Preceding Vowel Duration Research Articles

Closure duration versus f0 perturbation as a cue to underlying stops for the American English intervocalic flap

Researchers found that there are five main cues for distinguishing the voicing of these intervocalic plosives, preceding vowel duration, following vowel duration, closure duration, semantic context, and f0 perturbation, also known as consonant intrinsic f0. In American English, when /t/ and /d/ occur intervocalically, they are realized as a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ] (e.g., [ɹa͡ɪɾɪŋ] writing/riding, [liɾɚ] liter/leader). The presence of these cues indicates incomplete neutralization of these forms. To address a current gap in the literature, the present study focused on American English native speakers’ perception and use of CF0 and closure duration as independent and combined informative cues for deciding voicing contrast of /t/ and /d/ when neutralized by the flap. Participants engaged in a self-administered online forced-judgement task of a pseudoword in 30 combinations of CF0 and flap closure duration to indicate the underlying representation (/hɑtɑ/ or /hɑdɑ/) of the surface production [hɑɾɑ] they perceived. This study observed that participants are more likely to select /hɑtɑ/ when the CF0 is higher and / hɑdɑ/ elsewhere. These modest findings suggest that CF0 is a useful cue for voicing distinction. The results suggest that models of spoken word recognition and speech perception ought to include CF0 as a cue.

Acoustic cues and obstruent devoicing in Minnesotan English

Previous research shows that the amount of glottal pulsing in American English obstruents varies by dialect, with some dialects characterized by high rates of devoicing. The present study is an examination of word-final obstruent devoicing in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota. A production task with 30 native speakers in their 20s, 50s, and 80s shows robust devoicing, which is conditioned by multiple linguistic factors. Nearly equal proportions (30%) of obstruents surface as fully voiced or fully devoiced, and the ∼rest surface as partially de-voiced. These results show that obstruent devoicing in the Twin Cities is fundamentally different from devoicing in the Iron Range of Minnesota. Secondary cues to phonological voicing are further examined, and in all cases, the cues are significant factors in the amount of glottal pulsing present in an obstruent, regardless of underlying voicing. However, the cues do not have a compensatory relationship with glottal pulsing. Finally, there are generational differences in the use of cues, suggesting a possible cue re-weighting: older generations rely more on glottal pulsing to signal underlying voicing, while younger generations equally use glottal pulsing and preceding vowel duration. In sum, devoicing in this region is phonologically stable, but phonetically changing.

A Reanalysis of the Voicing Effect in English: With Implications for Featural Specification.

The voicing effect is among the most studied and robust of phonetic phenomena. Yet there remains a lack of consensus on why vowels preceding voiced obstruents should be longer than vowels preceding voiceless obstruents. In this paper we provide an analysis of the voicing effect in a corpus of natural speech, and using production data from a metronome-timed word repetition study. From this evidence, as well as the existing literature, we conclude that vowel duration differences follow from consonant duration differences. The characteristic voicing effect in English is largely limited to words of especially long duration, and preceding vowel duration does not reliably cue obstruent voicing under the following circumstances: when obstruent voicing or duration cues conflict; for lax or unstressed vowels; and for most conversational speech. We show that this behavior can be modeled using a competing-constraints framework, where all segments resist expanding or compressing past a preferred duration. Inherent segment elasticity determines the degree of resistance, but segment duration is ultimately determined by the interaction of these segmental constraints with constraints on the distribution of the lengthening force within the syllable, and how closely target durations are matched. This account of the voicing effect has a number of implications for phonological theory, especially the central role that the concept of prominence plays in the analysis of underlying features.

First-Language Phonetic Drift of Yemeni Arabic Stops

This study aims at examining the occurrence and direction of any phonetic interlanguage interference among Yemeni Arabic-English bilinguals by indicating the acoustic similarities and differences of L1 Yemeni Arabic stops produced by bilinguals and comparing it to monolinguals. It investigates Voice Onset Time of stops in initial and medial position as well as Preceding Vowel Duration of stops in medial position. A total of 60 native Yemeni Arabic subjects were involved in this study. Thirty subjects were late bilinguals with English as their L2 whereas the other 30 were monolinguals. Data was collected through two production tests: one for the bilingual group and the other for the monolingual group. All the subjects were asked to produce a list of Arabic words with the target stops /b, t, d, k/ in word-initial and word-medial position. Each subject in both samples was recorded individually. The bilingual subjects showed significantly longer mean Voice Onset Time values than monolinguals for /t, k/ whereas they showed mean Voice Onset Time values for the voiced stops /b, d/ that were very close in values to the monolingual group. However, bilinguals showed shorter mean values than monolinguals for the Preceding Vowel Duration, but the difference was not significant. The findings reveal that bilinguals showed signs of English-induced L1 phonetic drift in their pronunciation of Arabic /t, k/ whereas not in their realisation of Arabic /b, d/. This study provides conclusive evidence that L2 characteristics can systematically affect matured L1 phonological systems even among late bilinguals.

A sociophonetic account of gradient /z/ devoicing among Chicanx high schoolers

AbstractThis paper examines final /z/ devoicing among Chicanx teens in Southern California to investigate the degree to which devoiced final /z/ neutralizes with final /s/ in this dialect. Results indicate on the one hand that devoiced /z/ remains distinct from /s/: as expected, devoiced /z/ is significantly less voiceless than /s/ and has a significantly lower center of gravity (COG). However, unexpectedly, devoiced /z/ has a significantly longer fricative duration and a significantly shorter preceding vowel duration than /s/, a pair of results that run counter to general tendencies for voiced fricatives to be shorter and have longer preceding vowels than their voiceless counterparts. We propose that these durational findings may explain, at least in part, the salience of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes despite its ubiquity among speakers of mainstream US English. In this first instrumental sociophonetic account of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes, we also find that, counter to existing segmental accounts, the morphological status of /z/ is no longer a significant predictor of devoicing. Moreover, while both following segment and speaker gender are significant predictors of devoicing, they do not condition devoicing in the expected ways.

Perspectives on final laryngeal neutralisation: new evidence from Polish

An acoustic experiment on final devoicing in Polish, aimed at providing new data on incomplete neutralisation, is described. The experiment was modelled on a study of German by Roettger et al. (2014), who mitigated possible effects of orthography by employing a word-formation task based on auditory stimuli, eliciting stop-final nonce words with underlying final voiced or voiceless stops. Our results provide some evidence for incomplete neutralisation in Polish, with an effect on closure duration, but not on preceding vowel duration, as well as interspeaker variation in the reliability of contrast maintenance. Considered against the background of studies from other languages, the results point to implementational differences in incomplete neutralisation effects as a function of laryngeal typology, which are accounted for in the Onset Prominence representational model.

Effects of Glottalisation, Preceding Vowel Duration, and Coda Closure Duration on the Perception of Coda Stop Voicing.

English has multiple potential acoustic cues to coda stop voicing, including the duration of the preceding vowel, the coda closure duration, and, in some varieties, glottalisation. Glottalisation associated with coda stops appears to be a recent change to Australian English (AusE) with younger speakers using glottalisation more than older speakers in production. Here we report on a study designed to examine AusE-speaking listeners' perception of cues to coda stop voicing. Listeners were presented with audio stimuli in which preceding vowel duration, coda closure duration, and the relative proportions of the rhyme that these occupy were manipulated and co-varied with the presence or absence of glottalisation. The results show that listeners used preceding vowel duration to cue coda stop voicing, and that coda closure duration was a weaker cue to voicing when not varied in conjunction with preceding vowel duration. In addition, glottalisation facilitated increased perception of coda voicelessness, even when paired with very long preceding vowels, which otherwise signal coda voicing. Although age-related differences in production have previously been reported, we found that both older and younger listeners used glottalisation similarly in perception. These results may provide support for a sound change led by a shift in perception.

Glottalisation of word-final stops in Australian English unstressed syllables

Glottalisation functions as a cue to coda stop voicelessness in many varieties of English, occurring most commonly for alveolar stops, although varieties differ according to the context and frequency with which glottalisation is used. In Australian English, younger speakers glottalise voiceless coda stops at much higher rates than older speakers suggesting a recent change to the variety, yet this change has only been examined in stressed syllables for stops with alveolar place of articulation. In addition, research has found that glottalisation occurs in a trading relationship with preceding vowel duration to cue coda stop voicing: younger speakers make less use of vowel duration and more use of glottalisation. This study investigates glottalisation as a cue to coda voicing in unstressed syllables, an environment in which coda voicing-related vowel durational differences are already reduced. We examine this phenomenon in two separate datasets of Australian English with reference to stops at three places of articulation to explore dialect-specific distributional patterns and to track the potential progression of change. The results suggest that glottalisation occurs in conjunction with voiceless stops at all places of articulation in the unstressed Australian English contexts examined here. The results also confirm that younger speakers employ glottalisation more than older speakers, and show that females glottalise more than males, both results supporting previous suggestions of a recent change to the variety.

Transferring perceptual cue-weighting from second language into first language: Cues to voicing in Russian speakers of English

Does second language experience affect first language perception? The present paper addresses this question in a study of bilingual cue weighting with a focus on perceptual cues that are of markedly different importance for the corresponding monolingual groups. The study investigates the use of vowel duration and glottal pulsing duration as cues to stop voicing by adult Russian speakers of English, long-term residents of the USA, (n = 37, average age 38.8 years), as well as a control group of monolingual Russians, recruited and tested in Russia, (n = 34, average age 26.1 years) and a control group of monolingual English speakers, recruited and tested in the USA, (n = 34, average age 21.7 years). Participants took part in a binary-choice voicing identification experiment using resynthesized real-word stimuli recorded by native speakers of each language. The stimuli varied orthogonally in terms of preceding vowel duration and duration of glottal pulsing during stop closure. Results demonstrate that monolingual English participants assigned a greater perceptual weight to vowel duration and a lesser perceptual weight to glottal pulsing than monolingual Russian participants. Bilinguals also used different cue weighting depending on the language mode. Bilinguals’ cue weighting in English mode was not statistically different from that of monolingual English participants. Bilinguals’ cue weighting in Russian mode showed an increased reliance on vowel duration and a decreased reliance on glottal pulsing, compared to monolingual Russians, indicating the influence of English. These findings demonstrate that second language experience affects cue weighting patterns in bilinguals’ first language.

Pre-coda vowel duration in Nepali

Many previous studies have found that vowels are longer before voiced consonants than voiceless (Chen 1970). Fewer studies have examined vowel duration preceding aspirated vs. unaspirated stops, and results are inconsistent (Maddieson & Grandour 1976, Ohala & Ohala 1992). Durvasala and Luo (2012) find that both voicing and aspiration have a lengthening effect on the preceding vowel in Hindi, and that the voiced aspirated class has the longest preceding vowel duration. In the present study, I measure the duration of vowels preceding word final codas in Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language with the same four-way contrast as Hindi. A phonetic study of final stop realization has not yet been reported in the literature, though Nepali is described as variably neutralizing voiced aspirated to the plain voiced. I present an acoustic analysis of cues in word-final position including voicing, burst, and preceding vowel duration. I find evidence of neutralization of voiced and voiced aspirated stops in terms of aspiration duration, but also find results consistent with Durvasala and Luo (2012), that the voiced aspirated stops have longer preceding vowel than the voiced. The difference in vowel duration between the voiced and voiced aspirated classes suggests incomplete neutralization of voiced aspirated to voiced.Many previous studies have found that vowels are longer before voiced consonants than voiceless (Chen 1970). Fewer studies have examined vowel duration preceding aspirated vs. unaspirated stops, and results are inconsistent (Maddieson & Grandour 1976, Ohala & Ohala 1992). Durvasala and Luo (2012) find that both voicing and aspiration have a lengthening effect on the preceding vowel in Hindi, and that the voiced aspirated class has the longest preceding vowel duration. In the present study, I measure the duration of vowels preceding word final codas in Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language with the same four-way contrast as Hindi. A phonetic study of final stop realization has not yet been reported in the literature, though Nepali is described as variably neutralizing voiced aspirated to the plain voiced. I present an acoustic analysis of cues in word-final position including voicing, burst, and preceding vowel duration. I find evidence of neutralization of voiced and voiced aspirated stops in terms of aspiration...

First language phonetic drift in second language instructional environment

Recent research demonstrates that second language learning can affect first language speech production. This has been shown for proficient long-term second language learners in immigration settings (Flege, 1987) as well as novice learners in the study abroad setting (Chang, 2013). The question addressed in the present study is whether learners acquiring a second language in a classroom setting in the first language-dominant environment are also subject to L1 phonetic drift. A group of American students enrolled in intermediate-level Russian language courses at a major Mid-Western university were recorded reading a list of Russian and English words designed to investigate the acoustic realization if word-initial and word-final stop voicing. Several acoustic correlates of initial and final voicing were measured (VOT, onset f0, preceding vowel duration, glottal pulsing, etc.) and compared to data from monolingual speakers of American English from the same geographic region. Results demonstrate that learners’ realization of both initial and final voicing in English are affected by exposure to Russian. In the majority of measures, the drift occurred in the direction of norms characteristic of Russian voicing. Divergence from Russian was detected in the use of negative VOT for initial voiced stops.

The effect of lexical competition on vowel duration before voiced and voiceless English stops

One source of phonetic variation is lexical competition, which has been shown to cause both hyperarticulation, especially of vowel formants (e.g., Wright 2004), and reduction, manifested as shorter segment and word durations (Kilanski 2009, Gahl et al. 2012). Studies have found that lexical competition (e.g., having a minimal pair competitor, having more phonological neighbors) causes contrastive hyperarticulation of the initial stop voicing contrast in English: greater competition makes VOT longer for voiceless stops and/or shorter for voiced stops (Baese-Berk & Goldrick 2009, Nelson & Wedel 2017). I conducted a corpus study that looked for contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast in English. The cue examined was preceding vowel duration. I did not find contrastive hyperarticulation: neither minimal pair competitor existence nor higher neighborhood density caused vowels to be longer before final [d] or shorter before final [t]. Instead, both competition metrics correlated with shorter vowel durations before [t] and [d]. This result is consistent with Goldrick et al. (2013)’s failure to find contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast and their hypothesis that competition affects initial and final contrasts differently. It is also consistent with Gahl et al’s (2012) finding that high neighborhood density causes reduction.

Effects of ejective stops on preceding vowel duration.

One of the most widely studied observations in linguistic phonetics is that, all else being equal, vowels are longer before voiced than before voiceless obstruents. The causes of this phonetic generalization are, however, poorly understood and several competing explanations have been proposed. No studies have so far measured vowel duration before stops with yet another laryngeal feature: ejectives. This study fills this gap and presents results from an experiment that measures vowel duration before stops with all three laryngeal features in Georgian and models effects of both closure and voice onset time (VOT) on preceding vowel duration at the same time. The results show that vowels have significantly different durations before all three series of stops, voiced, ejective, and voiceless aspirated, even when closure and VOT durations are controlled for. The results also suggest that closure and VOT durations are inversely correlated with preceding vowel duration. These results combined bear several implications for the discussion of causes of vowel duration differences: the data support the hypotheses that claim that laryngeal gestures, temporal compensation, and closure velocity affect vowel duration. Some explanations, especially perceptual and airflow expenditure explanations, are considerably weakened by the results.

Talker variability and the use of perceptual cues in Hong Kong Cantonese lingual stop codas

Cantonese inaudibly released oral stop codas, whose place cues occur only before constriction and not during or after constriction, appear to be merging among young-adult speakers (Law, Fung, & Bauer, 2001). Prior work (Yip, 2015) revealed substantial articulatory variation among five talkers, ranging from gestural preservation, to coproduction of lingual-lingual sequences, to gestural loss. Coda contrasts were cued by first- and third-formant loci (both lower into /k/ than into /t/) and preceding vowel duration (longer before /t/ than before /k/). In the present study, 18 Cantonese-speaking listeners’ perception of codas produced by talkers in the prior study was tested in an AXB task in which ambiguous coda productions were judged as more similar to each talker’s best coda /t/ or /k/ production, as assessed with ultrasound tongue imaging. Comparisons of listener sensitivity to cues—based on LMER estimates for change in accuracy with respect to relevant acoustic response variables—with their accuracy rates for individual talkers indicate that listeners who were sensitive to particular acoustic cues gained a perceptual advantage for talkers who produced those cues. However, greater articulatory achievement in the stimuli did not correlate with better perception, except for productions by talker T4, who produced gestural loss.

Transferring cue-weighting from second language into first language: Group trends and individual differences

Second language learning has been shown to affect first language production (Flege, 1987; Major, 1992; Sancier & Fowler, 1997, inter alia). Less is known about whether and how experience with another language may affect first language perception. The present study examines the use of preceding vowel duration vs. voicing during closure as cues to word-final and word-medial stop voicing by three groups of listeners: native speakers of American English (34), native speakers of Russian (34), and Russian expatriates in the United States (24). The results suggest that bilingual listeners are transferring a greater reliance on vowel duration, characteristic of English perceptual mode, into native speech categorization. The transfer occurred in word-final condition where vowel duration as a correlate of voicing is of very different importance in the two languages. Individual trends revealed that bilinguals’ reliance on vowel duration may even be exaggerated in native, compared to non-native, speech perception. Th...

Acoustic evidence for incomplete neutralization of coda obstruents in Korean

The phonetic manifestation of phonological contrast neutralization is of long-standing interest for our understanding of the phonetic realization of phonological structure. Korean phonology is particularly interesting in this regard with three dimensions of coda contrast neutralization: laryngeal, manner, and palatal. Extending previous work (Kim & Jongman, 1996) that documented complete neutralization of manner contrasts, the present study investigated all of the three types of coda neutralization in both spontaneous (orthography absent) and read speech (orthography present). The results revealed no acoustic differences between most pairs of coda obstruents subject to manner or palatal neutralization. However, laryngeal neutralization was phonetically incomplete with lenis codas (/p, t, k/) differing from their non-lenis counterparts (/pʰ, tʰ, k’/). In spontaneous speech, this was observed in preceding vowel duration, voicing into closure, and closure duration; in read speech, voicing into closure, closure duration, and release burst duration of a following consonant differed. Our new findings demonstrate that laryngeal coda neutralization in Korean is phonetically incomplete regardless of the presence or absence of orthography. As a case of neutralization beyond final devoicing, this study extends the empirical basis of linguistic theory, discriminating between the predictions of traditional theories versus more recent ones such as exemplar-based theory.

Final voicing and devoicing in American English

English is typically described as a language in which voicing contrast is not neutralized in word-final position. However, a tendency towards devoicing (at least partial) of final voiced obstruents in English has been reported by the previous studies (e.g., Docherty (1992) and references therein). In the present study, we examine a number of acoustic correlates of obstruent voicing and the robustness with which each one is able to differentiate between voiced and voiceless obstruents in the word-final position in the speech recorded by twenty native speakers of the Mid-Western dialect of American English. The examined acoustic properties include preceding vowel duration, closure or frication duration, duration of the release portion, and duration of voicing during the obstruent closure, frication, and release. Initial results indicate that final voiced obstruents are significantly different from the voiceless ones in terms of preceding vowel duration and closure/frication duration. However, release duration for stops does not appear to correlate with voicing in an equally reliable fashion. A well-pronounced difference in terms of closure voicing between voiced and voiceless final stops is significantly reduced in fricative consonants, which indicates a tendency towards neutralization of this particular correlate of voicing in the word-final fricatives of American English.

Incomplete neutralization of the voicing contrast in word-final obstruents in Russian: Phonological, lexical, and methodological influences

Acoustic data from languages with word-final devoicing show that words ending in phonologically voiced versus voiceless obstruents (e.g., код /kod/ ‘code’ vs. кот /kot/ ‘cat’ in Russian) are seldom homophonous at the phonetic level. The present study examines how such incomplete neutralization of the underlying contrast varies across (i) different types of obstruents and stimulus words (plosives vs. fricatives; labials/coronals vs. dorsals; monosyllables vs. disyllables; minimal vs. non-minimal pairs) and (ii) different types of experimental tasks and stimulus lists (word-reading vs. picture-naming/word-guessing; presence vs. absence of minimal pairs among the stimuli). Results from Russian show that underlying voicing affects consonantal duration and glottal pulsing but not preceding vowel duration. For consonantal duration, voicing effects are found regardless of speakers' exposure to orthography or minimal pairs and more differences are seen in minimal pairs and monosyllables than non-minimal pairs or disyllables. For glottal pulsing, comparable effects are observed for all types of obstruents and stimulus words but they are significant only during word-reading or when speakers encounter full minimal pairs. This shows that incomplete neutralization has different sources for different acoustic parameters. Some differences are the result of phonological and lexical pressures. Other differences arise due to methodological influences.

Perception of voicing of English word-final consonants: A comparative study of English listeners and Korean listeners

This study aims to investigate the perception of word-final consonant voicing. Preceding vowel duration is of interest in comparing the perception of 7 English listeners (EL) and 7 Korean listeners (KL). Each listener was required to listen to 104 stimuli randomly composed of English voiceless and voiced consonants (e.g., “picks” and “pigs”) and to choose from two options what they heard for each of the stimuli. There were 2 types of stimuli: original and manipulated. To manipulate vowel duration, for example, the vowel in the originally voiceless stimulus “picks” was lengthened, whereas the vowel in the voiced stimulus “pigs” was shortened by using Praat. The results show that, in the original stimuli, both groups tend to perceive voicing accurately, but ELs are better than KLs. It is assumed that the lower percentage of KLs’ perception is due to the fact that there is no voicing contrast in Korean. In the manipulated stimuli, however, both groups generally fail to perceive voicing, and the number of stimuli whose voicing was never perceived was greater for ELs than that for KLs. This clearly indicates that ELs rely more on the voicing of following consonants than they do on the preceding vowel length.

Voicing assimilation in Catalan three-consonant clusters

Electroglottographic and acoustic data for Catalan three-consonant clusters composed of a word- and syllable-final C1C2 sequence and an underlyingly voiced C3 in word- and syllable-initial position were collected in order to verify whether a regressive voicing assimilation process operates on all obstruents placed at the C2 and C1 sites. Data reveal the presence of low percentages of vocal fold vibration during final stops and fricatives, C3-dependent regressive voicing effects occurring to some extent during C2 but not during C1, and a more robust voicing interaction involving C1 and C2 and thus consonants placed within the same syllable and the same word. Moreover, except for perceptually and/or aerodynamically conditioned cases, voicing effects were found to be triggered by sonorants rather than by obstruents and the trill /r/ in agreement with the predictions of the Degree of Articulatory Constraint (DAC) model of coarticulation. Acoustic data for three-consonant cluster pairs differing in the underlying C3 voicing status show that speakers may use C2 duration and intensity (but not C1 or preceding vowel duration) as voicing cues. Taken together these results suggest that voicing assimilation in Catalan three-consonant cluster cannot be modeled as a long-distance regressive process, and is strongly dependent on syllable/word affiliation and on the manner and place of articulation characteristics of the consonants in the cluster.