Voice

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

Consonant/vowel ratio: An improbable cue in speech

Abstract: The idea of the consonant duration relative to the vowel duration as a cue to voicing of postvocalic consonants is almost three decades old. Port and Dalby (1982) offer what they believeto be convincing support for such a view. We argue that the acceptance of this idea is premature and probably incorrect. In every instance that the concept of consonant! vowel (C/V) ratio is contrasted with an alternative view, the latter provides a significantly better description of the results. This alternative view considers consonant and vowel duration as independent cues to voicing, following the evaluation and integration of cues within the fuzzy-logical model of speech perception (Massaro & Cohen, 1976, 1977;' Massaro & Oden, 1980a, 1980b;Oden & Massaro, 1978). The first relevant study was carried out by Denes (1955), who varied vowel duration and the final consonant duration in the perception of the voicing difference between the pronunciations of the word use. Without any formal analysis, Denes interpreted the results in terms of the ratio of consonant duration to vowel duration, serving as a cue to voicing of the final consonant. The perceived voicing should decrease systematically with increases in the C/V ratio. However, in an earlier paper (Massaro & Cohen, 1977), we provided a quantitative test of the C/V ratio hypothesis against the observed results of Denes (1955). We also tested the idea that vowel duration and consonant duration provide independent cues to voicing of the consonant. The fit of the latter model was twice as good as that of the former, even though the better model required only three-fifths as many free parameters. In the present note, we evaluate the C/V ratio model against the data of Derr and Massaro (1980) and Port and Dalby (1982). The present tests offer as much flexibility as possible for the quantification of the C/V ratio idea. In addition, we contrast the C/V ratio model against the predictions of the fuzzylogical model, assuming independent vowel and consonant duration cues. The fuzzy-logicalmodel does a

Phonetics-phonology interactions in pre-sonorant voicing

Abstract: 11

VOT productions of word-initial stops in Mandarin and English: A cross-language study

Abstract: Voice Onset Time (VOT) is considered as one of the best methods for examining the timing of voicing in stop consonants and has been applied in the study of many languages The present study is designed to examine VOT production for phonetically voiceless stops in Mandarin and English by native Chinese speakers Thirty-six Taiwanese Chinese speakers recruited from National Cheng Kung University participated in this study The results indicate the following 1) Based on the three universal categories proposed by Lisker and Abramson (1964), for phonetically voiceless stops, Mandarin and English occupy the same place along the VOT continuum 2) The mean VOT value for the apical stop /t/ is slightly lower than the mean value for the labial stop /p/ This does not conform to the general consensus, which states that the further back the place of articulation the longer the VOT Very similar findings were also observed in previous studies 3) The difference between the mean VOT values of the English /p/ and /t/ produced by Chinese speakers was subtle, while it reached significance for native English speakers This suggests that a first language could be a crucial factor in L2 production Future studies might examine variations in L2 production both for the same persons over time and for different speakers

Consonant durations in clusters

Abstract: The durations of initial and final consonant clusters in monosyllabic and bisyllabic words within a frame sentence were studied from spectrograms of readings by 3 speakers. The durations of consonants within a cluster varied with the features of the consonant and its phonetic environment, such as voicing and point and manner of articulation. A durational model was proposed based on two mechanisms. An articulatory mechanism was attributed to effects involving coarticulation and restrictions in the motion of the tongue and lips during a cluster. Shortening of consonants in clusters seemed to arise from the shorter distances that the articulators travel in clusters. Lengthening of consonants before fricatives and voiced consonants and aspiration effects were noted. The other factor was a phonological mechanism, related to the use of duration as an acoustic cue in consonant perception. Single consonants varying only in the voicing characteristic had substantial durational differences which could aid in distinguishing them. However, phonological restrictions, such as common voicing among stops and fricatives, arise in the clusters, and the redundancies allow the durational differences to become less.