Coronal Stop Research Articles

Variation in Non-native Speech: How Far Do Non-native Speakers Replicate Target Constraints on Variation? A Novel Approach

This paper introduces a new framework to analyze how non-native speakers adhere to native-speaker norms of variation in contact settings. The author focuses on a well-established phonological variable in both native and contact-induced varieties of English: consonant cluster reduction. This process involves either dropping or maintaining a final coronal stop (t,d) in a consonant cluster in words such as "mind" and "west." The paper uses standard variationist methodologies to establish the constraints on consonant cluster reduction in a native-speaker group (Wellingtonian English) and a non-native speaker sample (Arab migrants to Wellington). The study then compares these constraints, identifying any changes introduced by non-native speakers. The results show that the non-native group is highly attuned to dialect-specific aspects of variation and demonstrates a deletion rate close to native speakers. Additionally, they exhibit a strong transfer of target articulatory constraints related to consonant cluster reduction and acquire the social cues associated with this variation. Interestingly, these patterns of variation in non-native speech are consistent across similar non-native groups, irrespective of first language, proficiency in English, and the complexity of the target constraints on variation.

English coronal stop deletion is categorical not gradient

English Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) has been a subject of debate in terms of whether it is categorical or gradient. Previous studies have overlooked the possibility that tongue tip raising during inaudible coronal stop may come from neutral tongue tip position rather than gradient CSD. The current study found that in sentence reading, that much involves word-initial tongue tip raising just prior to [m] that is significantly similar to the tongue tip behavior of much in isolation. We argue that English CSD should be analyzed as categorical deletion and that one can only argue for gradient deletion after considering the neutral position of the tongue tip. More generally, this study suggests that arguing for gradience involves complexities beyond merely noting variations in measurements. Therefore, one may conclude categoricity based on Occam’s razor and only argue for gradience when alternative explanations have been evaluated and suggested so.

Context-Specific Variance in PakE Coronal Stop: An Investigative Study of Pakistani English Speakers

Context-Specific Variance in PakE Coronal Stop: An Investigative Study of Pakistani English Speakers

영어 설단비음을 후행하는 유성설단폐쇄음의 발화양상: 코퍼스 분석

영어 설단비음을 후행하는 유성설단폐쇄음의 발화양상: 코퍼스 분석

Palatalization of /d/ across word boundaries in UK English

In many spoken varieties of English, the coronal stop /d/ may palatalize or affricate before /j/, including at word boundaries; e.g., “did you” [ˈdɪdʒu], “would you” [ˈwʊdʒu]. We study this process in the large, naturalistic Audio BNC (http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/AudioBNC). Previous studies have found that coronal fricatives /s, z/ palatalize preceding /j/ in predictable contexts and at increased speech rates, implying that palatalization results from coarticulatory gestural overlap. However, analysis of /t/ shows that palatalization to [tʃ] is a categorical stylistic variant, which is instead selected in formal contexts at slower speech rates. To determine whether [dʒ] results from gestural overlap or as a stylistic variant, we analyze /d/’s rate of palatalization using approximately 8000 tokens of /d#j/ gathered from the force-aligned Audio BNC. Tokens were impressionistically coded as palatalized to [dʒ], released as [d], or unreleased/deleted. With multinomial logistic regressioni, we test whether effects of lexical frequency, speech rate and duration, phonological context, discourse, or speaker characteristics (e.g., region, gender) predict the realization of /d#j/ in naturalistic speech. In line with previous findings, we hypothesize that [dʒ] is more likely in frequent collocations and at high speech rates, but style-driven effects of region, formality, or gender may also predict this variant.

Coronal stop lenition in French and Spanish: Electropalatographic evidence

Lenition of voiced and, to a lesser extent, voiceless stops is widely attested in Western Romance languages. In Spanish, utterance-initial voiced stops as well as those following nasals alternate with approximants in intervocalic position. Acoustic and articulatory studies have revealed factors that condition phonetic weakening. In contrast, very little is known about stop weakening in French. In this paper, using electropalatography, we provide articulatory evidence for the lenition of /t d/ in both Spanish and French. Data obtained from seven Spanish-speaking and four French-speaking participants reveal that, in both languages, /d/ is produced with less linguopalatal contact than /t/, and these differences are strongly conditioned by the position within the utterance or word. The languages differ, however, in the degree of /d/ lenition as well as in some of the contextual conditioning factors. Overall, our results, which should be interpreted with some caution given the number of speakers and the balance of the stimuli set, show that French resembles other Romance languages in its phonetic patterns of lenition, differing mainly in the degree of weakening.

New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion

AbstractThis paper probes the well-documented morphological effect on coronal stop deletion (CSD, also called /t,d/-deletion), by which there is more deletion in monomorphemes like mist than in regular past tense forms like missed. We observe that there are, in principle, additional morphological distinctions that could be made within each category: for instance, the “regular past” category contains perfect and passive participles; the “monomorpheme” category typically contains compounds and suffixed forms. We demonstrate that several of these newly introduced distinctions actually have significant effects on CSD rates in a corpus of Philadelphia English. And we argue that these new distinctions are worth attending to because they have consequences for two existing accounts of the basic morphological effect. In each case, we show that the existing accounts do not straightforwardly capture the additional significant distinctions we identify, calling the explanatory power of those accounts into question.

Voice and Emphasis in Arabic Coronal Stops: Evidence for Phonological Compensation.

The current study investigates multiple acoustic cues–voice onset time (VOT), spectral center of gravity (SCG) of burst, pitch (F0), and frequencies of the first (F1) and second (F2) formants at vowel onset—associated with phonological contrasts of voicing and emphasis in production of Arabic coronal stops. The analysis of the acoustic data collected from eight native speakers of the Qatari dialect showed that the three stops form three distinct modes on the VOT scale: [d] is (pre)voiced, voiceless [t] is aspirated, and emphatic [ṭ] is voiceless unaspirated. The contrast is also maintained in spectral cues. Each cue influences production of coronal stops while their relevance to phonological contrasts varies. VOT was most relevant for voicing, but F2 was mostly associated with emphasis. The perception experiment revealed that listeners were able to categorize ambiguous tokens correctly and compensate for phonological contrasts. The listeners’ results were used to evaluate three categorization models to predict the intended category of a coronal stop: a model with unweighted and unadjusted cues, a model with weighted cues compensating for phonetic context, and a model with weighted cues compensating for the voicing and emphasis contrasts. The findings suggest that the model with phonological compensation performed most similar to human listeners both in terms of accuracy rate and error pattern.

Interlingual Interactions Elicit Performance Mismatches Not “Compromise” Categories in Early Bilinguals: Evidence from Meta-Analysis and Coronal Stops

Previous studies attest that some early bilinguals produce the sounds of their languages in a manner that is characterized as “compromise” with regard to monolingual speakers. The present study uses meta-analytic techniques and coronal stop data from early bilinguals in order to assess this claim. The goal was to evaluate the cumulative evidence for “compromise” voice-onset time (VOT) in the speech of early bilinguals by providing a comprehensive assessment of the literature and presenting an acoustic analysis of coronal stops from early Spanish–English bilinguals. The studies were coded for linguistic and methodological features, as well as effect sizes, and then analyzed using a cross-classified Bayesian meta-analysis. The pooled effect for “compromise” VOT was negligible (β = −0.13). The acoustic analysis of the coronal stop data showed that the early Spanish–English bilinguals often produced Spanish and English targets with mismatched features from their other language. These performance mismatches presumably occurred as a result of interlingual interactions elicited by the experimental task. Taken together, the results suggest that early bilinguals do not have “compromise” VOT, though their speech involves dynamic phonetic interactions that can surface as performance mismatches during speech production.

영어 어말 설단폐쇄음의 약화 양상: 강세 모음을 선행하는 경우

Patterns of English coronal stop variation within a word are well-documented. However, little is known at present to ascertain if these generalizations apply across words, specifically when the following syllable is stressed. This paper explores aspects of English coronal stop alternations focusing on flapping across the word boundary. Results indicate that a coronal stop undergoes flapping even when the following vowel is stressed, This is very different from the flapping rule applying within a word that bans flapping from applying before a stressed vowel. Voiceless coronal stops, however, were subject to glottaling unlike voiced counterparts, thus maintaining the same value with respect to the [±voice] feature.

The structural motivation of palatalization

Este artigo trata da motivação estrutural da palatalização de consoantes plosivas coronais em português brasileiro (PB) e nas línguas do mundo. O objetivo é explicar por que (a) as plosivas coronais são o alvo típico do processo, (b) as plosivas coronais são o único alvo do processo em PB, (c) o gatilho típico da palatalização nas línguas do mundo é a vogal alta coronal , (d) o único gatilho do processo em PB é a vogal alta coronal. Propomos uma estrutura interna dos segmentos com os elementos abstratos C e V (VAN DER HULST, 2005, 2011) e mostramos que a consonantalidade dos vocoides anteriores altos é a motivação estrutural da palatalização. O processo tende a afetar consoantes semelhantes ao gatilho em termos estruturais. A proposta permite distinguir estruturalmente a palatalização secundária e a palatalização plena (BATEMAN, 2007). Também explica a seleção de gatilhos e alvos de palatalização em PB, que resultam de palatalização plena, um tipo de palatalização que exige gatilhos e alvos maximamente idênticos.

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

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

Word-final Coronal Stop Variation across Words : Cases of American and British English

It is well-documented that coronal stops in English are most likely to undergo lenition when appearing in a prosodically weak position. Based on the data in the two corpora, this paper analyzes the patterns of coronal stop realizations across words in American English (AE) and British English (or Received Pronunciation (RP)). Results showed that coronal stops over a word boundary were subject to flapping, glottaling, nasal plosion and deletion. Coronal stops in AE, specifically those in superlative and derivational suffixes, were commonly deleted. Most coronal stops in RP, however, stayed unchanged across words. In addition, coronal stops in AE tended heavily to undergo flapping between vowels, but those in RP did not. The underlying voicing contrast also played a significant role in the variation where voiceless coronal stops often underwent glottaling whereas voiced counterparts did not in both AE and RP. Also, word frequency had an influence on such alternations in the sense that low-frequency words resisted weakening in both dialects.

Effect of emphasis spread on coronal stop articulation in Qatari Arabic

Emphasis (contrastive uvularisation) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments (Davis 1995). The effect of emphasis spread on a consonant is manifested as lowering of its spectral mean (Jongman et al. 2011). Although stop consonants reveal a strong effect of emphasis, it is not known how emphasis spread affects other acoustic properties of stops, e.g. voice onset time (VOT). Previous studies (Kulikov 2018) showed that VOT and emphasis are linked in speech production: plain /t/ in Gulf Arabic is aspirated; emphatic /ṭ/ has short-lag VOT. Phonological theory predicts that plain /t/ should become more emphatic in emphatic context, which might reduce stop VOT as well. The current study investigates the effect of emphasis spread on VOT in word-initial coronal stops in Qatari Arabic. The stimuli, produced by sixteen native speakers of Qatari Arabic, contained target plain and emphatic stops /t/, /ṭ/ followed by short or long low vowel, and plain coronal obstruents /t, s, ð/ or their emphatic counterparts /ṭ, ṣ, ð̣/. The acoustic analysis included measurements of VOT and spectral mean of burst in the stop, and F1, F2, F3 frequencies at the vowel beginning, middle and end. The results showed that final emphatic obstruent triggered emphasis spread across the syllable. The effect of emphasis on the vowel was stronger next to the emphatic obstruent (p < .01). Spectral mean of burst in plain /t/ was lower in the emphatic context (D = 276 Hz, p = .05). VOT, however, was not affected by emphasis spread. Plain /t/ had long-lag VOT averaging 52 ms; emphatic /ṭ/ had short-lag VOT averaging 17 ms. These values were not different in emphatic context (p = .743). The findings demonstrate that emphasis spread within a syllable affects only spectral characteristics of a coronal stop. Emphaticness of plain /t/ did not affect its VOT and did not result in complete transformation of the stop category

영어 어말 설단폐쇄음의 탈락 양상: 고빈도 단어를 중심으로

Word frequency exerts a strong influence on coronal stop deletion. In general, high frequency words undergo word-final coronal stop deletion at a higher rate than low frequency words. This deletion process is undergone in consonant cluster simplification for economy of articulation. This study aims to investigate aspects of English word-final coronal stop deletion across a word boundary in high frequency words. Data were extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of Spontaneous American English Speech depending on morphological, phonological, phonetic and sociolinguistic variations. The results showed that different phonological environments favored one type of coronal stop variations such as [t], flapping, glottaling and deletion. Deletion was most prevalent for coronal stops in C/t,d/#C environment while coronal stops frequently underwent flapping in V/t,d/#V environment. In C/t,d/#C environment adjacent identical features were prohibited (Obligatory Contour Principle). More specifically, when the preceding consonants were more similar to coronal stops, the rate of coronal stop deletion was higher. The following consonants also influenced the coronal stop deletion. The rate of deletion was higher before sonorants than before obstruents. Therefore, actual education of coronal stop deletion should be done depending on various environments and factors.

벅아이 코퍼스에서 나타나는 영어 설단폐쇄음의 변이 양상: 단어경계를 중심으로

벅아이 코퍼스에서 나타나는 영어 설단폐쇄음의 변이 양상: 단어경계를 중심으로

Mediating linguistic diversity in the diaspora: An illustration from Haitian Canadians

This article aims at discussing mechanisms involved in the formation of diasporas and the phonetic dynamics underlying part of their diversity, as seen through the lens of a heterogeneous group of Canadians of Haitian descent living in Toronto. As an illustration of this, the data presented in this paper relates to some aspects of the English phonological repertoire used by 24 Haitian Canadians who were interviewed using the sociolinguistic interview technique. The phonological variables selected are coronal stop deletion and non postvocalic /r/. Auditory data results show realisations characteristic of mainstream Canadian English but also those found typically in francophone speakers of English and/or transferred from Haitian Creole. Haitian Canadians whose English is their dominant language are more likely to produce mainstream Canadian English forms. In light of the creative and ever-changing structural nature of many contemporary diasporas, including Canada, this phonological study shows a situation of “in-betweens” where Haitian Canadians, especially speakers who were born in Haiti, exhibit both a sense of identity preservation with respect to the host society and towards their ‘Haitianity’. The qualitative and quantitative data presently available does not grant the suggestion that a Haitian English variety is emerging in Toronto. This may be partly explained by the lack of strong community ties and a relatively young settlement in the city, and also due to Haitians’ diverse socio-historical and migratory trajectories.

Training Non-Native Consonant Production with Perceptual and Articulatory Cues

Background/Aims: Adult learners often struggle to produce novel phonemes in a second language and lack clear articulatory targets. This study investigates the combined efficacy of perceptual and articulatory training, the latter involving explicit instruction about tongue position and laryngeal control, for the production of non-native phonemes. Methods: Native English speakers were trained on a series of Hindi coronal stop consonants, with production assessed before, during, and after training sessions, on the basis of acoustic cues to place of articulation and voicing. Results: Improvement in production was most apparent during artic u­latory training, when cues to target articulation were available to learners. Some improvements were maintained after training was concluded. Conclusion: Articu­latory training can contribute useful cues to pronunciation for early learners. Improvement in acquisition of targets varies in stability across learners and targets.

Task-dependence of articulator synergies.

In speech production, the motor system organizes articulators such as the jaw, tongue, and lips into synergies whose function is to produce speech sounds by forming constrictions at the phonetic places of articulation. The present study tests whether synergies for different constriction tasks differ in terms of inter-articulator coordination. The test is conducted on utterances [ɑpɑ], [ɑtɑ], [ɑiɑ], and [ɑkɑ] with a real-time magnetic resonance imaging biomarker that is computed using a statistical model of the forward kinematics of the vocal tract. The present study is the first to estimate the forward kinematics of the vocal tract from speech production data. Using the imaging biomarker, the study finds that the jaw contributes least to the velar stop for [k], more to pharyngeal approximation for [ɑ], still more to palatal approximation for [i], and most to the coronal stop for [t]. Additionally, the jaw contributes more to the coronal stop for [t] than to the bilabial stop for [p]. Finally, the study investigates how this pattern of results varies by participant. The study identifies differences in inter-articulator coordination by constriction task, which support the claim that inter-articulator coordination differs depending on the active articulator synergy.

Modulation of the following segment effect on English coronal stop deletion by syntactic boundaries

Variable deletion of word-final coronal stops in English is strongly conditioned by whether the following segment is a consonant or a vowel. This paper uses corpus data to show that this following segment effect is weaker across strong syntactic boundaries (such as between independent matrix clauses) than across weak syntactic boundaries (between a verb and its direct object). This result is argued to be compatible with the Production Planning Hypothesis: that following context effects on phonological variation can be bled by failure to encode the next word in time for it to influence an alternation. Further, the interaction of boundary and following segment is asymmetric; the deletion-inhibiting effect of a following vowel is significantly weakened across stronger syntactic boundaries, while the deletion rate before consonants is more stable across different boundary types. The asymmetry provides new evidence in favor of syllabification-based explanations for why coronal stop deletion exhibits the following segment effect.