Voice

About: Voice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2393 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56637 citations.

Contextual effects on vowel duration, closure duration, and the consonant/vowel ratio in speech production

Abstract: Acoustic measurements were conducted to determine the degree to which vowel duration, closure duration, and their ratio distinguish voicing of word‐final stop consonants across variations in sentential and phonetic environments. Subjects read CVC test words containing three different vowels and ending in stops of three different places of articulation. The test words were produced either in nonphrase‐final or phrase‐final position and in several local phonetic environments within each of these sentence positions. Our measurements revealed that vowel duration most consistently distinguished voicing categories for the test words. Closure duration failed to consistently distinguish voicing categories across the contextual variables manipulated, as did the ratio of closure and vowel duration. Our results suggest that vowel duration is the most reliable correlate of voicing for word‐final stops in connected speech.

Effects of stress and final-consonant voicing on vowel production: articulatory and acoustic analyses.

Abstract: Durations of the vocalic portions of speech are influenced by a large number of linguistic and nonlinguistic factors (e.g., stress and speaking rate). However, each factor affecting vowel duration may influence articulation in a unique manner. The present study examined the effects of stress and final‐consonant voicing on the detailed structure of articulatory and acoustic patterns in consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) utterances. Jaw movement trajectories and F1 trajectories were examined for a corpus of utterances differing in stress and final‐consonant voicing. Jaw lowering and raising gestures were more rapid, longer in duration, and spatially more extensive for stressed versus unstressed utterances. At the acoustic level, stressed utterances showed more rapid initial F1 transitions and more extreme F1 steady‐state frequencies than unstressed utterances. In contrast to the results obtained in the analysis of stress, decreases in vowel duration due to devoicing did not result in a reduction in the velocity or spatial extent of the articulatory gestures. Similarly, at the acoustic level, the reductions in formant transition slopes and steady‐state frequencies demonstrated by the shorter, unstressed utterances did not occur for the shorter, voiceless utterances. The results demonstrate that stress‐related and voicing‐related changes in vowel duration are accomplished by separate and distinct changes in speech production with observable consequences at both the articulatory and acoustic levels.

A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology

Abstract: Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world’s languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of sounds (stress, tone, length, voicing, place of articulation, etc.), and their variable realization in di¤erent contexts (alternations). A speaker’s implicit knowledge of these patterns is often evident in their extension to novel items and in experiments probing phonological well-formedness. This implicit knowledge – its content, formalization, and representation, – is the central focus of modern theoretical phonology, including generative phonology and many of its derivatives (natural phonology, government phonology, dependency phonology, optimality theory). However, just as important as speaker’s implicit knowledge of sound patterns are explanations for the distribution of sound patterns across attested spoken languages. Some sound patterns, are extremely common, while others are rare. Some examples of recurrent sound patterns involving segment/feature inventories, distribution, and alternations are listed in (1). The sound patterns in (1i, iii, iv, v, viii) are exceptionless across the world’s attested spoken languages, while those in (1ii, vi, vii, ix–xii) are recurrent and frequent. Exceptionlesss patterns like (1i) are sometimes regarded as ‘linguistic universals’ (1i), while common patterns like (1ii) are often viewed as ‘universal tendencies’.

Learning phonotactic distributions

Abstract: The problem All languages have distributional regularities: patterns which restrict what sounds can appear where, including nowhere, as determined by local syntagmatic factors independent of any particular morphemic alternations. Early Generative Phonology tended to slight the study of distributional relations in favour of morphophonemics, perhaps because word-relatedness phonology was thought to be more productive of theoretical depth, reliably leading the analyst beyond the merely observable. But over the last few decades it has become clear that much morphophonemics can be understood as accommodation to phonotactic requirements, e.g., Kisseberth (1970), Sommerstein (1974), Kiparsky (1980), Goldsmith (1993), etc. A German-like voice-neutralising alternation system resolves rapidly when the phonotactics of obstruent voicing is recognised. And even as celebrated a problem in abstractness and opacity as Yawelmani Yokuts vocalic phonology turns on a surface-visible asymmetry in height-contrasts between long and short vowels. Distributions require nontrivial learning: the data do not explicitly indicate the nature, or even the presence, of distributional regularities, and every distributional statement goes beyond what can be observed as fact, the ‘positive evidence’. From seeing X in this or that environment the learner must somehow conclude ‘X can only appear under these conditions and never anywhere else’ – when such a conclusion is warranted. A familiar learning hazard is immediately encountered. Multiple grammars can be consistent with the same data, grammars which are empirically distinct in that they make different predictions about other forms not represented in the data.