Lax Vowels Research Articles

3. between California and the Pacific Northwest: The Front Lax Vowels in San Francisco English

3. between California and the Pacific Northwest: The Front Lax Vowels in San Francisco English

Does historical linguistics need the Cognitive Commitment? Prosodic change in East Slavic

Abstract On the basis of a case study of the so-called jer shift in Slavic, I argue that the Cognitive Commitment is essential for an adequate analysis of language change. While the “social turn” and the “quantitative turn” open up important perspectives and provide new opportunities for cognitive historical linguistics, the Cognitive Commitment remains essential because it facilitates elegant and insightful analyses and paves the way for more general hypotheses about language change. The jer shift is a prosodic change that originated in Late Common Slavic and spread to Old East Slavic in the twelfth century. This sound change involved the lax vowels /ĭ, ŭ/ (often referred to as jers or yers), which either disappeared or merged with /e, o/ depending on the prosodic environment. Contrary to traditional practice, I argue that the jer shift should be analyzed in terms of trochaic feet, i. e., rhythmic groups of two syllables, where the leftmost syllable is prominent. This account is psychologically realistic, as dictated by the Cognitive Commitment, since rhythmic grouping is a fundamental property of human cognition (Nathan 2015. Phonology. In Ewa Dąbrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics, 253–273. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton and Ding et al. 2016. Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech. Nature Neuroscience 19. 158–164). While the Cognitive Commitment is essential for historical linguistics, one important limitation deserves mention. Historical changes such as the jer shift can be represented as “sound laws”, i. e., statements that summarize changes that span over many generations. Such statements are not about processes in the minds of individual speakers or speech communities at any point in time. They are therefore not directly relevant for the Cognitive Commitment, but are nevertheless among the most valuable tools historical linguists have at their disposal.

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.

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...

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.

Non-native speakers’ acoustic variability in producing American English tense and lax vowels

The primary goal of the present study was to compare native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ vowel productions to determine whether the L2 subjects showed similar or greater within-subject (i.e., token-to-token) variability relative to the L1 talkers when producing American English vowels. We were particularly interested in whether L2 subjects whose vowels were more native-like would be less variable in their productions and whether L2 talkers’ whose vowels were less native-like would be more variable in their productions. First and second formants of the tense and lax vowel pairs / i—ɪ /, / e—ɛ /, and / u—ʊ / were measured and Coefficient of Variation was calculated for 10 native speakers of American English and 30 non-native speakers of English from three different language backgrounds (viz., 10 Mandarin speakers, 10 Korean speakers, and 10 Spanish speakers). Overall, the L2 subjects’ vowel formant patterns were found to be comparable to those of L1 speakers approximately half of the time. Whether the L2 talkers’ American English vowel formants were native-like or not, however, they seldom showed greater within-subject variability than the native speakers.

Production of English vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants by Korean learners of English

In English, consonant voicing has large effects on both the quality and duration of the previous vowel, as does the status of the vowel as tense or lax. Our aim is to examine whether there is L1 interference on L2 English vowel productions and whether temporal acquisition is easier than vowel quality acquisition. Korean L2 speakers were chosen as participants; Korean has no contrasts in tense vs. lax vowels, and no coda consonant voicing contrast in a monosyllabic structure, but does exhibit post-vocalic voicing contrasts in disyllabic structures, and in these cases, voiced consonants exhibit lengthening of the preceding vowel. The participants were asked to read the list of English nonce words consisting of the English high vowels and sets of plosives contrasting in voicing as a coda in the two different structures. None of the speakers exhibited different patterns in monosyllabic and disyllabic structures. All speakers did exhibit durational correlates to the voicing contrast, and to the tense-lax distinction. Formant frequency differences were found for both voicing and the tense-lax distinction, however, not as consistently. Specifically, back vowels were not distinguished by a number of subjects. In sum, temporal properties were more easily acquired than vowel quality properties.

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.

L2 Learners' Stress and Segmental Productions of Morphological Derivatives

L2 learners tend to encounter and use morphological derivatives more frequently as their L2 skills develop. To pronounce the morphological derivatives correctly, L2 learners have to be aware of the phonological changes occurring in the derivatives with affixation. The four phonological rules (stress shift, vowel laxing, consonant coalescence, and vowel reduction) in English, applying to morphological derivatives, are examined with respect to the entities that the rules affect (stress, vowels, and consonants); the number of rules (only one and more than one rule); and rule interaction (interacting and non-interacting) in L2 phonological acquisition. This study reveals that 1) the accuracy of consonant coalescence is highest although its significance with respect to the accuracy of stress shift and vowel laxing varies according to the number of rules; 2) stress shift and vowel laxing show different order in accuracy depending on the number of rules; 3) the three rules (stress shift, vowel laxing, and consonant coalescence) exhibit distinct behaviors with respect to the number of rules; 4) in the interacting rules, the accuracy of the fed rule (vowel reduction) is significantly lower than the feeding rule (stress shift) while in the non-interacting rules, the accuracy of one rule appears to have no influence on that of the other rule. Based on the results, implications for teaching pronunciation of the derivatives are suggested.

Vowel Quality and English Verb Stress

In this paper, vowel distributions of 3260 English monomorphemic verbs are examined to verify the claim that vowel height plays a considerable role in stress assignment in English. The claim was made by research on English nouns from a lexical database, CELEX(Baayen, Piepenbrock and Gulikers, 1995). It has found that vowel quality, especially vowel height, has a significant influence on stress location. Results of the current study provide further evidence for the claim that vowel height is related to stress location: First, lowness attracts stress; Second, a high front lax vowel, [?], is the second frequent vowel in unstressed syllables following a schwa.; Third, in stressed light syllables, a mid vowel, [?], appears most frequently while a low vowel [ae] is the most common vowel winning stress over a heavy syllable. These findings offer insights into the relations between phonetic properties of vowel phonemes and the nature of stress.

Phonetic and lexical influences on changes across the lifespan

The study considers longitudinal studies over several decades within the same individual in order to determine whether phonetic sound change takes place initially in more frequent words. The focus of the analysis was on the vowels of the Christmas Broadcasts by Queen Elisabeth II over several decades and in Alistair Cooke's Letter from America broadcasts. For the first of these, a re-analysis of the phonetic lowering of the vowel in the lexical set TRAP and of tensing of final lax vowel in HAPPY showed no effect of lexical frequency on sound change. The focus of analysis in the second was during a period in which the speaker was shown to acquire General American characteristics after emigrating to the United States from Britain, but then in later life to revert over a 5–10 year period back toward characteristics of British English Received Pronunciation. This reversion is shown to take place at a faster rate in lexically frequent words. While the evidence overall for lexically gradual changes is equivocal, the changes in both speakers are most appropriately modeled as a leveling due to variation in dialect contact: increasingly with middle class speakers for the Queen; decreasingly with American English speakers for Cooke.

Prosodic buffers: A constraint-based account of English vowel laxing

Using the tools of prosodic repulsion, this paper proposes a unified constraint-based account of vowel length alternation in sets of morphologically related English words such as wise?wisdom, tone?tonic and sane?sanity. These alternations, originally analyzed in SPE as resulting from rules of pre-cluster laxing, -ic/-id/-ish laxing and trisyllabic laxing, and in later work (e.g. Borowsky 1986, Myers 1987, Yip 1987) from shortening rules, are re-analyzed here as the result not of rule-based processes but of a parallel evaluation of ranked constraints. While the monomoraicity of words such as wisdom is determined by basic constraints regulating the maximum weight of a syllable, the moraicity of coda consonants, and moraic faithfulness, the short stressed vowel in words such as tonic and sanity emerges through the interaction not only of the three aforementioned constraints but also of two newly proposed ones. The first of these is a moraic resistance constraint that militates against the alignment of a strong mora with a syllable edge, and the second is a prosodic buffer constraint which formalizes a ban against vocalic buffers. As a result of this interaction of constraints, the intervocalic consonant in the optimal candidates of words like tonic and sanity is syllabified in the coda position of the stressed syllable, serving as a buffer between the strong mora and the syllable edge to quell the force of repulsion between them.

Acoustic effects of loud speech across vowels and speakers

Although loud speech is widely agreed mainly to involve increased respiratory driving support leading to greater acoustic intensity, past work suggests that speakers may make laryngeal and supralaryngeal adjustments as well. For example, previous studies suggest that loud speech is accompanied by greater jaw displacements as well as formant frequency variation, especially in the form of higher first formants. Acoustic studies have generally not sampled widely across the vowel space, however. This study assessed how formants, f0, duration, and intensity varied across conversational and loud conditions, with a particular focus on formant frequencies. Eleven German-speaking women performed three speaking tasks: Reading, answering questions, and recounting a recipe. Target words included a range of high, low, tense, and lax vowels. Loudness variation was elicited naturalistically via changing interlocutor distance. Initial results from the reading and question-answer tasks suggest that formant frequencies vary on average in louder speech, particularly for F1, but the effects are speaker-dependent and may also differ between high vs. low and tense vs. lax vowels. These acoustic data will ultimately be combined with simultaneously recorded data on intraoral pressure, vocal-fold contact, and breathing kinematics to assess the range of speakers' strategies for achieving louder speech.

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

AbstractThe study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono- vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic

An experimental approach to ambisyllabicity in English

Abstract The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well as in the single-consonant onset of many others; for this reason such consonants were often made ambisyllabic. This contrasts with the /n/ in standard, which is never the first consonant in a word-initial cluster (e.g. *ndorf) and, therefore, rarely made ambisyllabic in the experiment. Ambisyllabicity was also found more often when the vowel preceding the single medialconsonant was lax, or stressed, or when the medial-consonant was a sonorant rather than an obstruent. The idea that a stressed lax vowel in the first syllable conditions both the ambisyllabicity of the consonant and its geminate spelling is not supported.

The role of vowel phonotactics in native speech segmentation

Numerous studies have shown that listeners can use phonological cues such as word stress and consonant clusters to find word boundaries in fluent speech. This paper investigates whether they can also use language-specific restrictions on vowel positioning for native speech segmentation. We show that English adults can exploit the fact that typical English words do not end in a lax vowel (e.g. [*diːtʊ]) in order to segment unknown words in a nonsense phrase-picture matching task, in contrast to the null results in prior studies using lexical tasks. However, they only used this cue in quiet listening conditions, and not in the presence of background noise. Thus, like consonant clusters, the lax vowel constraint is vulnerable in adverse listening conditions.

The Canadian Shift: Its Acoustic Trajectory and Consequences for Vowel Categorization

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>The Canadian Vowel Shift (CS), generally described as a systematic lowering and backing of the front lax vowels (/</span><span>ɪ</span><span>, </span><span>ɛ</span><span>, æ/; as in </span><span>KIT</span><span>, </span><span>DRESS</span><span>, and </span><span>TRAP</span><span>), has been investigated by several researchers over the last two decades (see Boberg 2005, 2008, 2010; Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995; Hoffman 2010; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Roeder & Jarmasz 2010; Sadlier- Brown & Tamminga 2008, among others). Using apparent-time comparisons of older and younger Canadians’ vowel spaces, these studies do not always agree on the acoustic trajectory of the CS, notably whether the front lax vowels are principally receding and/or lowering; perhaps these disagreements are unsurprising given the ongoing nature of the vowel shift, the variety of birth years interviewed, and the studies’ methodological differences and diverse locales. Boberg (2005) found /</span><span>ɛ</span><span>/ to be retracting and /æ/ to be lowering and then retracting in the speech of Anglophone Montrealers; this paper addresses the current apparent-time trajectory of the CS in one Montreal community. In addition, though several studies have investigated the CS in vowel production, nearly none (save De Decker 2010) have probed its effect on the perceptual categorization of vowels. This paper also introduces a perception experiment carried out with the same participants interviewed for production data.</span></p></div></div></div>