Initial Consonants Research Articles

Prosodic size and rendaku immunity

Research has shown there to be a strong relationship between the mora and prosody in Modern Japanese. Recently proposed, although not as yet independently evaluated, has been a prosodic size rule governing the well-known allomorphic phenomenon of rendaku, by which the initial consonants of non-initial elements in compounds may be voiced under certain conditions. It is claimed that this prosodic size rule flags a native Japanese noun as being rendaku immune, a condition for which no empirical verification has hitherto existed. In this paper the author will demonstrate that, although slight modifications are necessary, a prosodic size rule for flagging rendaku immunity is indeed a reality.

Syllabification in Moroccan Arabic: evidence from patterns of temporal stability in articulation

AbstractCompeting proposals on the syllabification of initial consonants in Moroccan Arabic are evaluated using a combination of experimental and modelling techniques. The proposed model interprets an input syllable structure as a set of articulatory landmarks coordinated in time. This enables the simulation of temporal patterns associated with the input syllable structure under different noise conditions. Patterns of stability between landmarks simulated by the model are matched to patterns in data collected with Electromagnetic Articulometry experiments. The results implicate a heterosyllabic parse of initial clusters so that strings like /sbu/ comprise two syllables, [s.bu]. Beyond this specific result for Moroccan Arabic, the model reveals the range of validity of certain stability-based indexes of syllable structure and generates predictions that allow evaluation of a syllabic parse even when stability-based heuristics break down. Overall, the paper provides support for the broad hypothesis that syllable structure is reflected in patterns of temporal stability and contributes analytical tools to evaluate competing theories on the basis of these patterns.

The roles of tone and syllable structure in Mandarin spoken word recognition.

The present study adopts the gating paradigm to investigate the roles of tone, onset sonorancy, and nasal coda in Mandarin spoken word recognition. Duration‐blocked gates generated from eight monosyllabic quadruplets with matching frequencies of occurrence were used as stimuli. The initial consonant of each syllable formed the first gate, with later gates formed by 40 ms increments. Twenty‐eight native Mandarin speakers from Beijing were asked to identify each gated stimulus by writing down the Chinese characters. Isolation point (IP) based on correct tone identification as well as overall correct word identification (correct onset, rhyme, and tone) were collected. Results from both conditions showed that tone 1 has an earlier IP than tone 4, which has an earlier IP than tones 2 and 3. Sonorant‐initial syllables have an earlier IP than obstruent‐initial syllables, but further analyses of covariance indicated that this is due to the fact that IP covariates with the duration of the initial consonant. Syllables without a nasal coda have an earlier IP than syllables with a nasal coda. This effect might be due to the interference of nasalization on tone perception or the delayed tonal contour realization due to the nasal coda [Xu, (1998)].

A non-linear efferent-inspired model of the auditory system; matching human confusions in stationary noise

Current predictors of speech intelligibility are inadequate for understanding and predicting speech confusions caused by acoustic interference. We develop a model of auditory speech processing that includes a phenomenological representation of the action of the Medial Olivocochlear efferent pathway and that is capable of predicting consonant confusions made by normal hearing listeners in speech-shaped Gaussian noise. We then use this model to predict human error patterns of initial consonants in consonant–vowel–consonant words in the context of a Dynamic Rhyme Test. In the process we demonstrate its potential for speech discrimination in noise. Our results produced performance that was robust to varying levels of stationary additive speech-shaped noise and which mimicked human performance in discrimination of synthetic speech as measured by the Chi-squared test.

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

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

Effects of first-element phonological-length and etymological-type features on sequential voicing (rendaku) of second elements

Abstract Using a questionnaire comprising voiced-or-voiceless choices by native Japanese speakers, the present study investigated the influence of the phonological-length and etymological-type of first elements on sequential voicing or rendaku of the initial consonant of the CVCVCV-structured Wago-like nonwords /hukari/ and /hasuri/. Experiment 1 revealed an overall trend where voicing determination (i.e., voicing power) from one mora to three morae was observed to have a descending order of strength. After controlling for printed-frequency, script type, and free-standing single kanji, Experiment 2 showed that single-mora Wago first-elements had stronger voicing power on second elements than those consisting of two and three morae. Considering the combined results of Experiments 1 and 2, it may be concluded that a single CV mora Wago of first elements had greater voicing power than two or three morae cases. Experiment 3 demonstrated that first element Wago exerted stronger voicing power upon second elements than either Kango or Gairaigo, which exerted equally influence. However, after controlling for printed-frequency and script type, Experiment 4 indicated that the first element Wago and Kango resulted in rendaku on second elements with greater voicing power than Gairaigo. Thus, the present study demonstrated that both the first-element phonological-length and etymological-type appear to influence rendaku of the voiceless consonants of second elements.

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

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

Perceptual cues for consonant identification.

This research quantitatively explores the perceptual cues of initial consonants by using psychoacoustical methods. Speech sounds are encoded by across‐frequency temporal onsets called events. To determine the time‐frequency importance function of the consonant sounds, speech stimuli (16 nonsense CVs from the LDC‐2005S22 database) are high‐pass or low‐pass filtered and time‐truncated before being presented to normal hearing listeners. Databases of speech perception under various signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions are constructed to investigate the effect of noise on speech recognition. A visualization tool that simulates the auditory peripheral processing, called the AI‐gram, is used for the analysis of the speech events under various SNR conditions. To verify the nature of the events, a special software has been developed to convert one sound into another, starting from real speech sounds, by removing primary noise robust cues. In pilot studies with a hearing‐impaired subject, it is shown that feature boosting improves the robustness of select speech consonants to noise.

Voiced Initial Consonant Perception Deficits in Older Listeners With Hearing Loss and Good and Poor Word Recognition

This study examined differences in voiced consonant-vowel (CV) perception in older listeners with normal hearing and in 2 groups of older listeners with matched hearing losses: those with good and those with poor word recognition scores. Thirty-six participants identified CVs from an 8-item display from the natural voiced initial consonants/b, d, g, m, n, eth, v and z/in three vowel contexts (/a, o, u/) spoken by a male and a female talker. The listeners with hearing loss and poor word recognition scores (WRS) made more of the same types of errors, as well as errors not made by listeners with hearing loss and good word recognition. Errors above chance rates for these listeners were highest in the context of /a/ and were similar in the contexts of /o/ and /u/. Sequential information analyses (SINFAs) verified that information was transmitted least efficiently in the context of /a/. The results yielded a list of consonant confusions unique to listeners with poor WRS. Listeners with poor WRS have more difficulty identifying voiced initial consonants in CV syllables than do listeners with good WRS. These listeners made some systematic errors, but most errors were nonsystematic, perhaps due to the low level of feature information transmitted.

Bugotu and Cheke Holo reduplication: in defence of the Emergence of the Unmarked

This paper provides an analysis of the reduplicative systems of Bugotu, Cheke Holo, Tuvaluan and Hoava. In Bugotu and Cheke Holo, intervocalic consonants are not reflected in the reduplicative substring; Tuvaluan reduplication creates initial geminate consonants, while Hoava reduplicants include coda consonants. Blevins (2003, 2005) argues that these languages pose a serious problem for the optimality-theoretic hypothesis of the Emergence of the Unmarked (McCarthy & Prince 1994), which predicts that reduplicated structures should not favour relatively marked outputs. I show that the data in fact are not problematic for the Emergence of the Unmarked hypothesis, because different, conflicting dimensions of markedness can arise in reduplicative phonology. In Bugotu and Cheke Holo, the tolerance of extrasyllabic segments combined with size-penalising constraints helps produce the consonant-deletion pattern. A similar defence of the Emergence of the Unmarked is offered for the reduplicative systems of Tuvaluan and Hoava.

Treatment for anomia in Chinese using an ortho‐phonological cueing method

Background: Anomia therapies can be broadly categorised into semantically based and word‐form based. Comparable treatment outcomes of these different approaches have been reported. Law, Wong, Sung, and Hon (2006a) have recently applied semantic feature analysis (Boyle & Coelho, 1995) on three Chinese anomic speakers and found treatment progress limited to those with relatively mild semantic deficits. Hence the present study explored alternative approaches to manage naming problems. Despite the challenges to the use of cueing that stem from the characteristics of the Chinese script—i.e., the lack of mapping between sub‐character components and phonemes—an intervention was designed in which participants were trained to associate objects with letters representing the initial consonants of the target names, from which phonological cues were generated to assist in word retrieval. Aims: This study evaluated the effectiveness of an ortho‐phonological therapy for Chinese anomia. Given its function of strengthening semantic and phonological representations, the therapy was predicted to have item‐specific treatment effects. Methods & Procedures: Four Cantonese‐speaking anomic individuals participated in the study. Two were hypothesised to have disrupted access from semantics to phonology, whereas the other two suffer additional impairment to semantic processing and phonological output. A multiple baseline design was adopted, consisting of pre‐treatment training in which participants learned to generate CV syllables in response to letter cues, then a baseline, one or two treatment phases, and a maintenance phase. A cueing hierarchy was used during therapy, which began with a letter cue, followed by the provision of increasing phonological information if the participant continuously failed to retrieve the target name. Outcomes & Results: All participants benefited from the intervention and could maintain treatment gains for at least 1 month. Item‐specific improvement was observed for two participants, whereas the third patient also made progress on some of the untrained items that shared the same initials as the treated stimuli, and treatment generalisation of the fourth patient further extended to items with initial consonants different from the trained items. Different levels of facility in employing letter–sound correspondence during naming and executive problem‐solving skills were argued to have contributed to discrepant treatment outcomes. Conclusions: The ortho‐phonological therapy is a viable option for rehabilitating anomia in Chinese. It has the potential for being a naming strategy that may result in general improvement in word retrieval. Our findings echo the view in recent studies that urges investigation into the role of non‐linguistic cognitive abilities in predicting treatment outcomes.

Mandarin Lexical Tone Recognition: The Gating Paradigm

Research on spoken word recognition in Indo-European languages often does not incorporate prosody. In Mandarin Chinese, however, lexical prosody is used extensively and has been shown to affect word processing in previous studies. The present study uses the gating paradigm to investigate the processing of the four Mandarin tones as well as the role of the initial segment in processing. Duration-blocked gates generated from eight monosyllabic quadruplets with matching frequencies of occurrence were used as stimuli. To evaluate the effect of the initial segment, the initial consonant of each syllable always formed the first gate, with later gates formed by 40ms increments. Results showed that Tone 1 has a significantly earlier Isolation Point (IP) than Tone 4, which has an earlier IP than Tones 2 and 3. Sonorant-initial syllables have an earlier IP than obstruent-initial syllables, but further analyses of covariance indicated that IP covariates with the duration of the initial consonant. The tone responses proposed by the participants before reaching the IP were cross-examined with the acoustic features of the four tones. The results indicated that high register cues are more prominent than low register cues, as high tones were never misidentified as low tones. Moreover, contour information outweighs low register cues, as low-onset tones were sometimes misidentified as high-onset tones with which they share similar contours. These results provide more detailed temporal information about tone processing for Mandarin.

The Plausibility of Tonal Evolution in the Malay Dialect Spoken in Thailand: Evidence from an Acoustic Study

The F0 values of vowels following voiceless consonants are higher than those of vowels following voiced consonants; high vowels have a higher F0 than low vowels. It has also been found that when high vowels follow voiced consonants, the F0 values decrease. In contrast, low vowels following voiceless consonants show increasing F0 values. In other words, the voicing of initial consonants has been found to counterbalance the intrinsic F0 values of high and low vowels (House and Fairbanks 1953, Lehiste and Peterson 1961, Lehiste 1970, Laver 1994, Teeranon 2006). To test whether these three findings are applicable to a disyllabic language, the F0 values of high and low vowels following voiceless and voiced consonants were studied in a Malay dialect of the Austronesian language family spoken in Pathumthani Province, Thailand. The data was collected from three male informants, aged 30-35. The Praat program was used for acoustic analysis. The findings revealed the influence of the voicing of initial consonants on the F0 of vowels to be greater than that of the influence of vowel height. Evidence from this acoustic study shows the plausibility for the Malay dialect spoken in Pathumthani to become a tonal language by the influence of initial consonants rather by the influence of the high-low vowel dimension.

Similarity structure in visual speech perception and optical phonetic signals

A complete understanding of visual phonetic perception (lipreading) requires linking perceptual effects to physical stimulus properties. However, the talking face is a highly complex stimulus, affording innumerable possible physical measurements. In the search for isomorphism between stimulus properties and phoneticeffects, second-order isomorphism was examined between theperceptual similarities of video-recorded perceptually identified speech syllables and the physical similarities among the stimuli. Four talkers produced the stimulus syllables comprising 23 initial consonants followed by one of three vowels. Six normal-hearing participants identified the syllables in a visual-only condition. Perceptual stimulus dissimilarity was quantified using the Euclidean distances between stimuli in perceptual spaces obtained via multidimensional scaling. Physical stimulus dissimilarity was quantified using face points recorded in three dimensions by an optical motion capture system. The variance accounted for in the relationship between the perceptual and the physical dissimilarities was evaluated using both the raw dissimilarities and the weighted dissimilarities. With weighting and the full set of 3-D optical data, the variance accounted for ranged between 46% and 66% across talkers and between 49% and 64% across vowels. The robust second-order relationship between the sparse 3-D point representation of visible speech and the perceptual effects suggests that the 3-D point representation is a viable basis for controlled studies of first-order relationships between visual phonetic perception and physical stimulus attributes.

The role of a coda consonant as error trigger in repetition tasks

Speech errors are known to exhibit an intrusion bias in that segments are added rather than deleted; also, a shared final consonant can cause an interaction of the initial consonants. A principled connection between these two phenomena has been drawn in a gestural account of errors: Articulatory measures revealed a preponderance of errors in which both the target and intruding gesture are co-produced, instead of one replacing the other. This gestural intrusion bias has been interpreted as an errorful coupling of gestures in a dynamically stable coordination mode (1:1, in-phase), triggered by the presence of a shared coda consonant. Capturing tongue motion with ultrasound, the current paper investigates whether shared gestural composition other than a coda can trigger gestural co-production errors. Subjects repeated two-word phrases with alternating initial stop or fricative consonants in a coda condition (e.g., top cop), a no-coda condition (e.g., taa kaa), and a three-word phrase condition (e.g., taa kaa taa). The no-coda condition showed a lower error rate than the coda condition. The three-word phrase condition elicited an intermediate error rate for the stop consonants, but a high error rate for the fricative alternations. While all conditions exhibited both substitution and co-production errors, a gestural intrusion bias emerged mainly for the coda condition. The findings suggest that the proportion of different error types (substitutions, co-production errors) differs as a function of stimulus type: not all alternating stimulus patterns that trigger errors result in an intrusion bias.

Voice onset time in Shekgalagarhi stops

The aim of this paper is to determine the efficacy of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in distinguishing a series of word initial homorganic stop consonants in Shengologa, a dialect of Shekgalagarhi, a South-eastern Bantu language of the Western Sotho-Tswana group. Issues pertinent to VOT are also addressed: namely VOT as a function of place of articulation; and the effect of phonetic context on VOT; specifically the influence of the following vowel. Compared with other stops, ejectives have often manifested long VOT values in some languages with VOT values of around 80+ ms in duration being not uncommon. The argument is that in Shengologa, the voiceless unaspirated stops are pulmonic stops rather than glottalic. Voiceless aspirated stops in general manifest long duration of aspiration. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol.3 () 2006: pp.169-185

Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh: An alternative to rule-based learning

This paper examines Welsh-speaking children's productive command of mutation — a set of morphophonological changes, conditioned by lexical and syntactic environments, that affect the initial consonants of words. In Welsh, grammatical gender is marked by mutations, and the mapping between mutation and gender is opaque. Using a Cloze-type procedure, Experiment 1 presented children between the ages of 41/2 and 9 years with a distant gender-marked context, and Experiments 2 and 3 presented similar-aged children with triggering contexts for mutation that were not conditioned by gender. Results suggest that children's ability to mark gender categories is not limited by their underlying knowledge of the mutation system in general, but the course of development is protracted and complex.

Some pedantry

I have enjoyed the recent debate and at times enthusiastic correspondence stimulated by Drs. Harrop-Griffiths and Denny, after their recent editorial [1]. Whilst I have no wish to become embroiled in the professional jousting concerning different anatomical approaches to brachial plexus blockade, I must take issue with their claim that the phrase ‘medicine needs facts not cats’ is alliterative [2]. Alliteration is the matching or repetition of initial consonants in neighbouring words, for example ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’. Alternatively, assonance is repetition of vowel sounds, but not consonant sounds, for example ‘fleet feet sweep by sleeping geeks’. Additionally, consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels, for example ‘plitter platter’. Surely the phrase in question is not alliterative, but assonantal with possible hints of consonance? I am perhaps most disappointed in Dr. Harrop-Griffiths, who has previously shown his interest, aptitude and pedantry for such matters [3]. Perhaps Pippa's ‘pproach perplexes the protagonists!

Teaching phoneme awareness to pre‐literate children with speech disorder: a randomized controlled trial

Awareness of individual phonemes in words is a late-acquired level of phonological awareness that usually develops in the early school years. It is generally agreed to have a close relationship with early literacy development, but its role in speech change is less well understood. Speech and language therapy for children with speech disorder involves tasks that appear, either implicitly or explicitly, to require a phonemic level of awareness. However, children typically attend for intervention at a pre-school, pre-literate stage, i.e. before they would be expected to have developed the relevant phoneme segmentation and manipulation skills. To investigate whether it is possible to teach phoneme awareness skills to pre-literate children with speech disorder. In a randomized controlled trial design 42 children with speech disorder, aged 4;0-4;6, were allocated to either a phonological awareness or a language stimulation programme. Children were assessed on four measures of phoneme awareness (alliteration awareness, phoneme isolation, word segmentation and phoneme addition/deletion) immediately before and after the programme and categorized as 'improved' or 'not improved' according to predetermined criteria. Fisher's Exact test was used to compare outcome in the two groups. Significantly more children improved in the phonological awareness group than in the language stimulation group for three out of the four measures (all except alliteration awareness). However, for the two most advanced tasks (segmentation and addition/deletion) only a small minority of children showed improvement. A marked improvement in Phoneme Isolation was made by the majority of children in the phonological awareness group. It is possible to teach some advanced phoneme awareness skills to some pre-literate children. Phoneme Isolation was the most easily learned and is a skill that appears very relevant to speech and language therapy. However, phoneme addition, deletion and word segmentation showed relatively limited improvement and only in a small number of cognitively able and older children. Whereas isolation of word initial consonants appears to be a skill that can be triggered at 4;0-4;6 by relevant activities, most children in the study were not cognitively ready for more advanced, abstract phoneme manipulation tasks. This raises questions about how speech and language therapists should tackle many common errors and the age at which we should aim to develop or draw on phoneme awareness to stimulate speech change.

Phonological specificity of vowels and consonants in early lexical representations

Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age. One might expect that infants bring some of this phonological knowledge to bear in encoding the words they subsequently acquire. In line with this expectation, studies have found that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of initial consonants of familiar words when asked to identify a referent. However, there is very little research investigating infants’ sensitivity to vowels in lexical representations. Experiment 1 examines whether infants at 15, 18 and 24 months are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words. The results provide evidence for vowels constraining lexical recognition of familiar words. Experiment 2 compares 15, 18 and 24-month-olds’ sensitivity to consonant and vowel mispronunciations of familiar words in order to assess the relative contribution of vowels and consonants in constraining lexical recognition. Our results suggest a symmetry in infants’ sensitivity to vowel and consonant mispronunciations early in the second year of life.