Word-final Plosives Research Articles

An Empirical Study on Cantonese Upper-intermediate ESL Learners’ Production of English Word-final Plosives

This paper sets out to examine the pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese upper-intermediate ESL learners when they are producing English word-final plosives. The primary goal is to identify the basic error pattern and uncover influencing factors. Empirical data were collected in a controlled speech production experiment. Based on the transcription of speech data, the researcher classified the word-final plosives that are not fully retained into four types, namely devoiced, unreleased, deleted and others. The data indicate that the subjects performed much better in the production of voiceless word-final plosives and they are prone to substituting voiced plosives with voiceless ones. It is also found that the subjects tend to omit the release stage of English word-final plosives. In addition, the word-final plosives were totally deleted or pronounced as other irrelevant phonemes in a few cases. It is suggested that the errors of devoicing and unreleasing can be largely attributed to the interference of Cantonese. In light of the findings, remedial teaching programs can be designed and implemented to facilitate Cantonese ESL learners’ overcoming of these problems.

A morpheme-based approach to subtractive pluralisation in German dialects

Various German dialects delete certain word-final plosives in plural forms (e.g. [hʊnt] ‘dog’vs.[hʊn] ‘dogs’). I claim that this type of subtractive pluralisation is best analysed as an epiphenomenon resulting from the affixation of a disyllabic trochaic foot. This metrical template can create word-final empty-headed syllables; subtraction targets the onset of these syllables. Independent evidence comes from related phenomena, for the first time unified in a comprehensive account. Firstly, all varieties with word-final consonant subtraction delete the same consonants in the onset of post-tonic syllables containing a vowel. Additionally, some dialects display predictable interactions of consonant subtraction with either vowel shortening or the assignment of tonal accent. The proposal in this paper supports the idea that morphology is generally additive, and that subtraction can be derived from prosodic affixation. I thus argue that using more sophisticated independently motivated phonological representations can help to simplify the morphological grammar.

Plosive voicing acoustics and voice quality in Yerevan Armenian

Yerevan Armenian is a variety of Eastern Armenian with a three-way voicing contrast that includes voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops, but previous work has not converged on a description of how voice quality is involved in the contrast. We demonstrate how voice quality can be assessed in a two-dimensional acoustic space using a spectral tilt measure in conjunction with a measure of spectral noise. Eight speakers produced a list of words with prevocalic word-initial and postvocalic word-final plosives. The results suggest that Yerevan Armenian has breathy-voiced plosives which are produced with closure voicing and a relatively spread glottis that is maintained into a following vowel. These qualitatively differ from some Indic ones in that they do not have an extended interval of voiced aspiration after the closure. For the voiceless unaspirated plosives, most speakers produced acoustically modal voiceless plosives, although two showed evidence for some glottal constriction and tensing. Many acoustic cues contribute to overall reliable discriminability of the three-way contrast in both initial and final position. Nevertheless, closure voicing intensity and aspiration duration together provide a robust separation of the three categories in both positions. We also find that back vowels are fronted after the breathy-voiced plosives, which supports a historical analysis in which early Armenian voiced stops were also breathy, rather than plain voiced.

Language experience, speech perception and loanword adaptation: Variable adaptation of English word-final plosives into Korean

This study examines the influence of experience with the source language for loanwords on loanword adaptation, asking whether the influence can be attributed to listener-borrowers’ perception of the source language. The study focuses on variable insertion of /ɨ/ after word-final plosives in novel English words borrowed into Korean. Korean participants who differ in the extent of their English experience are asked to borrow English non-word stimuli ending on a coda plosive into Korean by attaching appropriate Korean case-markers to the stimuli. Korean case-marker allomorphy determines whether the participants insert /ɨ/ after the coda plosives or not. Four context factors, namely, coda release, coda voicing, coda place of articulation, and pre-coda vowel tenseness, are investigated. The results indicate that Korean listeners’ experience with English influences how they perform the task of borrowing, or adding a case-marker suffix to, English non-words. The effects of the four context factors on the variable vowel insertion are influenced by the listeners’ English experience: Listeners’ responses in the borrowing task reflect that less experienced listeners are more attentive to non-contrastive phonetic information, such as coda release, than more experienced listeners. The different perception of English sounds altered by the listeners’ English experience is proposed to be responsible for the seemingly random variation in loanword adaptation patterns.

The pronunciation of English by speakers from China

Despite the large number of speakers of English in China, little previous work has been done to describe their pronunciation. Thirteen young speakers from north-east, east and central China were recorded reading a passage and participating in a short interview, and their pronunciation is analyzed. The most salient features of their speech include the use of an epenthetic vowel after word-final plosives especially before another word beginning with a consonant, avoidance of reduced vowels especially in function words, heavy nasalization of vowels preceding a final nasal consonant, substitution of [s] for /θ/ and [z] or [d] for /ð/, use of [x] for /h/, and emphasis on sentence-final pronouns. It is suggested that some of these features may become established as part of a unique variety of English that is emerging in China.

Phonology at the interface of phonetics and morphology: Root-final laryngeals in Chong, Korean, and Sanskrit

Root-final laryngealized stops in the Mon-Khmer language of Chong are realized with the laryngeal gesture preceding the oral closure, implemented as a creak on the latter portion of the tautosyllabic vowel. This realization is phonologically sub-optimal, as the aerodynamic, articulatory, acoustic, and auditory properties of pre-glottalized stops do not culminate in a maximally salient percept. In contrast, those timing relations which evoke a stronger response at the level of the peripheral auditory system are optimal since a more robust neural response is likely to be more perceptually salient. The non-suffixing nature of Chong, in combination with the non-release of word-final plosives, conspire to account for this cross-linguistically marked pattern. Laryngealization in Chong may thus be viewed as the exception which proves the rule. By contrast, root-final laryngeals in Korean and Sanskrit, both of which allow for suffixation, are indeed implemented in canonical fashion - with the laryngeal gesture realized around the release interval of the oral occlusion - in those lexical environments where suffixation and root-final release are present.

A simulation of final stop consonants in speech perception using the bicameral neural network model

This paper demonstrates the integration of contextual information in a neural network for speech perception. Neural networks have been unable to integrate such information successfully because they cannot implement conditional rule structures. The Bicameral neural network employs an asynchronous controller which allows conditional rules to choose neurons for update rather than updating them randomly. The Bicameral model is applied to the perception of word-final plosives, an ongoing problem for machine recognition of speech.

Final Voicing and Vowel Length in Welsh

Abstract The great majority of Welsh word-final plosives are devoiced lenes (fully voiced before a following vowel or sonorant), with a long vowel preceding. There are also a certain number of words – nearly all borrowed – ending in a fortis plosive, voiceless in all circumstances, with a short vowel preceding. There are quite a few minimal pairs where a long vowel + lenis plosive is opposed to a short vowel + fortis plosive. Arguments for the primacy of voicing and of vowel length, respectively, are presented. A solution is put forward which specifies plosives with regard to voicing in the lexicon and which provides rules (a) doubling any voiceless plosive after a stressed vowel and (b) lengthening any stressed vowel in the context before up to one consonant. A number of exceptions are discussed. As a linguist, the author prefers a solution which requires the specifying of perhaps 60 or 80 exceptions as exceptional over one which would call for at least one extra feature specification for every word in the lexicon.