Stressed Vowels Research Articles

Tenseness in Northern Yi: An ultrasonic and acoustic study

A contrast between tense and lax vowels is a main feature of many Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages spoken in Southwest China. This study investigated the articulation and acoustics of tense-lax contrast in two Northern Yi dialects: Suondi and Yinuo. Both dialects have five pairs of phonologically-defined tense and lax vowels. Previous studies have shown that tense and lax vowels in TB had distinct patterns in phonation types and f0, while the difference in other acoustic dimensions—vowel quality, duration, and intensity are rarely examined, and the difference in the lingual gestures is largely unknown. The current study examined the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of tense-lax contrast using ultrasound imaging and spectrogram analysis. Our preliminary results showed that articulatorily, tense vowels were produced with more retracted tongue root. Acoustically, tense vowels had higher F1 and lower F2, which was caused by the lowered and retracted tongue position. The intensity of tense vowels was lower than that of lax vowels for front vowels. No significant difference was found in duration. Based on the articulatory and acoustic data, as well as the vowel harmony phenomenon in Yi, we propose that the tense-lax distinction in Northern Yi can be better represented as [+RTR] phonologically.

English listeners’ judgments of Japanese-accented English vowel productions: Relation to acoustic and kinematic characteristics

The present study investigates how monolingual English listeners categorize foreign (Japanese) productions of English tense and lax vowels with the aim of relating vowel identification to the acoustic and kinematic vowel space. American English front vowels (/i/, /ɪ/, /e/, /ɛ/, and /ae/) were elicited in /hVd/ context from ten Japanese adults who learned English as a second language (ESL). Listeners categorized these vowel productions in a six-alternative, forced-choice paradigm (including the choice /ʌ/). Vowels produced by two native English speakers were included in the perceptual task for comparison. Preliminary results showed higher perceptual accuracy for tense vowels than for lax vowels. As expected, vowels from English talkers were more accurately identified than those from Japanese ESL speakers. To determine whether listeners’ perceptual categorization corresponded with acoustic and kinematic patterns, perceptual data for contrasting vowel categories were compared with measured differences in form...

Cross-linguistic perception of clearly spoken English tense and lax vowels based on auditory, visual, and auditory-visual information

Studies on acoustic and visual characteristics of English tense and lax vowels show consistent enhancement of tensity contrasts in clear speech. However, the degree to which listeners utilize these enhancements in speech perception remains unclear. The present study addresses this issue by testing speech style effects on tense and lax vowel perception by 23 native English and 30 non-native Mandarin-Chinese listeners in audio-only (AO), audio-visual (AV), and visual-only (VO) stimulus modes. English and Chinese listeners showed similar relative differences in performance by mode (VO < AO < AV) and style (plain < clear). However, the two groups differed in the nature of the interaction between tensity, style, and stimulus mode. English listeners showed advantages for clear speech for both tense and lax vowels in all but VO stimuli, whereas Chinese listeners showed a clear speech advantage only for tense vowels, while clear lax vowels showed no improvement in AO and reduced accuracy in AV and VO. While temporal and spectral acoustic cues may coordinate to preserve or improve tense-lax category identity in clear speech, non-native listeners may not be attending to both dimensions. Further, Chinese listeners' greater reliance on visual information may account for their less accurate lax vowel identification.

An experimental investigation of acoustic task-based carryover effects

Carryover effects, where conditions in one experimental task affect behavior in subsequent tasks, have not received much attention in linguistics. This is worrying, given that linguistic elicitation tasks do affect talkers' production (Labov et al. 1972, Warner et al. 2012). This study used before and after within-subjects design. 16 talkers completed three tasks: a memory task, one of a set of intermediate tasks (passage reading, word reading or an interview), and a second memory task. Pitch, intensity and duration of stressed vowels were measured for productions from each task. Nested mixed linear effects models were constructed for each measure. In all models, acoustic measures were used as the response variable and subject and token as random intercepts. For data from the intermediate tasks, the inclusion of task identity significantly improved model fit for pitch (p < 0.05), intensity (p < 0.001) and duration (p < 0.001). In other words, there were very strong task effects. However, when comparing da...

Aspects of Arrernte prosody

This study presents duration data for six female speakers of Central Arrernte, based on continuous read speech. The vowels of Arrernte are treated separately in the durational analyses, and it is found that the vowel /a/ is much more "elastic" than the vowel /ə/ and the (relatively infrequent) vowel /i/, which are comparatively "non-elastic". The elastic vowel /a/ is lengthened considerably under stress, and also shows great durational variability when preceding or following consonant clusters – it is lengthened following the cluster, and slightly shortened before the cluster. By contrast, the non-elastic vowels /ə/ and /i/ show relatively stable durational values in these various prosodic contexts.In addition, it is shown that the singleton consonant is lengthened when it precedes a stressed vowel (i.e. when it is part of a CV sequence). This is despite Arrernte phonology having an underlying VC syllable structure. As regards consonant clusters, homorganic vs. heterorganic clusters result in different timing effects, which hint at different syllabic affiliations for the two different types of clusters.Together, these results present a picture of Arrernte durational patterns which are very dependent on elastic vs. non-elastic vowels, on stress, on the presence of singleton consonants vs. clusters, and the presence of homorganic vs. heterorganic clusters.

Vowel Reduction in Israeli Heritage Russian

This study examines vowel reduction patterns of Israeli Heritage Russian speakers (IHRs). Contemporary Standard Russian is well documented as having a complex system of vowel reduction (e.g., Barnes, 2002; Crosswhite, 1999; Jakobson, 1929; Padgett, 2004): specifically, underlying /o/ surfaces as [o] in stressed syllables, as [ɐ] in the first pretonic syllable, and as [ə] in other unstressed syllables. In Modern Hebrew, on the other hand, stressed and unstressed vowels differ in duration, but not in quality (Cohen, Silber-Varod, &amp; Amir, in preparation; Maymon, 2001). We conducted a production experiment to determine the patterns of vowel reduction in the Russian of IHRs. Sixteen IHRs were exposed to audiobased forms of real and nonce words with stressed /o/ and were required to produce the forms with and without stressed suffixes. Thus, underlying /o/ was produced in three distinct prosodic positions: stressed (e.g., /nos/ ‘nose sg.’), pretonic (e.g., /nos- ̍ɨ/ ‘nose pl.’), and antepretonic (e.g., /nos-o ̍voj/ ‘nasal.’). The quantity (duration) and quality (F1, F2) of /o/ were acoustically analyzed and compared to a control group of five Russian-speaking adult immigrants to Israel. The results showed that IHRs reduced unstressed /o/ in both real and nonce words, but in producing nonce words they did not display the height contrast that is expected between pretonic and antepretonic vowels. We argue that IHRs’ productions of real words may be rote-learnt, whereas their treatment of nonce words better reflects their productive grammar. We propose that IHRs’ productive system of vowel reduction is a mixed system, combining aspects of their heritage language (i.e., Russian) and dominant language (i.e., Hebrew).

Seeking an Anchorage. Stability and Variability in Tonal Alignment of Rising Prenuclear Pitch Accents in Cypriot Greek.

Although tonal alignment constitutes a quintessential property of pitch accents, its exact characteristics remain unclear. This study, by exploring the timing of the Cypriot Greek L*+H prenuclear pitch accent, examines the predictions of three hypotheses about tonal alignment: the invariance hypothesis, the segmental anchoring hypothesis, and the segmental anchorage hypothesis. The study reports on two experiments: the first of which manipulates the syllable patterns of the stressed syllable, and the second of which modifies the distance of the L*+H from the following pitch accent. The findings on the alignment of the low tone (L) are illustrative of the segmental anchoring hypothesis predictions: the L persistently aligns inside the onset consonant, a few milliseconds before the stressed vowel. However, the findings on the alignment of the high tone (H) are both intriguing and unexpected: the alignment of the H depends on the number of unstressed syllables that follow the prenuclear pitch accent. The 'wandering' of the H over multiple syllables is extremely rare among languages, and casts doubt on the invariance hypothesis and the segmental anchoring hypothesis, as well as indicating the need for a modified version of the segmental anchorage hypothesis. To address the alignment of the H, we suggest that it aligns within a segmental anchorage-the area that follows the prenuclear pitch accent-in such a way as to protect the paradigmatic contrast between the L*+H prenuclear pitch accent and the L+H* nuclear pitch accent.

Using Auditory Word Repetition to Improve L2 Pronunciation of English Schwa by Japanese Learners: From the Perspective of Phonological Processing

This study investigates the effects of immediate repetition of auditory words on L2 pronunciation improvement of English schwa by Japanese EFL learners. More specifically, the study is concerned with how the amount of input (i.e., five or ten repetitions) and stimuli characteristics (i.e., the position of schwa in a word, word familiarity) influences the repetition effect. The study consists of a study and a test phase: In the study phase, participants listened to and repeated words. In the test phase, they repeated spoken stimuli including previously heard as well as new words, both ten minutes and one week after the study phase. The auditory materials consisted of 32 real words. The duration ratio of schwa to a stressed vowel in a word and the quality of the schwa were acoustically examined. A repetition effect was mainly found in the durational aspect. Repeating the stimuli more than five times did not differentiate the effect. One week after the study phase, the effect persisted only for initial schwa, which is weakly represented in the participants’ mental representation. The pedagogical implications for L2 pronunciation teaching from the view of language processing are discussed.

The impact of code-switching, language context, and language dominance on suprasegmental phonetics: Evidence for the role of predictability

Purpose: The present study investigates the suprasegmental reflexes of code-switching, considering both language context (i.e., language mode) and language dominance. Design: To this end, an experimental oral production paradigm was administered to 14 Spanish-English bilinguals, comparing code-switched to non-switched productions and varying both context (monolingual or bilingual) and response language (dominant or non-dominant). Data and Analysis: Productions were analyzed for two suprasegmental features: pitch height and stressed vowel duration. Conclusions: Results indicate a significant effect of code-switching on suprasegmental production, with code-switched tokens produced with overall greater pitch movement and duration relative to non-switched tokens. These effects, however, were modulated by both language context and language dominance. Originality: Given the relation of prosody to cognitive factors, this novel approach to the suprasegmental features of code-switching, specifically considering language dominance and context, provides a unique opportunity to further the understanding of the underlying language switching process. Significance: These findings are addressed within a theoretical framework of predictability and hyper-articulation, and it is suggested that the suprasegmental realizations of code-switched tokens correspond to a degree of contextually driven predictability.

Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English tense and lax vowels.

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectral acoustic features were examined, including vowel duration, vowel-to-word duration ratio, formant frequency, and dynamic spectral characteristics. Results revealed that the tense-lax vowel difference was generally enhanced in clear relative to plain speech, but clear-speech modifications for tense and lax vowels showed a trade-off in the use of temporal and spectral cues. While plain-to-clear vowel lengthening was greater for tense than lax vowels, clear-speech modifications in spectral change were larger for lax than tense vowels. Moreover, peripheral tense vowels showed more consistent clear-speech modifications in the temporal than spectral domain. Presumably, articulatory constraints limit the spectral variation of these extreme vowels, so clear-speech modifications resort to temporal features and reserve the primary spectral features for tensity contrasts. These findings suggest that clear-speech and tensity interactions involve compensatory modifications in different acoustic domains.

“Tense” /æ/ is still lax: A phonotactics study

The production of the lax vowel /æ/ is widely studied as a sociolinguistic variable in American English, as several dialects differ in the allophonic distribution of lax and tense variants of the vowel. Using a forced-choice well-formedness judgment task, this paper tests whether the /æ/ used by Northern Cities Shift (NCS) speakers, which is described as a raised and tensed [ɛə] in all environments, is still represented as a lax vowel in speakers’ grammars. Participants who were native speakers of California English, which only tenses preceding nasals, and NCS English, which tenses everywhere, were asked to choose which of a pair of nonce words, constructed to include a lax-only environment /Vsk, Vsp/, as in gasp, risk, sounds more like a possible English word. California English speakers significantly prefer frames containing lax vowels, including [æ], over those containing tense vowels. NCS speakers respond in the same way: they favor [ɛə] in trials like [bɛəsp] vs. [bisp] just as California English speakers favor [æ] in [bæsp] vs. [bisp]. This suggests they keep the vowel in the phonologically active class usually considered to be lax vowels, providing evidence that speakers generalize features based on lexical distributions rather than phonetic properties.

St’át'imcets intonation contours: a preliminary study

AbstractAcoustic research on the prosody and intonation of Northwest Coast languages has until recently been under-researched. This paper joins the growing body of research on the subject and reports on the results of the first study of intonation in St’át'imcets (Lillooet Salish; Northern Interior Salish). It tests the generalization proposed by Davis (2007) that information structure is not correlated with prosody in Salish languages by comparing the intonation contours of declaratives and yes/no questions. Specifically, I ask two questions: is nuclear accent rightmost? And are yes/no questions associated with higher pitch, as predicted by the Universality of Intonational Meaning? Results are comparable to those reported for other Salish languages, namely Koch (2008, 2011) on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, Jacobs (2007) on Skwxwú7mesh and Benner (2004, 2006) and Leonard (2011) on SENĆOŦEN. Nuclear accent is associated with the rightmost stressed vowel, regardless of focus, and while no speaker signals yes/no questions with a final rise, each has higher pitch within typologically common parameters.

An orthographic effect in loanword adaptation

Loanword corpora have been an important tool in studying the relationship between speech perception and native-language phonotactics. Recent work has challenged this use of loanword corpora on methodological grounds, based on the fact that source and possibly loan orthography conditions the adaptation. The present study replicates and extends this finding by using information theory to quantify the relative strength of orthographic effects, in the adaptation of English vowels into Korean. It is found that the orthographic effect is strong for unstressed vowels, but almost unnoticable for stressed vowels. It is proposed that orthography plays a large role in adaptation only when the source form is perceptually compatible with multiple phonological parses in the borrowing language.

Acoustic characteristics of vowels in two Totonacan languages

This study examines the acoustics of vowels from two Totonacan languages, Upper Necaxa Totonac (UNT) and Huehuetla Tepehua (HT). Both languages have five-vowel systems consisting of the qualities /aeiou/ as well as phonemic quantity distinctions (short, long), and lexical stress. In addition, UNT makes use of contrastive phonation on vowels, while HT vowels may be produced with allophonically non-modal phonation when adjacent to glottalic segments and glottal stops. Data from four speakers (two female and two male) of each language are reported. Acoustic measures are based on multiple repetitions of each vowel in a variety of lexical items, elicited within a frame sentence. Measurements are taken from stressed vowels surrounded by obstruents wherever possible. A variety of analyses are undertaken. Traditional visualizations of the vowel spaces of male and female speakers using normalized F1-F2 plots are combined with comparisons of dynamic formant trajectories across the time course of vowel production. V...

Centring Diphthongs in Received Pronunciation

This paper argues that centring diphthongs in Received Pronunciation(RP) result from the sequence of a non-low tense vowel and /r/. When a non-low tense vowel is followed by /r/, the sequence is realized as a diphthong which consists of the corresponding lax vowel plus the off-glide [ə]. In terms of Optimality Theory, this can be dealt with by positing a markedness constraint that prohibits non-low tense vowels in the pre-r position. The newly proposed markedness constraint outranks the faithfulness constraints that militate against diphthongization or breaking. The analysis put forward in this paper can account for the occurrence of centring diphthongs whether the following /r/ is in the coda or in the onset.

Temporal variation in African American English: The Distinctive Use of Vowel Duration

Introduction: African American English (AAE) is a unique dialect of American English that differs systematically from the variety spoken by the White population. Acoustic-phonetic explorations of segmental structure of AAE including vowel and consonant productions are still rare and the current state and developmental direction of AAE in the United States relative to dialects of White American English (WAE) are largely undetermined. Particularly little is known about timing patterns in AAE such as segmental durations, speech rate and rhythm. Objective: The purpose of this study was to better understand temporal variation in AAE by analyzing vowel duration. Methods: The experiment was conducted in a historically well-established southern speech community of African Americans in Pitt County in North Carolina. Sixteen male speakers, eight AAE and eight WAE, read a randomized set of words containing 11 vowels followed by either a voiced stop /d/ or a voiceless stop /t/ for a total 896 tokens. Two measures were used, the absolute duration and the proportional duration (ratio). Results: Compared with WAE speakers, AAE speakers significantly prolonged vowels preceding voiced consonants but the shorter durations of vowels before voiceless consonants did not differ significantly from those of WAE speakers. The proportional measure further established that the temporal contrast between vowels preceding voiced versus voiceless consonants was significantly enhanced in AAE relative to WAE. Furthermore, the tense-lax vowel distinction was reduced in AAE relative to WAE in both voicing contexts. Conclusions: These findings indicate that both the extensive vowel lengthening before voiced stops and the smaller temporal contrast between tense and lax vowels are distinctive features of AAE, signaling a differential use of vowel duration in AAE. The vowel lengthening before voiced stops may serve as the most salient cue with respect to the voicing status of the word final consonant. It may enhance the temporal contrast between vowels, and this contrast may serve as the primary marker of the consonant voicing distinction even if the consonant itself is devoiced or deleted altogether.

A Contrastive Analysis of High/Closed Vowels Produced by Native Speakers of British English and Serbian

This paper presents the results of a contrastive analysis of high (closed) vowels of English /iː, ɪ, uː, ʊ/ and Serbian /i, u/ produced by 20 native speakers, adolescents (14 – 15 years old) from South East England (Ramsgate) and North Serbia (Ruma). Both groups of participants read the lists of words containing both long and short vowels of the two languages. The acoustic analysis (Praat, Boersma & Weeninik) involved measuring the values of the first three formants (F1, F2, F3), as well as the duration of the stressed vowels, which were then statistically analysed and the mean values were calculated for both groups of participants (SPSS 20.00). The results indicate that Serbian vowels tend to be more open than English vowels (the values of F1 are higher). However, English vowels are more centralised than Serbian vowels and the difference between the Serbian vowels /i/ and /u/ is reflected in their F2 values - /i/ is considerably more centralised than /u/, while in English both vowels are realised with similar F2 values – both tend to be centralised. With regard to the duration, the results reveal that Serbian vowels are longer than English vowels both in short and in long stressed syllables – primarily in short ones, where the difference is up to 52,19 ms.

Waarom dromedarissen maar één 〈m〉 hebben

This contribution focuses on the spelling of single consonants after a vowel without primary stress — and therefore a short duration — in polysyllabic Dutch words, e.g. kanaal (‘canal’) and dromedaris (‘dromedary’). The single consonant can be explained on the basis of the (Dutch-oriented) standard pronunciation with tense vowels like [a] or [o], but it can also be related to the (mostly Romance) etymology of the words. Only a few textbooks on Dutch spelling go into this matter. All of them are Flemish, possibly because Flemings pronounce and perceive vowels in open syllables without primary stress more frequently as lax (e.g., [ɑ], [ɔ]). For some words, however, the etymology is ignored and the spelling may have been adapted to the pronunciation, e.g. double 〈f〉 after the first vowel of saffraan (&lt; Fr. safran – ‘saffron’) and single 〈n〉 after 〈o〉 in stationeren (&lt; Fr. stationner – ‘to park’). Although this explanation seems plausible, it raises new questions as well. For example, words like kaproen (= type of headwear), patroon (‘pattern’) and Afrikaan (‘African’) also have an [ɑ]-like pronunciation (similar to saffraan), but unlike saffraan these words do not have a double consonant. Interestingly, for words like stationeren — that contain 〈io〉 + [n] + full vowel — the spelling appears to have changed since the end of the 19th century. De Vries and Te Winkel (1898) still wrote stationneeren (with 〈nn〉). To get more grip on our topic, a thorough study of the Dutch vocabulary is needed, since at the moment, it is unknown for which Dutch words the etymologically motivated spelling is replaced by a more phonetic one. This additional study will, for example, show which category is the most frequent one: the saffraan-type (where the consonant has been doubled) or the stationeren-type (where a double consonant has been replaced by a single one).

The role of gesture duration in the initial unstressed vowel shift in Galician. A first approximation

This study examines a change in the Galician vowel system. This change has been described as the phonologization of the distinction between low‑mid-low and mid-high vowels of Galician in unstressed pretonic position. The principal aim of this study is to test whether this distinction can be triggered by the longer duration of those initial vowels, favoured by the structure of the syllable and by the initial prosodic position. To verify this hypothesis, an articulatory simulation study with TADA and an acoustic study with native speakers of Galician were carried out. Since there are no studies in which the unstressed (neither initial nor medial) vowel system of Galician is examined in terms of acoustical properties, the first step was to determine whether it differs from the stressed vowel system and whether there is an acoustical opposition between mid-low and mid-high vowels in initial position. The results showed that there are significant differences between vowels in unstressed syllable and vowels in stressed syllable and also between the unstressed initial vowels /e/ and /ɛ/, and /o/ and /ɔ/. A linear relation between duration of the gesture and degree of distance between /o/ and /ɔ/ and between /e/ and /ɛ/ was found in the simulation study with TADA, and a significant relation between duration and height was found for /ɔ/ in the acoustic study.

Phonetic and phonological vowel reduction in Central Catalan

In Central Catalan, phonological vowel reduction causes the stressed seven-vowel system to reduce in number in unstressed position, where only the three reduced vowels [iəu] can occur. Exceptionally, full vowels (typically expected in a stressed syllable only) can appear in unstressed syllables in certain contexts. This study explores the acoustic characteristics of phonologically unreduced vowels found exceptionally in unstressed position in Central Catalan and compares them to stressed full vowels and corresponding unstressed (phonologically reduced) vowels. Results show that, contrary to traditional descriptions, presumably phonologically unreduced vowels in verb + noun compounds sporadically undergo phonological vowel reduction. When they do not, they are shorter than stressed vowels and more centralized in the F1*F2 vowel space. In addition, stressed full vowels do not differ in accented vs. unaccented contexts in duration or vowel quality, indicating that vowels are hyperarticulated under lexical stress, but not when they receive intonational pitch accent. The findings contribute to a body of cross-linguistic research dealing with the influence of prosody at the segmental level.