Phonetic Factors Research Articles

Labial palatalization in dialectal Polish: On phonetic naturalness in grammars

It is argued that a universal hierarchical organization of features based on phonetic criteria is not a property of mental grammars. Hardening of the palatal glide in the context of labials gave rise to synchronic alternations in dialectal Polish that cannot be generated under analyses that relate structural complexity to phonetic factors. Theories that propose a phonetically-based hierarchical organization of features (various models of feature geometry) are shown to be inadequate because they fail to predict the existence of diverse palatalization patterns within one linguistic system. It is argued that an account of labial palatalization must rely on language-specific generalizations extracted from the data. Two approaches are consistent with this claim: an analogical approach and a substance-free geometrical approach. The proposed analogical analysis employs phonetically-neutral generalizations manipulating segments and the substance-free analysis makes use of Optimality Theoretic constraints that refer to a hierarchy of features established on a language-particular basis.

SEPARATING THE EFFECTS OF ACOUSTIC AND PHONETIC FACTORS IN LINGUISTIC PROCESSING WITH IMPOVERISHED SIGNALS BY ADULTS AND CHILDREN.

Cochlear implants allow many individuals with profound hearing loss to understand spoken language, even though the impoverished signals provided by these devices poorly preserve acoustic attributes long believed to support recovery of phonetic structure. Consequently questions may be raised regarding whether traditional psycholinguistic theories rely too heavily on phonetic segments to explain linguistic processing while ignoring potential roles of other forms of acoustic structure. This study tested that possibility. Adults and children (8 years old) performed two tasks: one involving explicit segmentation, phonemic awareness, and one involving a linguistic task thought to operate more efficiently with well-defined phonetic segments, short-term memory. Stimuli were unprocessed signals (UP), amplitude envelopes (AE) analogous to implant signals, and unprocessed signals in noise (NOI) which provided a degraded signal for comparison. Adults' results for short-term recall were similar for UP and NOI, but worse for AE stimuli. The phonemic awareness task revealed the opposite pattern across AE and NOI. Children's results for short-term recall showed similar decrements in performance for AE and NOI compared to UP, even though only NOI stimuli showed diminished results for segmentation. Conclusions were that perhaps traditional accounts are too focused on phonetic segments, something implant designers and clinicians need to consider.

Consonant-f0 interaction under predictable voicing: f0 lowering due to phonetic factors

We report on consonant-f0 interactions in Malayalam. Crosslinguistically, voicing lowers f0 in the following vowel (House and Fairbanks 1953, Hombert 1978, Clements 2002, Moreton 2006). While this lowering has been attributed to physiological and phonetic factors (Stevens 1998, Atkinson 1978, and Honda 2004), Ohde (1984), Svantesson and House (2006), and Keating (1984) have argued that f0 lowering serves to maintain a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless segments. Voicing in Malayalam is predictable; voiceless stops appear initially, and voiced intervocalically. We report on data from 6 native speakers. 3 repetitions of each word in a frame sentence were recorded. Since Malayalam words only appear with voiceless initial stops, we contrast these with nasals from corresponding places of articulation. We examine time-normalized f0 perturbation due to voicing in Malayalam for all places of articulation for both initial and medial contexts. Our findings lend support to the physiological and phonetic account of f0 lowering. Malayalam exhibits a pattern of f0 lowering following voicing and raising during the production of voiceless segments. In spite of Malayalam voicing being predictable, the f0 perturbation in the following vowel follows the cross-linguistic pattern of lowering following voiced segments. This finding dove-tails with the results from earlier studies that take physiological factors to be responsible for the lowering of f0 following voiced segments.

Strength Asymmetry and Positional Licensing: An Optimality Theoretic Account of Assamese Regressive Voicing Assimilation

An attempt is made in this paper to examine whether strong or weak licensing capacity in a phonological domain is an inherent abstract property assigned by UG irrespective of languages or conditioned by phonetic factors. It is the normal case for languages to have homogeneous voice clusters, which are created by spreading both values of the [+/-voice] feature over the entire cluster, usually in a regressive fashion. Assamese exhibits the instance of regressive voicing assimilation, in which it is seen that the segment occurring in the coda position tends to agree in terms of feature [voice] with the following voiced obstruent in the onset position. But this regressive voicing assimilation is blocked by nasals and liquids. Since obstruent clusters agree in terms of sonority value they display assimilaton which is blocked among the segments of different class such as nasals, laterals and rhotics which are characterized by diverse sonority values. Voicing assimilation is functional among the segments of same sonority value and this is blocked between the segments of asymmetric sonority value. The data in this paper are collected from primary sources: ten native speakers of Assamese.

Phonetic reduction and variation in American Sign Language: A quantitative study of sign lowering.

During normal sign language use, a signer's productions will often be reduced from the citation forms of signs. This study examines a form of phonetic reduction in American Sign Language, in which signs that are located at the forehead are lowered in space. In particular, we explore the effects of signing rate and phonetic environment on the lowering of specific ASL signs and on their phonetic variation along the other two movement axes. Movement data were captured as native signers produced utterances that were controlled for phonetic environment and signing rate. We found that all signers produced lowered forms as an effect of the phonetic factors that we manipulated. In addition, several rate-induced effects occurred, which we had not predicted. Results are discussed in relation to past research on variation in sign production and in speech.

On the interaction of past tense and potentiality in Singaporean Colloquial English

It was observed in earlier studies on Singaporean English (e.g. Ho and Platt, 1993) that the past tense was used in marking present as well as past habitual aspect. Ho and Platt’s main thesis had proposed that the use of past tense in Singaporean (Colloquial) English was as a marker of lexical perfectivity rather than tense, and that, phonetic factors aside, the lexical aspect of the verb itself determined whether or not the past tense would be used at all to mark past time reference. The use of already as a marker of both perfect aspect and grammatical perfectivity, equivalent in function to Mandarin Chinese le, has also been observed by Bao (1995, 2005), and it is questioned to what extent such forms are in competition with one another. Little attention, however, has been afforded to the study of past tense in non-past environments in Singaporean (Colloquial) English, including those that may be considered to be, in some accounts, grammatically imperfective in terms of aspect marking, and ambivalent in terms of realis or irrealis marking. The present study isolates the use of past tense in marking future anteriority in realis conditional clauses and their semantic equivalents (where it is used to mark not only lexical perfectivity but grammatical perfectivity as well), in marking present habitual aspect, in expressing future plans, and in performative uses. It is questioned why the past tense can share with already some of its functions of marking grammatical perfectivity (but with non-past time reference), and why such perfective environments that can support a strongly realis function in a contact dialect are correspondingly situations for generating meanings of potentiality and irrealis in standard usage. The study also compares such uses with the distribution of the positive-declarative, periphrastic do-auxiliary in the history of English, a form that was claimed to function as a perfective marker in Middle and Early Modern English (Denison, 1993; Ziegeler, 2006). Many such uses were found in similar environments to those in which the non-temporal past tense is found in Singaporean Colloquial English.

Phonological Universals in Early Childhood: Evidence from Sonority Restrictions

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., bw>bd>lb; Greenberg 1978). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we examine whether children extend putatively universal sonority restrictions to onsets unattested in their language. Participants (M = 4;03) were presented with pairs of auditory words—either identical (e.g., lbif⇉lbif) or epenthetically related (e.g., lbif⇉lebif)—and asked to judge their identity. Results showed that, like adults, children's ability to detect epenthetic distortions was monotonically related to sonority distance (bw>bd>lb), and their performance was inexplicable by several statistical and phonetic factors. These findings suggest that sonority restrictions are active in early childhood, and their scope is broad.

Characteristics of stop releases in American English spontaneous speech

This study examines the factors affecting the production of stop releases in American English spontaneous speech. Previous research has shown that releases are conditioned by phonetic and social factors. However, previous studies either rely exclusively on read speech, or for sociolinguistic studies, focus on phrase-final stops. In this study, spontaneous speech is collected from two sources: interviews from the non-profit StoryCorps project and from sentences spontaneously generated in a picture description task. Stop releases were examined before obstruents and nasals in word-medial position (e.g. ru gb y), word-final, phrase-medial position (e.g. They cra ck n uts), and pre-pausally (e.g. I look u p ). Phonetic factors taken into account include identity of the stop, directionality of place of articulation in the consonant cluster (front-to-back vs. back-to-front) and manner of C2. For the StoryCorps data, race of the speaker was also found to be an important predictor. Results showed that approximately a quarter of the stops followed by a consonant were released, but release was strongly affected by the place of the stop and the manner of the following consonant. Release of pre-pausal stops differed between black and white speakers; the latter had double the amount of final release. Other realizations of the stops, such as deletion, lenition, and glottalization are also analyzed.

Stuttering, cluttering, and phonological complexity: Case studies

The phonological complexity of dysfluencies in those who clutter and/or stutter may help us better understand phonetic factors in these two types of fluency disorders. In this preliminary investigation, cases were three 14-year-old males, diagnosed as a Stutterer, a Clutterer, and a Stutterer–Clutterer. Spontaneous speech samples were transcribed, coded for dysfluent words which were then matched to fluent words on grammatical class (i.e., function vs. content), number of syllables and word familiarity. An Index of Phonological Complexity was determined per word, and word frequency, density and phonological neighborhood frequency were derived from an online database. Results showed that compared to fluent words, dysfluent words were more phonologically complex and ‘sparser’, implying that they have fewer phonological neighbors or words in which a single phoneme is added, deleted or substituted. Interpretations and future directions for research regarding phonological complexity in stuttering and cluttering are offered. Educational objectives: 1. The reader can list three key symptoms of cluttering. 2. The reader will define phonological neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency. 3. The reader can calculate the Index of Phonological Complexity (IPC) for a given word. 4. The reader can state two findings from the current study and how each relates to other studies of phonological complexity and fluency disorders.

Interaction of acoustic and neighborhood density parameters on spoken word recognition.

The neighborhood activation model (NAM) [Luce and Pisoni (1998)] predicts the speed and accuracy of word retrieval in the mental lexicon based on word frequency and neighborhood density. Data from NAM experiments have demonstrated processing advantages of dense words over sparse words. Little is known about how acoustic, versus phonetic, variability influences processing strategies used by listeners of acoustical‐degraded speech such as those using cochlear implants and hearing instruments. In this experiment, neighborhood density was investigated using speech‐like sentences which preserved detailed frequency information but removed most amplitude information. Results yielded no difference between dense and sparse words when presented in this time‐varying sinusoidal format [Remez et al. (1980)]. Consistent with prior research, amplitude modulation increased overall intelligibility of the stimuli; however, the effect of neighborhood density was in the opposite direction from that found in natural speech. We hypothesize that this may be indicative of the neighborhood density effect, becoming secondary to a phonotactic probability effect which has previously been associated with sublexical processing tasks. These results indicate that interactions between acoustic and phonetic factors must be accounted for when designing hearing instruments and cochlear implants. Follow‐up investigation with other acoustic variables is currently underway in our laboratory.

Lexical influences on response times in Japanese listeners’ recognition of spoken English words.

One index of phonological knowledge of an L2 is the magnitude of phonological neighborhood density (PND) effects on word recognition. Imai et al. [JASA (2005)] showed that effects of PND on word‐recognition accuracy were only present in advanced Spanish‐speaking L2 English learners and not in beginning learners. This poster presents a follow up to Imai et al.’s study using Japanese L1 acquiring English as an L2 (JL1‐EL2) and Native English listeners (NELs). Previous reports of this work [Yoneyama and Munson, J. Phonetic. Soc. Japan (2010)] failed to replicate Imai et al.’s findings, in that we observed strong effects of frequency and neighborhood density on the performance of three groups of listeners: both beginning and advanced JL1‐EL2 speakers, and native English speakers. Here we investigate the influence of lexical factors on reaction times (RTs) in spoken‐word recognition in the same listeners. A preliminary analysis of a subset of data comparing the least‐proficient JL1‐EL2 speakers to the NELs shows larger effects of PND on RTs for the JL1‐EL2 listeners than for the NELs. Together, the findings suggest that lexical and phonetic factors influence second‐language word recognition in complex, language‐specific ways. [Work supported by NSF Grant No. BCS 0729277.]

Modeling Phonology in Time

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2011) Modeling phonology in time Keith Johnson (University of California, Berkeley) keithjohnson@berkeley.edu 1. Introduction The aim of theoretical linguistics is to construct models that help us understand language in some meaningful sense. In this regard, linguistic theory is much like the other branches of social science in seeking to achieve explicit, falsifiable, predictive, and complete theories by implementing those theories in mathematical models of the systems we seek to understand. Examples of linguistic models include the formal descriptions of generative linguistics (e.g. Chomsky, 1965), psycholinguistic simulations of language processing (e.g. Frazier & Fodor, 1978), and sociolinguistic models of factors relating to linguistic variation (e.g. Labov, 1972). The key decisions in linguistic modeling (and models in the social sciences more generally) concern what to model and how to model it. Where generative linguistics focussed on modeling linguistic structure, psycholinguistics seeks to model the aspects of human cognition that are involved in using language, and sociolinguistic models seek to account for choices among linguistic variables in communities of speakers. One key point here is that different choices of what to model are interrelated. The speaker's selection of one linguistic variable versus another is influenced by cognitive processing, and the set of all sociolinguistic choices ultimately determines linguistic structure. The question of how to model language is also answered in different ways by different theoreticians. Where generative linguistics uses methods from formal logic and finite mathematics, psycholinguists model behavior with simulations of cognitive processes, and sociolinguists use regression models to identify causally-linked factors in language change. 2. Sound change and explanatory phonology This paper seeks to make a contribution toward an explanatory theory of phonological structure by modeling sound change. My approach assumes that phonological structure is shaped by the phonetic, cognitive, and social forces that impinge upon human speech communication. An explanatory theory of phonological structure is thus dependent upon a workable model of sound change (see Hume & Johnson, 2001). In passing, I would note that the structure of optimality theory (McCarthy & Prince, 1993) lends itself to an interpretation as a theory of sound change; with GEN as a source of phonetic variation and EVAL as a set of constraints on the inclusion of phonetic variants in a subsequent stage of the language. The key to success in modeling sound change, is to incorporate as many explanatory factors as needed. From before there was a difference between phoneticians and phonologists, scholars have espoused the idea that phonetic factors influence phonology (see e.g. Baudouin de Courtenay,

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

Sign lowering and phonetic reduction in American Sign Language

This study examines sign lowering as a form of phonetic reduction in American Sign Language. Phonetic reduction occurs in the course of normal language production, when instead of producing a carefully articulated form of a word, the language user produces a less clearly articulated form. When signs are produced in context by native signers, they often differ from the citation forms of signs. In some cases, phonetic reduction is manifested as a sign being produced at a lower location than in the citation form. Sign lowering has been documented previously, but this is the first study to examine it in phonetic detail. The data presented here are tokens of the sign WONDER, as produced by six native signers, in two phonetic contexts and at three signing rates, which were captured by optoelectronic motion capture. The results indicate that sign lowering occurred for all signers, according to the factors we manipulated. Sign production was affected by several phonetic factors that also influence speech production, namely, production rate, phonetic context, and position within an utterance. In addition, we have discovered interesting variations in sign production, which could underlie distinctions in signing style, analogous to accent or voice quality in speech.

Phonetic bases of similarities in cross-language production: Evidence from English and Catalan

Previous research has shown that speakers do not produce all non-native phonotactic sequences with equal accuracy. Several reasons for these accuracy differences have been proposed, including markedness, analogical extension from permitted sequences, and language-independent phonetic factors. In this study, evidence from the production of unattested obstruent-initial onset clusters by English and Catalan speakers tests the viability of these explanations. Variables manipulated in this study include the manner, place, and voicing of the consonant clusters, and the input modality of the stimuli—whether speakers were presented the stimuli in an audio+text condition, or in an audio-only condition. Results demonstrate none of the linguistic factors interacted with language background; all speakers were less accurate on stop-initial sequences than fricative-initial ones, and on voiced sequences than voiceless sequences. It is argued that the fact that the particular accuracy patterns are independent of language background is incompatible with an analogy-based explanation, and is better accounted for by language-independent phonetic factors. However, the role of the native language phonology is reflected in the preferred repair types, which vary by native language. Finally, while the presence of text improves performance, the patterns of accuracy are still largely the same for both audio+text and audio-only input, suggesting that the underlying mechanisms responsible for speech production are independent of input modality.

Nasal vowels in French loanwords in German: The effect of linguistic environment

This article describes the phonological treatment of nasal vowels in French loanwords in Standard German, including both northern and southern regional standards, in light of recent language contact theory, in particular Van Coetsem (1 9 88, 2000). Based on the realizations reported in the major pronunciation dictionaries of Standard German, it is shown that in aural, as opposed to spelling-based loanwords, linguistic environment plays a determinant role. In particular, in non-contrastive, assimilatory environments before stops, there is no attempt at imitating the French nasal vowels which are fully adapted to native German oral vowel + nasal consonant sequences. In contrastive, non-assimilatory environments before fricatives (more generally, continuants) and in absolute word-final position, on the other hand, there is a more conscious attempt at imitating the French nasal vowels, although in the mouths of northern monolingual Germans, imitation fails and partial adaptation to native V[η] sequences results. It is argued that V[η] sequences come closest to nasal vowels, phonetically speaking, and represent an, albeit unsuccessful, attempt at imitation. Furthermore, the pronunciations listed in the dictionaries for words containing more than one nasal vowel in French suggest that successful imitation starts in word-final position. Both phonological and phonetic factors are suggested to account for the contextual differences. Lastly, it is shown that the synchronic continuum of realizations for nasal vowels in French loanwords in German corresponds to the successive stages typically found in the development of distinctive nasalization in languages.

Cross-dialectal variation in formant dynamics of American English vowels

This study aims to characterize the nature of the dynamic spectral change in vowels in three distinct regional varieties of American English spoken in the Western North Carolina, in Central Ohio, and in Southern Wisconsin. The vowels /I, epsilon, e, ae, aI/ were produced by 48 women for a total of 1920 utterances and were contained in words of the structure /bVts/ and /bVdz/ in sentences which elicited nonemphatic and emphatic vowels. Measurements made at the vowel target (i.e., the central 60% of the vowel) produced a set of acoustic parameters which included position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, amount of spectral change [measured as vector length (VL) and trajectory length (TL)], and spectral rate of change. Results revealed expected variation in formant dynamics as a function of phonetic factors (vowel emphasis and consonantal context). However, for each vowel and for each measure employed, dialect was a strong source of variation in vowel-inherent spectral change. In general, the dialect-specific nature and amount of spectral change can be characterized quite effectively by position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, TL (but not VL which underestimates formant movement), and spectral rate of change.

Phonetic Factors in Transliteration of Biblical Proper Names into Greek and Latin

Phonetic Factors in Transliteration of Biblical Proper Names into Greek and Latin

Durational Characteristics of English Vowels Produced by Japanese and Thai Second Language (L2) Learners1

This empirical study investigated durational characteristics of English vowels /i/ as in ‘heat’ and /I/ as in ‘hit’ produced by two groups of second language (L2) learners who differ in their first language (L1) backgrounds, i.e. Japanese and Thai. In these languages, vowel length is phonemic. Experiment 1 compared the /i/-/I/ contrast produced in monosyllabic words ending with /p t k/ by Australian English (OZ1, n=6) and Thai speakers (T, n=22). Experiment 2 compared the same vowel contrast in monosyllabic words ending with /t/ and /d/ by another group of Australian English speakers (OZ2, n = 12) and Japanese speakers (J, n =24). While both non-native groups showed a greater durational differentiation of the /i/-/I/ contrast than the OZ groups to which they were compared, J and OZ2 differed to a greater extent when the /i/-/I/ contrast occurred before /t/ than before /d/. This finding highlights the importance of taking language-specific phonetic factors such as allophonic variation into consideration in L2 speech acquisition research.

Segment Inventories

AbstractThe nature of speech sound inventories has been a focus of study by phonologists and phoneticians, facilitated in 1984 with the publication by Ian Maddieson of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. This article gives an overview of the study of inventories and summarizes some of the major findings. Crosslinguistic comparison of inventories provides a window into the phonetic factors that shape languages, but also reflects non‐linguistic factors. Models of the phonetic and phonological factors argued to shape inventories are discussed, along with some challenges that need to be dealt with in order to isolate linguistically interesting facts.