Stop Phonemes Research Articles

Variable Contrast in Border Uruguayan Spanish /b/

Abstract This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called “pedantic v” and “orthographic loyalty” in other Spanish varieties.

Phonological redeployment for [retracted tongue root] in third language perception of Kaqchikel stops

Phonological redeployment is the theoretical ability of language learners to utilize non-local phonological knowledge from known languages in the mapping and acquisition of novel contrasts in their target languages. The current paper probes the limits of phonological redeployment in a third language acquisition scenario. The phonological features [Advanced Tongue Root] and [Retracted Tongue Root] capture a range of phonological contrasts and harmony processes in both vowels and consonants of spoken languages across the world, including, but not limited to, vowel tensing and post-velar places of articulation (e.g. uvular). Kaqchikel (cak) exhibits both a tense-lax vocalic contrast in its vowels plus a velar-uvular Place contrast in its eight stop consonant phonemes. English (eng) exhibits a tense-lax vocalic distinction but no velar-uvular distinction among its six stop phonemes. Spanish (spa) exhibits neither of these contrasts in its vowels or among its six stop phonemes. How do multilingual learners of Kaqchikel already familiar with English and Spanish, but who differ in which is their first language (L1), compare in their categorical perception of Kaqchikel stop consonants? Despite English and Spanish having a three-way Place distinction among stops in common, in a phonemic categorization task, L1 English learners of Kaqchikel were better at correctly categorizing audio recordings of Kaqchikel uvular stops than L1 Spanish learners of Kaqchikel. To account for this surprising result, I propose that the L1 English group have easier access than the L1 Spanish group to the feature underlying English's tense-lax distinction. This access allows them to redeploy that phonological feature to accurately map out the novel four-way contrast of Kaqchikel's stop consonants, and the [±RTR] specified velar-uvular distinction in particular. Therefore, phonological redeployment must be considered in models of third language acquisition.

The Acquisition of Italian Stops by Igbo Speakers

This research explored the acquisition of Italian singleton stops by Igbo speakers. The voiceless and voiced stop phonemes /p t k/ and /b d g/ are present in both Italian and in the Igbo languages. This creates a perfect condition to check the learning strategies implemented in Italian L2. The theoretical framework taken up in this study was the Speech Learning Model. According to this approach, the sounds of L2 can be perceived by learners as the same, similar or as new compared to those present in their L1, depending on the greater or lesser acoustic and perceptive distance established between them. A spectro-acoustic analysis achieved on the stops produced by Igbo learners of Italian showed the presence of sound categories with a different acoustic structure. In Italian L2 stops have undergone an important phonetic adaptation that makes them perceptually different from what is achieved by native Italians.

Phonetics and Phonology of Stop Consonants in the Guaymi Spoken in Costa Rica


 
 
 The present work consists of an analysis of the phonetic and phonological properties of the sequences /t-k/ and /b-d-ɡ/ from the Guaymi spoken in La Casona, Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The corpus was analyzed with Speech Analyzer and the Lisker and Abramson (1964) method was applied in order to obtain the values of the V.O.T. The results suggest that the sequence /t-k/ does not present systematic allophonic variations, while /b-d-g/ alternates with stop, fricative, and approximant allophones; neutralization among stop phonemes is not frequent. Lastly, the V.O.T. contributes to the differentiation between voiceless and voiced stops.
 
 

The acoustic realization and timing of glottal stops in Hawaiian

Studies of glottal stop realization have shown that it is often not produced with full closure (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996), but conditioning factors are not well understood. This study focuses on Hawaiian, which has phonemic glottal stop that is contrastive in both word-initial (/ˀaka/ “laugh,” [aka] “shadow”) and word-medial position (/pua/ “flower,” /puˀa/ “to excrete”). Glottal stop realization is examined with respect to word position, different versus identical flanking vowel (/puˀu/ “hill”), and duration of the target /VˀV/ sequence. Data from eight native speakers come from the Ka Leo HawaiÊ»i radio program. The majority of glottal stops are produced as a period of creaky voice (63%), either in a modal-creaky-modal, modal-creaky or creaky-modal configuration. Full closures (6.6%) were more likely in word-initial position, and identical flanking vowels led to longer periods of creak. Some tokens had only an intensity dip. Shorter target intervals had longer proportions of creak. These findings for the glottal stop phoneme are consistent with research on the timing of contrastive voice quality in vowels, which show a preference for modal-nonmodal-modal patterns to ensure that vowel quality, voice quality, and tone are recoverable (Silverman, 1997). Effects of word position and flanking vowel are also related to recoverability and segmentation.

Математичні метод і модель диференціації фоностатистичних структур авторського стилю

Розроблено метод комплексного аналізу диференціації фоностатистичних структур авторського стилю англійської мови, який ґрунтується на поєднанні трьох статистичних критеріїв: критерію Стьюдента, критерію Колмогорова-Смірнова і критерію хі-квадрат. Поєднання цих критеріїв дає змогу підвищити достовірність диференціації авторських стилів. Для розв'язання задачі диференціації авторських стилів побудовано статистичну модель, яка підвищує достовірність результатів авторської атрибуції тексту. Розроблена програмна система реалізує метод і модель з використанням мови програмування Java, що забезпечує платформонезалежність. Для тестування програми вибрано статті С. Логан і Д. Вебстер з газети "Вільна газета" ("Freedom Paper", papers by S. Logan and D. Webster). Істотні відмінності встановлено за групами носових, дорсальних і велярних фонем за критерієм Стьюдента, за всіма вісьмома групами фонем за критерієм Колмогорова-Смірнова, істотні відмінності встановлено за групами сонорних, щілинних, дорсальних, зімкнених, губних і носових фонем за критерієм хі-квадрат. Поєднання використаних критеріїв дало змогу встановити групу фонем з найбільшою авторорозрізняльною здатністю. Це група дорсальних фонем. За цією групою можна диференціювати тексти різних авторів, що дає змогу змінімізувати кількість груп фонем, за якими здійснюється авторська атрибуція тексту.

Does the name say it all? Investigating phoneme-personality sound symbolism in first names.

Sound symbolism has typically been demonstrated as an association between certain phonemes and perceptual dimensions (e.g., size or shape). For instance, the maluma-takete effect is the sound symbolic association between sonorant and voiceless stop phonemes and round and sharp visual shapes, respectively. Here we explored a novel association between phonemes and a more abstract dimension: personality. Further, although sound symbolism has often been examined using nonwords, here we studied it in the context of existing first names. In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented first names containing sonorant versus voiceless stop consonants and found that participants associated these with different personality factors from the HEXACO model of personality. In general, names with sonorant phonemes (e.g., Mona, Owen) were associated with high Emotionality, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, whereas names with voiceless stop phonemes (e.g., Katie, Curtis) were associated with high Extraversion. In Experiment 3, we examined whether the associations of a person's name predict their personality. A sample of 1,071 individuals provided their names and completed a HEXACO personality inventory. We found no real-world evidence of the associations we observed in the lab. In Experiment 4, we used invented names and tested participants in the lab once again, finding evidence of the same associations as in Experiment 1 and 2. This suggests that phonemes, and not just existing knowledge of individuals with particular names, are key to the associations observed. Finally, in Experiment 5, we found that these effects are not mediated by likability. We discuss potential mechanisms for the observed associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The VOT Category Boundary in Word-Initial Stops: Counter-Evidence Against Rate Normalization in English Spontaneous Speech

Some languages, such as many varieties of English, use short-lag and long-lag VOT to distinguish word- and syllable-initial voiced vs. voiceless stop phonemes. According to a popular view, the optimal VOT category boundary between the two types of stops moves towards larger values as articulation rate becomes slower (and speech segments longer), and listeners accordingly shift the perceptual VOT category boundary. According to an alternative view, listeners do not shift the VOT category boundary with a change in articulation rate, because the same category boundary remains optimal across different rates of articulation in normal speech, although a shift in the optimal boundary location can be induced in the laboratory by instructing speakers to use artificially extreme articulation rates. In this study we compared the effectiveness of rate-independent VOT category boundaries applied to word-initial stop phonemes in spontaneous English speech, against the effectiveness of Miller et al.’s (1986) rate-dependent VOT category boundary applied to laboratory speech. The effectiveness of the two types of category boundaries were comparable, when spontaneous speech data were controlled for factors other than articulation rate. Our results suggest that perceptual VOT category boundaries need not shift with a change in articulation rate under normal circumstances.

Nasalization as a Repair for Voiced Obstruent Codas in Noon

The Senegalese language Noon exhibits a pattern by which the voiced stop phonemes /b, d, ɟ, g/ surface as nasals [m, n ɲ, ŋ] in coda position, undergoing complete neutralization with /m, n, ɲ, ŋ/. This allophonic alternation can be seen as a repair to the cross-linguistic constraint against voiced obstruents in coda position. However, the only otherwise attested repair to this marked structure is devoicing. Why should devoicing be so overwhelmingly preferred to other logical alternatives such as nasalization or gliding? Steriade (2008) answers this question with reference to her P-Map hypothesis, arguing that a [b~p] alternation is preferred because the perceptual distance between these sounds is less in this environment than between [b] and [m]; in essence, the synchronic system prefers a repair that changes a sound as little as possible, as determined by perceptual distinctness. The Noon facts are a clear counter-example to this prediction, and challenge any answer to the above question which requires synchronic systems to prefer the most “phonetically natural” repair.

Neurophysiologic measures of auditory brainstem responses to Hindi speech stimulus in typically developing children

Context: Speech evoked auditory brain stem responses (spABR) are used to assess brain stem ability to encode speech. However, brain stem representations of speech sound are affected by acoustic differences of speech, language background and experiences. Hence, linguistically and culturally specific stimulus should be used. Therefore, there is need to investigate the brain stem encoding of Hindi speech sound. Objective: The purpose of the study was to investigate the spABR to Hindi stimulus in typically developing children. Methods and Material: Total 25 atypical children of the mean age of 6.3 years with SD 2.3 years in the age range of 8-12 years were recruited. A 40ms duration Hindi stop phoneme of CV combination |da| was synthesized to gain response of consonant (transient) and vowel (sustained) portion of speech stimulus from all subjects. Results: The spABR latencies and amplitudes of discrete peaks as well as the latency, amplitude, area & slope of V-A complex were measured. The stimulus to response timing and spectral magnitudes of periodic portion were also calculated. The mean, median, standard deviation, minimum, maximum and 95% confidence interval values were calculated. Conclusions: The obtained spABR values suggest faithful representation of acoustic characteristic of speech at brain stem level. These values are found to be similar with previous reports. Hence, spABR can serve as important tools in the diagnostic work up of auditory processing deficits in children to understand speech perception and production abilities.

A tale of one letter: Morphological processing in early Arabic spelling

The study examined spelling of the letter ت <t> in Arabic among first-, second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade native Arabic-speaking children (N = 150). The letter <t> is among the most frequent letters in Arabic and it participates in the encoding of three productive morphological entities: root, word-pattern and affix. The letter <t> is also homographic and may represent the default voiceless dental-alveolar stop phoneme /t/ as well as its emphatic allophonic variant [ṭ] coinciding, hence, with the phoneme typically represented by the letter <ṭ> ط. The study tested whether children use morphological cues in spelling the letter <t> in Arabic, and whether morphological processing is different for different morphemes and in different grades. The results indicate that morphological processing is functional very early on in Arabic spelling among children. Yet, morphological processing appears to depend on the specific morpheme targeted, with some morphemes lending themselves more strongly to morphological processing than others. The results are discussed within the framework of the morphological and morpho-orthographic structure of Arabic.

Acoustic Bases for Place-Faithful Loan Adaptation

Acoustic Bases for Place-Faithful Loan Adaptation

A Study for the Effect of the Emphaticness and Language and Dialect for Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)

The signal sound contains many different features, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), which is a very important feature of stop sounds in many languages. The only application of VOT values is stopping phoneme subsets. This subset of consonant sounds is stop phonemes exist in the Arabic language, and in fact, all languages. The pronunciation of these sounds is hard and unique especially for less-educated Arabs and non-native Arabic speakers. VOT can be utilized by the human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in English.This search focuses on computing and analyzing VOT of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), within the Arabic language, for all pairs of non-emphatic (namely, /d/ and /t/) and emphatic pairs (namely, /d?/ and /t?/) depending on carrier words. This research uses a database built by ourselves, and uses the carrier words syllable structure: CV-CV-CV. One of the main outcomes always found is the emphatic sounds (/d?/, /t?/) are less than 50% of non-emphatic (counter-part) sounds ( /d/, /t/).Also, VOT can be used to classify or detect for a dialect ina language.

The frontal and temporal lobe in the identification of laryngeal contrasts

To investigate neuroanatomical correlates of the categorization of laryngeally contrastive phonemes, an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed during an auditory identification task in which 10 participants were distinguished among the three types of word-initial stop phonemes, either lax, tense, or aspirated. Perception of the aspirated consonant series elicited significantly higher activation in the inferior frontal gyrus as compared with both the lax and tense series, and the tense series showed significantly higher activation in the left superior temporal gyrus in comparison with either the lax or the aspirated series. The results show differential involvement of frontal and temporal lobe language areas for distinct phonemic contrasts, supporting a linguistic feature formulation model that posits variably specified phonological representations for the three-way distinctions.

Acoustics and perception of velar softening for unaspirated stops

Abstract This paper provides articulatory, acoustic and perceptual data in support of the hypothesis that the velar softening process through which /k/ becomes /tʃ/ is based on articulation rather than on acoustic equivalence if operating on unaspirated stops. Production data for unaspirated /k/ are analyzed for five speakers of Majorcan Catalan, where the velar stop phoneme exhibits (alveolo)palatal or velar allophones depending on vowel context and position. Data on several parameters, i.e., contact anteriority and dorsopalatal contact degree, burst spectral peak frequency, energy and duration, and F2 and F3 vowel transition endpoints and ranges, suggest that /tʃ/ may have originated from (alveolo)palatal stop realizations not only before front vocalic segments but also before low and central vowels and word finally. Perception results are consistent with the production data in indicating that the most significant /tʃ/ perception cues are burst energy before /a, u/ and burst duration word/utterance finally. They also suggest that velar softening for unaspirated /k/ before front vocalic segments is triggered by an increase in burst frication energy and duration resulting from the narrowing of an (alveolo)palatal central channel occurring at stop closure release. These findings are in agreement with the existence of contextual and positional (alveolo)palatal stop allophones of /k/, and with evidence from sound change, in the Romance languages.

Phonetic realization of glottal stop in Shugni.

Shugni is an underdocumented Indo‐European language, mainly spoken in the Pamir mountains. Orthographically, Shugni used the apostrophe to symbolize the glottal stop phoneme, and the symbol only occurred word initially. In this paper, phonetic manifestation of glottal stop was examined, and the adjacent vowel [a] was compared under five conditions: (1) word‐initial glottal stop followed by [a] and a consonant #[ʔaC1], (2) word‐medial [C2aC1] sequence where [a] was also syllable‐medial, (3) word‐medial [C2aC1] sequence where [a] was syllable‐final, (4) word‐final [a] preceded by a consonant [C2a]#, and (5) a sequence of [C2a]# [ʔaC1] where glottal stop was word‐initial and intervocalic. Four acoustic parameters were measured, and glottal stop was defined as (1) an absence of formant transitions entering or leaving [a], (2) an abrupt start or end of [a]’s magnitude, (3) identifiable stop closure, and (4) irregular pulses produced by glottal tension. The results showed that irregular pulses were noticed in some but not all [a]s of words which began with the apostrophe. No other significant acoustic differences were noted among conditions. The results suggested that glottal stop in Shugni be described as non‐phonemic vowel laryngealization or creaky phonation. The word‐initial apostrophe had to be treated cautiously to interpret the variation.

Variation in Voice Onset Time for Korean Stops

Abstract. Acoustic data elicited from 34 native speakers of Korean living in the United States pro-vide evidence for diachronic change in the voice onset time (VOT) of phrase-initial aspirated and lax stop phonemes. While older speakers produce aspirated and lax stops with clearly differentiated average VOT values, many younger speakers appear to have neutralized this difference, producing VOTs for aspirated stops that are substantially shorter than those of older speakers, and comparable to those for corresponding lax stops. The data further indicate that, within each age group, older speakers manifest sex-based differences in VOT while younger speakers do not. Despite this appar-ent shift in VOT values, the acoustic evidence suggests that all speakers in this study, regardless of age, continue to mark underlying differences between aspirated and lax stops in terms of stop closure and the fundamental frequency of the following vowel. It is concluded that the data point to a recent phonetic shift in the language, whereby VOT no longer serves as the primary cue to differentiate between lax and aspirated stops. There is not, however, evidence of any reorganization of the lan-guage as the phonemic level: the language's underlying lax ~ aspirated ~ tense contrasts endure.

High-frequency components of normal and dysphonic voices

The analysis of high-frequency energy levels can presently be considered as being more influenced by the characteristics of the speaker than by the phonetic material, serving as an indicator of the quality of the voice. In this study the energy levels in the frequency intervals of 6-10 and 10-16 kHz were evaluated, both in dysphonic voices and in subjects with no voice problems. The material consisted of consonant-vowel syllables formed by stop phonemes and the basic Spanish vowels, analyzing the vocal segment. The results indicate that the energy, found from the power spectrum average, in both frequency areas, is significantly bigger in the group with dysphonic voices. The analysis in the 10-16 kHz regions shows additional significant differences of energy between the vowels, progressively decreasing from front to back vowels.

Modeling microsegments of stop consonants in a hidden Markov model based word recognizer

The motivation of this study is the poor performance of speech recognizers on the stop consonants. To overcome this weakness, word initial and word final stop consonants are modeled at a subphonemic (microsegmental) level. Each stop consonant is segmented into a few relatively stationary microsegments: silence, voice bar, burst, and aspiration. Microsegments of certain phonemically different stops are trained together due to their similar spectral properties. Microsegmental models of burst and aspiration are conditioned on the adjacent vowel category: front versus nonfront vowels. The resulting context-dependent microsegmental hidden Markov models (HMMs) for six stops possess the desired properties for a compromise between modeling accuracy and modeling robustness. They allow the recognizer to focus discrimination onto those regions of a stop that serve to distinguish it from other stops. Use of these models in recognition experiments for word lists consisting of CVC words reduces the error rate by 35% compared with the result obtained by using one HMM for each stop phoneme.

When is a stop aspirated

A simple answer to the question is this: A stop is aspirated when a linguist/phonetician judges it to be so. This property, often referred to in descriptions of the stop consonants of English and many other languages, has been variously defined in physical terms, aerodynamically, articulatorily, and acoustically. Linguists seem generally to agree that in English aspiration is a predictable, i.e., context determined, and hence a nondistinctive attribute of/p t k/in certain contexts. In some other languages, e.g., Hindi, aspiration is a distinctive feature of certain stop phonemes, so that [t] contrasts with [th]. Hindi‐English bilinguals, however, when speaking English, regularly use Hindi /t/ and not/th/, where a “predictably” aspirated English/t/would be expected. For native English speakers, including linguists, this choice seems erroneous. Consistent with this choice by Hindi speakers, is the general opinion of many Hindi‐speaking linguists that, contrary to the opinion of American linguists, English /p t k/are not aspirated. Labeling tests of edited naturally produced nonsense CV syllables yielded data showing that Indian and American linguists differ considerably in locating an inaspirate‐aspirate boundary along the VOT dimension.