Phonetic effects of grammatical category: How category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency impact the duration of nouns and verbs
Publication date: January 2020Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 78Author(s): Arne Lohmann, Erin ConwellAbstractThis paper is concerned with phonetic correlates of grammatical category, specifically the finding that nouns are pronounced with greater duration than verbs in discourse. Most previous research has attributed this difference to the sentence positions that the two grammatical categories occupy and concomitant prosodic effects. Based on previous findings, we test two further effects, namely a category-specific effect on prosodic phrasing, which leads to stronger prosodic boundaries after nouns than verbs even in...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 27, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Training a non-native vowel contrast with a distributional learning paradigm results in improved perception and production
Publication date: January 2020Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 78Author(s): Heather Kabakoff, Gretchen Go, Susannah V. LeviAbstractPrevious distributional learning research suggests that adults can improve perception of a non-native contrast more efficiently when exposed to a bimodal than a unimodal distribution. Studies have also suggested that perceptual learning can transfer to production. The current study tested whether the addition of visual images to reinforce the contrast and active learning with feedback would result in learning in both conditions and would transfer to gains in production. Native English-speak...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 27, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
An articulatory study of the alveolar versus retroflex contrast in pre- and post-stress position in Arrernte
This study presents articulometry and palatography data for Arrernte, a language of Central Australia. It examines the contrast between the apical consonants – alveolar versus retroflex – according to lexical stress. Stop, nasal and lateral consonants are treated separately. Results show that the most prototypical retroflex articulation – where the tongue tip is retracted for post-alveolar closure and eventually released at a more anterior location – occurs after a stressed vowel. By contrast, a prototypical alveolar articulation – with closure and release at the same (anterior) region along the palate – is mor...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 27, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 10, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Acknowledgements for the 2019 Volumes
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): (Source: Journal of Phonetics)
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 10, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Dialectal phonology constrains the phonetics of prominence
Publication date: January 2020Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 78Author(s): Rachel Smith, Tamara RathckeAbstractAccentual prominence has well-documented effects on various phonetic properties, including timing, vowel quality, amplitude, and pitch. These cues can exist in trading relationships and can differ in magnitude in different languages. Less is understood about how phonetic cues to accentuation surface under different phonological constraints, such as those posed by segmental phonology, aspects of the prosodic hierarchy, and intonational phonology. Dialectal comparisons offer a valuable window on these issues, b...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - December 9, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Articulatory and acoustic correlates of prominence in French: Comparing L1 and L2 speakers
This study investigates how L1 and L2 speakers of French produce phonetic correlates of French prosodic structure, specifically the properties of Accentual Phrases that are evidenced in dimensions other than f0. The L2 speakers had English L1, with varying levels of proficiency in French. We also examined the same individuals’ productions of sentences in English. Differences in prosodic structure between English and French lead us to expect differences between the two groups of speakers. Our study measured jaw displacement in electromagnetic articulography, as well as acoustic duration and vowel formant values. Patterns ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 20, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Syllable-internal corrective focus in Korean
This study investigates prominence modulation at the sub-syllable level using a corrective focus task, examining acoustic duration and pitch with particular attention to the gestural composition of Korean tense and lax consonants. The results indicate that focus effects are manifested with systematic variations depending on the gestural structures, i.e. consonants, active during the domain of a focus gesture, but that the patterns of focus modulation do not differ as a function of elicited focus positions within the syllable. The findings generally support the premise that the scope of the focus gesture is not (much) small...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 12, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Phonological processes across word and language boundaries: Evidence from code-switching
This study examines the application of phonological rules across word and language boundaries in cases of code-switching, exploiting cross-linguistic differences in voicing assimilation and spirantization processes in English and Spanish. Results from an oral production paradigm conducted with Spanish–English bilinguals showed an asymmetrical impact of code-switching: switched and non-switched tokens differed in Spanish, but not English. A similar pattern was found for bilinguals of different language dominance profiles. This asymmetry is discussed with respect to the different language-specific degrees of variability in...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 9, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Visible amplitude: Towards quantifying prominence in sign language
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Oksana Tkachman, Kathleen Currie Hall, Robert Fuhrman, Yurika AonukiAbstractWhile there has been some prior work on what characteristics can increase or decrease the phonetic prominence of a sign in a signed language, there is not yet an easily obtainable, objective measure that can be used to help quantify signal-based aspects of sign language prominence. This paper introduces a novel measure, visible amplitude, which provides a way to quantify the amount of movement contained on a frame-by-frame basis in a video, and as such, can be used as ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 3, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The effect of focus prominence on phrasing
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Michael Wagner, Michael McAuliffeAbstractProsody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of intonational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative prosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which extent their pr...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - November 1, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Predictors of bilinguals’ speaking rates
This study examined native and second-language speaking rates in a speeded sentence production task; speaking rate was expected to reflect the speed with which processes underlying speech production can be executed. Sixty Spanish-English bilingual adults participated. They differed according to AOL (2–38), years of English Experience (1–45), and percent English Use (10–100). The purpose was to determine the influence of the three just-mentioned factors and their interactions using linear mixed-effects modeling. The primary findings were: (1) a linear AOL effect such that higher AOL predicted lower English relative to...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 29, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Articulatory characterization of English liquid-final rimes
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Michael Proctor, Rachel Walker, Caitlin Smith, Tünde Szalay, Louis Goldstein, Shrikanth NarayananAbstractArticulation of liquid consonants in onsets and codas by four speakers of General American English was examined using real-time MRI. Midsagittal tongue posture was compared for laterals and rhotics produced in each syllable margin, adjacent to 13 different vowels and diphthongs. Vowel articulation was examined in words without liquids, before each liquid, and after each liquid, to assess the coarticulatory influence of each segment on the ...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 23, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The relevance of auditory feedback for consonant production: The case of fricatives
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77Author(s): Eugen Klein, Jana Brunner, Phil HooleAbstractPrevious perturbation studies of vowels show that speakers employ auditory feedback to monitor their own speech production and adjust their articulation when auditory errors occur. In contrast, although a few studies have demonstrated that acoustic changes may occur to consonants under perturbed or masked auditory feedback, it is less clear if speakers rely on auditory feedback to systematically restore acoustic parameters of their perturbed consonant production. To investigate this question, we con...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 18, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Plosive (de-)voicing and f0 perturbations in Tokyo Japanese: Positional variation, cue enhancement, and contrast recovery
This study addresses the two-way laryngeal contrast of plosives in Tokyo Japanese, which is commonly analyzed as a “true voicing” language. We examine how voicing-related properties of the plosive and f0 of the following vowel varied with the position in the word and in the sentence. We compare word-initial with word-medial positions for words in citation (between two pauses) and for two prosodic conditions in a carrier sentence: with vs. without a preceding pause. In word-initial position, unlike in a typical “true-voicing” language such as French, voiced plosives in Tokyo Japanese show a high devoicing rate, whil...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - October 18, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
