Voice

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

Physiologic, Acoustic, and Perceptual Aspects of Coarticulation: Implications for the Remediation of Articulatory Disorders

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses physiology, acoustic, and perceptual aspects of coarticulation. The concept of coarticulation is based on the postulation that canonical forms of sounds or phonemes are represented at a central level of the speech production process. These canonical forms are characterized by ideal or target features or properties. The nature of the features or properties presumably relates to the place, manner, and voicing characteristics of consonants and the lip rounding, tongue height, and tongue advancement characteristics of vowels. As speech sounds are usually preceded and followed by other sounds, the coarticulatory process occurs in both directions. Several terms have been used to describe effects of preceding and following sounds on the production of a target segment. Right to left coarticulation refers to the influence of the articulatory characteristics of one sound on the production of a preceding sound. In general, coarticulatory changes are explained in terms of the compatibility of the sounds in a sequence and the parallel production of features

Effects of speaking rate on the vowel length distinction in Korean

Abstract: Variations in speaking rate affect the perception of temporally defined phonetic distinctions in consonants, such as voicing in stops, and the stop‐glide and stop‐affricate contrasts. The production data on these contrasts show asymmetrical effects on temporally distinctive pairs, with the longer members showing the effects more markedly. These data further suggest that the shorter member of the pair serves as a phonetic anchor. This study investigates whether similar effects emerge for vowels. To this end, production of short‐long vowel pairs was examined across speaking rates in Korean, a language that has phonemic vowel length. Results show that both long and short vowels vary across speaking rates, such that the symmetrical effects found for consonants are not found for vowels. Short vowels do not provide a phonetic anchor: In fact, the durations of short vowels produced at a slow rate nearly always overlap those of long vowels produced at a fast rate. [Work supported by NIH.]

Selective acoustic phonetic impairment and lexical access in an aphasic patient.

Abstract: The relationship between acoustic‐phonetic disturbances and lexical access was explored in an aphasic patient. M.L. had a restricted disturbance of phonemic discrimination that affected the discrimination of voicing contrasts in nonword stimuli. Despite this impairment, her discrimination of voicing contrasts in words and her comprehension of auditorily presented words containing voiced segments was excellent. Performance on lexical decision was impaired: M.L.’s rejection of nonwords was poor and her reaction times and error rates for word stimuli showed a trend toward being influenced by the lexical status (word or nonword) of the item that would be formed by a change in voicing. The results are consistent with a role for a phonemic code in auditory word recognition, coupled with lexical‐to‐acoustic/phonetic feedback, but are also compatible with the view that other access codes for the Phonological Input Lexicon are also available.

Distributional learning for speech reflects cumulative exposure to a talker’s phonetic distributions

Abstract: Efficient speech perception requires listeners to maintain an exquisite tension between stability of the language architecture and flexibility to accommodate variation in the input, such as that associated with individual talker differences in speech production. Achieving this tension can be guided by top-down learning mechanisms, wherein lexical information constrains interpretation of speech input, and by bottom-up learning mechanisms, in which distributional information in the speech signal is used to optimize the mapping to speech sound categories. An open question for theories of perceptual learning concerns the nature of the representations that are built for individual talkers: do these representations reflect long-term, global exposure to a talker or rather only short-term, local exposure? Recent research suggests that when lexical knowledge is used to resolve a talker's ambiguous productions, listeners disregard previous experience with a talker and instead rely on only recent experience, a finding that is contrary to predictions of Bayesian belief-updating accounts of perceptual adaptation. Here we use a distributional learning paradigm in which lexical information is not explicitly required to resolve ambiguous input to provide an additional test of global versus local exposure accounts. Listeners completed two blocks of phonetic categorization for stimuli that differed in voice-onset-time, a probabilistic cue to the voicing contrast in English stop consonants. In each block, two distributions were presented, one specifying /g/ and one specifying /k/. Across the two blocks, variance of the distributions was manipulated to be either narrow or wide. The critical manipulation was order of the two blocks; half of the listeners were first exposed to the narrow distributions followed by the wide distributions, with the order reversed for the other half of the listeners. The results showed that for earlier trials, the identification slope was steeper for the narrow-wide group compared to the wide-narrow group, but this difference was attenuated for later trials. The between-group convergence was driven by an asymmetry in learning between the two orders such that only those in the narrow-wide group showed slope movement during exposure, a pattern that was mirrored by computational simulations in which the distributional statistics of the present talker were integrated with prior experience with English. This pattern of results suggests that listeners did not disregard all prior experience with the talker, and instead used cumulative exposure to guide phonetic decisions, which raises the possibility that accommodating a talker's phonetic signature entails maintaining representations that reflect global experience.