Voice

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

Coping with phonological variation in early lexical acquisition

Abstract: Mapping word forms onto their corresponding meanings is one of the most complex tasks that young infants acquiring their native language have to perform. This is due to the fact that an utterance can refer to many different aspects of a scene, a problem known as referential ambiguity (Quine 1960). An even more basic problem, though, is that it is not easy to find word forms to start with. In fact, the speech waveform is continuous, and word boundaries are not readily available. Moreover, words often surface with different phonetic forms due to the application of postlexical phonological processes; that is, surface word forms exhibit what we call phonological variation. Most models of lexical acquisition assume that infants can somehow extract unique word forms out of the speech stream before they acquire the meaning of words (e.g. Siskind 1996). Hence, they propose a solution to the problem of referential ambiguity, thereby assuming that the problems of finding word boundaries and undoing phonological variation have already been solved. There is evidence that infants can indeed find word boundaries before they have a lexicon (Jusczyk & Aslin 1995). By contrast, virtually nothing is known concerning the question of how prelexical infants deal with phonological variation. In this paper, we will examine if and how infants that do not have a lexicon might undo phonological variation, i.e. deduce which phonological processes apply and infer unique underlying word forms that will constitute lexical entries. The various intricacies of phonological variation for lexical acquisition can be illustrated within a single language, i.e. Korean. First, consider the allophonic rule of obstruent voicing. This rule voices plain obstruents that occur between two voiced segments, as illustrated in (1); voiced obstruents do not otherwise occur in Korean.

Estimation of Voicing-Character of Speech Spectra Based on Spectral Shape

Abstract: This letter presents a method for estimation of the voicing-character of speech spectra. It is based on a calculation of a similarity between the shape of the signal short-term magnitude spectra and spectra of the frame-analysis window, which is weighted by the signal magnitude spectra. It is demonstrated that the proposed voicing measure is related to the local SNR of noise-corrupted voiced speech. The performance is evaluated for detection of voiced regions in the spectra of speech corrupted by various types of noise. The experimental results in terms of false-acceptance and false-rejection show errors of less than 5% for speech corrupted by white noise at the local SNR of 10 dB and in terms of recognition accuracy obtained by an ASR system using the voicing information estimated by the proposed method and by the full a priori knowledge about the noise show similar recognition performance

When is a velar an alveolar? Evidence supporting a revised psycholinguistic model of speech production in children.

Abstract: Speech data from a single child with a phonological impairment were analysed with a view to assessing the influence of utterance mode (spontaneous vs confrontation naming vs repetition), lexical status (word vs non-word) and phonological context (voicing status and position in word) on the accuracy of production of velar targets Under these conditions, accuracy was found to vary between 'correct' velar and 'incorrect' alveolar place of articulation First, accuracy increased over four conditions, from spontaneous speech to confrontation naming to real word repetition to non-word repetition Second, there was a higher incidence of correct velar targets in initial than final position in the word, and a higher incidence of correct /k/ targets than /g/ targets These findings are discussed in relation to a proposed model of child speech production, the configuration of which borrows heavily from similar models described recently in the literature The model attempts to explain how a child represents and processes word-forms, and over time revises their pronunciation The explanation offered for these findings entails a claim that speech articulations are concerned directly with reproducing perceptual phenomena and that their ability to do so accurately may be constrained by processing load

Voice and aspiration in Austrian German plosives

Abstract: It is well-known that so-called voiced plosives in German, including Austrian German, are voiceless except between vowels where they are (sometimes) voiced (i.e. have vocal fold vibration during closure). Nonetheless, in the phonological literature, the contrast is often treated as one of [voice]. This leaves a rather substantial mismatch between the phonological description and the phonetic facts. Jessen & Ringen (2002) have recently presented experimental evidence in support of the position that the contrast in northern Standard German (NG) is one of [spread glottis]. It is often suggested that in Austrian German there is a two-way contrast of plosives, but no aspiration. This raises a question about whether the contrast in Austrian Standard German (AG) can possibly be one of [spread glottis] vs. non-[spread glottis]. This paper investigates this question. We present experimental results and argue that for AG, like NG, the appropriate feature of contrast is [spread glottis].