largely Ken Stevens’s work, in personal communications, that enabled us to quantify these distinctions. This led to the notion that it was possible to describe a continuum of phonation types: voiceless, breathy, voiced, creaky, glottal closure. Using a modified version of another notion suggested by Stevens, we were able to consider possible quantal states along the parameter of glottal stricture. Further investigation of different languages suggested that contrasts along a single parameter may not be as straightforward as they seemed, and a number of ‘‘helping features’’ (yet another Stevens notion) were often involved. Despite being misled by the binary notions of colleagues at MIT, Ken Stevens’s work has been of great help in linguistic phonetics.

Syllable asymmetries in comparative Yoruba phonology

Syllables display symmetrical and asymmetrical properties in two Yoruba dialects. In the asymmetrical dialect, only a vowel with an onset participates in syllable-conditioned processes; an onsetless vowel is syllabically inert. In the symmetrical dialect, a vowel, with or without an onset, participates in syllable processes. It is argued that onsetless vowels are not syllabified in the asymmetrical dialect. Since there is no phonological contrast between syllables with onsets and those without onsets in the symmetrical dialect, all vowels are parsed into syllables exhaustively. Using ideas from Optimality Theory, attested interdialectal variation is shown to follow from different rankings of the same syllable and faithfulness constraints.

Can a model with gestural phonological repre-sentations account for acquired phonological and articulatory impairments? Two case studies

AbstractThis study investigated the errors of speech sound production made by a woman (NC) with Dementia of the Alzheimer Type, and a man (HO) with cerebrovascular etiology. Five tasks were used to investigate the participants' phonological retrieval in picture naming, reading and repetition; ability to preserve phonological contrast in one-syllable minimal pair production; articulatory execution in vowel production and diadochokinesis; and non-speech orofacial movements. Both speakers made speech sound production errors in all single word production tasks, but had greater difficulty retrieving spoken word forms in naming than reading or repetition. Both preserved phonological contrast in one-syllable minimal pairs. HO was impaired at vowel production and diadochokinesis and NC showed a lesser degree of impairment in diadochokinesis. In the orofacial praxis tasks, HO showed impaired laryngeal control and NC was unimpaired. These results suggest that both speakers had difficulty in the phasing, scaling and...

Native-language phonetic and phonological constraints on perception of non-native speech contrasts

Adults discriminate many non-native speech contrasts poorly, especially from an unfamiliar language that is not (yet) an L2. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) [Best et al., JEP: HPP 14, 34 560 (1988)] posits that this difficulty stems from knowledge of both the phonological functions and the phonetic details of native speech segments. Thus, discrimination of an unfamiliar contrast depends not only on whether it resembles a native phonological contrast, but also on perceived goodness of fit between the non-native segments and native phonetic category(s). Cross-language comparisons support PAMs prediction that perceptual assimilation of contrasting non-native segments to a single native category yields poorer discrimination than assimilation to two categories (TC contrasts). Discrimination is worst if both phones are equally similar to a single category (SC), substantially better if they differ in category goodness (CG), near ceiling for TC assimilations, and good to excellent for consonants that fail to be assimilated as speech, instead being perceived as nonspeech events (non-assimilable: NA). Recent findings indicate that, as predicted, SC, CG, and TC assimilations are associated with preferential activation of left hemisphere language regions, whereas NA stimuli yields bilateral brain activation. Other findings with fluent bilinguals indicate a persisting L1 effect on non-native consonant discrimination even if their L2 is acquired prior to 5 years. [Work supported by NICHHD and NIDCD.]

Phonology and phonetic evidence: Papers in laboratory phonology IV Ed. by Bruce Connell and Amalia Arvaniti (review)

908 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) praise-oratory as commodity examines the economic value of language. Commodification of language is also at issue in Michael Silverstein's discussion of the U.S. ideology of monolingual Standard English. Silverstein's critique of the LSA's resolution against the Official English movement may cause some linguists to open—and others to roll—their eyes. Finally , Jane Hill's study of Mexicano and Spanish use in Mexico's Malinche region indicates that ideologies oflinguistic purity may co-exist with and even be formulated within 'impure' mixed codes. With its broad scope and useful introductory essays , the book fills a gap between textbooks and edited volumes for scholarly use. It will anchor courses in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis and will also serve as a useful reference for researchers. [Mary Bucholtz, University of California, Berkeley.] Phonology and phonetic evidence: Papers in laboratory phonology IV. Ed. by Bruce Connell and Amalia Arvaniti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 403. This book is a selection of papers from the Fourth Conference in Laboratory Phonology held in Oxford in August 1993. Following the pattern ofthe previous LabPhon books and conferences, this book contains both papers and commentaries on those papers. The commentaries provide a second, and sometimes contrary , perspective on the data and issues discussed in the papers. In this, the fourth book in the LabPhon series, some issues fromthe previous books are revisited , demonstrating that laboratory phonology is an emerging research paradigm which has revealed new issues for investigation. The book is organized into three parts. Part I, 'Features and perception' (7-92), contains chapters on the nature of features and their place in phonology. John Kingston and Randy Diehl (discussed by Terrance Nearey) examine the status of features in perception and conclude that features represent intermediate perceptual categories, not acoustic events. John Ohala and Manjari Ohala (discussed by James McQueen) investigate underspecification in lexical access in Hindi, following up work by William Marslen-Wilson and Aditi Lahiri ('Lexical processing and phonological representation '. Gesture, segment, prosody: Papers in laboratory phonology II. ed. by Gerard Docherty and D. Robert Ladd, 229-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Kenneth de Jong presents an articulatory study of redundant features and shows that speakers use a variety of articulatory strategies to implement a phonological contrast. Part II, 'Prosody' (95-201), contains chapters on suprasegmental structure. Esther Grabe and Paul Warren and Irene Vogel, H. Timothy Bunnell, and Steven Hoskins (both discussed by Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel) present acoustic and perceptual studies of stress shift in the English rhythm rule. Haruo Kuobonzo (discussed by Mary Beckman) presents perceptual evidence for the mora in Japanese . Kathleen Hubbard (discussed by Bernard Tranel) examines acoustic evidence for moraic timing in Bantu. Part III, 'Articulatory organization' (205-392), contains chapters concerned primarily with articulatory phonology, a theoretical framework which is closely tied to the laboratory phonology paradigm. Caroline Smith (discussed by Richard Ogden) tests models of gestural coordination for Italian and Japanese. Sun-Ah Jun (discussed by Gerard Docherty ) presents a gestural analysis of stop voicing in Korean that makes crucial use of prosodically conditioned gestural overlap. Elizabeth Zgisa (discussed by James Scobbie); Tara Holst and Francis Nolan (discussed by Catherine Browman); and Daniel Recasens, Jordi Fontdevila, and Maria Dolors Pallares consider differences between the phonological and articulatory representations ofpalatal and palatalized consonants. Sook-Hyang Lee (discussed by Francis Nolan) examines the relationship between jaw movement and consonant place of articulation in oral and guttural consonants. Didier Demolin (discussed by Louis Goldstein) presents an aerodynamic and acoustic study of implosive consonants in Lendu. [Stefan Frisch, Indiana University .] ...

Non-native speech perception as a window on the native phonological system and its development

The perceptual assimilation model (PAM) [Best etal ., JEP: HPP 14, 345–360 (1988)] posits that perception of non-native contrasts is constrained by experience with both the phonological functions and the phonetic details of familiar native contrasts. Adults’ discrimination of an unfamiliar contrast depends not only on whether its members resemble a known phonological contrast, but also on perceived ‘‘goodness of fit’’ to native phonetic categories. Adult findings support PAM’s prediction that perceptual assimilation of contrasting non-native consonants or vowels to a single native category yields poorer discrimination than assimilation to two categories (TC contrasts). Discrimination is worst if both phones are equally similar to a single category (SC), substantially better if they differ in category goodness (CG), near ceiling for TC assimilations. PAM predictions have focused on adults’ first encounters with unfamiliar contrasts. However, non-native speech perception also provides a window on infants’ emerging knowledge about phonetic details and phonological organization in native speech. Native phonetic experience influences discrimination of unfamiliar non-native contrasts by 10 months, but systematic phonological knowledge is not evident until later. PAM can also be extended to phonetic and phonological aspects of second language (L2) learning developmentally. [Work supported by NICHHD and NIDCD.]

The Acquisition of a Complex Phonological Contrast: Voice Timing Patterns of English Final Stops by Native French Speakers

Abstract This study examines the acquisition of the phonetic implementation of English final stops by two groups of French speakers. Investigated are parameters which demand a high degree of accuracy in the timing of the sequential movements of the glottal and supraglottal articulators. Rate of acquisition is found to be high for absolute vowel durations and unaspirated final stop release bursts. It is lower for flapping of alveolar stops and relative vowel durations, and it is lowest for extra-short stop closures and short-lag realization of voiced stops. The results confirm those obtained for initial stops. The factors facilitating the acquisition of L2 segments with close counterparts in L1 are the degree of perceptual salience of the various subsegmental intervals and the existence in L1 of allophonic variants similar in realization to the L2 segment. Acquisition begins with the positive transfer of these variants to L2 and their distributional extension to new contexts. In the presence of facilitating factors, it is restricted to the first few years of L2 exposure. In their absence, it requires longer exposure and is limited. Acquisition also strongly depends on individual factors.

Acquisition of non‐native vowel categories.

Is the acquisition of foreign phoneme identification determined by native abstract categories [Best, Development of Speech Perception, pp. 167–224 (1994)] or by particular tokens [Pisoni et al., Development of Speech Perception, pp. 121–166 (1994)]? If Best is correct, members of all instances of the same phonological contrast should be equally easy to identify. If Pisoni et al. are correct, then listeners should not generalize to new speakers or contexts. The acquisition by American English listeners of the potentially four front rounded German vowels /y:,y,oe:,oe/ was examined. Speaker and consonantal context were manipulated. Listeners improved with training. Our listeners, in contrast to those of Pisoni et al. (1994), generalized to new speakers and contexts. Contrary to Best’s 1994 prediction that identification of the same contrast would be equally easy, it was found in this study that listeners who heard one set of speakers identified the mid tense:lax /oe:,oe/ pair more accurately than the high /y:,y/ pair, and identified the lax high:mid /y,oe/ pair more accurately than the tense /y:,oe:/ pair. Listeners who heard a second set of speakers reversed these inequalities. Thus assimilation makes generalization to novel stimuli possible but does not preclude sensitivity to phonetic differences. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. 5‐R29‐DC01708 and NSF Grant No. DBD92‐12043.]

The Acquisition of a Complex Phonological Contrast: Voice Timing Patterns of English Initial Stops by Native French Speakers

Abstract This study examines the acquisition of the glottal and supra-glottal timing patterns of English initial stops by French speakers. French speakers have greater difficulty reducing the duration of glottal pulsing for English /bdg/ than producing long-lag voice onset time (VOT) and the concurrent reduction in closure duration for /ptk/. This is ascribed to the greater articulatory complexity of English /bdg/ for French speakers, the lower degree of perceptual salience of differences in glottal pulsing, compared to differences in VOT, the existence in English of a competing pattern of more fully voiced /bdg/, and the existence in French of aspirated contextual variants of the lingual stops before high vowels. The latter also explains why long-lag VOT is more difficult to acquire for the labial than for the lingual stops. Acquisition of English-like VOT appears to proceed from (1) positive transfer from French of long voicing lag for lingual stops in high vowel contexts, to (2) distributional extension to nonhigh vowel contexts and to the labial stop, and to (3) gradual stretching of the lag to better approximate the English norm. The acquisition of English-like voicing appears to proceed in a similar fashion.

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as 'coarticulation' and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

Timing characteristics of speech after brain damage: Vowel length in Thai

This paper explores the extent of timing deficits in vowels produced by brain-damaged speakers of a language with a phonological contrast in vowel length. Short and long vowels in Thai were produced in isolated monosyllabic words by 20 normal adults, 14 right hemisphere patients, and 17 left hemisphere aphasics. Vowel durations were measured spectrographically. Although the phonological contrast was relatively preserved, as indicated by average duration, a subtle timing deficit in vowels produced by nonfluent aphasics was indicated by a compressed duration continuum and increased variability in vowel production.

Acoustical characteristics of fortis and lenis consonants in Tyap and Jju.

The contrast between fortis and lenis consonants in Tyap and Jju of Nigeria must be explained otherwise than as a voicing distinction. The acoustical correlates of this phonological contrast between prevocalic consonants include temporal differences, reported earlier [N. P. McKinney, J. Phon. 18, 255–266 (1990)] and expanded upon in this study, and spectral differences, which are also examined here. Pairs of words differing only in whether the initial consonant was fortis or lenis were produced by two speakers of each of the two languages and were analyzed spectrographically. Transitions to vowels from fortis palatalized consonants were found to start with a higher F2 than those from corresponding lenis consonants. Similarly, transitions from fortis labialized consonants were found to start with a lower F1 and F2 than those from lenis ones. Interdependence of these temporal and spectral characteristics will be discussed.

Four‐year‐olds' perception of nonnative contrasts differing in phonological assimilation

Young infants discriminate most native and nonnative phonetic contrasts. Adults, however, often have difficulty with nonnative contrasts, as do infants by 10–12 months [Werker, Am. Sci. 77, 54–59 (1989)]. Best et al. proposed that phonological development fosters perceptual assimilation of nonnative contrasts to the most similar native phoneme(s), according to four possible patterns [J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Percept. Perf. 14, 345–360 (1988)]: (1) Both phones assimilate to a single category (SC); (2) they differ in category goodness (CG); (3) they assimilate to two categories (TC); or (4) they are nonassimilable (NA). Only SC contrasts should pose difficulty for phonologically sophisticated listeners. Recently, however, 10–12 month olds failed to discriminate nonnative CG and TC contrasts, which were discriminated by adults and younger infants [Best, Int. Conf. Infant Studies (April 1990)]. The present study examined further perceptual development in 4 year olds, who discriminated a native control contrast and the CG contrast, but not the TC contrast. Two possible explanations will be discussed: (1) still‐immature perception of phonological contrast; or (2) specific difficulty with the fricative voicing feature employed in the TC contrast. In either case, the results suggest that 4 year olds do not yet show mature phonological assimilation. [Work supported by NIH Grant DC‐00403.]

The nonlinear organization of the affricate

This paper proposes that affricates are composed of [-cont] and [+cont] specifications which are unordered at underlying representation and throughout the phonological derivation, although they are ordered phonetically. Previous autosegmental treatments of the affricate, which include this ordering as part of underlying representation, can handle edge effects, which are cases where rules refer to only the adjacent value of [cont]. But the ordered representation cannot account for anti-edge effects: those rules which involve the nonadjacent value of [cont]. Moreover, it predicts that ordering of the gestures is a possible phonological contrast, but this is incorrect, as no language has [+cont][−cont] single segments. As predicted by the unordered representation, all apparent cases of phonological edge effects can simply be stated as rules referring to a value of [cont]; all rules which show true edge effects occur after the values are phonetically ordered.

Cerebral hemispheric involvement in the acquisition of new phonetic categories

This study was concerned with the involvement of the cerebral hemispheres in the acquisition of perceptual skill with novel speech sounds. Two groups of eight subjects rated on three occasions the dissimilarity of pairs of Mandarin Chinese speech sounds varying on voicing and aspiration, presented to the left or right ear with contralateral noise. The experimental group received listening experience with long passages of Mandarin containing the target sounds. Multidimensional scaling analysis of dissimilarity ratings indicated that listening experience leads to increased perceptual differentiation of phonetic categories drawn from a language unfamiliar to the listener. This improvement occurred sooner with presentation of the target sounds to the right hemisphere than to the left if the phonological contrast was along the voicing dimension. Improvement in the perception of stimuli varying on aspiration occurred in right ear presentations only. This finding supports the position that speech perception mechanisms at the feature level may be distributed asymmetrically across the hemispheres.

Temporal characteristics of fortis stops and affricates in Tyap and Jju

The phonetic correlates of the phonological contrast between prevocalic fortis consonants and lenis ones in Tyap and Jju include temporal differences. Minimal pairs of words differing in the fortisness of the initial stop or affricate were produced by two speakers of each of the two languages and were analyzed spectrographically. For both languages, the results showed closure durations to be quite similar for fortis and lenis counterparts, but the durations of the following aspiration or fricative noise were significantly longer for the fortis consonant than for its lenis counterpart.

Perception of Hindi retroflex versus dental stops by monolingual speakers of American English

Cross‐language studies have shown that foreign consonant contrasts vary in the degree of perceptual difficulty that they present adult non‐native listeners. Phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic factors have been considered important in accounting for this variability. These factors were examined by comparing English listeners' perception of the Hindi retroflex versus dental place‐of‐articulation contrast in four different voicing contexts: prevoiced, voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated, and breathy voiced. Differences in the perceptual difficulty of the four Hindi contrasts were predicted based on: (1) phonemic status (the functional status of the contrast in listeners' native phonology), (2) phonetic familiarity (as allophones or free variants), (3) differences in acoustic salience related to voicing, and (4) assimilation strategies. Differences in performance in a categorial AX discrimination task were ordered from most to least errors: prevoiced, voiceless aspirated, breathy‐voiced, and voiceless unaspirated. Perceptual differences were correlated with both acoustic salience of place cues and subjects' descriptions of their assimilation strategies. [Work supported by NICHD and NINCDS.]

Speaker variation and phonation type in Tsonga nasals

Tsonga has a phonological contrast between normally voiced and breathy voiced nasals. The latter are associated with large perturbations in F 0 and appear to be subject to speaker variation involving the phonetic details of phonation type. The two questions of interest are, first, whether there are measurable properties of the nasals that will allow one to quantify the speaker variation in phonation type and, secondly, whether this variation is constrained by a principle of relative in variance or is random. The study suggests that there are reliable speaker differences based inter alia on spectral tilt and that most, but not all, subjects produce the phonological contrast between normally voiced and breathy voiced nasals in a relatively invariant way.

Are F0 differences after stops accidental or deliberate?

Differences in F0 after stops are generally thought to be unavoidable perturbations of the rate of vocal fold vibration brought about by changes in the tension of the folds during the stop [Hombert, Ohala, and Ewan, Language 55, 37–58 (1979)]. For example, F0 is depressed after voiced stops because the folds are slackened during the closure, but elevated after voiceless stops because the folds are tensed. Recent work has shown, however, that all the mechanisms proposed to account for differences in F0 after stops are seriously flawed [Kingston, MS thesis (1985)] and, furthermore, that stops of the same phonetic type, e.g., voiceless unaspirated, can elevate F0 in one language but depress it in another [Caisse, MS thesis (1982)]. The F0 differences may therefore be introduced deliberately. to enhance the phonological contrast, rather than arising as accidental byproducts of other articulations. This possibility was tested with data from Tamil, a language which contrasts long and short stops where the long stops are predictably voiceless and the short ones are predictably voiced. Since voicing is allophonic rather than distinctive in this language, F0 differences need not appear after stops if they are deliberate. On the other hand, if the F0 differences are simply an accidental byproduct of having the folds vibrating or not, then they should appear regardless of the phonological role of vocal fold vibration. Measurements of F0 after stops in Tamil show no significant difference at the onset of vowels following the two kinds of stops, supporting the contention that F0 differences are deliberate in other languages.