Vowel Adaptation Research Articles

Sensorimotor adaptation to a nonuniform formant perturbation generalizes to untrained vowels.

When speakers learn to change the way they produce a speech sound, how much does that learning generalize to other speech sounds? Past studies of speech sensorimotor learning have typically tested the generalization of a single transformation learned in a single context. Here, we investigate the ability of the speech motor system to generalize learning when multiple opposing sensorimotor transformations are learned in separate regions of the vowel space. We find that speakers adapt to a nonuniform "centralization" perturbation, learning to produce vowels with greater acoustic contrast, and that this adaptation generalizes to untrained vowels, which pattern like neighboring trained vowels and show increased contrast of a similar magnitude.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We show that sensorimotor adaptation of vowels at the edges of the articulatory working space generalizes to intermediate vowels through local transfer of learning from adjacent vowels. These results extend findings on the locality of sensorimotor learning from upper limb control to speech, a complex task with an opaque and nonlinear transformation between motor actions and sensory consequences. Our results also suggest that our paradigm has potential to drive behaviorally relevant changes that improve communication effectiveness.

Factors influencing vowel adaptation in English loanwords in Korean

Abstract This study explores the extent to which perceptual and other factors (i.e., orthography and standardization) affect vowel adaptation in English loanwords in Korean. It also examines whether perceptual variability gives rise to adaptation variability, and it further addresses whether the degree of perceptual influence in vowel adaptation is different from that in consonant adaptation. Data on Korean listeners’ perceptual mapping patterns for English vowels were collected in an English-to-Korean vowel category mapping experiment and compared to the patterns in a loanword database. The results indicate that perceptual factors have a great impact on the adaptation of English vowels into Korean, in line with de Jong and Cho’s (de Jong, Kenneth & Mi-Hui Cho. 2012. Loanword phonology and perceptual mapping: Comparing two corpora of Korean contact with English. Language 88. 341–368) findings for the adaptation of English consonants into Korean. Consequently, factors such as orthography and standardization are viewed as deviations from these perceptual influences. The impact of perceptual adaptation is, however, rather limited because the correlation between perceptual mappings and loanword mappings is less robust for English vowel adaptation than for English consonant adaptation possibly due to the less categorical nature of vowels relative to consonants. Additionally, the results show that increased strength of modal perceptual mappings is related to less loanword variability in vowel adaptation.

Vowel adaptation patterns within English loanwords in Iraqi Arabic

This research examines the phonological adaptation of pure vowels in English loanwords in Iraqi Arabic (IA). Unlike previous small-scale studies, the present study collected 346 loanwords through document review and self-observation, and then analyzed them using quantitative content analysis to identify the patterns of pure vowel adaptation involved in incorporating English loanwords into IA. The content analysis findings showed that most pure vowel adaptations in English loanwords in IA follow systematic patterns and may thus be attributed to specific characteristics of both L1 and L2 phonological systems. Specifically, the findings suggest that the IA output forms typically preserve the features of the input pure vowel to the maximum degree feasible by either converting input pure vowels to their direct IA counterparts or replacing them with their closest IA match.

A Study of Vowel Adaptation in Kanuri Loanwords in Pabər/Bura

Abstract: The paper focuses on identifying and studying those linguistic items borrowed from the Kanuri to Pabǝr/Bura language with special attention to the modifications made to the vowels of the source language (Kanuri) before incorporating the loanwords into the target language (Pabǝr/Bura). It is believed that in as much as two or more communities with different linguistic backgrounds came in contact with one another; there is a tendency that linguistic borrowing will take place. Therefore, even though the languages under study belong to different language phyla, there exists linguistic borrowing between them. Because of this, the paper specifically focuses its attention on the adaptation of vowels in borrowed words. The research can establish that the target language (Pabǝr/Bura) employed various phonological processes in incorporating the loan words. More so vowel substitution is found to be the major technique used by the target language in incorporating the borrowed words. However, there are also cases of vowel deletion and insertion. The research employed two distinct sources as methods of data collection. These sources are primary and secondary. The primary source includes unobtrusive observation when discourse is taking place in Pabǝr/Bura language and listening to Pabǝr/Bura radio program broadcast by Yobe Broadcasting Corporation, Damaturu. Similarly, the researchers’ intuition plays a significant role in identifying the loanwords. On the other hand, secondary sources include written records, such as journal articles, dissertations, theses, dictionaries, etc. The paper concludes that Pabǝr/Bura borrowed a good number of lexical items from Kanuri, a Nilo-Saharan language.

Shared Vowels in English Loanwords in Arabic: Variation in Similarity-Based Adaptation

This paper investigates vowel adaptation in English-based loanwords by a group of Saudi Arabic speakers, concentrating exclusively on shared vowels between the two languages. It examines 5 long vowels shared by the two vowel systems in terms of vowel quality and vowel duration in loanword productions by 22 participants and checks them against the properties of the same vowels in native words. To this end, the study performs an acoustic analysis of 660 tokens (loan and native vowel sounds) through Praat to measure the first two formants (F1: vowel height and F2: vowel advancement) of each vowel sound at two temporal points of time (T1: the vowel onset and T2: the peak of the vowel) as well as a durational analysis to examine vowel length. It reports that measurements of the first two formants of vowels in native words appear to be stable during the two temporal points while values of the same vowel sounds occurring in loanwords are fluctuating from T1 to T2 and that durational differences exist between loanword vowels in comparison with vowels of native words in such a way that vowels in native words are longer in duration than the same vowels appearing in loanwords..

The Role of Speech Perception in French Nasal Vowel Adaptation: Phonemic vs. Acoustic Processing

The Role of Speech Perception in French Nasal Vowel Adaptation: Phonemic vs. Acoustic Processing

English Vowel Adaptation in Korean: Differential Degrees of Perceptual Influence on Individual

English Vowel Adaptation in Korean: Differential Degrees of Perceptual Influence on Individual

Perceptual adaptation of vowels generalizes across the phonology and does not require local context.

Listeners usually understand without difficulty even speech that sounds atypical. When they encounter noncanonical realizations of speech sounds, listeners can make short-term adjustments of their long-term representations of those sounds. Previous research, focusing mostly on adaptation in consonants, has suggested that for perceptual adaptation to take place some local cues (lexical, phonotactic, or visual) have to guide listeners' interpretation of the atypical sounds. In the present experiment we investigated perceptual adaptation in vowels. Our first aim was to show whether perceptual adaptation generalizes to unexposed but phonologically related vowels. To this end, we exposed Greek listeners to words or nonwords containing manipulated /i/ or /e/, and tested whether they adapted their perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast, as well as the unexposed /u/-/o/ contrast, which represents the same phonological height distinction. Our second aim was to test whether perceptual adaptation in vowels requires local context. Thus, a half of our listeners heard the manipulated vowels in real Greek words, while the other half heard them in nonwords providing no phonotactic cues on vowel identity. The results showed similar adjustment of /i/-/e/ categorization and of /u/-/o/ categorization, which indicates generalization of perceptual adaptation across phonologically related vowels. Furthermore, adaptation occurred irrespective of whether local context cues were present or not, suggesting that, at least in vowels, adaptation can be based on the distribution of auditory properties in the input. Our findings, confirming that fast perceptual adaptation in adult listeners occurs even for vowels, highlight the role of phonological abstraction in speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

English vowel adaptation in Korean: Cases of loanwords with English /ɛ/ and /æ/

English vowel adaptation in Korean: Cases of loanwords with English /ɛ/ and /æ/

When in doubt, read the instructions: Orthographic effects in loanword adaptation

Loanword adaptation has yielded many insights into the relationship between speech perception and the phonological grammar. Evidence is now mounting that orthographic effects on loanword adaptation may be more prevalent than was once thought (cf. Paradis and LaCharité, 2002; Vendelin and Peperkamp, 2006), partially obscuring phonological effects. This paper investigates orthographic effects in the adaptation of vowels of English words loaned into Korean. Experiment I uses information-theoretic statistics, called the orthographic and perceptual information gains, to estimate a lower bound on the contribution of orthography and perception to vowel adaptation. The results suggest that orthography contributes more to the adaptation of unstressed vowels, while perception contributes more to the adaptation of stressed vowels. Experiment II considers the adaptation of the /ɛ/∼/æ/ contrast; these vowels have merged recently in Korean although the orthographic distinction is maintained. The paper concludes by proposing the Perceptual Uncertainty Hypothesis: source-loan orthographic alignment plays the greatest role in constraining loanword adaptation when phonological parsing in the borrowing language is underdetermined by perceptual factors alone.

The influence of speech perception on French nasal vowel adaptation in Korean and English

The influence of speech perception on French nasal vowel adaptation in Korean and English

Reverse Engineering: Emphatic Consonants and the Adaptation of Vowels in French Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic

On the basis of two large corpora of French (and Spanish) loanwords into Moroccan Arabic, the paper documents and analyzes the phenomenon noted by Heath (1989) in which a pharyngealized consonant is introduced in the adaptation of words with mid and low vowels such as moquette > [MokeT] = /MukiT/ 'carpet'. It is found that French back vowels are readily adapted with pharyngealized emphatics while the front vowels tend to resist this correspondence. The implications of the phenomenon for general models of loanword adaptation are considered. It is concluded that auditory similarity and salience are critical alternative dimensions of faithfulness that may override correspondences based on phonologically contrastive features.

Variable vowel adaptation in Standard Mandarin loanwords

This study examines which English vowel is matched with which vowel in Standard Mandarin in loanword adaptation, investigates the general patterns for and restrictions on vowel adaptation in Standard Mandarin loanwords, and determines which aspects of vowel quality is more carefully replicated than others. The results show that despite the seemingly high degree of variation, there are systematic patterns: (i) the front-back dimension is more faithfully replicated than height and rounding, (ii) deviation along the height dimension is tolerated but minimal, (iii) a rounding mismatch occurs mostly in adapting mid central/back vowels, and (iv) central vowels behave as if they are unspecified for or ambiguous between front and back. This study demonstrates how the grammar prioritizes which aspects to replicate in the loanword adaptation process and has implications for theories of loanword phonology in particular and feature theory in general.

The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.

Vowel stability may constrain selective adaptation

Current models of selective adaptation for vowels implicate acoustic or auditory mechanisms rather than phonetic mechanisms. However, inconsistencies have been reported for /i/, /■/, and /ε/ [Morse et al. (1976)] in that the middle vowel /■/ did not elicit significant adaptation effects. These inconsistencies may reflect category goodness effects [Miller et al. (1983); Samuel (1982)] in that adaptation is more robust for tokens further from the category boundary. In the present study, category goodness was determined precisely for /i/, /■/, and /ε/ by obtaining within-subject rating data. Two continua were then constructed for each subject with these three vowels as the endpoints. Vowel adaptation was then assessed for the two continua using each subject’s three best exemplars as the adapting stimuli. Despite the fact that each subject’s adapting stimulus was, by definition, the ‘‘best’’ exemplar of that category, only /■/ and /ε/ showed significant adaptation. The absence of adaptation for /i/ may reflect its status as a point vowel, suggesting that extreme vocal tract positions, and their acoustic correlates, are remarkably stable. Research in progress on the point vowel /a/ will reveal whether this hypothesis is correct. [Work supported by NSF SBR94-21064.]

Selective adaptation of vowels

Two experiments investigating the selective adaptation of vowels examined changes in listeners’ identification functions for the vowel continuum [i-I-∈] as a function of the adapting stimulus. In Experiment I, the adapting stimuli were [i], [I], and [∈]. Both the [i] and [∈] stimuli produced significant shifts in the neighboringand distant phonetic boundaries, whereas [I] did not result in any adaptation effects. In order to explore the phonetic nature of feature adaptation in vowels, a second experiment was conducted using the adapting stimuli [gig] and [g ∈ g], which differed acoustically from the [i] and [∈] vowels on the identification continuum. Only [gig] yielded reliable adaptation effects. The results of these experiments were interpreted as suggesting arelative rather than a stableauditory mode of feature analysis in vowels and a possibly more complex auditory feature analysis for the vowel [i].

EBS amplifiers debut : S. Edelman, Electron. Engnr, February (1971), p. 52

Loanword adaptation has yielded many insights into the relationship between speech perception and the phonological grammar. Evidence is now mounting that orthographic effects on loanword adaptation may be more prevalent than was once thought (cf. Paradis and LaCharité, 2002, Vendelin and Peperkamp, 2006), partially obscuring phonological effects. This paper investigates orthographic effects in the adaptation of vowels of English words loaned into Korean. Experiment I uses information-theoretic statistics, called the orthographic and perceptual information gains, to estimate a lower bound on the contribution of orthography and perception to vowel adaptation. The results suggest that orthography contributes more to the adaptation of unstressed vowels, while perception contributes more to the adaptation of stressed vowels. Experiment II considers the adaptation of the /ɛ/∼/æ/ contrast; these vowels have merged recently in Korean although the orthographic distinction is maintained. The paper concludes by proposing the Perceptual Uncertainty Hypothesis: source-loan orthographic alignment plays the greatest role in constraining loanword adaptation when phonological parsing in the borrowing language is underdetermined by perceptual factors alone.