Showing papers on "Voice published in 1971"

Distinctive features and laryngeal control

Abstract: Physiological, acoustic, and perceptual data indicate that the timing of events at the glottis relative to articulation differentiates homorganic stops in many languages. Such categories are variously described in terms of voicing, aspiration, and force of articulation. Chomsky & Halle 1968 have proposed a universal set of phonetic features, four of which-voice, tensity, glottal constriction, and heightened subglottal pressure-allegedly operate to control the onset timing of laryngeal pulsing. But the observational basis for their analysis is flimsy, and Chomsky & Halle have no substantive argument for rejecting the possibility of temporal control of laryngeal function. Until fairly recently the non-historical study of language was, at least in the United States, pretty much the province of two groups of people: the grammarians and the phoneticians. Each group paid little if any serious attention to the problems and findings of the other, even in the area of phonology, where their interests would seem to converge. In the case of the phoneticians, their ignorance of linguistics was not normally elevated to a matter of principle. Some grammarians, however, refused to consider phonetic research an integral part of linguistics. Such work was consigned to physiology and physics at the very time that the primacy of the spoken over the written forms of language was being asserted most emphatically.' The dichotomy drawn between langue and parole may have served as an excuse for minimizing the attention given to language in its most directly observable manifestation. Moreover, from the principle that only message-differentiating phonetic features are relevant to language description, linguists proceeded to the practice of knowing only as much about the processes of speech production and perception as sufficed to provide a set of labels by which to spell different messages distinctively.2 In the linguist's concern with the components of sentences and their arrangements, his primary interest may not be in 1 This point has been discussed at length, with reference to various linguists, by Haugne 1951. 2 Phoneticians, often enough scolded for doing research not immediately relatable to the linguist's own interests, have generally tried to remedy this situation; but sometimes this seems to take the form of renouncing research in any area not directly relevant to linguistics as most narrowly defined. Thus a phonetician with some training in linguistics can write, in connection with a study of mechanical pressures developed in the articulation of certain consonants, that 'the nasals are still another matter, as they do not enter into the lenis/fortis opposition, and calculating percentages of overlapping of their values with those of the stops would be meaningless' (Mal6cot 1966a:176). Phoneticians have failed to exploit research possibilities that closer attention to linguists' discussions would have made them aware of; but this does not imply that areas of phonetic research with which linguists have not concerned themselves are without relevance to linguistics. Recent discussion by Mattingly & Liberman 1969 suggests that linguists have been sometimes too ready to deny linguistic relevance to language and speech studies which threatened to yield findings not readily expressible in the current mode of linguistic description.

Boundaries as obstruents: Old English voicing assimilation and universal strength hierarchies

Abstract: I. The facts about the behaviour of fricatives in Old English in relation to surrounding segments are well known; but these facts (and some others) illustrate some interesting general principles that seem not to have been thoroughly discussed. A classic formulation of the data is that of Sweet (1953: 3):… f and s, in addition to their modern values, could represent respectively the sounds of v and z, letters which were not normally used in O.E. These three letters, f, s, p, had the sounds of f, s, and th in thin (‘breathed’ or ‘voiceless’) initially and finally in accented words; next to ‘voiceless’ consonants (such as p, t); and when double; … They had the sounds of v, z, and th in then (‘voiced’) when single between vowels, or between a vowel and another ‘voiced’ sound (such as l, r, m, n)….To generalize this, we might say that in Old English fricatives were voiced between sonorants, and voiceless if geminate or contiguous to a major boundary, or in clusters with voiceless obstruents (of which as we will see geminates are a special case). One way of capturing these facts would be a rule which states simply that fricatives are voiced between sonorants, and voiceless elsewhere.

Verbal transformations on repeated listening to some english consonants

Abstract: Verbal transformations of common English consonants were analysed according to five linguistic features. A consonant and its transform tended to share the features of voicing, nasality and affrication, but not of duration and place of articulation.

Judgments of Similarities among Initial Consonants Using an Auditory Sorting Apparatus

Abstract: Subjects used a computer‐controlled sorting apparatus to initiate the presentation of 16 different consonant sounds, each followed by the vowel /a/ Each subject arranged 16 pegs, which assessed the auditory stimuli, on a 16×16‐hole board so that the distances between pairs of pegs reflected the similarities of the corresponding consonant sounds, ie, the closer the pegs, the more similar the sounds It was assumed that each subject's arrangement would include both information about the relative importance of attributes of the stimuli and noise, owing to incomplete checking of all 120 interstimulus distances Euclidean distances in the subjects' arrangements served as input to the Carroll‐Chang INDSCAL program [Psychometrika (1970) (to be published)] The resulting group stimulus space revealed a separation between continuants and stops Nasals were clustered Pairs of stops differing only in voicing were grouped together

The Role of Format Transitions in the Voice‐Voiceless Distinction for Stops

Abstract: Research at the Haskins Laboratories has shown that an acoustic correlate of the distinction between syllable‐initial voiced and voiceless stop consonants in English is the onset time of voicing relative to the time of release of the consonant. The present study examines the hypothesis that this critical time on voicing onset is determined by the time when the first formant (and possibly also higher formants) has completed its transition rather than by some fixed absolute time interval of aspiration. A synthesizer was used to generate a series of consonant‐vowel stimuli in which (1) the absolute interval between consonantal release and voicing onset, and (2) the duration of the formant transitions, could be manipulated independently. Responses to these stimuli indicate support for the hypothesis. Acoustic analysis of natural consonant‐vowel syllables also are consistent with the hypothesis. These findings suggest that the perception of [t] as opposed to [d] in English (for example) is influenced strongly ...

Scenarios of change in Chinese dialectology

Abstract: Alternative explanatory hypotheses covering three problematical areas in Chinese dialectology are presented, and, on the basis of the inadequacies in some earlier formulations, new possibilities are explored. First, an examination of the development of tones and their relation to phonation types and voicing in initial consonants shows that 1) phonation types and devoicing of the initials interact to produce the occurring tonal systems, and 2) neither the intrinsic phonetic effects nor the simple phonological categorization of voiced consonants is sufficient to explain the lowered allotones of the basic four tones. Second, evidence is presented to the effect that both the peculiar retroflex dental series and the palatal affricate series of Middle Chinese may have originated from velars, i.e., roughly speaking *ki- > *tci : *ky- > ti- . Third, the Princeton Hypothesis advocates the possibility that Wu, Xiang and Min are more closely related to each other than to any other dialects in China.

Rehearsal and recoding of information from visual sensory-memory.

Abstract: Summary.-Consonant-vowel bigrams were presented in a modification of Sperling's (1960) partial-report procedure. Delay of recall and ability to rehearse were manipulated. The results showed that accuracy of recall was poorer with disrupted rehearsal and that errors in recall could be described in terms of the articulatory features of the consonants only when rehearsal was possible. The delay X rehearsal interacrion was not significant. The results indicate that the iconic image persists for at least 11 sec. and that its contents may be verbally recoded for rehearsal in short-term storage. When an array of letters is presented, errors made in the recall of this array often tend to be more closely related to the auditory than to the visual characceristics of the stimuli (Laughery & Harris, 1970; Hintzman, 1967; Conrad, 1964; Sperling, 1963). These characteristics can be specified in terms of a set of distinctive features (Gibson, 1969; Norman & Rumelhart, 1970). Some visual (graphemic) features are: verticality, diagonality, and curvature; some linguistic (articulatory-phonemic) features are: place of articulation, voicing, and nasality. Most speech sounds can be abstractly characterized by a small set of feature dimensions. For example, the phoneme /p/ is unvoiced and /b/ is voiced. In terms of the place of articulation dimension, /p/ is produced from the front of the mouth, whereas /k/ is produced much more from the back of the mouth. The psychological reality of phonemic distinctive features has been demonstrated in sntdies of speech perceprion (Miller & Nicely, 1955), reaction-times to speech sounds (McInish & Tikofsky, 1969), and paired-associate learning of trigrams (Jenkins, Foss, & Greenberg, 1968). When consonant-vowel (CV)

Perception of Dichotically Presented Stop Consonants in Relation to Amount and Kind of Information Shared by Ears

Abstract: Earlier experiments had shown that dichotically presented stops are more often identified correctly when they share place of production (e.g.,/ba, pa/) or voicing (e.g., /ba, da/) than when neither feature is shared (e.g., /ba, ta/). We interpreted this as further evidence for the perceptual reality of phonetic features. It is possible, however, that the advantage of sharing a feature has an auditory rather than a phonetic basis. We therefore compared the increments due to feature sharing, for synthetic stop‐vowel syllables in which formant transitions were the sole cues to place of production, under two experimental conditions: (1) when the vowel was the same for both syllables in a dichotic pair, as in our earlier studies, and (2) when the vowels differed. If the increment in performance due to sharing place is not diminished when vowels differ (so that formant transitions do not coincide), we can conclude that it accrues after the process of feature extraction and therefore has a phonetic rather than a...