Minimal Pairs Research Articles

Gradient phonological relationships: Evidence from vowels in French

The dichotomy of contrastive and allophonic phonological relationships has a long-standing tradition in phonology, but there is growing research that points to phonological relationships that fall between contrastive and allophonic. Measures of lexical distinction (minimal pair counts) and predictability of distribution were applied to Laurentian French vowels to quantify three degrees of contrast between pairs: high, mid, and low contrast. According to traditional definitions, both the high and mid contrast pairs are classified as phonologically contrastive, and low contrast pairs as allophonic. As such, a binary view of contrast (contrastive vs. non-contrastive) predicted that high and mid contrast pairs would pattern together on tasks of speech perception, and low contrast pairs would show a different pattern. The gradient view predicted all vowel pairs would fall along a continuum. Thirty-two speakers of Laurentian French participated in two experiments: an AX task and a similarity rating task. The results did not support a strict binary interpretation of contrast, since the high, mid, and low contrast vowel pairs pattern differently across the experiments. Instead, the results support a gradient view of phonological relationships. This article is part of the special collection: Marginal Contrasts

The Effects of Forensically Relevant Face Coverings on the Acoustic Properties of Fricatives

This forensically motivated study investigates the effects of a motorcycle helmet, balaclava, and plastic mask on the acoustics of three English non-sibilant fricatives, /f/, /θ/, and /v/ in two individuals. It examines variation within the individual as an effect of the physical environment. Two speakers recorded a list of minimal pairs in each of the three guises and with no face covering. The results showed that facewear significantly affected fricative intensity and the four spectral moments: centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. The acoustic changes caused by facewear have implications for judging the reliability of earwitnesses’ content recall and voice identification as well as forensic speech scientists’ examination of content and speaker identity in disputed recordings.

Patterns of vowel laxing and harmony in Iberian Spanish: Data from production and perception

We investigate the production and perception outcomes of sound changes involving phonological vowel harmony, and how phonetic processes (i.e., /s/ lenition and vowel laxing) bear on these outcomes. Our data come from two varieties of Iberian Spanish: Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS), a variety that undergoes lenition of word-final /s/, and North-Central Peninsular Spanish (NCPS), a variety that typically retains /s/. In Experiment 1 we show that EAS (but not NCPS) speakers lax the low and mid vowels /a e o/ (i.e., approximating [æ ɛ ɔ], respectively) of /as es os/-final words. In Experiment 2 we show that EAS (but not NCPS) speakers harmonize the mid vowels /e o/ when followed by laxed /a e o/. We analyze this right-to-left spreading as a phonologically-induced change, and argue that it cannot be interpreted as anticipatory coarticulation with word-final lax vowels. During Experiment 3, EAS and NCPS listeners judged the grammatical status of stimuli from the minimal pair [nene] – [nεnε] (‘boy’ – ‘boys’) in a forced-choice word identification task. While all listeners tended to associate [nene]-type stimuli as singular words, EAS listeners alone reliably associated [nεnε]-type stimuli as plural words. This suggests that EAS listeners have greater perceptual sensitivity to the /e/-/ε/ contrast than NCPS listeners. Altogether, our multifaceted approach offers insight on sound change from varied temporal perspectives: we explain what historical factors may have led to laxing and phonological harmony, and what synchronic motivations these processes may have.

DENSITY-1-BOUNDING AND QUASIMINIMALITY IN THE GENERIC DEGREES

AbstractWe consider the question “Is every nonzero generic degree a density-1-bounding generic degree?” By previous results [8] either resolution of this question would answer an open question concerning the structure of the generic degrees: A positive result would prove that there are no minimal generic degrees, and a negative result would prove that there exist minimal pairs in the generic degrees.We consider several techniques for showing that the answer might be positive, and use those techniques to prove that a wide class of assumptions is sufficient to prove density-1-bounding.We also consider a historic difficulty in constructing a potential counterexample: By previous results [7] any generic degree that is not density-1-bounding must be quasiminimal, so in particular, any construction of a non-density-1-bounding generic degree must use a method that is able to construct a quasiminimal generic degree. However, all previously known examples of quasiminimal sets are also density-1, and so trivially density-1-bounding. We provide several examples of non-density-1 sets that are quasiminimal.Using cofinite and mod-finite reducibility, we extend our results to the uniform coarse degrees, and to the nonuniform generic degrees. We define all of the above terms, and we provide independent motivation for the study of each of them.Combined with a concurrently written paper of Hirschfeldt, Jockusch, Kuyper, and Schupp [4], this paper provides a characterization of the level of randomness required to ensure quasiminimality in the uniform and nonuniform coarse and generic degrees.

Tracking the parallelism of difference with ostension schemes

In this paper I develop an instrument for monolingual elicitation through ostension. I call the instrument an ostension scheme. Ostension schemes are matrices with rows to introduce pictures and columns to represent sentences. Ostension schemes have utility for monolingual elicitation of an unfamiliar language and they allow for the collection and storage of certain kinds of linguistic data in a particularly transparent fashion that does not primarily utilize translation. This transparency is due to design features which help distinguish between a sentence and its entailments or between a sentence and precizations of that sentence. The data stored on an ostension scheme allows access to the linguistic hierarchy at the level of the basic sentence. Comparison of minimal sentence pairs allows for movement within the linguistic hierarchy, from the level of the basic sentence to the level of the morpheme or the phoneme. Ostension schemes utilize a principle I call the parallelism of difference. By this principle, minimal differences in the forms of basic sentences tend to correspond to minimal differences in situations described by these sentences. I take up the problem of how to determine these minimal differences. I demonstrate how ostension schemes have been used to elicit a number of sentences from the Sakha language (Yakut) and to identify morphemes in the language, and I also provide a brief discussion of overcoming first language bias of the designer of the scheme. Finally, I consider how the rows and columns of ostension schemes interact and how this interaction facilitates elicitation. The instrument as developed here promises to be highly practical, but at the same time it is limited in the kind of language it can be used to elicit. The theoretical investigation should be useful not only by engaging in fundamental issues of language study but also by paving the way for possibly broader applications of these ostension schemes.

Instrumentos de avaliação de leitura em fase inicial: habilidades e processos envolvidos

Este estudo se constitui como uma análise e discussão de instrumentos de avaliação de leitura inicial: “Bateria de Recepção e Produção da Linguagem Verbal” (SCLIAR-CABRAL, 2003a) e “Teste de Competência de Leitura de Palavras e Pseudopalavras” (SEABRA-CAPOVILLA, 2010). O principal objetivo é analisar questões relativas a alguns dos múltiplos processos cognitivos (decodificação, reconhecimento de palavras e acesso lexical, processamento sintático e textual, e compreensão) e habilidades básicas de leitura (fluência – ritmo, prosódia, velocidade – e exatidão) nos instrumentos. Concluímos que os instrumentos analisados, ainda que avaliem leitura em fase inicial através de medidas desconectadas (off-line), o fazem com base em diferentes aspectos. Enquanto a Bateria de Recepção e Produção da Linguagem Verbal permite verificar habilidades de percepção de oposição entre grafemas em pares mínimos e em frases, dificuldades no processamento de frases, habilidades de decodificação grafêmico-fonológica e compreensão textual, o Teste de Competência de Leitura de Palavras e Pseudopalavras permite verificar o estágio de desenvolvimento de leitura, a partir da classificação do processamento do sujeito avaliado como logográfico, alfabético ou ortográfico.

Acoustic consequences of speech treatment in children with cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common motor disability in childhood and can severely impact speech intelligibility. However, sparse evidence exists on which to base treatment. The current study examined the acoustic outcomes of Speech-Systems-Intelligibility-Treatment (Levy, 2014), a speech treatment aimed at enhancing intelligibility by targeting increased articulatory-working-space and vocal intensity through child-friendly prompts. Thirteen American-English speaking children with spastic dysarthria due to CP were assigned to a speech treatment group or a control group. Before and after treatment, participants repeated pre-recorded minimal pair nonsense words contrasting only in the initial consonant. Acoustic analysis of the children’s nonsense word productions indicated that on average, duration and sound-pressure-level (SPL) increased for the speech group post-treatment. Similar increases were observed in the control group’s SPL and duration, but to a lesser extent. Thus, preliminary results suggest promising treatment effects on speech acoustics for repeated words. Analyses of fricative-affricate contrasts, and F2 slope changes shed additional light on stability and changes in the speech of children with dysarthria in response to treatment. Additionally, changes in connected speech without a model talker may point to possible transfer of new skills to more spontaneous speech.

Effectiveness of an intervention program combining direct vocabulary instruction and individualized phonetic training for Mandarin-speaking young children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning process, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception and phonological processing deficits. In this study, we designed an intervention program combining small-group direct vocabulary instruction and individualized phonetic training computer program. Twenty-five 5- to 7-year-old children with SLI participated in the study, and another 15 children with SLI served as control group. All participants in the experimental group attended 50-minutes direct vocabulary instruction class with interactive activities for ten weeks. The phonetic training computer games included AX discrimination and identification tasks of Mandarin consonant and lexical tones minimal pairs presented in single word and sentence levels. Children were asked to play the phonetic training games at least 30 minutes a week at home and encouraged to run more if they prefer. Results showed that children in the experimental group performed better than control group in the post test, including receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge. In addition, there was a correlation between the gain in the post test and the time spent in the phonetic training game. The result suggests the vocabulary intervention programs incorporated with speech perception training promote children’s vocabulary abilities.

Inferior Frontal Cortex Contributions to the Recognition of Spoken Words and Their Constituent Speech Sounds.

Speech perception and comprehension are often challenged by the need to recognize speech sounds that are degraded or ambiguous. Here, we explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in resolving ambiguity in the identity of speech sounds using syllables that contain ambiguous phonetic segments (e.g., intermediate sounds between /b/ and /g/ as in "blade" and "glade"). We used an audio-morphing procedure to create a large set of natural sounding minimal pairs that contain phonetically ambiguous onset or offset consonants (differing in place, manner, or voicing). These ambiguous segments occurred in different lexical contexts (i.e., in words or pseudowords, such as blade-glade or blem-glem) and in different phonological environments (i.e., with neighboring syllables that differed in lexical status, such as blouse-glouse). These stimuli allowed us to explore the impact of phonetic ambiguity on the speed and accuracy of lexical decision responses (Experiment 1), semantic categorization responses (Experiment 2), and the magnitude of BOLD fMRI responses during attentive comprehension (Experiment 3). For both behavioral and neural measures, observed effects of phonetic ambiguity were influenced by lexical context leading to slower responses and increased activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus for high-ambiguity syllables that distinguish pairs of words, but not for equivalent pseudowords. These findings suggest lexical involvement in the resolution of phonetic ambiguity. Implications for speech perception and the role of inferior frontal regions are discussed.

Is it blow or below? Non-native listeners' perception of words that contrast in syllable count

Non-native speakers often have difficulty accurately producing and perceiving the syllable structure of a second language. For example, Japanese learners of English often insert epenthetic vowels when producing English words, e.g., stress produced as /sutoresu/. Similarly, when asked to count syllables in spoken English words, they frequently overestimate the number of syllables, suggesting that they tend to perceptually insert epenthetic vowels between adjacent consonants. These tendencies suggest the possibility that learners may have difficulty distinguishing between English words that contrast in syllable count, i.e., words that differ in the presence/absence of a vowel, e.g., blow-below, sport-support. Furthermore, if listeners perceptually insert epenthetic vowels, then they should misperceive blow as below more often than below as blow. To test these predictions, Japanese listeners participated in a 2AFC identification task, using 78 English minimal pairs contrasting in syllable count such as blow-below. Results showed that Japanese listeners indeed had difficulty with this task. However, misidentification of blow-type words as below was less frequent than misidentification of below-type words as blow, contrary to predictions based on perceptual epenthesis. These results suggest that simple comparison of syllable structure between languages may not suffice to predict difficulties in L2 speech perception. [Work supported by JSPS.]

Design and Implementation of a Tactile Stimulation Device to Increase Auditory Discrimination.

Reading is a complex process that requires various simultaneous brain processes. One of the most common types of reading disorders is developmental dyslexia, and one of the objectives of speech therapy sessions for children with developmental dyslexia is to increase their auditory discrimination. One of the most commonly used AuditoryDiscrimination Tests (ADTs) isWepman's AuditoryDiscrimination Test(WADT). It includes minimal pair words categorized by characteristics of vowels and consonants. The goal of this research is to design and implement a tactile stimulation device based on Wepman's test to increase auditory discrimination in children with developmental dyslexia in therapy sessions, so that while playing each word for the children, vibrational cues are presented to their left palm and fingers. The vibrational cues provided by 23 vibration motors can notify the child of the difference or similarity between the words. First, the device was evaluated by being applied on six female participants aged 6 to 8 with no hearing disabilities and no developmental dyslexia. Scores obtained from the healthy children showed that they can perceive the tactile function of the device. Then, function of the device was tested on 8-year-old twin girls with developmental dyslexia. The test was conducted as a controlled experiment. One of the twins participated in speech therapy treatment, while the other practiced with the device. During the study, three sessions were allocated to determine the baseline of auditory discrimination, three sessions to the intervention, and two sessions (the first, one week and the second, three weeks after the intervention sessions) to determine the children's auditory discrimination (follow-up). The analysis of trend variations and changes in mean showed that both the speech therapy and the intervention based on practicing with the device were effective in increasing children's auditory discrimination (Percentage of Non-overlapping Data = 100%). The results were stable three weeks after the intervention sessions. Therefore, using the device in speech therapy sessions can be useful and effective in improving auditory discrimination.

Perception of Japanese Pitch Accent without F0

Phonological contrasts are typically encoded with multiple acoustic correlates to ensure efficient communication. Studies have shown that such phonetic redundancy is found not only in segmental contrasts, but also in suprasegmental contrasts such as tone. In Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) is the primary cue for pitch accent. However, little is known about its secondary cues. In the present study, a perception experiment was conducted to examine whether any secondary cues exist for Japanese accent. First, minimal pairs of final-accented and unaccented words were identified using a database, resulting in 14 pairs of words. These words were then produced by a native Tokyo Japanese speaker, and presented to participants in both unedited and edited forms. Edited speech stimuli were created by replacing F0 in the natural speech stimuli with white noise. While word identification by Tokyo Japanese speakers had higher accuracy for natural speech than for edited speech, the accuracy exceeded the chance level for edited speech, suggesting the existence of secondary cues for Japanese accent. Acoustic analysis of the stimuli revealed that relative mean amplitude and relative maximum amplitude were greater for final-accented words than for unaccented words.

Perception of Marathi consonant manner contrasts in children with and without hearing impairment

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Very few published studies have reported phoneme contrasts in children with and without hearing impairment in Indian languages. The present study is aimed at comparing perception of manner contrasts in 6 to 8 year old Marathi children with normal hearing and those with hearing impairment using hearing aids and cochlear implants<span lang="EN-IN">. </span></p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> Two hundred 6 to 8 year olds participated across three groups: 106 with normal hearing (NH), 47 with hearing aids (HA) and 47 with cochlear implants (CI). Perception of four consonant manner contrasts was assessed using a four-alternative, forced choice picture-pointing task using recorded minimal pairs with CVC or CVCV words: a) Stop vs. Fricative; b) Stop vs. Nasal; c) Stop vs. Affricate and d) Aspiration<span lang="EN-IN">. </span></p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> All NH participants obtained ceiling scores for stop vs. fricative and stop vs. nasal contrasts. NH participants performed significantly better than participants with CI on all contrasts. Performance of HA participants was more variable and significantly poorer than the CI participants. Children implanted at or before 4 years of age and those using CI for more than 2.5 years performed consistently better on all contrasts as compared to those implanted after 4 years of age and using it for less than 2.5 years. Children fitted with HA at or after 2.5 years of age performed consistently better than those fitted before 2.5 years of age. Participants with average hearing aided thresholds 45 dB HL or lower (better) performed better than those with average aided thresholds above 45 dB HL<span lang="EN-IN">. </span></p><p class="abstract"><strong>Conclusions:</strong> Normative data on perception of various manner contrasts in Marathi is generated. Phoneme perception skills of children with NH are significantly better than those of children with CI and HA<span lang="EN-IN">.</span></p>

The phonetic specificity of competition: Contrastive hyperarticulation of voice onset time in conversational English

Competition between words in the lexicon is associated with hyperarticulation of phonetic properties in production. This correlation has been reported for metrics of competition varying in the phonetic specificity of the relationship between target and competitor (e.g., neighborhood density, onset competition, cue-specific minimal pairs). Sampling a systematic array of competition metrics, we tested their ability to predict voice onset times in both voiced and voiceless word-initial stops of conversational English. Linear mixed effects models were compared according to their corrected Akaike’s Information Criterion (AICc) values. High-performing models were evaluated using evidence ratios, with the competition metrics of top-performing models tested for significance using nested model comparisons. Words with a minimal pair defined for initial stop voicing were contrastively hyperarticulated, with shorter voice onset times for voiced stops and longer voice onset times for voiceless stops. No other competition metric reliably predicted hyperarticulation for both stop types. These results suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation is phonetically specific, increasing the perceptual distance between target and competitor.

Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities

Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible.

Teaching Pronunciation : An Extensive Use of Minimal Pair Drills

Teaching Pronunciation : An Extensive Use of Minimal Pair Drills

The Effect of L2 Minimal Pairs Practice on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Pronunciation Accuracy

The Effect of L2 Minimal Pairs Practice on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Pronunciation Accuracy

Word segmentation in phonemically identical and prosodically different sequences using cochlear implants: A case study

ABSTRACTCochlear implant (CI) users frequently achieve good speech understanding based on phoneme and word recognition. However, there is a significant variability between CI users in processing prosody. The aim of this study was to examine the abilities of an excellent CI user to segment continuous speech using intonational cues. A post-lingually deafened adult CI user and 22 normal hearing (NH) subjects segmented phonemically identical and prosodically different sequences in French such as ‘l’affiche’ (the poster) versus ‘la fiche’ (the sheet), both [lafiʃ]. All participants also completed a minimal pair discrimination task. Stimuli were presented in auditory-only and audiovisual presentation modalities. The performance of the CI user in the minimal pair discrimination task was 97% in the auditory-only and 100% in the audiovisual condition. In the segmentation task, contrary to the NH participants, the performance of the CI user did not differ from the chance level. Visual speech did not improve word segmentation. This result suggests that word segmentation based on intonational cues is challenging when using CIs even when phoneme/word recognition is very well rehabilitated. This finding points to the importance of the assessment of CI users’ skills in prosody processing and the need for specific interventions focusing on this aspect of speech communication.

Quantifying contextual effects in second language processing of phonolexically ambiguous and unambiguous words

ABSTRACTSecond language (L2) speakers often experience difficulty discriminating speech sounds of the nonnative language, which can result in phonolexical ambiguity. We report two experiments that examine how L2 Russian speakers may utilize contextual constraints for phonolexical ambiguity resolution during speech comprehension. L2 ambiguous words constitute minimal pairs with palatalized and unpalatalized consonants in the Russian language, where the phonological feature of palatalization marks semantic, morphological, or syntactic distinctions between words. L2 performance is compared to that of a control group of Russian native speakers. The results demonstrate that L2 listeners rely on contextual information for meaning disambiguation during sentence comprehension, but that the relative reliance on different types of context is task specific.

الاستغراق الزمني للأصوات وأثره في تشكيل اللغة وإدراكها

الاستغراق الزمني | الطول | الكمية | الإطالة | التزمين | المقطع | الصوامت | الصوائت | الثنائيات الصغرى | التنغيم | النبر | Duration | Length | Quantity | Lengthening | Tempo | Syllable | Consonants | Vowels | Minimal Pairs | Intonation | Stress