Phonemic Contrasts Research Articles

Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details.

The speech signal is inherently rich, and this reflects complexities of speech articulation. During spoken-word recognition, listeners must process time-dependent perceptual cues, and the role that these cues play varies depending on the phonological status of the sounds across languages. For example, Canadian French has both phonologically nasal vowels (i.e., contrastive) and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels, as opposed to English, which only has coarticulatorily nasalized vowels. We investigated how vowel nasalization duration, a time-dependent phonetic cue to the French nasal contrast, affects spoken-word recognition. Using eye tracking in two visual world paradigm experiments, the results show that fine-grained phonetic information is important for lexical recognition, and that lexical access is dependent on small variations in the signal. The results also show gradient interpretation of ambiguous vowel nasalization despite the phonemic distinction between phonological nasal vowels and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in Canadian French. Gradience was found when words were ambiguous, and interpretation was more categorical when words were unambiguous. These results support the hypothesis of gradient interpretation of phonetic cues for ambiguously produced stimuli and the storage of coarticulatory information in phono-lexical representations for a language that has a phonological contrast for nasality (i.e., French).

Increased language co-activation leads to enhanced cross-linguistic phonetic convergence

Purpose: This study investigates the effects of bilingual language modes (or settings) on the speech production patterns of a group of early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca, Spain. Our main research question was as follows: are bilingual speech patterns modulated by the level of (co-)activation of a bilingual’s two languages? Design: Bilingual participants were classified as a function of their linguistic experience (or dominance), from Catalan- to Spanish-dominant. Subsequently, we recorded their speech in two experimental settings: a unilingual setting in which only Catalan words were uttered, and a bilingual setting in which both Catalan and Spanish words (cognates) were produced in random order. Data and analysis: The study examined the acoustic realization of Spanish and Catalan unstressed /a/, which surfaces as [a] in Spanish but is reduced to schwa, [ə], in Catalan. The acoustic characteristics of unstressed /a/ were explored across the two languages and the two experimental settings. Findings: Catalan unstressed /a/, which was similarly reduced to schwa in the speech of all participants, became slightly more similar to Spanish unstressed /a/ (i.e., it had a higher first formant) when produced alongside Spanish words (bilingual setting) than when produced in a Catalan unilingual setting. There were no effects of linguistic experience, and the effects of setting did not interact with experience. Originality: Very few studies have reported the effects of dynamic cross-linguistic interference in phonetic production, and even fewer have reported them with a phonetic variable resulting from a language-specific phonological process (unstressed vowel reduction) rather than a phonemic contrast. Implications: These findings suggest that cross-linguistic interaction is dynamic and modulated by language activation, and that an absence of dominance effects does not necessarily entail an absence of online cross-linguistic phonetic influence.

Reading ability and phoneme categorization

Dyslexia is associated with abnormal performance on many auditory psychophysics tasks, particularly those involving the categorization of speech sounds. However, it is debated whether those apparent auditory deficits arise from (a) reduced sensitivity to particular acoustic cues, (b) the difficulty of experimental tasks, or (c) unmodeled lapses of attention. Here we investigate the relationship between phoneme categorization and reading ability, with special attention to the nature of the cue encoding the phoneme contrast (static versus dynamic), differences in task paradigm difficulty, and methodological details of psychometric model fitting. We find a robust relationship between reading ability and categorization performance, show that task difficulty cannot fully explain that relationship, and provide evidence that the deficit is not restricted to dynamic cue contrasts, contrary to prior reports. Finally, we demonstrate that improved modeling of behavioral responses suggests that performance does differ between children with dyslexia and typical readers, but that the difference may be smaller than previously reported.

VOT or quantity: What matters more for the voicing contrast in German regional varieties? Results from apparent-time analyses

Standard German distinguishes voiced (short-lag) and voiceless (long-lag) stops in domain-initial and -medial position with VOT being the most important cue. This phonemic distinction has been neutralized in many dialects but the merger appears to have been reversed in the corresponding regional accents probably due to the increasing influence of the standard language. This apparent-time study investigates the emerging importance of VOT and VCratio (a combined measure of proportional vowel and closure duration) in Bavarian and Saxon, two German regional varieties prone to reverse the merger. To this end we analyzed acoustically minimal pairs with stops in medial and initial position and investigated the integrated effects of VOT and VCratio in perception. VOT is becoming more important in younger speakers and dialectal traces are more pronounced in older participants. While a trading relation between VOT and VCratio was present in the perception of all groups it has only emerged in younger Bavarians' production (possibly reinforced by a greater amount of schwa deletion in this group). The findings are discussed within a usage-based model.

Lexically dependent estimation of acoustic information in speech

Current estimates of the relevant acoustic information in speech are typically inventory-based. They assume a set of phonemes or featural/gestural decompositions of phonemes exists in a language, and proceed to identify and rank/weight the set of acoustic parameters sufficient to distinguish a phonemic contrast based on data from instantiations of the sounds/categories comprising those contrasts in either a controlled set of real words in the language or in nonword syllables. Acknowledging that such contrasts ultimately derive from lexical oppositions, we present an alternative, complementary approach to the quantification of acoustic information in speech: one that is lexically based. Using acoustic data from the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision project (Tucker et al., 2018)—over 26,000 unique words produced by a single speaker of Western Canadian English—and listener identification data on a representative 240-word sample of that lexicon, we define a weighted network of the phonological lexicon (cf. Vitevitch, 2008), where the weights on links between minimal pairs correspond to the predicted acoustic similarity from a model fit to the listener error distributions. From this network the distributed, “global” information contributed by individual parameters operating in an ensemble of lexical oppositions can be estimated from changes in network entropy under perturbations of those parameters.

Does native language temporal experience transfer to audio-visual synchrony perception?

The temporal alignment of what we hear and see is fundamental for the cognitive organization of information from our environment. Research indicates that a perceiver's experience influences sensitivity to audio-visual (AV) synchrony. We theorize that experience that enhances sensitivity to speech sound distinctions in the temporal domain would enhance sensitivity in AV synchrony perception. With this basis, a perceiver whose native language (L1) involves duration-based phonemic distinctions would be expected to be more sensitive to AV synchrony in speech than for an L1 which has less use of temporal cues. In the current study, simultaneity judgment data for the syllable /ba/ were collected with 23 steps of AV alignments: from audio preceding the video (audio-lead) to the audio and video being physically aligned (synchronous) to video preceding the audio (video-lead). Two groups of participants differing in L1 experience with phonemic duration were included: native speakers of Norwegian (binary phonemic quantity distinction) and English (no phonemic quantity distinction). Preliminary results based on measures the audio-lead threshold (ALT) support the hypothesis that native language experience may influence broad mechanisms of timing, such as those moderating AV synchrony perception. Findings contribute to understanding the underpinnings of experience and AV synchrony perception.

Development of fricative sound perception in Korean infants: The role of language experience and infants’ initial sensitivity

In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants’ perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language’s distinct categorization of sounds. Unlike many fricative contrasts utilized in most of the world’s languages, Korean fricatives (/s*/-/s/) are all voiceless. Moreover, compared with other sound categories, fricatives have received very little attention in the speech perception development field and no studies thus far have examined Korean infants’ development of native phonology in this domain. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we tested 4‒6-month-old and 7‒9-month-old Korean infants on their abilities to discriminate the Korean fricative pair in the [a] vowel context, /s*a/-/sa/, which can be distinguished based on acoustic cues, such as the durations of aspiration and frication noise. Korean infants older than 7 months were able to reliably discriminate the fricative pair but younger infants did not show clear signs of such discrimination. These results add to the growing evidence that there are native sound contrasts infants cannot discriminate early on without a certain amount of language exposure, providing further data to help delineate the specific nature of early perceptual capacity.

Moving towards a bilingual baseline in second language phonetic research

Abstract This investigation compared adult sequential bilinguals and native speakers (NSs) with the intention of determining if bilinguals are an appropriate comparison group for second language (L2) learners in L2 phonetic research. To that end, 16 Spanish-English bilinguals were compared to 20 NSs of English on their perception and production of two English vowels. In perception, both groups had a similar category boundary and acoustic cue weighting. In production, both groups produced distinct vowels that were highly intelligible, although the bilinguals produced the phonemes closer together in the vowel space and had more variable performance than the NSs. The inspection of these two participant groups reveals that bilinguals have the ability to perceive and produce a difficult L2 phonemic contrast, with slight and inconsequential differences when compared to NSs. Thus, I argue that bilinguals who have acquired a target structure are an apt comparison group in L2 phonetic experiments.

Enhanced neural and behavioural processing of a nonnative phonemic contrast in professional musicians.

Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign language perception and learning, we examined the impact of musical expertise on the categorisation of syllables including phonemes that did (/p/, /b/) or did not (/ph /) belong to the French repertoire by analysing both behaviour (error rates and reaction times) and Event-Related brain Potentials (N200 and P300 components). Professional musicians and nonmusicians categorised syllables either as /ba/ or /pa/ (voicing task), or as /pa/ or /ph a/ with /ph / being a nonnative phoneme for French speakers (aspiration task). In line with our hypotheses, results showed that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. Moreover, the difference between the native (/p/) and the nonnative phoneme (/ph /), as reflected in N200 and P300 amplitudes, was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. These results show that behaviour and brain activity associated to nonnative phoneme perception are influenced by musical expertise and that these effects are task-dependent. The implications of these findings for current models of phoneme perception and for understanding the qualitative and quantitative differences found on the N200 and P300 components are discussed.

Acoustic classification of Russian plain and palatalized sibilant fricatives: Spectral vs. cepstral measures

This study compares two methods for classifying voiceless sibilant fricatives forming a 4-way phonemic contrast found in Russian, but otherwise cross-linguistically rare. One method uses spectral measures, i.e. vowel formants, COG, duration and intensity of frication. The second method uses cepstral coefficients extracted from different regions inside fricatives and neighboring vowels. The corpus comprises 1,431 plain and palatalized fricatives from two places of articulation, produced by 10 speakers. Logistic regression was used to classify the productions of males and females together and separately. The productions of females yielded higher correct classification rates (highest 91.9%). Cepstral measures outperformed spectral measures across-the-board.

Training-induced pattern-specific phonetic adjustments by first and second language listeners

The current study investigated the phonetic adjustment mechanisms that underlie perceptual adaptation in first and second language (Dutch-English) listeners by exposing them to a novel English accent containing controlled deviations from the standard accent (e.g. /i/-to-/ɪ/ yielding /krɪm/ instead of /krim/ for ‘cream’). These deviations involved contrasts that either were contrastive or were not contrastive in Dutch. Following accent exposure with disambiguating feedback, listeners completed lexical decision and word identification tasks. Both native and second language listeners demonstrated adaptation, evidenced by higher lexical endorsement rates and word identification accuracy than untrained control listeners for items containing trained accent patterns. However, for L2 listeners, adaptation was modulated by the phonemic contrast, that is, whether or not it was contrastive in the listeners’ native language. Specifically, the training-induced criterion loosening for the L2 listeners was limited to contrasts that exist in both their L1, Dutch, and L2, English. For contrasts that are either absent or neutralized in Dutch, the L2 listeners demonstrated relatively loose pre-training criteria compared to L1 listeners. The results indicate that accent exposure induces both a general increase in tolerance for atypical speech input as well as targeted adjustments to specific categories for both L1 and L2 listeners.

Glottal phonation in Punjabi: Tone or aspiration

This study investigates a puzzle in the glottal phonation of the South Asian Language Punjabi. Though phonetically absent from the spoken language, voiced aspirated plosives (VAP) are still perceived as a distinct phoneme by native speakers. This phonological identification is achieved by the introduction of rising and falling tones in complementary phonological environments. Specifically, the VAP lose both voicing and aspiration in word-initial positions and yet speakers are able to discern the expected phoneme due to the epenthesis of a falling tone. Elsewhere, the VAP is phonetically indistinct from the corresponding voiced plosives, but for the rising tone on the same syllable. The vowel bearing the inserted tone in Punjabi must also be stressed. Consequently, the underlying VAP and the corresponding tones can be heterosyllabic. However in such scenarios, the tones associated with the position of VAP is reversed. We propose that an attempted glottal friction is linked to the introduction of the rising...

Language experience outweighs perceptual enhancement in category learning

Some theorists claim that cues that contribute to the same acoustic percept are naturally coupled in category learning. In contrast, others claim that no pairs of cues are privileged in this way, and listeners simply learn cue correlations from language input. We compared the cue weighting and cue-shifting between pitch and breathiness, which are enhancing but do not signal a phonemic contrast in English (Experiment I), and pitch and closure duration, which are not enhancing but are correlated in signaling the English voicing contrast (Experiment II). When the cues were enhancing but not contrastive, English listeners successfully learned to weight the more informative cue higher. In contrast, preliminary results show that listeners have difficulty weighting the informative cue higher when the two cues are not enhancing but only contrastive. Results suggest that language experience outweighs auditory enhancement relationships in the perceptual coupling of cues.

An Investigation of The Velar Nasal in Badini Kurdish Dialect

The velar nasal, also called "Engma" or "Angma", can be found in the phonologicalinventories of many languages across the world. Kurdish researchers vary in their opinions as to whether this sound is listed among the inventory of Kurdish language phonemes or not. Some researchers have tackled this case in Sorani Kurdish but research in Badini is scarce in this area. In this paper we aim to investigate the velar nasal /N/ in Badini Kurdish, which is a very controversial topic. The paperaims to answer the question as to whether it can be considered as a phoneme or it is just an allophonic realization of the alveolar nasal /n/ when followed by the voiced velar stop/g/. This is done through providing examples that have the combination of (n+g) which have a possible occurrence of the velar nasal. These examples are first analyzed articulatory in terms of some phonological processes such as assimilation, morpheme affixation, and syllabification. They are then analyzed acoustically by contrasting the pairs and searching for nasal bands using Praat. After analyzing both articulatory and acoustic data, it was concluded that the velar nasal can be found in Badini Kurdish but only as an allophone of the alveolar nasal which is the result of certain phonological rules such as assimilation and co-articulation. They are in free variation and couldn’t change the meaning. So, we can’t consider it as a distinct phoneme in this dialect.

An Investigation of The Velar Nasal in Badini Kurdish Dialect

The velar nasal, also called "Engma" or "Angma", can be found in the phonologicalinventories of many languages across the world. Kurdish researchers vary in their opinions as to whether this sound is listed among the inventory of Kurdish language phonemes or not. Some researchers have tackled this case in Sorani Kurdish but research in Badini is scarce in this area. In this paper we aim to investigate the velar nasal /N/ in Badini Kurdish, which is a very controversial topic. The paperaims to answer the question as to whether it can be considered as a phoneme or it is just an allophonic realization of the alveolar nasal /n/ when followed by the voiced velar stop/g/. This is done through providing examples that have the combination of (n+g) which have a possible occurrence of the velar nasal. These examples are first analyzed articulatory in terms of some phonological processes such as assimilation, morpheme affixation, and syllabification. They are then analyzed acoustically by contrasting the pairs and searching for nasal bands using Praat. After analyzing both articulatory and acoustic data, it was concluded that the velar nasal can be found in Badini Kurdish but only as an allophone of the alveolar nasal which is the result of certain phonological rules such as assimilation and co-articulation. They are in free variation and couldn’t change the meaning. So, we can’t consider it as a distinct phoneme in this dialect.

READING IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: RELATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS OF VOCABULARY AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

This study was designed to examine the relative contributions to EFL learners’ reading comprehension of vocabulary size and phonological awareness, potentially significant for the mainly Japanese university students who were the subjects of the study, because of the transfer of L1 reading behaviors which may interfere with fluent reading in English which is a growing necessity for the ‘global human resources’ Japan needs to participate fully in international society. Since both vocabulary size and pronunciation are known to be related to reading skill, this study measured learners’ vocabulary size, phonemic distinction ability, and reading comprehension ability, all using well-known standard tests. A further test of general awareness of English phonology, suggested by Coulson et al. (2013), was also carried out. The results were then statistically examined for any possible correlations, and what they might tell us about the relationships between these various abilities. Although no evidence was found to support a strong relationship between vocabulary alone and reading comprehension, there were indications of interaction between phonological awareness and vocabulary. A relationship between aural phonological distinction ability and reading comprehension was clearly indicated, and there was strong evidence of an effect for the subjects’ first language. These results suggest that phonological knowledge does, indeed, have a part to play in reading comprehension, and possibly reading speed. This underlines the importance of reading aloud practice and encouraging learners’ to acquire accurate pronunciation when teaching reading.

Effect of early dialectal exposure on adult perception of phonemic vowel length.

Attunement to native phonological categories and the specification of relevant phonological features in the lexicon occur early in development for monolingual and monodialectal speakers. However, few studies have investigated whether and how early exposure to two dialects of a language might influence the development of phonological categories, especially when a phonemic contrast exists only in one dialect. This study compared perceptual sensitivity to mispronunciations in phonemic vowel length in Australian English adult listeners with and without early exposure to another English dialect that did not have this contrast. The results showed that, while both mono- and bi-dialectal groups were sensitive to mispronunciations in vowel length, the bi-dialectal adults were more likely to accept a mispronunciation in vowel length compared to mono-dialectal adults. The bi-dialectal group accepted mispronunciations in vowel length more than in vowel height and backness. These results suggest that the bi-dialectal Australian English adults may employ a more flexible vowel length category for spoken word processing compared to mono-dialectal adults. The findings reveal a complex influence of early exposure to another dialect on the development of phonological categories.

Pitch height as part of speech plans: Evidence from response to auditory startle

In Mandarin, pitch contour denotes phonemic contrast while pitch height does not serve as a phonemic parameter. When triggered by a startling auditory stimulus (SAS, >120dB), prepared Mandarin CV syllable [ba] is elicited rapidly while its pitch contour remains unperturbed, suggesting that phonemic details are included in the speech plan and susceptible for rapid release under feedforward control [Chiu and Gick 2014, JASA-EL, 322-328]. Pitch height, however, is elevated in SAS-induced responses. It is not clear whether or not pitch height can be independently pre-specified in speech plans. The current study uses the startle paradigm to tackle this question by comparing general Mandarin speakers and Mandarin speakers with pitch training. Preliminary results show that specific pitch height can be prepared and is preserved in SAS-induced responses. More unperturbed pitch height is observed in pitch-trained speakers’ responses than in general Mandarin speakers’ responses. While slight and limited elevation may occur at the beginning of SAS-induced responses, the preservation of the absolute pitch height appears to interact with intended response durations. The results suggest that absolute pitch height, even when not acting as a phonemic parameter, can be pre-specified in speech plans and released by a SAS both rapidly and accurately.

Articulation Entropy: An Unsupervised Measure of Articulatory Precision

Articulatory precision is a critical factor that influences speaker intelligibility. In this letter, we propose a new measure we call “articulation entropy” that serves as a proxy for the number of distinct phonemes a person produces when he or she speaks. The method is based on the observation that the ability of a speaker to achieve an articulatory target, and hence clearly produce distinct phonemes, is related to the variation of the distribution of speech features that capture articulation-the larger the variation, the larger the number of distinct phonemes produced. In contrast to previous work, the proposed method is completely unsupervised, does not require phonetic segmentation or formant estimation, and can be estimated directly from continuous speech. We evaluate the performance of this measure with several experiments on two data sets: a database of English speakers with various neurological disorders and a database of Mandarin speakers with Parkinson's disease. The results reveal that our measure correlates with subjective evaluation of articulatory precision and reveals differences between healthy individuals and individuals with neurological impairment.

Individual phonological attrition in Albanian–English late bilinguals

The purpose of this study was to investigate phonological attrition in 10 native Albanian speakers who acquired Standard Southern British English (SSBE) as a second language (L2) in London, United Kingdom. A contrast was examined which is phonemic in Albanian but allophonic in SSBE, namely the production of light and dark lateral approximants. Impressionistic and acoustic analyses revealed that one late bilingual completely neutralized the phonemic contrast in her native Albanian speech. Furthermore, two other bilinguals neutralized the phonemic contrast between light /l/ and dark /ɫ/ in coda position, and overall there appeared to be a stronger trend for light /l/ to become dark in coda position than for dark /ɫ/ to become light in onset position. The findings are discussed in relation to the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) and indicate that phonological attrition in native speech production is possible in late L2 acquisition, although not inevitable.