Voice

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

Perceptual relevance of prevoicing in Dutch

Abstract: In this dissertation the perceptual relevance of prevoicing in Dutch was investigated. Prevoicing is the presence of vocal fold vibration during the closure of initial voiced plosives (negative voice onset time). The presence or absence of prevoicing is generally used to describe the difference between voiced and voiceless Dutch plosives. The first experiment described in this dissertation showed that prevoicing is frequently absent in Dutch and that several factors affect the production of prevoicing. A detailed acoustic analysis of the voicing distinction identified several acoustic correlates of voicing. Prevoicing appeared to be by far the best predictor. Perceptual classification data revealed that prevoicing was indeed the strongest cue that listeners use when classifying plosives as voiced or voiceless. In the cases where prevoicing was absent, other acoustic cues influenced classification, such that some of these tokens were still perceived as being voiced. In the second part of this dissertation the influence of prevoicing variation on spoken-word recognition was examined. In several cross-modal priming experiments two types of prevoicing variation were contrasted: a difference between the presence and absence of prevoicing (6 versus 0 periods of prevoicing) and a difference in the amount of prevoicing (12 versus 6 periods). All these experiments indicated that primes with 12 and 6 periods of prevoicing had the same effect on lexical decisions to the visual targets. The primes without prevoicing had a different effect, but only when their voiceless counterparts were real words. Phonetic detail appears to influence lexical access only when it is useful: In Dutch, the presence versus absence of prevoicing is informative, while the amount of prevoicing is not.

German fricatives : coda devoicing or positional faithfulness ?*

Abstract: In this paper we show how Jessen & Ringen's (2002) analysis of voicing in German stops can be extended to account for the voicing of German fricatives. It is argued that while stops in German contrast for the feature [spread glottis], fricatives contrast for [voice] (and [spread glottis]). Our analysis, which involves presonorant faithfulness, is compared to an analysis with coda devoicing. We show that the two analyses make crucially different predictions, and present experimental evidence in support of the presonorant faithfulness analysis. The experimental results show considerable variation, which can be accommodated in our OT analysis.

Inferior frontal cortex contributions to the recognition of spoken words and their constituent speech sounds

Abstract: Speech perception and comprehension are often challenged by the need to recognize speech sounds that are degraded or ambiguous. Here, we explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in resolving ambiguity in the identity of speech sounds using syllables that contain ambiguous phonetic segments e.g., intermediate sounds between /b/ and /g/ as in "blade" and "glade". We used an audio-morphing procedure to create a large set of natural sounding minimal pairs that contain phonetically ambiguous onset or offset consonants differing in place, manner, or voicing. These ambiguous segments occurred in different lexical contexts i.e., in words or pseudowords, such as blade-glade or blem-glem and in different phonological environments i.e., with neighboring syllables that differed in lexical status, such as blouse-glouse. These stimuli allowed us to explore the impact of phonetic ambiguity on the speed and accuracy of lexical decision responses Experiment 1, semantic categorization responses Experiment 2, and the magnitude of BOLD fMRI responses during attentive comprehension Experiment 3. For both behavioral and neural measures, observed effects of phonetic ambiguity were influenced by lexical context leading to slower responses and increased activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus for high-ambiguity syllables that distinguish pairs of words, but not for equivalent pseudowords. These findings suggest lexical involvement in the resolution of phonetic ambiguity. Implications for speech perception and the role of inferior frontal regions are discussed.