Showing papers on "Voice published in 2010"

Variations in Intensity, Fundamental Frequency, and Voicing for Teachers in Occupational Versus Nonoccupational Settings

Abstract: Purpose In this study, the authors created a more concise picture of the vocal demands placed on teachers by comparing occupational voice use with nonoccupational voice use. Method The authors used...

Finding the signal by adding noise: The role of noncontrastive phonetic variability in early word learning

Abstract: It is well attested that 14-month olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g. bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. In contrast, Rost and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14-month olds’ minimal pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study investigates which components of the variability found in multi-talker input improved infants’ processing, assessing both the phonologically contrastive aspects of the speech stream and phonologically irrelevant indexical and suprasegmental aspects. In the first two experiments, speaker was held constant while cues to word-initial voicing were systematically manipulated. Infants failed in both cases. The third experiment introduced variability in speaker, but voicing cues were invariant within each category. Infants in this condition learned the words. We conclude that aspects of the speech signal that have been typically thought of as noise are in fact valuable information – signal – for the young word learner.

An Introduction to English Phonetics

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Overview of the human speech mechanism 3. Representing speech 4. Voicing 5. Vowels 6. Approximants 7. Plosives 8. Nasals 9. Fricatives 10. Airstreams 11. Sounds and structures Glossary

Distributional Phonetic Learning at 10 Months of Age

Abstract: Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6–8 months, an age at which native phonetic categories have not yet developed. Here, three experiments test infants of 10 months to help illuminate perceptual ability following perceptual reorganization. English-learning infants did not change discrimination in response to nonnative speech sound distributions from either a voicing distinction (Experiment 1) or a place-of-articulation distinction (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, familiarization to the place-of-articulation distinction was doubled to increase the amount of exposure, and in this case infants began discriminating the sounds. These results extend the processes of distributional learning to a new phonetic contrast, and reveal that at 10 months of age, distributional phonetic learning remains effective, but is more difficult than before perceptual reorganization.

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

Abstract: paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolic patterns hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolism patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999). 1. Background Sound symbolism refers to cases in which particular images are associated with certain sounds; for example, Sapir’s (1929) seminal experimental work shows that English speakers tend to associate [a] with an image larger than that associated with [i]. Previous studies have argued that these sound symbolic patterns have phonetic bases (e.g. Eberhardt 1940; MacNeilage and Davis 2001; Ohala 1983b, 1994; Paget 1930; Sapir 1929); for example, [a] may be perceived as larger than [i] because [a] involves wider opening of the mouth than [i] (see section 5 for 1 There is a large body of literature on sound symbolism, which is too large to list in this short

Using Standardized Tests to Inventory Consonant and Vowel Production: A Comparison of 11 Tests of Articulation and Phonology

Abstract: Purpose This report considered the validity of making conclusions about a child’s phonetic inventory (the sounds a child can and cannot produce spontaneously without a prior model or other stimulat...

Pharyngeal articulation in the production of voiced and voiceless fricatives.

Abstract: A structural magnetic resonance imaging study has revealed that pharyngeal articulation varies considerably with voicing during the production of English fricatives. In a study of four speakers of American English, pharyngeal volume was generally found to be greater during the production of sustained voiced fricatives, compared to voiceless equivalents. Though pharyngeal expansion is expected for voiced stops, it is more surprising for voiced fricatives. For three speakers, all four voiced oral fricatives were produced with a larger pharynx than that used during the production of the voiceless fricative at the same place of articulation. For one speaker, pharyngeal volume during the production of voiceless labial fricatives was found to be greater, and sibilant pharyngeal volume varied with vocalic context as well as voicing. Pharyngeal expansion was primarily achieved through forward displacement of the anterior and lateral walls of the upper pharynx, but some displacement of the rear pharyngeal wall was also observed. These results suggest that the production of voiced fricatives involves the complex interaction of articulatory constraints from three separate goals: the formation of the appropriate oral constriction, the control of airflow through the constriction so as to achieve frication, and the maintenance of glottal oscillation by attending to transglottal pressure.

Effects of age and experience on the production of English word-final stops by Korean speakers*

Abstract: This study examined the effect of second language (L2) age of acquisition and amount of experience on the production of word-final stop consonant voicing by adult native Korean learners of English. Thirty learners, who differed in amount of L2 experience and age of L2 exposure, and 10 native English speakers produced 8 English monosyllabic words ending in voiced and voiceless stops. These productions were presented to 10 English listeners for perceptual judgment and subjected to acoustic analyses to determine how well learners produced vowel duration and closure (stop gap) duration, two cues to stop consonant voicing. Results revealed that even learners with 10 years of L2 experience did not always produce stop consonant voicing accurately, that learners' age of acquisition influenced their production of both cues, that vowel duration was easier to learn than closure duration, and that English listeners used both these cues in their judgments of production accuracy.

A rational account of perceptual compensation for coarticulation

Abstract: A rational account of perceptual compensation for coarticulation Morgan Sonderegger (morgan@cs.uchicago.edu) Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA Alan Yu (aclyu@uchicago.edu) Phonology Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA Abstract natural coarticulated speech. As another example, the percep- tion of a fundamental frequency (f 0 ) contour can change as a function of vowel height (Hombert, 1978; Silverman, 1987) or consonant voicing (Pardo & Fowler, 1997): /i/ is perceived as lower in pitch relative to an /a/ with the same f 0 , presum- ably because high vowels typically have higher f 0 than low vowels. Listeners’ language-specific experience crucially affects the degree of perceptual compensation. In a study replicated in part below, Beddor, Harnsberger, & Lindemann (2002) found that English and Shona listeners compensate for the coarticulatory effects of V 2 on V 1 in CV 1 CV 2 sequences. That is, listeners identified a continuum of synthesized vow- els between /a/ and /e/ more often as /a/ when the following vowel was /i/ than when the following vowel was /a/. Impor- tantly, they observed that Shona listeners compensate more for the vowel contexts that triggered larger acoustic influences in speech production. Compensatory responses can affect lis- teners’ rating judgments as well. English listeners are less accurate in judging vowel nasality in nasal than in non-nasal contexts, with nasal vowels in nasal contexts the most diffi- cult (Beddor & Krakow, 1999; Kawasaki, 1986). Explanations of PC effects have been advanced from sev- eral theoretical perspectives. Some emphasize the lexical and phonemic content of the context in determining the identifica- tion of the target sound (Elman & McClelland, 1988; Samuel & Pitt, 2003). Gestural theorists, who assume that listeners parse the acoustics in terms of its articulatory sources, argue that listeners attribute the acoustic properties of a target sound to the coarticulatory context rather than to the target (Fowler, 1996, 2006). Auditorists attribute context-induced shifts in category boundaries to general auditory processes such as fre- quency contrast or spectral contrast (Diehl & Kluender, 1989; Kingston, 1992; Kingston & Diehl, 1995; Lotto & Kluender, 1998). Such auditory explanations are unavailable for com- pensation effects such as vowel-dependent pitch height com- pensation (Fowler, 2006; Lotto & Holt, 2006). Motivated by such cases, Lotto & Holt (2006) suggest that the spectral con- trast explanation be supplemented with a “general learning” mechanism for category formation from correlations between stimulus parameters. The generality of PC effects is accentuated by evidence for contextual compensation with speech and non-speech sounds in human and non-humans (Holt, Lotto, & Kluender, 2000; Lotto, 2004). For example, when /da/–/ga/ syllables are pre- ceded by tone glides matching in frequency to the third for- mant (F 3 ) transition of /al/ or /ar/, listeners’ syllable identi- A model is presented that explains perceptual compensation for context as a consequence of listeners optimally categoriz- ing speech sounds given contextual variation. In using Bayes’ rule to pick the most likely category, listeners’ perception of speech sounds, which is biased toward the means of phonetic categories (Feldman & Griffiths, 2007; Feldman, Griffiths, & Morgan, 2009), is conditioned by contextual variation. The effect on the resulting identification curves of varying cate- gory frequencies and variances is discussed. A simulation case study of compensation for vowel-to-vowel coarticulation shows the predictions of the model closely correspond to hu- man perceptual data. Keywords: Speech perception; perceptual compensation; ra- tional analysis. Introduction A major challenge for models of speech perception is explain- ing the effect of context on phonemic identification. Depend- ing on their acoustic, phonological, semantic, syntactic, and even socio-indexical contexts, identical acoustic signals can be labeled differently and different acoustic signals can be la- beled identically. One of the most investigated types of con- textual effects stems from phonemes’ phonetic environments. Because of coarticulation, a phoneme’s phonetic realization is heavily context-dependent. To understand speech, the lis- tener must take into account context-induced coarticulatory effects to recover the intended message. The term perceptual compensation (PC) has often been used to characterize this type of context-induced adjustment in speech perception. For example, the identification of an ambiguous target syllable as /da/ or /ga/ is shifted by preceding /ar/ or /al/ contexts (Mann, 1980): the same /Ca/ token is less likely to be heard as /ga/ in /arCa/ context than in /alCa/ context. This effect has been ar- gued to result from perceptual reduction of the coarticulatory fronting effects of /l/ on a following velar consonant: listen- ers are compensating for the effect of /l/ on /g/. This paper proposes a simple model in which PC effects emerge as an optimal solution to the problem of categorization in the pres- ence of context-induced variation. In this model, listeners behave as if they are compensating because what is optimal differs by context. PC effects have been observed in many phonetic settings. The fricative /S/ has lower noise frequencies than /s/, and lip rounding lowers the resonant frequencies of nearby segments. Synthetic fricative noises ranging from /S/ to /s/ are more of- ten identified by English listeners as /s/ when followed by /u/ than by /a/ (Mann & Repp 1980; see also Mitterer 2006), pre- sumably because listeners take into account the lowering ef- fect of lip rounding from /u/ on the noise frequencies of /s/ in

Human phoneme recognition depending on speech-intrinsic variability.

Abstract: The influence of different sources of speech-intrinsic variation (speaking rate, effort, style and dialect or accent) on human speech perception was investigated. In listening experiments with 16 listeners, confusions of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sounds in speech-weighted noise were analyzed. Experiments were based on the OLLO logatome speech database, which was designed for a man-machine comparison. It contains utterances spoken by 50 speakers from five dialect/accent regions and covers several intrinsic variations. By comparing results depending on intrinsic and extrinsic variations (i.e., different levels of masking noise), the degradation induced by variabilities can be expressed in terms of the SNR. The spectral level distance between the respective speech segment and the long-term spectrum of the masking noise was found to be a good predictor for recognition rates, while phoneme confusions were influenced by the distance to spectrally close phonemes. An analysis based on transmitted information of articulatory features showed that voicing and manner of articulation are comparatively robust cues in the presence of intrinsic variations, whereas the coding of place is more degraded. The database and detailed results have been made available for comparisons between human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognizers (ASR).

Perception of final fricative voicing: native and nonnative listeners' use of vowel duration.

Abstract: Does experience with a perceptual cue for a phoneme contrast in the native language affect its use in a second language for a similar contrast in a different phonetic context? Two experiments investigated Dutch and English listeners' use of preceding vowel duration as a perceptual cue for nonword-final fricative voicing in English. Dutch listeners have native language experience with the use of vowel duration for vowel length and intervocalic obstruent voicing contrasts, but not for final voicing contrasts, as Dutch does not have voiced obstruents word-finally. Previous research [Broersma, M. (2005). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 3890-3901; Broersma, M.(2008) J. Acoust. Soc. Am.124, 712-715] showed that Dutch listeners used vowel duration less for final /v-f/ categorization than English listeners did when vowel duration varied only between subjects, discouraging its use as a perceptual cue. The present study assessed the use of vowel duration for final /v-f/ and /z-s/ contrasts when it varied within subjects. A goodness rating and a phonetic categorization experiment showed that Dutch listeners used vowel duration, but less than English listeners did. Thus, experience with a perceptual cue for a different contrast and for a similar contrast in a different position in the native language did not lead to native-like use of this cue in the second language.

An acoustic study of Georgian stop consonants

Abstract: This study investigates the acoustic properties of ejective, voiced and voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian, a Caucasian language, and seeks to answer two questions: (i) Which acoustic features discriminate the three stop types? and (ii) Do Georgian stops undergo initial strengthening, and if so, is it syntagmatic or paradigmatic strengthening? Five female speakers were recorded reading words embedded in carrier phrases and stories. Acoustic measures include closure duration, voicing during the closure, voicing lag, relative burst intensity, spectral moment of bursts, phonation (H1-H2) and F0. Of these, voicing lag, voicing during the closure, mean burst frequency, H1-H2 and F0 could all be used to discriminate stop type, but stop types did not differ in closure duration or relative burst intensity. Georgian stops did show initial strengthening and showed only syntagmatic enhancement, not paradigmatic enhancement. Stops showed longer closure durations, longer voicing lags, and higher H1-H2 values in higher prosodic positions.

The nature of the phonological processing in French dyslexic children: evidence for the phonological syllable and linguistic features' role in silent reading and speech discrimination

Abstract: This study investigated the status of phonological representations in French dyslexic children (DY) compared with reading level- (RL) and chronological age-matched (CA) controls. We focused on the syllable's role and on the impact of French linguistic features. In Experiment 1, we assessed oral discrimination abilities of pairs of syllables that varied as a function of voicing, mode or place of articulation, or syllable structure. Results suggest that DY children underperform controls with a 'speed-accuracy' deficit. However, DY children exhibit some similar processing than those highlighted in controls. As in CA and RL controls, DY children have difficulties in processing two sounds that only differ in voicing, and preferentially process obstruent rather than fricative sounds, and more efficiently process CV than CCV syllables. In Experiment 2, we used a modified version of the Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (Applied Psycholinguistics 20:507-532, 1999) paradigm. Results show that DY children underperform CA controls but outperform RL controls. However, as in CA and RL controls, data reveal that DY children are able to use phonological procedures influenced by initial syllable frequency. Thus, DY children process syllabically high-frequency syllables but phonemically process low-frequency syllables. They also exhibit lexical and syllable frequency effects. Consequently, results provide evidence that DY children performances can be accounted for by laborious phonological syllable-based procedures and also degraded phonological representations.

Underspecification and asymmetries in voicing perception

Abstract: The purpose of our study is to show that phonological knowledge is an important basis for making predictions during speech perception. Taking the phonological constraint in English that coda obstruent clusters agree in their value for voicing, we conducted two experiments using vowel–stop–fricative sequences, where the task was to identify the fricative. Stimuli included sequences that were either congruent or incongruent. Consistent with models of featural underspecification for voiceless obstruents, our results indicate that only voiced stops induced predictions for an upcoming voiced fricative, eliciting processing difficulty when such predictions were not met. In contrast, voiceless stops appear to induce no equivalent predictions. These results demonstrate the important role of abstract phonological knowledge in online processing, and the asymmetries in our findings also suggest that only specified features are the basis for generating perceptual predictions about the upcoming speech signal.

Development of Voice Onset Time in Standard-Greek and Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Preschoolers.

Abstract: The current investigation examined the development of voice onset time (VOT) in Standard-Greek (SG) and Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children at age levels 2;0-2;5, 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3;5, and 3;6-4;0 years. SG presents with a two-way voicing contrast (voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops) whereas CG is a three-way contrast dialect containing voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and pre-voiced stops. A cross-sectional design was used. The main goals were: (1) to determine the age at which Greek and Cypriot Greek children acquire voicing contrasts, and (2) to examine the mechanism used during the process of acquisition. Stimuli included pseudo words in minimal pair contrasts differing in stop voicing (e.g. ['gaga] vs ['kaka]). Children were taught the target words using fast mapping procedures. Each member within a word pair referred to an unfamiliar object. Audio-recorded samples were analysed from wide-band spectrograms. Results indicated a greater overall variation of voicing patterns for children than adults, in both Greek and Cypriot VOT contrasts. Greek children acquired consistent pre-voicing and short lag aspiration patterns very early on, achieving adult values for VOT contrasts for alveolar and for velar places of articulation as early as 2;0-2;5 years old. On the contrary, a developmental lag in the acquisition of voicing contrasts was noted for Cypriot children as compared to the Greek counterparts. Accounts about the developmental differences among Greek and Cypriot children with respect to the adult VOT contrasts are discussed.

Temporal acoustic correlates of the voicing contrast in European Portuguese stops

Abstract: This study focuses on the temporal analysis of stops /p b t d k ɡ/ and devoicing analysis of voiced stops /b d ɡ/ produced in different word positions by six native speakers of European Portuguese. The study explores acoustic properties related to voicing. The following acoustic properties were measured: voice onset time (VOT), stop duration, closure duration, release duration, voicing into closure duration, duration of the preceding vowel and duration of the following vowel. Results suggested that when [b d ɡ] were devoiced, the acoustic properties stop duration, closure duration, duration of the following vowel, duration of the preceding vowel and duration of voicing into closure were relevant for the voicing distinction. Implications for research and practice in speech and language therapy are discussed. Further investigation is needed to find how the productions analysed in the present study were perceived by listeners, specifically productions of devoiced stops.

A longitudinal study of the effect of voicing on the dichotic listening ear advantage in boys and girls at age 5 to 8.

Abstract: Recent studies indicate that the effect of voicing on the ear advantage in dichotic listening might serve as indicator of the development of speech processing abilities in children. In the present longitudinal study, we tested this idea by applying dichotic listening with voiced and unvoiced consonant-vowel syllables. In 35 boys and girls, tested at the age of 5, 6, 7, and 8 years, we found that the effect of voicing increases with age, and that girls were more affected by the voicing characteristics than boys. These results indicate a sex difference in the development of speech processing abilities.

Processing of consonant clusters by Japanese native speakers: Influence of English learning backgrounds

Abstract: Previous research has revealed that Japanese native speakers are highly likely to both perceive and produce epenthetic vowels between consonants. The goal of the present study is to investigate the influence of English learning backgrounds in the perception and production of consonant clusters by Japanese native speakers. In Experiment 1, a forced-choice AXB task to identify VC(u)CV is assigned to 17 highly fluent Japanese-English bilinguals and 22 Japanese monolinguals. Results show that monolinguals made significantly more errors than bilinguals. In Experiment 2, the influence of English proficiency on the production of consonant clusters, and the effect of consonant voicing on vowel epenthesis are investigated. The epenthetic vowels are acoustically analyzed and categorized into three degrees: full, partial and no epenthesis. The voicing combinations of the consonant clusters are C[+voice]-C[+voice], C[−voice]-C[+voice], and C[−voice]-C[−voice]. Results show that monolinguals inserted more epenthetic vowels than bilinguals, and that the influence of consonant voicing was stronger in monolinguals than bilinguals. Furthermore, monolinguals’ epenthetic vowels between C[−voice]-C[+voice] and C[−voice]-C[−voice] tended to become devoiced than bilinguals. This result suggests a stronger L1 influence on monolinguals. The results of the two experiments thus suggest that the English proficiency influences the perception and production of consonant clusters.