Lenis Stop Research Articles

The Effect of Cue-specific Lexical Competitors on Hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 Contrasts in Korean Stops

As is known, the fundamental frequencies (F0) of the vowels following aspirated or lenis stops have become associated with the aspirated~lenis stop contrast while Voice Onset Time (VOT) values of them became merged in Seoul Korean. Previous studies found the effects of age, gender, lexical frequency, and vowel height. However, although lexical competition has been demonstrated to affect the trajectory of sound change regarding contrastivity, it has not been considered in this context. The present study examines the effects of lexical competition on this sound change. Through a production experiment, analyses demonstrate that the aspirated~lenis contrast is hyperarticulated in minimal pairs for both VOT and F0, but only in aspirated stops with following high vowels. Moreover, speakers advanced in the sound change produce lower F0 values for lenis stops with following non-high vowels if an aspirated competitor exists. We find that the F0 distinction in lenis stops is more hyperarticulated in speakers advanced in the sound change, but that speakers appear to hyperarticulate VOT regardless of how much of a VOT contrast they normally produce themselves. This may be related to the fact that VOT is still a robust cue to the aspirated~lenis distinction in much of the speech community.

Kimchi or gimchi? Perceived similarity between Korean lenis and Japanese voiced/voiceless stop sounds

When distinguishing stop consonants, Korean listeners use the fundamental frequency of the following vowel (F0) as well as the voice onset time (VOT). However, it is unclear whether the F0 and VOT of natural speech sounds play an effective role in hearing nonnative stops. In the present study, we examined whether Korean listeners perceive Japanese voiced stops, rather than Japanese voiceless stops, as being similar to Korean lenis stops depending on F0 and VOT. Native Korean listeners matched a speech sound starting with either a Japanese voiced or voiceless stop to a target. The targets were meaningful visual words starting with a lenis stop in Experiment 1 and meaningless speech sounds starting with a lenis stop in Experiment 2. Native Japanese listeners, who primarily use VOT for stop distinction, also participated in Experiment 2. The results revealed that the extent to which Korean listeners chose voiced stops was influenced consistently by F0, and the pattern of results differed between Korean and Japanese listeners. These findings suggest that even when hearing natural speech sounds, Korean listeners use F0 when judging the similarity between lenis and nonnative stops.

The Non-Coalescence of /h/ and Incomplete Neutralization in South Jeolla Korean.

This study examines articulatory and acoustic data in order to investigate the non-coalescence of /h/ in South Jeolla. Seoul Korean speakers produce /pap/ "rice" followed by /hana/ "one" as [pa.pha.na] with the coalescence of /p/ and /h/; this is called an aspiration merger. In South Jeolla Korean, this merger may be blocked, as in cases where speakers produce /pap+hana/ as [pa.ba.na]. Electroglottographic (EGG) data indicate the existence of two groups of South Jeolla speakers: one that merges the plosive and /h/ (the merger group), and the other with the canonical South Jeolla Korean pronunciation that does not merge the two consonants (the non-merger group). The production of non-coalesced lenis stops in the non-merger group is phonetically comparable with an underlying lenis stop produced by both of the groups. However, in the non-merger group, the open quotient (OQ) of a vowel following a non-coalesced lenis stop is higher (breathier) than that of an underlying lenis stop. Spectral tilt results display a similarly increased breathiness when the vowel follows a non-coalesced lenis stop. As for the non-merger group of South Jeolla, we argue that speakers display incomplete neutralization such that the non-merger group produces two types of voiced lenis stops differing in the phonation of the following vowel. These findings suggest that previous phonological analyses that posit the /h/-deletion in the non-merger group of South Jeolla Korean need to be revisited.

An apparent-time study of an ongoing sound change in Seoul Korean: A prosodic account.

In present-day Seoul Korean, the primary phonetic feature for the lenis–aspirated stop distinction is shifting from VOT to F0. Some previous studies have considered this sound change to be a tonogenesis, whereby the low-level F0 perturbation has developed into tonal features (L for the lenis and H for the aspirated) in the segmental phonology. They, however, have examined the stop distinction only at a phrase- or utterance-initial position. We newly explore the sound change in relation to various prosodic structural factors (position and prominence). Apparent-time production data were recorded from four speaker groups: young female, young male, old female, old male. The way the speakers use VOT versus F0 indeed varies as a function of position and prominence. Crucially, in all groups, VOT is still used for the lenis–aspirated distinction phrase-medially due to the lenis stop voicing. This role of VOT, however, is found only in the non-prominent (unfocused) condition, in which the F0 difference is reduced to a low-level perturbation effect. In the prominent (focused) context in which tones come into play, the role of VOT diminishes, led by young female speakers. These can be interpreted as a prosodically-conditioned, complementary use of the features to maintain sufficient contrast. Importantly, however, the tonal difference under focus is not bidirectionally polarized, so that F0 is not lowered for the lenis stop. A lack of direct enhancement of the distinctive L tone weakens a possibility that F0 is transphonologized to the phonemic feature system of the language. As an alternative to the view that tonal features are newly introduced in the segmental phonology, we propose a prosodic account: the sound change is best characterized as a prosodically-conditioned change in the use of the segmental voicing feature (implemented by VOT) versus already available post-lexical tones in the intonational phonology of Korean.

An Investigation of the Perception of Korean Stops and Fricatives as a Function of Prosodic Conditions

This study investigates how the prosodically conditioned phonetic properties from different prosodic levels and word types affect the perception of Korean alveolar stops and fricatives. In the perception study, the identification of the Korean stops (/t/, /tʰ/, /t’/) and the fricatives (/s/, /s’/) was examined across IP-initial, PP-initial, and Wd-initial positions in real and nonsense words. For the lenis and aspirated stops, and the lenis fricative, the CVs taken from the Wd-initial position caused more error rates in the identification of the target segments placed in the IP-initial and PP-initial positions. Also with the lenis stop, listeners showed greater error rates in identifying CVs from the IP-initial position when the CVs were placed in the PP-initial and Wd-initial positions. This error pattern was not found for the fortis stop and the fortis fricative.

Achieving Native-like Pronunciation through Phonetic Analysis and Poetry

The problem of identifying phonetic phenomena related to language transfer and correction in second language (L2) production can be approached by conducting broad analyses of the same L2 speaker. This approach is applied in the present study, which investigates errors of pronunciation segmentally (grammatical mistakes, voicing of consonants, and vowel distinctions) and suprasegmentally (intonation and time-gaining techniques) in order to establish the possibility of their being corrected in two recordings of readings by a non-native French speaker. The errors from the first recording were identified, analyzed, and corrected through pronunciation exercises with the aim of raising awareness of the problems to help overcome them on the second reading attempt. The correction methods involved exercises such as reading poetry aloud, pronouncing consonantal segments in various vocalic environments, and reading the target text, syllable by syllable. In addition, the analysis investigates the possibility of phonetic transfer from the two primary languages of the speaker: Bulgarian and English. The researcher is the speaker, the methodological implications of which are discussed, reaching the overall conclusion that it helps to raise awareness of the phonetic background of the errors. Despite the risk of compromising the data through this methodological choice, the results show that a high level of attention and monitoring of the speech alone may be insufficient for internalizing corrections. While grammatical mistakes were corrected most effectively, other segmental and suprasegmental features showed different levels of success. One of the features (the /ɛ/ and /e/ distinction) even exhibited deterioration in the second recording. These examples suggest the presence of “equivalence classification” phenomena and raise the question of the appropriateness of the phonetic exercises for overcoming the errors. Another area of interest was determining the source of errors such as “uptalk”, the reassigning of grammatical gender, word-final devoicing, and elimination of syllable-initial lenis stop prevoicing. Due to the limited amount of data available, it was difficult to draw firm conclusions, but the tendencies observed suggested that the errors might be due to transfer from the speaker’s primary languages, whose influence appeared to be equal. Further research should therefore control for the influence of the two primary languages and extend the scope to include a second post-training recording. Overall, the second recording demonstrated that raised awareness and training helped to achieve acceptable production in the suprasegmental features as well as most of the instances of unfamiliar phones, such as /ʁ/, front-rounded vowels, and nasal vowels.

Coarticulation of non-modal phonation.

Although there are many studies on the acoustics of phonation, few deal specifically with the coarticulation of non-modal phonations. Using data from three languages (English, White Hmong, and Korean), this project describes the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels. In English, such contours are found in vowels preceded by [h] or an aspirated stop, and followed by a preglottalized coda-stop, e.g., “cat.” In Hmong, the contours are found in vowels with a phonemic creaky tone that are preceded by an aspirated stop or [h]. In Korean, the contours are derived from vowels preceded by an aspirated or lenis stop and followed by a coda-stop, which is found to show preglottalization. Twelve speakers of each language were recorded saying monosyllables with expected phonation contours in carrier sentences. The phonation was analyzed using VOICESAUCE [Shue et al. (2009)], which outputs a value at each millisecond for several acoustic measures. Time courses for measures like H1*-H2* and harmonics-to-noise ratio show support for the presence of breathy-creaky contours in the three languages. I analyze the cross-linguistic differences in the timing of the contours in light of previous findings on the timing of non-modal phonation [e.g., Blankenship (2002)] and current theories of coarticulation.

Initial stops in Hittite (with an excursus on the spelling of stops in Alala Akkadian)

In this article it is argued that in Hittite the members of the sign pairs ta vs. da, ka vs. ga and ke/i vs. ge/i represent phonologically distinct sounds in word-initial position. The signs ta and da represent a normal fortis and a glottalized fortis stop, respectively: ta = /ta/ vs. . The signs ka and ke/i, on the one hand, and ga and ge/i, on the other, represent a fortis and a lenis stop, respectively: ka and ke/i = /k-/ vs. ga and ge/i = /g-/. The distribution of the fortis and lenis stops in word-initial position in Hittite is then compared to the situation in the Luwic branch. Moreover, it is argued that the phonetic values of these signs directly reflect their value as attested in the Old Babylonian texts from Alala VII.

An acoustic and perceptual study of Swiss German stops

Oral stops in Swiss German show a three-way contrast, traditionally characterized as lenis /b, d, g/, fortis /p, t, k/ and long fortis /p:, t:, k:/. Fortis occur after long vowels, long fortis after short vowels, and lenis after both. Spectrographic analysis was performed on all stops in medial and final position for three Bernese speakers. Absence of voicing and lack of significant differences in voice onset times were noted, suggesting closure duration alone accounts for the three-way contrast: lenis are on average 57% shorter than fortis, and fortis 70% shorter than long fortis. Using the minimal set [ra:de] (‘spin’), [ra:te] (‘guess’) and [rat:e] (‘rat’), the salience of preceding vowel length relative to closure duration was examined in two perceptual experiments: The lenis stop was lengthened in 20-ms increments to long fortis length, and the long fortis stop was shortened to lenis length. The lengthened continuum shows a clear shift from lenis to fortis percept, but no shift to fortis long. The shortened continuum shows chance performance. Robust crossover effects in the lengthened continuum suggest vowel and consonant length are relevant to stop identification, while the shortened continuum suggests vowel length is primary.

Gestural overlap analysis of lenis stop reduction in Korean.

Korean lenis stops have been reported to become voiced intervocalically (Kagaya, 1974) and are often reduced to sonorants in casual speech with different degrees of reduction depending on the place of articulation (Lee, 1995). Velar lenis stops are more often reduced than the labials and coronals, which makes sense from the point of view of articulatory phonology (Browman and Goldstein, 1990). The oral gesture for a velar stop is on the same vocal tract tier (tongue body tier) as the neighboring vowels, so it should be more affected by overlap and blending with the vowel gestures than the closure gestures for other stops. This study investigates in what vowel environments lenis stop closure shows the most reduction. /VCV/ tokens in carrier sentences were recorded and acoustic analysis was done. The results showed that generally, reducing lenis stop closure is most in the environment of preceding and following low vowels, and least in the environment of high vowels, where the tongue body gestures of neighb...

Sound symbolism in Korean

I. In Korean, alternation between certain vowels or consonants in sound symbolic adjectives and adverbs is regularly correlated with a connotation shift in those words. The examples below illustrate such alternation and the resulting connotation shift: (i) Vowel alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘(turn) round and round’ /pεŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the circle involved is smaller and the movement faster)’(2) Consonant alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘round and round’ /phiŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the movement is more powerful and faster)’ ‘ppiŋkwl/ same as /phiŋkwl/ The alternation between /i/ and /ε/ in the examples in (1) brings about a connotation shift in the speed of the movement and also in the size of the moving object and of the circle made by the circular movement. In the examples in (2), the alternation between the word initial lenis stop /p/ on the one hand, and its aspirated or tense counterpart on the other, signals a connotation shift in the speed and force of the movement, but curiously not in the size of the circle or of the moving object. These means of changing the connotation of words are highly productive in the sense that, given a basic word that belongs to the category of sound symbolic words, native speakers can predict the form and connotation of the paired member resulting from the phoneme alternation.

The Perception of English Stops by Speakers of English, Spanish. Hungarian, and Thai: A Tape-Cutting Experiment

American English stops, including residual stops, i.e., stops in /s/-clusters after the removal of the /s/, were presented in front of stressed vowels for identification on the one hand to native speakers of American English, on the other, to native speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish, Hungarian, and Thai, languages with differences in the phonetic composition of their stop phonemes. Speakers of American English identified the residual stops with the voiced (lenis) stop; the others, with the voiceless stop. The results suggest that there is a hierarchic organization among the features of these stops: the lack of aspiration tends to force the evaluation of stops in the direction of /b, d, g/ in American English, whereas in the languages where other distinctions exist, the evaluation is different.