Voice

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

Phonological transfer and levels of representation: the perceptual acquisition of Thai voice and aspiration by English and French speakers:

Abstract: In this article, we show that the generative phonological distinction between lexical and surface representation can explain apparently contradictory orders of acquisition of L2 voice and aspiration contrasts by native speakers of English. Cross-language speech perception research has shown that English speakers distinguish synthetic voice onset time counterparts of aspirated–unaspirated minimal pairs more readily than voiced–voiceless. Here, we present evidence that in the perceptual acquisition of the same Thai contrasts, English speakers acquire voicing before aspiration. These divergent orders are argued to be due to the levels of representation tapped by the methodologies employed in each case: surface representations in the earlier studies, and lexical in the present one. The resulting difference in outcomes is attributed to the presence of aspiration in surface, but not lexical, representations in English (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). To address the further question of whether allophonic aspiration in...

The Origin of Vowel Length Neutralization in Final Position: Evidence from Finnish Speakers

Abstract: In a broad variety of languages with contrastive vowel length, long vowels are systematically excluded from a domain-final position, and are replaced with short vowels there This is despite the fact that vowels at the end of a domain (utterance, phrase, word) are generally longer in duration than corresponding nonfinal vowels We propose that the phonological pattern of final shortening arises diachronically from the effects of final devoicing – the breakdown in voicing at the end of an utterance Partial devoicing of the final vowel makes it difficult to hear the end of the vowel and so favors identification of final vowels as short If language learners generalize such an identification pattern, they have adopted a final shortening pattern The claim that partially voiceless final vowels tend to be identified as short is supported by a series of experiments with Finnish speakers The first two experiments establish that there is both final lengthening and final devoicing in the language Three further experiments show that Finnish speakers identify the length category of partially voiceless final vowels on the basis of the duration of its voiced portion, so that partial devoicing of a vowel increases the probability of its being identified as short

Analysis of stop consonant production errors in developmentally dysphasic children

Abstract: The speech production skills of 12 dysphasic children and of 12 normal children were compared. The dysphasic children were found to have significantly greater difficulty than the normal children in producing stop consonants. In addition, it was found that seven of the dysphasic children, who had difficulty in perceiving initial stop consonants, had greater difficulty in producing stop consonants than the remaining five dysphasic children who showed no such perceptual difficulty. A detailed phonetic analysis indicated that the dysphasic children seldom omitted stops or substituted nonstop for stop consonants. Instead, their errors were predominantly of voicing or place of articulation. Acoustic analyses suggested that the voicing errors were related to lack of precise control over the timing of speech events, specifically, voice onset time for initial stops and vowel duration preceding final stops. The number of voicing errors on final stops, however, was greater than expected on the basis of lack of differentiation of vowel duration alone. They appeared also to be related to a tendency in the dysphasic children to produce final stops with exaggerated aspiration. The possible relationship of poor timing control in speech production in these children and auditory temporal processing deficits in speech perception is discussed.

Laryngeal enhancement in early Germanic

Abstract: This paper builds on growing evidence that aspirated or fortis obstruents in languages like English and German are laryngeally marked, but that phonetic voicing in the (unmarked) unaspirated or lenis series is contextually determined. Employing the laryngeal feature set proposed by Halle & Stevens (1971), as incorporated into the ‘ dimensional theory ’ of laryngeal representation (Avery & Idsardi 2001, forthcoming), we develop an explicit account of this phonetic enhancement of phonological contrasts, which is widely known as ‘ passive voicing ’. We find that both passive voicing and inherent aspiration have been phonetic and phonological characteristics of the Germanic languages since the break-up of Indo-European, with laryngeally unmarked stops repeatedly enhanced by the gesture of [spread glottis]. A key implication of this view is that Verner’s Law was not an innovation specifically of early Germanic, but rather is an automatic (ultimately phonologised) reflex of passive voicing, itself a ‘ persistent change’ rising out of the enduring ‘ base of articulation ’ that came to characterise Germanic.