Stressed Vowels Research Articles

Partial Dependency of Vowel Reduction on Stress Shift: Evidence from English -ion Nominalization

While classic theories utilize the comparison between cómp[ɛ]nsate going to comp[ə]nsátion and cond[ɛ́]nse going to cond[ɛ]nsátion to argue that stressed vowels are immune to reduction in multiple affixations (e.g., SPE), this paper presents a corpus-based case study that looks into this quantitative interaction between vowel reduction and stress shift during English -ion nominalization and offers discoveries that go against the classic claim. After analyzing 1,047 verb-noun target pairs extracted from the CELEX2 dictionary corpus, this study claims that vowel reduction only partially depends on its stress-bearing feature and that the suffix type, the stress shift pattern, vowel tenseness, and crucially some lexically specific constraints also predict vowel reduction. This finding is further supported by an OT analysis and a statistical model. As a quantitative study that relies on an exhaustive list of English samples to derive theoretical analysis, this research not only provides new insights into this long-lasting debate but also aims to highlight the significance of incorporating large data samples for a complete understanding of phonological phenomena.

Variation in the articulation of Russian stressed vowels and the mechanics of palatalization in consonants

A 3D/4D ultrasound study of Russian stressed vowels in the context of ‘soft’ (phonetically palatalized or palatal) versus ‘hard’ consonants reveals that vowels in these two contexts differ systematically in terms of the position of the tongue root while the tongue dorsum is less consistently modified depending on the speaker, vowel or consonant context. This paper proposes that the observed vowel allophony, as well as the softness contrast in Russian consonants, and the contrast between front and central high vowels, are all defined in terms of the feature [ATR].

Articulatory descriptions: It is all fun and games

In the 100-level Phonetics for Speech and Hearing Sciences course at Indiana University, students learn articulatory descriptions for the vowels and consonants of American English. I have incorporated activities to help students practice the descriptions and apply them to real-world problems. The activities include (1) articulatory description puzzles: Students are given a series of consonant and vowel articulatory descriptions. They must then determine the corresponding vowels and consonants, which ultimately make up a quote. (2) Sounds of Fortune: In this “Wheel of Fortune”-style game rather than guessing letters in standard orthography, the answer is in IPA and students make their guesses by using the articulatory description (e.g., “I’d like to buy a high front tense vowel”). (3) Misheard song lyrics: Students are presented with song clips, which are likely to result in errors. The students write down what they hear in orthography. After that, they are presented with the actual lyric. They then phonemically transcribe both the real and misheard lyrics. They identify consonant errors across the two transcriptions and then compare in terms of their place, manner and voicing characteristics. These activities can be used directly after the introduction of the material as well as for review exercises.

영어 어중 폐쇄음의 선행 모음 길이 분석을 통한 영어 재음절화 연구

This study argues that resyllabification in English only takes place when the vowel preceding the intervocalic consonant is a stressed lax vowel by conducting a production experiment with 6 English native speakers. The experiment analyzed duration of the vowels before voiced and voiceless stops in English. The data consisted of monosyllabic and bisyllabic nonce words in English. The results revealed that the vowels were longer before voiced stops than before voiceless stops in monosyllabic words(CVC). As for bisyllabic words(CVCVC), however, the lax vowels [ɑ] and [ɪ] were significantly longer before voiced consonants only when they got stressed. In contrast, the diphthong [ɑɪ] and the tense vowel [i] were not longer before voiced consonants regardless of their stresshood. These results suggest that resyllabification in CVCVC occurs only when the first syllable contains a stressed lax vowel in English. These results will be discussed in light of the syllable structure in English against a superheavy syllable.

Acoustic analysis of vowel formant frequencies in genetically-related and non-genetically related speakers with implications for forensic speaker comparison.

The purpose of this study was to explore the speaker-discriminatory potential of vowel formant mean frequencies in comparisons of identical twin pairs and non-genetically related speakers. The influences of lexical stress and the vowels’ acoustic distances on the discriminatory patterns of formant frequencies were also assessed. Acoustic extraction and analysis of the first four speech formants F1-F4 were carried out using spontaneous speech materials. The recordings comprise telephone conversations between identical twin pairs while being directly recorded through high-quality microphones. The subjects were 20 male adult speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), aged between 19 and 35. As for comparisons, stressed and unstressed oral vowels of BP were segmented and transcribed manually in the Praat software. F1-F4 formant estimates were automatically extracted from the middle points of each labeled vowel. Formant values were represented in both Hertz and Bark. Comparisons within identical twin pairs using the Bark scale were performed to verify whether the measured differences would be potentially significant when following a psychoacoustic criterion. The results revealed consistent patterns regarding the comparison of low-frequency and high-frequency formants in twin pairs and non-genetically related speakers, with high-frequency formants displaying a greater speaker-discriminatory power compared to low-frequency formants. Among all formants, F4 seemed to display the highest discriminatory potential within identical twin pairs, followed by F3. As for non-genetically related speakers, both F3 and F4 displayed a similar high discriminatory potential. Regarding vowel quality, the central vowel /a/ was found to be the most speaker-discriminatory segment, followed by front vowels. Moreover, stressed vowels displayed a higher inter-speaker discrimination than unstressed vowels in both groups; however, the combination of stressed and unstressed vowels was found even more explanatory in terms of the observed differences. Although identical twins displayed a higher phonetic similarity, they were not found phonetically identical.

Lenisering etter kort vokal: relikt-fenomen eller opphav?

The topic of the paper is a small group of Norwegian dialects where lenition of p, t, k into b, d, g in intervocalic and word-final position is limited to words characterized by a monomoraic, stressed syllable in Old Norse. These dialects are spoken in the easternmost local communities in Agder county, at the eastern margin of the South-Norwegian lenition areas where lenition hit all short oral stops irrespective of preceding vowel length. After the quantity shift had made all stressed vowels bimoraic, with rimes being either VV or VC, the distribution of the lenited plosives are after both long and short vowels (the main area) or after short vowels only (the eastern marginal area).
 Haslum (2004) argues that the limited distribution in the east ist the result of a reversal after long vowels only. While this cannot be refuted as a possibility, I argue below that it may also be the result of a two-stage process, whereby lenition after a short vowel has spread further than the generalized process. 

Implementation Of Contrastive Analysis To Overcome The Difficulties of Learning English Pronunciation Sub-Skill

This research was conducted to investigate and understand pronunciation problems, which is the sub-skill of speaking in the first semester students of the UPR FKIP English Education Study Program through contrastive analysis. The purpose of this study was to analyze pronunciation errors in English words and the causes of the errors made by students who were the research subjects. The design used in this study to present the data is descriptive qualitative. The results of data analysis were classified into consonant errors (consonants), vowels (vowels), and vowels (diphthongs) and the causes why these errors occured.
 Based on the results of data analysis, the English segmental sounds that were difficult to pronounce by students of the English Education Study Program semester I in the academic year 2020/2021 were (1) long vowels or tense vowels (i:, u:, ?:, ?:, ?:]; (2) short vowels soundor lax vowels low vowel sound [æ], and neutral vowel (schwa) [?]; (3) the sound of diphthongs (double vowels), namely rising diphthongs [??] and falling diphthongs [??], [e?], and [??]; and (4) fricative consonant sounds [f, v, z, ?, ð, ?, ?].
 The causes of difficulty in learning pronunciation of English segmental sounds are (1) differences in Indonesian and English sound systems and (2) lack of knowledge of the English sound system.

Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish

AbstractSpanish dialectology observes that dialects with a preference for velarized variants of /n/ (e.g. Caribbean dialects) include nasalized vocalic allophones in their inventory. Instrumental cross-dialectal comparisons of Spanish anticipatory nasalization, however, remain surprisingly rare. To this end, I compare the time-course of nasality in pre-nasal vowels in Argentine and Dominican Spanish, as well as across a number of linguistic variables described in the phonetic, sociolinguistic and historical literature. Twenty-eight speakers from Santo Domingo and twenty-six from Buenos Aires were recorded with a nasometer, an ideal instrument for data collection in the field. Measurements of nasal energy were extracted to acoustically characterize the time-course of nasality. Results indicate that Dominican speakers present more extensive anticipatory vowel nasalization than Argentine speakers. These findings are consistent with observations of allophonic nasalization (i.e. phonologized) in the Caribbean dialect under study, Dominican Spanish. Regarding the linguistic variables, stressed pre-nasal vowels showed earlier onset of nasalization, particularly among the Caribbean speakers, which further provides support for the phonological differences in vowel nasality.

ИНТОНАЦИОННЫЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ РЕЧИ ДЕТЕЙ С УМСТВЕННОЙ ОТСТАЛОСТЬЮ

In the literature, data on the formation of intonation in Russian-speaking children with mild intellectual disabilities (mental retardation) without genetic syndromes and serious neurological disorders (for example, cerebral palsy) based on the instrumental analysis of children’s speech are absent. The aim of this study was to compare the intonation characteristics of speech in children, aged 5 to 7, with typical development and with mild intellectual disabilities. The participants of the study were 20 children aged 5 to 7: 10 children (5 girls and 5 boys) with typical development (TD group) and 10 children (6 boys and 4 girls) with mild intellectual disabilities (ID group, ICD-10-CM Code F70). Intellectual disabilities were not associated with genetic or severe neurological disorders (non-specific ID). Child speech was taken from the AD-CHILD.RU speech database. Audio and video recordings of speech and behavior of TD group children (in a kindergarten) and ID group children (in an orphanage) were made in the model situation of a “dialogue with an adult”. Two studies were conducted: a perceptual experiment (n=10 listeners – native speakers, researchers in the field of child speech development) and an instrumental spectrographic analysis of child speech. The instrumental analysis of speech was made in the Praat program. The duration of utterances and stressed vowels, pitch values (average, maximum and minimum), pitch range values of utterances, and pitch range values of vowels were analyzed. The perceptual experiment showed that the utterances of ID group children classified as less clear and more emotional than the utterances of TD group children. The task of phrase stress (words highlighted by voice) revealing was more difficult for adults when they were listening to the speech of ID group children vs. TD group children. In ID group children, the values of utterance duration are lower and the values of vowel duration are higher than in TD group children. The average, maximum, and minimum pitch values, the pitch range values of ID group children’s utterances are higher vs. the corresponding parameters of TD group children’s speech. The duration and pitch range values of stressed vowels from ID group children’s words highlighted by intonation are higher than these features of TD group children’s stressed vowels. The pitch contours of stressed vowels from TD group children’s words highlighted by intonation were presented in most cases by the rise of the pitch contour; the pitch contours of stressed vowels from ID group children’s words highlighted by intonation were presented by the fall of the pitch. The dome-shaped vowel pitch contour and U-shaped contour are more frequent in the speech of ID group children vs. TD group children. In the future, the intonation characteristics of speech of children with different diagnoses could be considered as additional diagnostic criteria of developmental disorders.

An Analysis of Students Problem To Pronounce Aspirated /P/, /T/, /K/ at Initial Position of English Words

The purpose of this research was to analyze the third semester students’ problem in learning English basic sounds pronunciation. The research design was case study. The data were collected by recording the students’ pronunciation. The subject of the research were the third Semester Students of English Department at Universitas Ekasakti). The result of the research was found that Each aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ have two allophones, [ph] and [p], [th] and [t], [kh] and [k]. Then, all instances of [ph] occured immediately before a stressed vowel. It can be said that the following rule: /p/ becomes [ph] when it occured before a stressed vowel or initial position of English words. Moreover, aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ sounds were really pronounced in two different ways. First, when these sounds came at the beginning of the word they are always followed by a puff of breath. Second, if aspirated /p/, /t/, and /k/ occur at the end of final position of English words, it is not necessary to pronounce them by following a puff of breath. In following there is a chart of aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ sounds at initial position of English words

Gradient and categorical assimilation of pretonic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper addresses the acoustic realisations of the pretonic vowels /e, o/ that have been previously reported to undergo regressive vowel harmony in Brazilian Portuguese. It examines how the height of pretonic /e, o/ is affected by the phonological and phonetic height of the adjacent stressed vowel in three dialects: Northeastern (Bahia), Northern (Amazonas) and Southern (Rio Grande do Sul). A pseudoword reading task was performed with two speakers each of the three different dialects. The findings suggest that there is some kind of low harmony, in that /e, o/ are realized with markedly higher F1 before the stressed low vowels /ɛ, a, ɔ/ than before the stressed non-low vowels /i, e, o, u/. This effect was found for all dialects, but appears to be categorical (and thus phonological) for the Northern and Northeastern speakers, while gradient for the Southern speakers, where it is likely due to phonetic V-to-V coarticulation. More importantly, no effect of height harmony was found in any of the dialects: pretonic /e, o/ were not produced significantly higher before a stressed /i, u/. In addition, Northern and Southern speakers showed V-to-V coarticulation for the non-high pretonic vowels, illustrating with Northern speakers that a categorical harmony process can co-occur together with a gradient vowel assimilation in the same dialect.

“Stelele și lalelele”: saggio di micromonografia storico descrittiva di una classe flessiva della lingua romena (I)

“Stelele şi lalelele”: Essay of Micromonography of a Romanian Inflectional Class (I). This article is the first of a three-part study aimed at reconstructing the origin and the history of a sub-class of nouns that, from a Romance perspective, has been considered a distinctive feature of Romanian, as well as at bringing into discussion its current status. The object of the study is the sub-class of f nouns ending in the sg NA in stressed vowel, and with pl in -le. In this first part, the author lays out the matter, illustrating the distinctiveness of the morpheme f pl le with respect to Romance pl endings and describing the morphological traits of this class in contemporary Romanian as “radical theme” nouns, i.e. f nouns lacking a specific morpheme for sg NA (f√ ø). In preparation to the following two parts of the study, the author discusses here the Latin origin of f√ ø in Common Romanian, identifying the members of the sub-class directly inherited from Latin.

Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL) or Middle English Compensatory Lengthening (MECL)?

This study addresses a controversial aspect of the change traditionally known as Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL): the variable results of lengthening in disyllabic (C)V.CVC stems, theheaven–havenconundrum. It presents a full philological survey of the recoverable monomorphemic input items and their reflexes in Present-day English (PDE). A re-examination of the empirical data reveals a previously unnoticed correlation between lengthening and the sonority of the medial consonant in forms such aspaper,rocket,gannetandbaron, as well as interplay between that consonant and the σ2coda. The alignment of disyllabic stems with a medial alveolar stop and a sonorant weak syllable coda (Latin,better,otter) with (C)V.RVR stems (baron,felon,moral) opens up a new perspective on the reconstruction of tapping in English. The results of lengthening in disyllabic forms, including those previously thought of as ‘exceptions’ to the change, are modeled in Classical OT and Maxent OT, prompting an account which reframes MEOSL as a stem-level compensatory process (MECL) for all inputs. We show that OT grammars with conventional constraints can correctly predict variation in the (C)V.TəR stems and categorical lengthening or non-lengthening in other disyllabic stems. Broadening the phonological factors beyond the open-syllable condition for potential stressed σ1inputs in (C)V.CV(C) stems allows us to apply the same constraints to stems whose input structure does not involve an open syllable and to propose a uniform account of stressed vowel quantity in all late Middle English mono- and di-syllabic stems.

Difficulties Faced by Iraqi Second Year Students in Learning Weak Forms

تهدف الدراسة الحالية الى استقصاء الصعوبات التي يواجهها طلبة المرحلة الثانية لطلبة الكلية من العراقيين دارسي اللغة الإنكليزية لغة أجنبية عند تعلم الصيغ الصوتية الضعيفة .لذا تم تبني المنهج الوصفي التحليلي واعتماد ثلاثة أدوات من أجل جمع البيانات وعلى وجه الخصوص استبانة واختبارات تمييز وأنتاج لأجل تطبيقها على عينة الدراسة والتي تشمل طلبة قسم اللغة الإنكليزية للمرحلة الثانية في كلية اللغات والبالغة (80) طالب تم تقسيمهم الى (80) طالب كعينة أنتاج و(40) طالب كعينة تمييز . أظهرت النتائج بان لدى طلبة المرحلة الثانية لطلبة الكلية من العراقيين دارسي اللغة الإنكليزية لغة أجنبية صعوبة لتعلم الصيغ الضعيفة والتي يمكن عزوها الى صعوبة في الفهم او الأدراك للمقاطع الصوتية والنبرة . وعلاوة على ذلك ان خريجي اللغة الأنكليزية ليس لهم القدرة على تحديد عدد المقاطع ولا على التمييز ما بين فئات الكلمة المختلفة وينقصهم تحديد موضع النبرة وتخفيف صوت العلة .

Stød in unexpected morphological contexts in Standard Danish: An experimental approach to sound change in progress

AbstractIn recent years stød has appeared in words where the current phonological and morphological principles of its distribution would exclude it. Thus, a disyllable like [ˈsiːðə]side‘page’ is without stød, also in a compound likebagside‘back page’, but it has lately been heard with stød:. In a controlled experiment, speakers were required to produce compounds consisting of an existing initial word succeeded by a final nonce noun. The results indicate that stød may be spreading in this context. Furthermore, its distribution across the 40 nonce nouns was found to be similar to its distribution among existing nouns in the vocabulary: There are more nonce nouns with stød (i) in the definite singular, (ii) especially with short stressed vowels, and (iii) particularly if the initial word is monosyllabic. A change is apparently underway which will eventually partially suspend a non-stød principle which relieves disyllabic lexemes of stød.

영어 어말 설단폐쇄음의 약화 양상: 강세 모음을 선행하는 경우

Patterns of English coronal stop variation within a word are well-documented. However, little is known at present to ascertain if these generalizations apply across words, specifically when the following syllable is stressed. This paper explores aspects of English coronal stop alternations focusing on flapping across the word boundary. Results indicate that a coronal stop undergoes flapping even when the following vowel is stressed, This is very different from the flapping rule applying within a word that bans flapping from applying before a stressed vowel. Voiceless coronal stops, however, were subject to glottaling unlike voiced counterparts, thus maintaining the same value with respect to the [±voice] feature.

The Impact Of Lexical Stress Type and Position of a Vowel Within a Phrase on Vowel Formant Bandwidths

The article sets out to explore the impact of different types of lexical stress and word position within a phrase as well as the interaction of these factors on formant bandwidths. The findings contribute to establishing the role of these formant features as acoustic correlates of the Russian lexical stress. The experimental material for analysis is presented by the Russian sound [a] embedded in a word in a natural language carrier phrase. The word position is changed from phrase initial to the phrase final one and in each position the target word is uttered with a neutral and an emphatic stress by four speakers. The Praat software is used to extract the mean values of the first four formant bandwidths of the target vowel. Two-way ANOVA is carried out to establish the significance of difference between neutrally and emphatically stressed vowels in all the three phrasal positions. The impact of phrasal position and stress type is clearly pronounced and is valid for all the four speakers. Specific trends in bandwidth alterations are hard to identify in most cases because of inconsistent fluctuations of formant bandwidths and a heavy influence of the speakers' idiolects: formant bandwidths expand, contract or remain unchanged. An explanation of the results obtained is suggested.

Generative Adversarial Phonology: Modeling Unsupervised Phonetic and Phonological Learning With Neural Networks.

Training deep neural networks on well-understood dependencies in speech data can provide new insights into how they learn internal representations. This paper argues that acquisition of speech can be modeled as a dependency between random space and generated speech data in the Generative Adversarial Network architecture and proposes a methodology to uncover the network's internal representations that correspond to phonetic and phonological properties. The Generative Adversarial architecture is uniquely appropriate for modeling phonetic and phonological learning because the network is trained on unannotated raw acoustic data and learning is unsupervised without any language-specific assumptions or pre-assumed levels of abstraction. A Generative Adversarial Network was trained on an allophonic distribution in English, in which voiceless stops surface as aspirated word-initially before stressed vowels, except if preceded by a sibilant [s]. The network successfully learns the allophonic alternation: the network's generated speech signal contains the conditional distribution of aspiration duration. The paper proposes a technique for establishing the network's internal representations that identifies latent variables that correspond to, for example, presence of [s] and its spectral properties. By manipulating these variables, we actively control the presence of [s] and its frication amplitude in the generated outputs. This suggests that the network learns to use latent variables as an approximation of phonetic and phonological representations. Crucially, we observe that the dependencies learned in training extend beyond the training interval, which allows for additional exploration of learning representations. The paper also discusses how the network's architecture and innovative outputs resemble and differ from linguistic behavior in language acquisition, speech disorders, and speech errors, and how well-understood dependencies in speech data can help us interpret how neural networks learn their representations.

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

The effect of clear speech on the integration of auditory and visual cues to the tense-lax vowel distinction in English was investigated in native and non-native (Mandarin) perceivers. Clear speech benefits for tense vowels /i, ɑ, u/ were found for both groups across modalities, while lax vowels /ɪ, ʌ, ʊ/ showed a clear speech disadvantage for both groups when presented in the visual-only modality, with Mandarin perceivers showing a further disadvantage for lax vowels presented audio-visually, and no difference in speech styles auditorily. English perceiver responses were then simulated in an ideal perceiver model which both identified auditory (F1, F2, spectral change, duration) and visual (horizontal lip stretch, duration) cues predictive of the clear speech advantage for tense vowels, and indicated which dimensions presented the greatest conflict between cues to tensity and modifications from clear speech (F2 and duration acoustically, duration visually). Altogether, by combining clear speech acoustics, articulation, and perception into a single integrated framework we are able to identify some of the signal properties responsible for both beneficial and detrimental speech style modifications.

A contrast-based account of word-final tensing

Some languages allow tense and lax vowels to contrast before word-final consonants but not word-finally, where only tense vowels are permitted. What is the motivation for this pattern? This paper proposes that the loss of vowel-duration contrasts in word-final positions is a phonetic precursor to word-final tensing. In languages where tense and lax vowels differ both spectrally and temporally, neutralization of duration contrasts in word-final positions results in tense-lax pairs differing only spectrally. If this spectral difference is not sufficient to support a phonemic contrast, the tense-lax contrast is neutralized altogether. The preference for tense vowels in case of neutralization can be explained as a preference for more distinct vowel contrasts in the F1xF2 space. Evidence for this account comes from an acoustic study of Swiss French showing that, although tense-lax contrasts are maintained both before word-final consonants and word-finally in this variety, they are signaled by temporal cues only before word-final consonants. While Dispersion-Theoretic analyses of vowel inventories tend to focus on F1 and F2, the present analysis suggests that distinctiveness along both spectral and temporal dimensions is relevant to understand the typology of phonological patterns.