Dorsal Fricative Research Articles

Dorsal fricatives in Ukrainian

Dorsal fricatives in Ukrainian

Palatalisation can be quantity-sensitive: Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in Liverpool English

This paper shows that the Liverpool English dorsal fricative, derived through the lenition of /k/, is subject to place of articulation assimilation, driven by the preceding vowel. This is similar to the vowel-driven aspects of typical perseverative Dorsal Fricative Assimilation (a type of palatalisation), as found, for example, in the Germanich-Laut~ach-Lautalternation, where (among other things) a preceding front high or mid vowel is followed by the front dorsal [ç], and other vowels are followed by a back dorsal. However, the majority Liverpool English pattern differs from previously described cases of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in that [ç] only occurs followinglongfront high vowels, while a back dorsal remains after their short congeners. This type of quantity-sensitive pattern in assimilation has not been reported before. We use Centre of Gravity measurements to investigate this pattern of place assimilation, and argue for the use of an innovative normalisation technique for consonant measurements, based on measurements of /k/ aspiration in a linear regression model. We thus both expand the taxonomy of what is known to be possible in phonology and also provide new detail in the description of Liverpool English (including a proposal for the featural analysis of its vowel system).

Two palatovelar fricatives?! the case of theich-Lautin German

AbstractThis study concentrates on the alternation between two dorsal fricatives: [x] and [ç] in Modern Standard German. The primary source of data for the analysis include both native German words and loanwords. Moreover, the discussion encompasses some strictly related processes such asg-spirantization [g] > [x]/[ç], e.g.Ber[ç] ‘mountain’ andTa[x] ‘day’, and coronalization [ç] > [ʃ], e.g.mi[ʃ] ‘me’ found in various German dialects and colloquial variants. Finally, since it is responsible for the appearance of both alternants in an identical context, e.g.Frau[ç]en‘woman, dim’ andrau[x]en‘to smoke’, a brief look is taken at the historical development of the diminutive suffixchen.It is argued here that in contemporary German there are two palatovelar fricatives [ç] which differ in their internal organization of the melodic content. In loanwords and in the diminutive suffix-chen, [ç] is lexically specified for palatality, while after front vowels and coronal sonorants the same fricative shares the palatality element with the preceding segment. The analysis is couched in a recent version of Element Theory and it proceeds on two assumptions: a) front vowels and coronal sonorants [l ʁ n] in German are defined by the resonance element |I| and b) [ç] is a complex segment containing two resonants |I| and |U|.

The distribution of speaker information in Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues.

Although previous work has shown that some speech sounds are more speaker-specific than others, not much is known about the speaker information of the same segment in different linguistic contexts. The present study, therefore, investigated whether Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues contain differential speaker information as a function of syllabic position and labial co-articulation. These linguistic effects, established in earlier work on read broadband speech, were first investigated. Using a corpus of Dutch telephone speech, results showed that the telephone bandwidth captures the expected effects of perseverative and anticipatory labialization for dorsal fricative /x/, for which spectral peaks fall within the telephone band, but not for coronal fricative /s/, for which the spectral peak falls outside the telephone band. Multinomial logistic regression shows that /s/ contains slightly more speaker information than /x/ in telephone speech and that speaker information is distributed across the speech signal in a systematic way; even though differences in classification accuracy were small, codas and tokens with labial neighbors yielded higher scores than onsets and tokens with non-labial neighbors for both /s/ and /x/. These findings indicate that speaker information in the same speech sound is not the same across linguistic contexts.

Compensatory Lengthening in OT and DOT: Loss of Dorsal Fricatives in Middle or Early Modern English

The loss of dorsal fricatives in English held significant consequences for the adjacent tautosyllabic vowels, which underwent Compensatory Lengthening in order to preserve a syllable weight. While the process appears to be regular in descriptive terms, its evaluation handled within standard Optimality Theory highlights the ineffectiveness of the framework to parse both the segment deletion and two weight-related processes: Weight- by-Position and vowel lengthening due to mora preservation. As Optimality Theory has failed to analyse the data in a compelling manner, the introduction of derivation, benefitting from the legacy of Lexical Phonology, seems inevitable. The working solution is provided by Derivational Optimality Theory, which assumes a restrictive use of intermediate stages throughout the evaluation.

Relative difficulty in the L2 acquisition of the Spanish dorsal fricative

Research on relative difficulty in L2 production has revealed that learners target the most salient parameter when acquiring new sounds (Colantoni & Steele, 2008). For example, L1 English-L2 French learners acquire the more salient fricative manner of the French /ʁ/ before the voicing and duration parameters (Colantoni & Steele, 2007, 2008). Previous work in this framework has not compared the acquisition of place and manner parameters. If the more salient parameter is targeted first, we should expect L2 learners to acquire the manner of articulation before the place of articulation, given that manner is a more salient feature than place (Miller & Nicely, 1955; Bedoin et al., 2013). This hypothesis was tested by investigating the L2 production of the Spanish voiceless dorsal fricative by L1 English speakers living in Madrid, a region in which the fricative has a strident realization (Hualde, 2014) and a uvular place of articulation (Ibabe et al., 2016). Fourteen L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers and 14 native Spanish controls performed a picture description task that elicited the target in two vocalic contexts: [aχe, eχa]. An acoustic analysis revealed that the L2 speakers produced fricatives with a similar amplitude compared to controls. However, in the [eχa] context, the learners produced fricatives with a more anterior place of articulation and less frication. The results are consistent with the finding from previous work that learners focus on the most salient property when learning new segments, and provide further evidence that vocalic context is an important factor in production difficulty.

Source characteristics of voiceless dorsal fricatives

Aerodynamic and acoustic data on voiceless dorsal fricatives [x/χ] in Arabic, Persian, and Spanish were recorded to measure the extent to which such productions involve trilling of the uvula, thus exhibiting a sound source which, contrary to assumptions for voiceless fricatives, is mixed rather than aperiodic. Oscillation in airflow indicative of uvular vibration was present more often than not in Arabic (63%) and Persian (75%), while Spanish dorsal fricatives were more commonly produced with unimodal flow indicative of an aperiodic source. When present, uvular vibration frequencies averaged 68 Hz in Arabic and 67 Hz in Persian. Rates of uvular vibration were highly variable, however, and ranged between 40 and 116 Hz, with oscillatory periods averaging 4-5 cycles in duration, with a range of 1-12. The effect of these source characteristics on dorsal fricative acoustics was to significantly skew the spectral shape parameters (M1-M4) commonly used to characterize properties of the anterior filter; however, spectral peak frequency was found to be stable to changes in source characteristics, suggesting the occurrence of trilled tokens is not due to velar-uvular allophony, but rather is more fundamental to dorsal fricative production.

Determining the place of articulation of Arabic voiceless dorsal fricatives

Previous, mostly impressionistic, examinations of Arabic varieties provide varied descriptions of the dorsal fricative /χ/ place of articulation, ranging from velar to uvular. While some descriptions attribute this variation to dialectal differences, descriptions of the same dialect also vary. 3D ultrasound data were collected from six native speakers of different dialects of Arabic, one each from Syria, Palestine, Faifi (in Saudi Arabia), Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco. Apart from the dorsal fricatives, the corpus included productions of palatal, pharyngeal, and contrasting velar and uvular stops to provide comparative standards for various points of articulation. The Syrian, speaker showed very similar articulations for /χ/ with uvular stops, while the other speakers variably showed a more anterior articulation between the velar and uvular stops. The most anterior articulations were apparent in the Moroccan and Algerian speakers, giving some suggestion of a dialectal difference; however, point of articulation of the dorsal fricative was variable for most of the speakers and not obviously restricted by dialect. The effect of these articulatory observations on the acoustic noise spectra are ongoing.

Source properties of dorsal fricatives

Present models of voiceless fricative acoustics assume excitation of the vocal cavity anterior to a narrow constriction by an aperiodic source generated from turbulence within that constriction (or in the case of dipole sources from interaction of the jet with an obstacle downstream). This model has been applied successfully to anterior places of articulation (labial to palatal) but for dorsal fricatives, i.e., velar /x/ and uvular /χ/, there is evidence to suggest the assumption of a line source may not hold. Rather, preliminary data from our lab and from studies such as Zeroual (ICPhS, 2003) and Shosted & Chikovani (JIPA, 2006) indicates intermittent presence of a mixed source due to passive vibration of the uvula, yet no study to date has directly addressed this element of the sound source in dorsal fricative production. Acoustic and aerodynamic data on dorsal fricatives produced by four speakers each of Arabic, Persian, and Spanish are presented to validate the nature of the dorsal fricative source component and the degree of cross-linguistic variation in production of these sounds. Measures of periodicity duration and cycle amplitude/shape are employed to estimate the oscillatory pattern of the uvula and model its contribution to the radiated acoustic signal.

Synchronic evidence of a diachronic change: Voicing and duration in French and Spanish stop-liquid clusters

AbstractThis article investigates the role that the phonetic parameters of duration and voicing play in shaping asymmetric patterns of Romance stop-liquid cluster realization. Based on acoustic analysis of experimental data from Quebec French and Argentine Spanish, we demonstrate the existence of an asymmetry in the proportional duration of the stop and a following epenthetic vowel or lateral: sonorants are shorter after voiceless stops in stop-liquid clusters. Rhotics do not participate in this process. The Spanish tap does not vary significantly in length, and the French dorsal fricative is longer in voiceless clusters. We propose that compensatory adjustments of the following sonorant are the result of the interaction of coarticulatory constraints, both universal (shorter sonorants after voiceless stops or fricatives) and language-specific (voicing in dorsal fricatives in French). Parallels are drawn between the synchronic variation attested and well-known patterns of diachronic change in Romance.

Phonotactic constraint violations in German grammar are detected automatically in auditory speech processing: A human event‐related potentials study

In this human ERP study, effects of language-specific phonotactic restrictions on automatic auditory speech processing were investigated by means of the dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA) that is obligatory in German grammar. Using a multiple passive oddball paradigm, we studied the deviance-related processing of phonotactically ill-formed strings violating DFA. Eight VC-syllables were created by exhaustively combining the vowels [Y,..,...,...] and the dorsal fricatives [Ç X], resulting in four well-formed and four ill-formed stimuli that were contrasted in oddball blocks with changing probabilities of occurrence. Only the ill-formed deviants elicited a negative ERP deflection maximal at about 100 msec after the onset of the fricative. This negativity is considered to reflect a phonotactic evaluation process requiring the activation of implicit phonotactic knowledge from long-term memory and resulting in the automatic detection of a DFA violation.

Activation and application of an obligatory phonotactic constraint in German during automatic speech processing is revealed by human event-related potentials

In auditory speech processing, implicit linguistic knowledge is activated and applied on phonetic and segment-related phonological processing level even if the perceived sound sequence is outside the focus of attention. In this study, the effects of language-specific phonotactic restrictions on pre-attentive auditory speech processing were investigated, using the Mismatch Negativity component of the human event-related brain potential. In German grammar, the distribution of the velar and the palatal dorsal fricative is limited by an obligatory phonotactic constraint, Dorsal Fricative Assimilation, which demands that a vowel and a following dorsal fricative must have the same specifications for articulatory backness. For passive oddball stimulation, we used three phonotactically correct VC syllables and one incorrect VC syllable, composed of the vowels [ε] and [ɔ] and the fricatives [ç] and [ʃ]. Stimuli were contrasted pairwise in experimental oddball blocks in a way that they differed in regard to their respective vowel but shared the fricative. Additionally to the usual Mismatch Negativity which is attributable to the change of the initial vowel and which was elicited by all deviants, we observed a second negative deflection in the deviant ERP elicited by the phonotactically ill-formed syllable only. This negativity cannot be attributed to any acoustical or phonemic difference between standard and deviant, it rather reflects the effect of a phonotactic evaluation process after both sounds of the syllable were identified. Our finding suggests that implicit phonotactic knowledge is activated and applied even outside the focus of the participants' attention.

The Monophthongisation of Diphthongs Before Dorsal Fricatives: A Corpus Study

The Monophthongisation of Diphthongs Before Dorsal Fricatives: A Corpus Study The paper discusses the geographical distribution of the monophthongisation of (1) the diphthong [ei] (< [e:ç]) before the palatal fricative [ç] (i.e. [eiç > i:ç]) and (2) the diphthong [ou] (< [o:×]) before the velar fricative [×] (i.e. [oux > u:x] in words like high an bough. The resulting monophthongs became the input to the diphthongisation rule, a part of the Great Vowel Shift. On the basis of forty-nine Middle English poetic texts from the Chadwyck-Healey online corpus an effort is made here to establish temporal and dialectal conditioning of the change.

The obligatory phonotactic constraint of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in German is activated and applied during automatic speech processing

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Acoustic characteristics of Swedish dorsal fricatives

The identity of [“hooktop heng”], the “voiceless dorso-palatal/velar fricative” or “simultaneous” [“esh”] and [x], is controversial (IPA 2009: 140, 203). The present study attempts to acoustically differentiate [“esh”], [x], and (non-labialized) [“hooktop heng”]. A female speaker of Stockholm Swedish produced VCV nonsense words with balanced V and alternating C. Windowed spectra were obtained and averaged at various locations in the fricatives. [“esh”] can be reliably differentiated from [x] and [“hooktop heng”] based on center of gravity measures in the middle of the fricative. However, center of gravity differences between [x] and [“hooktop heng”] are not revealing, confirming Lindblad's x-ray tracings (1980: 89). The most robust acoustic difference between the two dorsal fricatives is the presence of erratic, high-amplitude disturbances during [x]. These may be attributed to sudden explosions of saliva and ephemeral contact with the uvula, more likely for slightly-retracted [x] than for [“hooktop heng”]. It seems unlikely that [“hooktop heng”] is produced with a second simultaneous constriction that is of acoustic relevance. International Phonetic Association. 1999. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindblad, P. 1980. Svenskans sje- och tje-ljud i ett Allmänfonetisk perspektiv. Travaux de l'Institut de linguistique de Lund 16. Lund: LiberLäromedel/Gleerup.

Has in Hungarian

The paper discusses the possible analyses of the behaviour of [h] and [x] in Hungarian. It argues that in a derivational, rule-based framework two types of analyses are possible: one that assumes two separate underlying segments, /x/ and /h/, and thus misses the generalisation that the two segments are in complementary distribution, a typical characteristic of allophones. The second kind of approach argues that [h] and [x] come from the same underlying segment; this type of analysis can be further divided into two subtypes. According to one of these, the underlying segment is /h/. To be able to derive the attested output forms, three separate strengthening rules must be posited, an obvious disadvantage. The other possible approach, on the other hand, argues that the underlying segment is always /x/ weakened into a [h] in onsets and deleted in a group of lexically marked words by a minor rule. Besides, we also consider the behaviour of H-type segments in voice assimilation: they trigger but do not undergo that process. Siptár and Törkenczy (2000) suggest that if a filter disallowing surface voiced dorsal fricatives is proposed, then the desired result is obtained. While such a filter is an ad hoc device in rule-based theories, it is an organic part of a solution in Optimality Theory (OT), which argues that both /h/ and /x/ may occur in the input and the constraint hierarchy must be such that they should always select well-formed output candidates as optimal regardless of the input. As a result of this and Lexicon Optimization (LO), non-alternating forms will have /h/ or /x/ in their underlying representation depending on the output forms while alternating forms may have an underlying /x/ or /h/ as a result of the alternation sensitive LO (Inkelas 1994). Finally, we will show that the treatment of the behaviour of /x/ or /h/ in voice assimilation is simple in OT if we assume the constraint proposed by Siptár and Törkenczy (2000), prohibiting voiced dorsal fricatives, which, interacting with the ones suggested by Petrova et al. (2001), will be able to select the actual surface form as optimal in all cases.

Feature spreading as dealignment: the distribution of [ç] and [x] in German

Prosodification processes like syllabification and foot parsing are often limited to a particular morphological constituent; i.e. they do not apply across a morpheme boundary. Prince & Smolensky (1993) present a new interpretation of this phenomenon which identifies the edge of a morphological constituent, rather than the morphological constituent as such, as opaque to prosodification. On their view, the morphological boundedness of processes that erect metrical structure reflects the desire for a grammatical constituent edge to coincide with the edge of a prosodic constituent, formalised as ALIGN(GCat-Edge 1, PCat-Edge 1) in their theory. Since prosodification across a morpheme boundary results in a mismatch between the edges of a prosodic and a morphological constituent, it is blocked whenever alignment is obeyed.In this paper I claim that not only prosodification processes but also feature spreading is subject to pressure from an alignment constraint, and so is avoided. The case in point is dorsal fricative assimilation in Modern Standard German. Dorsal fricative assimilation does not apply across a compound boundary or to the dorsal fricative of the diminutive suffix -chen, which, though morphologically a suffix, is prosodically a separate phonological word of German (Noske 1990, Iverson & Salmons 1992, Borowsky 1993, Wiese 1996). Bringing Itô & Mester's (in press) notion of crisp alignment to bear on the analysis, I argue that the application of fricative assimilation is constrained by CRISPEDGE(PrWd), which requires the prosodic word to have sharply defined boundaries. Since spreading from a word-final back vowel to the initial dorsal of the following word results in a blurred word edge, it is ruled out, because CRISPEDGE(PrWd) is ranked higher than the constraint governing spreading.