Phonetic Correlate Research Articles

What’s wrong with being a rhotic?

The class of rhotics is subject to extensive variation, and a reliable phonetic correlate has not been found. This variation is also why identifying a segment as a rhotic in an unknown language is not a trivial matter. In contrast to other phonological classes whose membership is attributed based on principled criteria, the set of rhotics is arbitrary. This article identifies two properties independent of phonetics which characterize rhotics cross-linguistically PROCEDURAL STABILITY—rhotics that are implicated in phonological processes can vary in a phonetically arbitrary manner without perturbing the process itself—and DIACHRONIC STABILITY: the phonetics of rhotics can vary in diachronic evolution without impact on their phonotactics. On the empirical side the article establishes a cross-linguistic survey of the phonetic variability of rhotics. It is also argued that the phonetic realization of a rhotic may be unpredictable and divorced from its phonological identity and this shows that languages are happy to instantiate an arbitrary phonetics-phonology relationship. Finally, it is argued that rhotics show that the interface which maps phonological objects to their phonetic instantiations is capable of handling an arbitrary relationship. Further, there is no reason to assume that this property of the interface is specific to rhotics; in principle, all phonetic and phonological categories could enter into an arbitrary relationship. This has important implications for theories which seek to impose phonetic or naturalness based constraints on phonology: it is difficult to see how the relationship between a phonetic object which has no obvious articulatory connection to its phonological representation could be considered phonetically natural. Rhotics thus provide support for the view of substance-free phonology whereby phonological objects are devoid of any reference to phonetic categories.

Acoustic properties of vowels in Upper Necaxa Totonac

Upper Necaxa Totonac is a Totonacan language spoken in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. While the Totonacan languages historically have three phonemic vowel qualities, the Upper Necaxa system consists of five vowels that contrast length and laryngealization. With acoustic data from six native speakers from the Totonacan communities of Patla and Chicontla, we explore the phonetic properties of vowels with respect to the first and second formant frequencies, quantity (duration), vowel phonation (modal vs. laryngeal), and stress. The data indicate that long, short, modal and laryngeal vowels occupy a similar formant space and that duration is the primary phonetic correlate of phonemic vowel length. A shift in vowel quality and an increase in duration and pitch were shown to be the acoustic characteristics of stress. The study provides a first acoustic analysis of vowels in Upper Necaxa, and contributes to typological descriptions of the properties of vowels connected with quality, quantity, stress, and phonation.

Quantifying sonority contour: A case study from American English

Previous studies have argued that the most reliable phonetic correlate of sonority is intensity (e.g., Parker 2002, 2008, Jany et al. 2007). However, those studies have only considered intensity of a single segment. This paper investigates the phonetic correlate of sonority contour in consonant clusters. 10 native speakers of American English (5 male, 5 female) read 33 monosyllabic English words that begin with a bi- or tri-consonantal cluster (e.g., play, stray) embedded in a frame sentence (“Father saw ‘____’ again,” used in Parker 2008). Measured first were (i) an average RMS and (ii) sound level minima of each consonant in the cluster C1C2, and the sonority contour was quantified by subtracting the intensity value of C1 from the intensity value of C2. Also, (iii) actual intensity slopes in the transition between the two consonants were measured. Results show that the intensity contours calculated based on (i) and (ii) do not always correspond to the intensity slopes (iii), while both of them are in general correlated with the sonority contour. It will also be suggested that it is intensity slopes (iii) that play a crucial role in consonant cluster perception and in phonological phenomena involving consonant clusters.

Phonetic correlates of phonological quantity of Yakut

We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes have short and long contrastive counterparts. The study aims at revealing acoustic characteristics of the binary quantity distinction in vowels. We used two sets of data: (1) A female native Yakut speaker read a 200-word list containing disyllabic nouns and verbs with four different combinations of vowel length in the two syllables (short–short, short–long, long–short, and long–long) and a list of 50 minimal pairs differing only in vowel length; (2) Spontaneous speech data from 9 female native Yakut speakers (aged 19–77), 200 words with short vowels and 200 words with long vowels, were extracted for analysis. Acoustic measurements of the short and long vowels’ f0-values, duration and intensity were done. Mixed-effects models showed a significant durational difference between long and short vowels for both data sets. However, the preliminary results indicated that, unlike in quantity languages like Finnish and Estonian, there was no consistent effect of f0 as the phonetic correlate in Yakut vowel quantity distinction.

Distinctive Features and the Liquids in Picard

<p>The class of liquid consonants, which traditionally groups laterals and rhotics, is called into question due to a lack of shared phonological feature with a phonetic correlate. Following recent work on the liquid consonants, this paper examines these consonants in Picard, a Gallo-Romance variety spoken in Northern France and Southern Belgium. The behavior of these consonants is analyzed both word-initially in liquid-glide clusters where we observe resyllabification, epenthesis, and sometimes deletion, as well as in word-final complex clusters. We find that the lateral consonant is more prone to deletion next to coronal consonants in both positions, leading to the analysis that the lateral is phonologically specified as [coronal], whereas the rhotic, which is phonetically coronal in Picard, is unspecified for place in the phonology.</p>

Ese Ejja Accent

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2013) Nicholas Rolle UC Berkeley “Ese Ejja Accent” 1 n.rolle@berkeley.edu Ese Ejja is a Takanan language spoken in the Bolivian Amazon. This study presents a description and analysis of stress accent on nouns and verbs, arguing for a specific representation of these data, and positing a limited OT account. Data come from Vuillermet’s (2012) PhD dissertation - hereafter referred to as (V:page number) - who presents an extensive description and organization of these accent facts, documenting approximately 2,000 verb forms. Most words in Ese Ejja have a single primary accent (synonymous here with “stress”), which falls on one of the first three syllables of the word, whose consistent phonetic correlate is high pitch. Ese Ejja has distinct accent patterns on nouns versus verbs, showing phonological patterns differing by part of speech. Accent placement depends on a complex interaction of factors, based on (1) inherent accent of a word, (2) accent assignment from affixes/clitics, (3) accent assignment based on part of speech, (4) rules of accent clash resolution, (5) rules of (trochaic) footing, (6) rules of directionality, and (7) restrictions on the primary stress (word stress) window. [Transcription note: I use σ to indicate primary stress, and σ secondary, rather than ˈ and ˌ ] Relevant phonology background Ese Ejja has four monophthong phonemes /i e a o/, and three (rising) diphthongs /i a i o oe/, written as , , and respectively; contrastive falling diphthongs (e.g. [ai ]) do not exist. Vowel length is not contrastive, and adjacent vowel-vowel sequences are pronounced separately (V:172). The canonical syllable structure is (C)V; underlying codas do not exist. The only surface codas are glides which result from vowel-vowel sequences, e.g. /mei/ “stone” [mej]. Cliticization reveals these vowels as underlying heterosyllabic, e.g. /mei=a/ “strone=INSTR” [meia] ( * [meja]) (V:177-8). Noun Accent 2 In order to understand both noun and verb accent, we must distinguish between three types of (surface) accents. One type is an inherent accent on a syllable, specified in the lexical entry of a morpheme (an unpredictable accent). A second type is assigned accent, an accent which is assigned to a specific part of a morpheme by an accompanying affix/clitic, by construction, and/or due to its use as a particular part of speech. A third type is footing accent, an accent which falls on a syllable based on the trochaic footing algorithm, applying subsequent to the first and second types. These are shown in example (0). In (0a), bishe has inherent accent on /she/. In contrast, in (0b), the clitic =nixe assigns an accent to the final syllable of the noun inawewa, which then based on footing assigns stress two syllables away, on /na/. This manuscript owes much to discussion with Marine Vuillermet (first and foremost), Zach O’Hagan, and Sharon Inkelas. These data come from (V:200-205). I will not discuss noun compounds (e.g. noun+adj), or the e-noun class, e.g. ese “tooth”, eshaxa “ear”, emekishe “nail”, in which the e- here is best analyzed as extra-metrical.

The Phonetics of Fortis and Lenis Consonants in Itunyoso Trique

This paper discusses the phonetic properties of the fortis–lenis distinction in San Martin Itunyoso Trique (Oto-Manguean). Discussions of the fortis–lenis contrast in related languages argue that it may instead be considered a geminate–singleton contrast. However, lenis obstruents are frequently realized with voicing and spirantization. These phenomena have led other researchers to argue against reanalyzing “fortis–lenis” contrasts as consonant length contrasts. In the first of two experiments, I show that the primary phonetic correlate of the fortis–lenis contrast in Itunyoso Trique is duration. Fortis obstruents are additionally realized with a glottal spreading gesture, which is absent in lenis obstruents. In the second experiment, I show that durational changes, due to speech rate, account for variable patterns of spirantization and partial voicing. Abstract features of articulatory effort are not necessary to account for the phonetic variation in lenis obstruents in Trique. This analysis argues in fa...

On the phonetic status of syllabic consonants: Evidence from Slovak

AbstractThis paper investigates the phonetic correlates of syllable structure, focusing on syllabic consonants. Cross-linguistically, syllables containing consonantal nuclei are often subject to a number of restrictions compared to their vocalic counterparts. However, some languages, like Slovak, allow relatively freely distributed syllabic liquids. Phonetic studies of syllable structure have shown that the vowel provides the basis for the articulatory coordination relationships within a syllable, and consonant–vowel timing patterns have been identified as a primary phonetic correlate of syllable structure. However, how coordination relationships within a syllable are organized when a consonant occupies the nucleus is largely unknown. We investigate whether in Slovak, syllabic consonants change their consonantal kinematics to approach a more vowel-like articulation and whether vowel-less syllables differ in their articulatory timing characteristics from canonical syllables containing vowels. Our results show that a consonant does not change to be more like a vowel in its articulatory dynamics when occupying the nucleus position. However, we find consistent effects in articulatory timing in that consonantal syllables show less overlap on a variety of measures compared to vocalic syllables. We argue that the typological possibility for syllabic consonants may be related to the general consonant timing pattern of a language.

Voice onset time in Persian initial and intervocalic stop production

The purpose of this study is to examine voice onset time as a phonetic correlate of voicing distinction in standard Persian. Issues pertinent to VOT are also addressed: namely, the effect of place of articulation, vowel context and sex of speakers. The VOTs were measured from recordings of five male and five female speakers reading 65 words that contained a full set of Persian oral stops in word initial and intervocalic positions. This acoustic experiment indicated that VOT distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops. The results also revealed that Persian uses mainly {voiceless unaspirated} and {voiceless aspirated} categories for [±voice] distinction in initial position and {voiced} and {voiceless aspirated} categories in intervocalic position. Vowel context also affected VOT values but the only significant difference was due to high vowels, which caused the preceding voiceless stop to have a longer VOT. Examining sex differences in the VOT values indicated that for voiced items females produced longer VOTs than males. However, voiceless items displayed no significant sex differences for VOT values. Fundamental frequency (F0) of the onset of the following vowel was also examined as another cue to voice distinction. Although the F0 values of voiceless tokens were higher than those of the voiced ones in each voiced–voiceless category, the results suggest that F0 is not a major cue distinguishing the two stop categories.

Intonation and Emotion in Autistic Spectrum Disorders

The classic picture of an autistic individual includes an impoverished ability to interpret or express emotion. The prosody of spoken language in autistic children is thought to lack emotional content. In this study, the verbal intonation of children with autism was examined and compared to that of children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and normal controls (ctrl). Utterances elicited by repetition and by spontaneous story completion were analyzed by quantifying phonetic features (pitch, amplitude, and length) and comparing them to subjective ratings of produced emotion (happy, sad or angry). Since the most consistent phonetic correlate of these emotional targets has been demonstrated to be pitch range, speakers with autistic spectrum disorders were expected to have decreased pitch range; however in the repetition task, autistic subjects actually had a larger pitch range than the other groups. Other measures of intonation including amplitude, duration, and location of pitch peak revealed defects that are more complex than predicted. In spontaneous speech, autistic subjects performed more poorly on both phonetic targets and subjective ratings than ctrls, and AS subjects fell between autistics and normals.

The diachrony and synchrony of vowel quantity in English and Dutch

This investigation of Open Syllable Lengthening in Middle English and Middle Dutch treats the changes as the result of listener-based reinterpretations of coarticulatory effects on vowel duration. OSL in English is a result of compensatory lengthening, which is analyzed as a hypocorrection. OSL in Middle Dutch involves a hypercorrection in which the duration of etymologically long vowels is reinterpreted as a purely phonetic correlate of stress in open syllables. The different phonological bases for OSL provide a diachronic explanation for the retention of contrastive vowel quantity in Modern English and its absence in Modern Dutch.

‘Fortis/lenis' revisited one more time: the aerodynamics of some oral stop contrasts in three continents

The terms fortis and lenis are variously regarded as having one single underlying phonetic correlate or many. An exploratory analysis of acoustic and aerodynamic data on contrasting stop series in a number of European and non‐European languages confirms that a significant variation in peak intra‐oral pressure and in articulatory stricture duration are two of the main factors differentiating these series. Two central questions are: (1) Is the contrast in peak pressure controlled by lung volume decrement or by the degree of glottal aperture? (2) Is the gesture for the lenis sound a truncated or a re‐scaled version of the gesture for the fortis sound? A more detailed examination of the data from the non‐European languages suggests that glottal aperture, rather than respiratory effort is the main physiological parameter underlying the pressure variation, and that each member of the opposition has a specific target peak pressure, rather than the lenis peak pressure being truncated by the early release of the articulatory closure.

Categorical perception of [ba] and [pa]: Integration of acoustical cues

Multiple acoustical cues contribute to the perceptual distinction of many phonetic contrasts. For example, the basic and dominant phonetic correlate of the phonemic (voiced) contrast in stop consonants in word-initial position is the duration of voice onset time (VOT). However, as analysis of production data shows, voiced and voiceless stop consonants vary also in the intensity of a noise burst. The reported study focused on changes in the categorical perception of initial stop consonants [ba] and [pa]. Twenty-eight young adults with normal hearing (better than 10 dB HL) participated in the experiment. Ninety-nine syllables ranging from [ba] to [pa], and which varied in both the VOT and intensity of initial burst, were synthesized on a NEXT computer. Participants were asked to categorize 792 tokens into [ba] and [pa] categories. Results indicate that listeners relied on available cues in different ways. Thus listeners could be divided into two groups: those who used the intensity of burst in their categorization and those who relied exclusively on VOT. Those who integrated information about both acoustical cues did so especially within the ambiguity range.

Syllabic weight and syllabic duration: a correlation between phonology and phonetics

This paper explores a correlation between phonology and phonetics. It first reviews a phonological analysis that proposes that all full Mandarin rhymes are heavy and that all Shanghai rhymes are underlyingly light. Then it reports a small phonetic experiment that attempts to determine whether there is a phonetic correlate for the phonological claim. Four Mandarin speakers and five Shanghai speakers were recorded, each reading five sentences four times at normal speed. Average syllable durations were determined. It was found that the average syllable duration in Mandarin was 215 ms and that in Shanghai was 162 ms. Statistics show that the durational difference is significant. The result thus agrees with the phonological analysis. Implications and limitations of the present study will be discussed.

The story of /r/

In describing sound changes, sound patterns and alternations in languages one clearly needs to refer to a natural class of r sounds, or rhotics. This phonological class encompasses sounds with a wide variety of manners and places of articulation, and it has been suggested that its “phonetic correlate” is acoustic in nature, namely a lowered F3. Acoustic properties of phonetically different /r/s were investigated in languages like American English, Yoruba, French, Southern Swedish, Hausa, and Edo, using several speakers of each language. The results do not show any single acoustic parameter underlying the phonological class of [+rhotic]. The third formant does not lower for all types of /r/s. There is often a decreased intensity associated with the rhotic, but this is by no means consistent. The natural class of [+rhotic] sounds is a phonologically convenient class, but it is not controlled by any single articulatory or acoustic correlate. Instead, this phonological class is associated with complex combinations of both articulatory and acoustic parameters. [Work supported by NSF.]

Syllable-Boundary Phenomena in Korean

Syllable-Boundary Phenomena in Korean Young-Key Kim-Renaud 1. Introduction Even a linguistically naive speaker can identify how many syllables there are in a given string, but linguists have not succeeded in determining a simple phonetic correlate that will identify a syllable and boundaries between syllables. It is probably for this reason that the syllable has often been considered quite unimportant, especially by such early generative phonologists as Chomsky and Halle (1968), and thought as playing no role at the more abstract levels of phonology. However, the reality and necessity of the syllable as an operational unit in phonology have been advanced recently by other linguists, e.g., Pulgram (1970), McCawley (1968), Hoard (1971), Vennemann (1972), Hooper (1972), Lehiste (1970), K. O. Kim and Shibatani (1974), who take the view that the phonological description of certain languages often could achieve generality, naturalness, and explanatory adequacy only if stated in terms of syllables. One new and important aspect of syllabification that has been proposed recently is that it is done not only on the phonetic basis but also with reference to different grammatical boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to study some of the long-standing problems in Korean phonology, such as the neutralization of obstruents, h becoming a dental stop, postobstruent fortition, and consonant cluster simplification, and to show that adopting the notion of syllable and syllable boundary facilitates our understanding of an important portion of the Korean phonological component. It is also claimed here that the seemingly heterogeneous phonological alternations are due to a very 243 244YOUNG-KEY KIM-RENAUD regular and prevalent metaforce that exists in the language, i.e., the unreleasing of the syllable coda.1 This paper is written within the framework ofgenerative phonology, with some recent modifications by various linguists. It is assumed that linearly ordered phonological transformations associate the surface syntactic structure of an utterance with its phonetic representations. Underlying forms are viewed as fully specified (McCawley 1974:85) and minimally abstract (Kiparsky 1968). A major concern of this work is to provide phonetic and other motivation for the phonological processes that are posited in order to ensure that the solution proposed be as natural as possible (Stampe 1972). The dialect analyzed is that of the Seoul area, generally referred to as "standard. " The variant forms in this dialect as well as other dialectal forms are discussed wherever relevant, not only for descriptive accuracy but also for their significance as evidence for possible on-going change. Assumptions underlying syllabification taken in this study are as those in Kim-Renaud 1974, Appendix A.2. In brief, phrase boundary (#) and compound boundary (f) are also syllable boundaries (S) (Syntactic Syllabification) ; $ is inserted after y in case of a morpheme iy or i:y (Lexical Syllabification) ; $ is inserted so that the syllable-initial position takes the maximum number of segments possible, i.e., before a consonant followed by a vowel with a glide optionally intervening. If there is no consonant but only a glide between the vowels, $ is inserted before the glide. $ falls between two consecutive vowels otherwise (Phonetic Syllabification ); syntactic and lexical syllabifications must precede phonetic syllabification ; only phonetic syllabification applies in surface syllabification (resyllabification). 2. Obstruent Neutralization On the phonetic level, Korean allows only a limited number of consonants in syllable-final position, i.e., [p=, t=, k=, 1, m, ?, ?], although other consonants may occur in the same position at nonsuperficial levels. What we note here particularly is the fact that there are no aspirated or fortis stops in this position. Now observe the following examples:2 1.This article is drawn from my doctoral dissertation (Kim-Renaud, 1974). I thank all my friends and teachers for their help and guidance in pursuing my studies, especially Professor Irwin Howard, Chin-Wu Kim, Greg Lee, and Ho-min Sohn. 2.Throughout this study () shows the orthographic representation, / / the underlying representation, and [ ] the surface representation. A hyphen (-) is used where the specific nature of a boundary is irrelevant. An unattested form is marked by *. Coexisting forms are connected by ~. C represents a consonant, V a vowel, C= an unreleased stop, C a fortis consonant and Ch a strongly aspirated one. For typographical convenience c is...