Nuclear Vowel Research Articles

한국어 이중모음 활음과 핵모음의 공조음 상황에서의 음향 특성

한국어 이중모음의 활음과 후행 핵모음에서 측정한 제1 포먼트(F1), 제2 포먼트(F2) 값과 모음 공간(vowel space)에서의 활음과 핵모음 간 유클리드 거리를 음향변수로 설정하여 이와 대응되는 두 개 단모음에서의 결과와 대조하였다. 이를 통해 대전 지역 20대 여성들의 한국어 이중모음의 음향음성학적 특성과 이중모음 내 활음과 핵모음 간의 모음 공간 내 위치와 거리의 특성을 살펴보았다. 이중모음의 활음과 관련하여 활음 /j/는 단모음 /이/보다 후설 쪽에서, 활음 /w/는 단모음 /오/, /우/보다 전설 쪽에서 조음되었다. 활음 /j/와 /w/ 모두 후행하는 핵모음의 입열림 정도(개구도)가 클수록 제1 포먼트 값이 높아지는 경향이 관찰되었다. 핵모음의 경우 선행 활음이 /j/일 때 후행 핵모음의 제2 포먼트값이 이에 대응하는 단모음보다 높게 측정되어 전설성이 두드러졌다. 선행 활음이 /w/일 때는 후행 핵모음들이 대응하는 단모음보다 후설성이 더 강하게 나타났다. 이중모음의 활음과 핵모음 간 유클리드 거리는 그 활음과 핵모음에 대응되는 두 개 단모음 간의 유클리드 거리보다 짧았으며 모음 공간의 중앙부를 점유하는 경향을 보였다.

Echoes of Past Contact: Venetian Influence on Cretan Greek Intonation.

Prosodic aspects of cross-linguistic contact are under-researched, especially past contact that has subsequently ceased. In this paper, we investigate declarative and polar question tunes of contemporary Cretan Greek, a regional variety of Greek whose speakers were in contact with Venetian speakers during the four and half centuries of Venetian rule on the island, from 1204 to 1669. The F0 contours of the Cretan tunes and alignment of peaks and troughs of interest with the nuclear vowel are compared to the corresponding tunes in Venetian dialect and Venetian Italian and to those in Athenian (Standard) Greek, which are used as control. The data (1610 declarative utterances and 698 polar questions) were drawn from natural speech corpora based on pragmatic criteria: broad focus for declaratives, broad focus, and information-seeking interpretation for polar questions. The pitch contour shapes of the tunes are modeled using polynomial basis functions, and the F0 alignment points are determined analytically. The results show the robustness of contact effects almost three and a half centuries after regular contact ceased and indicate that the shapes of the F0 contours of Cretan and Venetian declarative and polar question tunes are similar. In addition, Cretan alignment patterns are similar to Venetian and significantly different from Athenian. Insights are gained from research into how long prosodic characteristics may persist in a recipient language-decades or even centuries after the cessation of contact.

Understanding anticipatory speech postures: does coarticulation extend outside the acoustic utterance?

Multiple studies strongly suggest that anticipatory coarticulation has a planned component. Speakers forced to begin an acoustic utterance before knowing all details of how it will unfold show reduced coarticulatory influences from those initially unknown speech segments. Therefore, anticipatory coarticulation as we currently understand it may reflect a more general process whereby speech acts that are currently planned, but whose acoustic consequences remain in the future, bias current articulator positions. This more general process could be in effect even before an utterance is acoustically active. The present talk will review the author’s recent work in anticipatory speech postures. Specifically, these findings suggest that speakers bias their lips to anticipate utterances yet to be acoustically initiated, in a way that tracks currently available information. In laboratory tasks, speakers primed with just the initial consonant or nuclear vowel of an upcoming monosyllabic utterance shape their lips to reflect this priming. Similarly, speakers in natural conversation produce anticipatory lip postures while awaiting their turn, but only when the intended utterance is quite short. The conceptual links between these findings and anticipatory coarticulation will be discussed.

転写資料を活用した韓国語音韻史の研究 - 近世日韓の語学書を中心に -

Research on Korean historical phonology to date has focused solely on the Hangŭl notation of Korean as it appears in Hangŭl sources. Although Hangŭl is a phonographic writing system, the inherently conservative nature of writing makes it extremely difficult to reflect upon linguistic changes that appear over time. Therefore, in the study of Korean historical phonology, it is necessary to make active use of sources other than Hangŭl in order to capture the phonological changes that occur as a result of cumulative phonetic changes. As an example of such an attempt, this paper examines the changes in Korean vowels using Japanese-Hangŭl and Korean-Kana transcriptional sources, especially pre-modern Korean and Japanese study books. Up until now, transcriptional sources have mainly been studied in the field of Japanese linguistics, so there has been a practice of referring to all Japanese study books that were compiled in Korea and Korean study books that were compiled in Japan as ‘Chosun sources.’ However, for the systematic use of various sources, it is necessary to distinguish between different types of transcriptions according to the subject of the compilation, the target language, and the written script. In the case of Korean-Kana transcriptions, it is necessary to reconstruct the Korean language from the Kana in order to make use of them in the study of Korean language history. In the process of reconstruction, it is advisable to rely on Kana transcriptions and Japanese translations, and to use Hangŭl notation only as a supplement. Based on this methodology, the study of both Japanese-Hangŭl and Korean-Kana transcriptional sources reveals a variety of information that cannot be obtained from the Hangŭl notations alone. In the Japanese-Hangŭl transcriptional sources, Japanese /e/ is transcribed as <ㅕ> and <ㅖ> depending on the context, and after being unified to <ㅖ>, it is also transcribed as <ㅔ> after /n, t/. This shows that the nuclear vowel of /ㅕ/ was realized close to [e] in the [+coronal] context, but underwent vowel backing, and /ㅔ/ underwent vowel fronting in the same context. In Korean-Kana transcriptional sources, Korean /ㅕ/ is often transcribed with <e>, but in non-word-initial and native word contexts, it is often transcribed with <yo> or <ya>. /ㅔ/ is often transcribed with <oi>, but there are cases where it is transcribed with <e(i)> in non-final particles. This shows that the backing of /ㅕ/ and the fronting-monophthongization of /ㅔ/, which occurred in conjunction with the backing of /ㅕ/, originated in a non-word-initial and native word context and spread to word-initial and Sino-Korean word context, and that the [+front] feature of vowels is deeply related to the [+coronal] feature of the preceding and following consonants.

Where does the beat fall? Speech-beat alignment in Mandarin and English singing

Text-to-sing generates singing from text input (i.e., music score with lyrics), from which only syllable-level speech-music alignment can be acquired. To enhance the text-to-sing models, more fine-grained phoneme-level information is needed. We therefore investigate the acoustic measurements of segments and their temporal relationship with music beats as an answer from a linguistics perspective. Two research questions are addressed: (1) Do beats align with syllable onsets or nuclear vowel onsets? (2) Do different types of consonants present different speech-beat alignment results? Unaccompanied singing by professional singers in two rhythmically dissimilar languages, English (15 songs) and Mandarin (25 songs), were analysed. Data were segmented manually into phonemes by a trained annotator; a music scholar independently labelled the beats. Preliminary results suggest that Mandarin songs strongly favour vowels as anchors for beats (66.7%) while only 52.9% of beats fall on vowels in English. Both languages show that the beats have a strong preference for the end of consonants and the beginning of vowels. Phoneme types also play a significant role in the speech-beat alignment distribution. Future modelling of the speech-beat alignment in singing and comparison with speech rhythm data will also contribute to linguistic rhythm theories.

Nuclear vowel priming and anticipatory oral postures: evidence for parallel phonological planning?

ABSTRACTLinguistic and psycholinguistic theories of speech planning typically assume serial phonological encoding. However, under some neurally-inspired speech models, phonological elements are initially co-active in a parallel planning space. Research using acoustic reaction times has perhaps mistakenly attributed execution-level phonetic effects to serial encoding. We used motion-tracked digital video to measure lip posture. In two form-preparation experiments, participants were sometimes primed with the nuclear vowels of CVC words. All words contained either /i/ (spread lips; e.g. “seed”) or /u/ (rounded lips, e.g. “soup”). The initial consonants were uncertain. Analyses emphasised oral postures preceding stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, participants’ early postures anticipated the upcoming vowel when it was primed. Experiment 2 included two pairs of vowel-primed blocks. The words of one /i/-block began with rounded consonants. Primed vowels influenced anticipatory articulation except when superseded by conflicting demands from likely initial consonants. We discuss the implications for parallel encoding.

Gestural coordination and blending among liquid consonants and vowels in American English

In General American English (GAE), tense/lax vowel contrasts occur before syllables ending in /l/ (e.g., peel, pill), but not those ending in /ɹ/ (e.g., peer; no [i]/[ɪ] contrast). No such restrictions occur after a syllable-initial liquid consonant (e.g., lip, leap, rip, reap). This study investigates the hypothesis that these phonotactic asymmetries arise from the interaction of differences in gestural coordination between nuclear vowels and liquid consonants in syllable onset versus coda position (Browman & Goldstein 1995) and differences in blending parameter strength for GAE laterals versus rhotics. A study of speech production by four GAE speakers was conducted using real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Narayanan et al. 2004). Liquid consonants were produced in various vocalic environments and syllable positions (syllable-final, syllable-initial: word-initial and intervocalic). Analysis using a center of gravity metric defined by midsagittal lingual outlines points to greater articulatory stability in rhotics versus laterals across different vocalic contexts and less coarticulatory displacement of pre-lateral vowels than pre-rhotic vowels. Further analysis of spatial and temporal effects in the data will be used to test hypotheses about coordination of vowel and liquid consonant gestures in different syllable positions and their relation to phonotactic patterns. [Research supported by NIH and ARC.]

Duration reflexes of syllable structure in Mandarin

Recent discussions of Mandarin phonology have appealed to various aspects of phonetic duration as support for hypotheses concerning the structure of the syllable. But the actual empirical evidence for these claims is based on early studies typically conducted with a limited number of speakers (often just one) using varied methods of data collection and analysis. This paper provides a more firm empirical foundation for various durational reflections of the Mandarin syllable based on the analysis of 960 monosyllabic words recorded by five female speakers. Our main findings are as follows. We find no statistically significant difference between CV and CVN syllables, supporting the bimoraic analysis of the former. We replicate the Tone 3>Tone 2>Tone 1>Tone 4 duration hierarchy of earlier studies with a larger variety of syllable types. Relative to CV syllables, the nuclear vowel is shortened in both CGV and CVN structures suggesting that the prenuclear glide is associated to the syllable rhyme. The vowel is shortest in CGVN syllables supporting the analysis of the Cjan>Cjen low vowel raising process as motivated by phonetic undershoot. Finally, in Cuan syllables the nuclear vowel's backness is determined more by the coda than the prenuclear glide.

The influence of speech rate on Fujisaki model parameters

The current paper examines influences of speech rate on Fujisaki model parameters based on read speech from the BonnTempo-Corpus containing productions by 12 native speakers of German at five different intended tempo levels (very slow, slow, normal, fast, fastest possible). The normal condition was produced at an average rate of 6.34 syllables/s or 100%, the very slow version at 67%, and the fastest version at 161% of the normal rate. We extracted F0 contours and subjected them to decomposition using the Fujisaki model. We ordered all the data with respect to their actual speech rates. First, we assessed how prosodic realizations vary with speech rate and examined phrase command magnitudes, the number of phrase commands as well as the base frequency, accent command amplitudes, and the timing of accent command with respects to the underlying syllables and their nuclear vowels. Second, we analyzed between-sentence variability within and between speakers and investigated whether and how the prosodic structure is preserved at different speech rates. For very slow speech, we found for some of the speakers that the original phrase structure had disintegrated into something like a list of isolated words separated by pauses. Very fast speech became chains of uniform syllables at very high pitch and with almost flat intonation. With respect to the F0 range reflected by the amplitude of accent commands, we found strong interspeaker differences. While four of the subjects exhibited a significant reduction at higher speech rates, the others did not. As speed increases, it appears that F0 gestures commence earlier in the syllable, that is, the onset time of accent commands is located closer to the syllable/vowel onset than at lower speed.

Nuclear pitch accent in American English dialects: Truncation and compression

Dialects of the same language can differ in their use of prosody. We explored realization of nuclear pitch accent in female speech in three regional varieties of American English: Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. We found that both OH and WI speakers truncate the F0 contours while NC speakers compress them in identical environments. Our second question pertained to the effects of obstruent voicing in syllable coda on the F0 of the preceding nuclear vowel. We admitted three possibilities for the effects of a voiceless coda: shortened vowel duration may (1) “clip” the F0 contour and reduce the dialectal differences; (2) maintain the dialectal differences by preserving the F0 contour shapes found before a voiced coda; or (3) some dialects may “clip” and some may preserve the F0 contour. The results supported the third option. Ohio and Wisconsin speakers “clipped” the F0 contour so that F0 terminal values before a voiceless coda were higher than before a voiced coda. However, North Carolina speakers not only preserved the contours but their F0 terminal values before a voiceless coda were substantially lower than before a voiced coda. The effects of coda voicing on F0 fall were found to augment the dialectal differences.

Manlleus en cantonès: conflicte entre condicions de fidelitat en rimes VC

This paper focuses on the ways in which English loanwords are brought into line with four phonotactic constraints that restrict the possible combinations of nuclear vowels and coda consonants in Cantonese Chinese. It is found that three of the four constraints are strictly enforced in loans. Repairs change either the vowel or the coda consonant. Parallel to Mandarin, changes in vowel height features ([high], [ATR]) as opposed to changes in vowel backness are employed. Coda consonant changes obey a dorsal &gt; coronal &gt; labial faithfulness hierarchy that mirrors the typology of coda mergers discovered by Chen (1973) for many Chinese dialects. While changes in both the vowel and coda consonant occur, on-line adaptations favor changing the coda and preserving the vowel and suggest that the relative phonetic salience of the nuclear vowel to the coda consonant still plays a role in these adaptations.

Voice quality as a correlate of stop coda voicing in developing speech

Previous work reported that two children from the Imbrie Corpus (2005) tend to produce noise at the end of the nuclear vowel in words with [-voice] stop codas (duck, cup), but not in words with [+voice] codas (tub, bug) [JASA 123, 3320]. This noise resembles the preaspiration reported for adult speech in some languages. In this paper the earlier work is extended to the remaining eight children in this corpus of speech from 2- to 3-year old children learning American English. Furthermore, for nine subjects we compare their behavior to that of their primary female caregiver. Many of the children produce unvoiced coda stops that are coded as being strongly preaspirated. Their caregivers also produce vowel-final noise preceding [-voice] stops, but these tend to be coded as being weakly preaspirated. For both child and adult subjects preaspiration is more likely to occur for /k/ than for /p/. A few subjects produce irregular voicing rather than noise before [-voice] coda stops. More detailed acoustic measures such as durations and relative intensities will be presented. In addition, the acoustics are used to infer the physiology behind these voice quality differences between children and adults. [Work support from NIH R01DC00075, R01HD057606.]

Ungrammatical Affixed Words in the Huojia Dialect

D-words in the Huojia dialect all occur without a coda consonant or an off-glide and in some cases a mid vowel is added (He 1989, Lin 1993). Huojia D-word formation has been analyzed as having an underlying D-suffix // and an output template that bans codas and complex nuclei (Lin 2001a). Some roots, however, have no D-word counterparts, and the generalization is that any root that ends in a non-high nuclear vowel cannot have a D-word. Within Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993), two major proposals have been put forward to account for absolute ungrammaticality. The first is the MPARSE analysis (Prince and Smolensky 1993), in which the constraint MPARSE (which demands that the output must have a morphological structure) is ranked below relevant markedness constraints, and the Null Parse (an output that is phonetically unrealized because of the lack of a morphological structure) is then selected. The second is proposed by Orgun and Sprouse (1999) in which a component called CONTROL acts as a filter to check the grammaticality of the output selected by constraint evaluation in OT. This paper offers an account of the ungrammatical forms under Huojia D-word formation and argues that the CONTROL model is better able to capture the generalizations that a D-word cannot have a coda consonant/glide and that the absence of a D-word results from the requirement that a D-word must be distinct from its root.

Stress shift in rhythmical speech

In phrases like thirteen men, stress in thirteen is often shifted forward from its canonical final position. Presumably, the occurrence of this optional stress shift may be partly controlled by the rhythm of speech. Work on rhythmic speech production has demonstrated that given a repetition cycle, T, its harmonic fractions like T/2 attract stressed vowel onsets. Comparing phrases like ceMENT thirTEEN and GALaxy thirTEEN, differing in the number of weak syllables between strong ones, it was predicted that, during rhythmic production, the harmonic locations would attract shifted stress. Since shifting stress results in more even distribution of syllables through the cycle, we expected that faster repetition rates would also result in more stress shift. Dependent variables were the relative stress in the second word of each pair, and the location of onset of the nuclear vowel of the stressed syllable. Results confirmed the predictions, first, that with more intermediate unstressed syllables, stress was shifted forward more often (thereby locating the stressed vowel onset closer to T/2) and, second, that stress shifted forward more often at faster speaking rates. [Work supported by Fulbright Visiting Scholar program and by Utrecht University, The Netherlands.]

On the distinctive pitch of vowels: Perceptual prototypes for sinewave analogs?

A recent study by Kuhl etal. (1991) found striking perceptual correspondences between vowels and steady tones. Whether subjects experienced spoken vowels, visually presented images of articulating faces producing vowels, or imaginary vowels, they matched the vowel /ɑ / with a low-pitch tone, and /i/ with a high-pitch tone. However, tonal analogs of vowels were matched in the opposite manner, with low pitch associated with the vowel /i/ and high with the vowel /ɑ /. These sine-wave vowels were therefore excluded from hypothesized recognition mechanisms employing distinctive vowel pitches as perceptual prototypes. This finding is counterevidence to claims that tonal analogs of utterances are perceived through ordinary means. The present study employed sinewave realizations of several words differing solely in the nuclear vowel, /ɑ / or /i/, in an attempt to replicate and extend this finding. Subjects were asked to match the predominant pitch or vowel quality of these medial sine-wave vowels to the pitch of a single tone. The results will be discussed with respect to claims about the ordinariness of the perception of sinewave replicas and hypothetically prototypic distinctive vowel pitches. [Research supported by NIDCD and NICHD.]

The initials of Chengdu speech as compared with Standard Chinese

Chengdu speech is the received pronunciation among the various Sichuan dialects spoken by ten million people in Southwest China. In this short paper, I intend to discuss the characteristics of the initials of Chengdu speech as compared with Standard Chinese. The following abbreviations and conventions are used: CDH = Chengduhua, i.e. Chengdu speech of Chinese. PTH = Putonghua, Standard Chinese based on Beijing pronunciation. CPA = the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. Chinese characters are transliterated into CPA first when they are cited as examples. A phonetic transcription of CDH pronunciation follows, in square brackets. Tone symbols are placed before the CDH syllable: [̄] High Level, [̖] Low Falling, [̀] High Falling, [̬] Fall-rise. For PTH the tone symbol is placed above the CPA nuclear vowel letter e.g. mā High Level, má High Rising, mǎ Fall-rise, mà High Falling.

Some Suprasegmental Contours in French Two-Year-Old Children’s Speech

Abstract Six 2-year-old French (Aix-en-Provence) children were tape-recorded as they identified 46 pictures with polysyllabic names (e.g., éléphant, tracteur). Approximately 200 utterances were then analyzed for fundamental frequency (Fo) contours over the word, peak intensity (I) differences between the last two syllables, and absolute and relative nuclear vowel durations (D) between the last two syllables. The principal findings were: (1) falling Fo contours outnumbered rising by about 2.5: 1; (2) rising Fo contours were somewhat narrower, on the average, than falling; (3) nearly half of the I contours were essentially level, and 84% involved differences of 6 dB or less; (4) the final vowel was, on the average, longer than the penultimate vowel by a ratio of about 1.6:1, or an absolute difference of about 70 ms; (5) Fo and I were moderately correlated, with wide rising and falling Fo being associated with wide rising and falling I contours, respectively; (6) there was a similar, though statistically weaker, relationship between Fo and D contours; and (7) there was essentially no statistical relationship between I and D contours. These findings show that French 2-year-olds are influenced by the prosodic shape of their parents’ language yet are also under the control of presumably universal speech production constraints.

Vowel duration measurement: A reliability study

In recent studies involving the correlation of speech segment durations, the measurement error in locating segment boundaries has usually been ignored or assumed to be constant and small. Since the relative magnitude of the error in locating such a boundary may vary greatly depending upon its phonetic context and the procedures employed, thereby affecting the derived intersegment covariances profoundly, an experiment was designed to estimate these errors directly. Several tokens of four sentences containing syllables differing in the quality, length, degree of stress, and consonantal context of their nuclear vowels were copied onto two-track tapes and sent to several professional phoneticians with instructions to measure the durations of the indicated vowels, on first one track and then, at least two weeks later, the other. The resulting measurement errors varied systematically in several ways: (1) long, stressed vowels had greater errors than short, unstressed ones; (2) initial voiced stops (/b/) were easiest to segment and approximants (/w/) hardest, with voiceless stops (/k/) and fricatives (/f/) intermediate; (3) great differences among phoneticians did not appear to depend in any obvious way upon the instrumentation used. The minimum standard deviation for measurements of vowel duration by the most accurate phoneticians ranged from about 2 to 5 ms; 95% confidence intervals for carefully measured vowel durations may therefore be expected to range from about 10 to 25 ms, depending upon the consonantal context of the vowel. Because of this range of intrinsic measurability of vowel durations, and therefore presumably other phonetic segments as well, the results of studies using covariance statistics of segment durations should be interpreted cautiously.

Measurement error for vowel durations

In recent studies involving the correlation of speech segment durations, the measurement error in locating segment boundaries has usually been ignored or assumed to be constant and small. Since the relative magnitude of the error in locating such a boundary can have a profound effect on derived intersegment correlations, an experiment was designed to estimate these errors directly. Several tokens of four sentences containing syllables differing in the quality, length, degree of stress, and consonantal context of their nuclear vowels were copied onto two‐track tapes and sent to several professional phoneticians with instructions to measure the durations of the indicated vowels, on first one track and then, at least two weeks later, the other. The resulting measurement errors varied systematically in several ways: (1) long, stressed vowels had greater errors than short, unstressed ones; (2) initial voices stops (/b/0 were easiest to segment and approximants (/w/) hardest, with voiceless stops (/k/) and fricatives (/f/) intermediate; (3) great differences among phoneticians appeared to depend on the segmentation criteria used, not their instrumentation.

The location of rhythmic stress beats in english: an experimental study II.

This study examines the perceived location of rhythmic stress beats in sentences drawn from spontaneous conversation. Subjects listened to each sentence repeatedly from a tape loop and located the beats associated with various syllables in three ways: first, they tapped their fingers in time to the rhythm of the sentence; second, they moved an audible click around in the sentence until they felt it occurred at the same time that they would have tapped in the first task; third, they heard an audible click superimposed on the sentence near a rhythmic beat and were asked to judge whether or not the click "hit the beat". The times of occurrence of the subjects' taps, their placements of the movable click, and their judgments of which clicks hit the beat were compared as beat locations and were found to be in general agreement: the rhythmic beats were closely associated with the onsets of the nuclear vowels of the stressed syllables, but precede those vowel onsets by an amount positively correlated with the le...