PhoneticaThis is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader, such as GoogleReader, or to display this data on your own website or blog. Subscribe to this data using MyMedWorm.Subscribe to this data using GoogleReader.Subscribe to this data using Bloglines.Subscribe to this data using MyYahoo.

Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

• Contents
• Discussions

Pages: 1  2  3  

Effects of speaking rate and vowel length on formant frequency displacement in Japanese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined effects of phonemic vowel length and speaking rate, two factors that affect vowel duration, on the first and second formants of all vowels in Japanese. The aim was to delineate the aspects of formant displacement that are governed by the physiological proclivity of vowel production shared across languages, and the aspects that reveal language-specific phenomena. Acoustic analysis revealed that the phonemic long vowels occupied a more peripheral portion of the F1 x F2 vowel space than the phonemic short vowels (effect of vowel length), but effects of speaking rate were less clear. This was because of the...
Source: Phonetica - September 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Hirata Y, Tsukada K Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Do listeners store in memory a speaker's habitual utterance--final phonation type?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Earlier studies report systematic differences across speakers in the occurrence of utterance-final irregular phonation; the work reported here investigated whether human listeners remember this speaker-specific information and can access it when necessary (a prerequisite for using this cue in speaker recognition). Listeners personally familiar with the voices of the speakers were presented with pairs of speech samples: one with the original and the other with transformed final phonation type. Asked to select the member of the pair that was closer to the talker's voice, most listeners tended to choose the unmanipulated ...
Source: Phonetica - September 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Bohm T, Shattuck-Hufnagel S Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Perceptual assimilation and L2 learning: evidence from the perception of Southern British English vowels by native speakers of Greek and Japanese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined the extent to which previous experience with duration in first language (L1) vowel distinctions affects the use of duration when perceiving vowels in a second language (L2). Native speakers of Greek (where duration is not used to differentiate vowels) and Japanese (where vowels are distinguished by duration) first identified and rated the eleven English monophthongs, embedded in /bVb/ and /bVp/ contexts, in terms of their L1 categories and then carried out discrimination tests on those English vowels. The results demonstrated that both L2 groups were sensitive to durational cues when perceiving the Engl...
Source: Phonetica - September 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lengeris A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

A duration-dependent account of coarticulation for hyper- and hypoarticulation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The objective of the current research was to conceptually and quantitatively unify these two studies. This was accomplished by showing that the opposite changes to frequency onsets of F2 transitions due to emphatic and rapid speech systematically vary as a function of the durational changes in the stop closure interval. Specifically, the decrease in coarticulation in emphatic speech is characterized by increases in F2 onsets and longer stop closures (relative to a normal baseline); the increase in coarticulation due to rapid speech shows concomitant decreases in F2 onsets coinciding with shorter stop closure intervals. Voc...
Source: Phonetica - September 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lindblom B, Sussman HM, Agwuele A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Rhythm as an affordance for the entrainment of movement.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A general account of rhythm in human behaviour is provided, according to which rhythm inheres in the affordance that a signal provides for the entrainment of movement on the part of a perceiver. This generic account is supported by an explication of the central concepts of affordance and entrainment. When viewed in this light, rhythm appears as the correct explanandum to account for coordinated behaviour in a wide variety of situations, including such core senses as dance and the production of music. Speech may appear to be only marginally rhythmical under such an account, but several experimental studies reveal that s...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Cummins F Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Rhythm in speech and language: a new research paradigm.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Like any other aspect of spoken language, rhythm needs to be, and has been, studied from four different perspectives for a comprehensive and insightful account of its nature and functioning in speech communication: symbolic representation, production, perception, communicative function. The paper first gives an overview of the milestones in the analysis of rhythm under the headings of these four approaches over the past 70 years. This survey of the development of scientific ideas in rhythm research prepares the ground for the integration of the four strands in an interrelated framework of linguistic and speech signal a...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kohler KJ Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article reviews the evidence for rhythmic categorization that has emerged on the basis of rhythm metrics, and argues that the metrics are unreliable predictors of rhythm which provide no more than a crude measure of timing. It is further argued that timing is distinct from rhythm and that equating them has led to circularity and a psychologically questionable conceptualization of rhythm in speech. It is thus proposed that research on rhythm be based on the same principles for all languages, something that does not apply to the widely accepted division of languages into stress- and syllable-timed. The hypothesis is adv...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Arvaniti A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The Pairwise Variability Index and coexisting rhythms in language.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) has been widely used as a metric for quantifying rhythm in languages, often with a view to placing them on a continuum between notional categories of stress-timing and syllable-timing. We review the history of and rationale for the PVI, and point out three potential anomalies in the way the PVI has been applied. Following up one of these we apply the PVI to the level of the foot, and argue that stress-timing and syllable-timing are not points at either end of a continuum but orthogonal dimensions, so that a language can be (for instance) both syllable-timed and stress-timed. Results...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Nolan F, Asu EL Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Do rhythm measures reflect perceived rhythm?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In a production study, Bulgarian, English and German verses with regular poetic metrical metres of different types and elicited prose utterances with varied accentual patterns are produced in textual and iterative (dada) form and measured at syllable level according to the pairwise variability index (PVI) principle. Systematic differences in PVI values show that the measure is sensitive to metrical differences. But variations for utterances with the same metrical structure and comparable measures for accentually different utterances show the measure to be insensitive to the temporal distribution of accents. A perceptua...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Barry W, Andreeva B, Koreman J Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

F0-based rhythm effects on the perception of local syllable prominence.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A perception experiment shows for German that different global, F(0)-based speech rhythms in the context section of stimuli influence the local prominence position in the target section. This effect may be conceptualized as a perceptual adjustment of the syllables in the target section to the ones of the global rhythmic context with regard to both the prominence and the F(0) patterns. Two conclusions were drawn on this basis. First, listeners use speech rhythm to predict the perceptual properties of syllables, which is in line with the guide function that speech rhythm is assumed to have in German and other Western Ger...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Niebuhr O Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

On the possible role of brain rhythms in speech perception: intelligibility of time-compressed speech with periodic and aperiodic insertions of silence.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study was motivated by the prospective role played by brain rhythms in speech perception. The intelligibility - in terms of word error rate - of natural-sounding, synthetically generated sentences was measured using a paradigm that alters speech-energy rhythm over a range of frequencies. The material comprised 96 semantically unpredictable sentences, each approximately 2 s long (6-8 words per sentence), generated by a high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis engine. The TTS waveform was time-compressed by a factor of 3, creating a signal with a syllable rhythm three times faster than the original, and whose intelli...
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ghitza O, Greenberg S Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Whither speech rhythm research?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19391303 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - June 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kohler KJ Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Production and perception of temporal patterns in native and non-native speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Two experiments examined production and perception of English temporal patterns by native and non-native participants. Experiment 1 indicated that native and non-native (L1 = Chinese) talkers differed significantly in their production of one English duration pattern (i.e., vowel lengthening before voiced versus voice-less consonants) but not another (i.e., tense versus lax vowels). Experiment 2 tested native and non-native listener identification of words that differed in voicing of the final consonant by the native and non-native talkers whose productions were substantially different in experiment 1. Results indicated...
Source: Phonetica - August 7, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Bent T, Bradlow AR, Smith BL Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Effects of accentual fall on phrase-final vowel duration in Japanese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study explores the effect of accentual fall on phrase-final vowel duration in read declarative sentences of Standard Japanese. The results show that an intonational phrase-final vowel is significantly shorter when the final phrase has an accentual pitch fall than when it does not. Previous studies have reported a vowel-shortening effect for the final position of Japanese declarative sentences; the new finding reported in this paper is that this shortening effect is enhanced by the pitch fall of an accent in the sentence-final phrase. PMID: 18679043 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - August 7, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Mori Y, Erickson D Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Effect of speaking rate on the identification of word boundaries.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Two experiments were conducted to determine whether listeners' ability to use allophonic variation to identify word boundaries is influenced by speaking rate. Listeners in both experiments were presented two-word sequences (such as great eyes) spoken by naturally fast and naturally slow talkers; in one experiment the sequences were presented in quiet and in the other they were presented in noise. The listeners' task was to identify the intended sequence from among four choices with alternative segmentations (e.g. great eyes, gray ties, great ties, gray eyes). In both experiments performance was worse for the sequences ...
Source: Phonetica - August 7, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Schwab S, Miller JL, Grosjean F, Mondini M Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

'Speech-Smile', 'Speech-Laugh', 'Laughter' and Their Sequencing in Dialogic Interaction.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Laughing is examined auditorily and acoustico-graphically, on the basis of exemplary speech data from spontaneous German dialogues, as pulmonic air stream modulation for communicative functions, paying attention to fine phonetic detail in interactional context. These phonetic case descriptions of laughing phenomena in speaker interaction in a small corpus have as their goal to create an awareness of the phonetic and functional parameters that need to be considered in the future acquisition, acoustic analysis and statistical evaluation of large spontaneous databases. PMID: 18523364 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher...
Source: Phonetica - June 5, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kohler KJ Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Spectral Integration of Dynamic Cues in the Perception of Syllable-Initial Stops.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The present experiments examine the potential role of auditory spectral integration and spectral center of gravity (COG) effects in the perception of initial formant transitions in the syllables [da]-[ga] and [t(h)a]-[k(h)a]. Of interest is whether the place distinction for stops in these syllables can be cued by a 'virtual F3 transition' in which the percept of a frequency transition is produced by a dynamically changing COG. Listeners perceived the virtual F3 transitions comparably with actual F3 transitions although the former were less salient a cue. However, in a separate experiment, static 'virtual F3 bursts' wer...
Source: Phonetica - June 5, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Fox RA, Jacewicz E, Feth LL Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Prosodic Strengthening in Transboundary V-to-V Lingual Movement in American English.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigates how prosodic strengthening is kinematically manifested in V-to-V lingual movement in English CV#CV context (where # is a prosodic boundary). Results showed that both boundary and accent gave rise to a kind of prosodic strengthening (showing spatial and temporal expansion), but exact kinematic patterns of prosodic strengthening were different as a function of the type of gesture (tongue lowering versus raising) associated with different vowels (/i/to-/Ealpha/ vs. /Ealpha/-to-/i/) and the source of prosodic strengthening (boundary versus accentuation). This implies that speakers must know about prosod...
Source: Phonetica - June 5, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Cho T Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The Intonation of Gapping and Coordination in Japanese: Evidence for Intonational Phrase and Utterance.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In previous studies of Japanese intonational phonology, levels of prosodic constituents above the Major Phrase have not received much attention. This paper argues that at least two prosodic levels exist above the Major Phrase in Japanese. Through a detailed investigation of the intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese, we argue that each syntactic clause projects its own Intonational Phrase, while an entire sentence constitutes one Utterance. We show that the Intonational Phrase is characterized by tonal lowering, creakiness and a pause in final position, as well as a distinctive large initial rise and pitch ...
Source: Phonetica - June 5, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kawahara S, Shinya T Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Identification of Phonemes: Differences between Phoneme Classes and the Effect of Class Size.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study reports general and language-specific patterns in phoneme identification. In a series of phoneme monitoring experiments, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, English, and Polish listeners identified vowel, fricative, and stop consonant targets that are phonemic in all these languages, embedded in nonsense words. Fricatives were generally identified more slowly than vowels, while the speed of identification for stop consonants was highly dependent on the onset of the measurements. Moreover, listeners' response latencies and accuracy in detecting a phoneme correlated with the number of categories within that phoneme...
Source: Phonetica - June 5, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wagner A, Ernestus M Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Voice register in Khmu': experiments in production and perception.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Some Khmu' dialects have phonologically distinctive voice registers. Auditory observations have claimed a stable distinction between clear voice and high pitch for Register 1 and breathy voice and low pitch for Register 2 in the Khmu' Rawk dialect of northern Thailand. Word pairs distinguished only by register were recorded by 25 native speakers. Acoustic analysis yielded F0 and overall amplitude contours, frequencies of F1 and F2 in quasi-steady states of the vowels, relative intensities of higher harmonics to that of the first harmonic, and vowel durations. When circumstances caused early attention to perception test...
Source: Phonetica - October 5, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Abramson AS, Nye PW, Luangthongkum T Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The 'trough effect': an ultrasound study.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study demonstrates the effectiveness of ultrasound as a technique in phonetic research, making possible the analysis of tongue surface movement for large amounts of data from multiple subjects. PMID: 17914279 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - October 5, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Vazquez-Alvarez Y, Hewlett N Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Effects of acoustic variability in the perceptual learning of non-native-accented speech sounds.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study addressed whether acoustic variability and category overlap in non-native speech contribute to difficulty in its recognition, and more generally whether the benefits of exposure to acoustic variability during categorization training are stable across differences in category confusability. Three experiments considered a set of Spanish-accented English productions. The set was seen to pose learning and recognition difficulty (experiment 1) and was more variable and confusable than a parallel set of native productions (experiment 2). A training study (experiment 3) probed the relative contributions of category cent...
Source: Phonetica - October 5, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wade T, Jongman A, Sereno J Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The influence of ambient speech on adult speech productions through unintentional imitation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper deals with the influence of ambient speech on individual speech productions. A methodological framework is defined to gather the experimental data necessary to feed computer models simulating self-organisation in phonological systems. Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 was run on French native speakers from two regiolects of Belgium: two from Liège and two from Brussels. When exposed to the way of speaking of the other regiolect via loudspeakers, the speakers of one regiolect produced vowels that were significantly different from their typical realisations, and significantly closer to the wa...
Source: Phonetica - October 5, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Delvaux V, Soquet A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The signalling of German rising-falling intonation categories--the interplay of synchronization, shape, and height.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Based on the phonology of the Kiel Intonation Model (KIM), a tripartite opposition of German intonation is investigated: early, medial, and late peaks. These intonation categories, which can be projected onto H + L*, H*, and L* + H in the AM framework, are described in the KIM as rising-falling F(0) peak patterns differentiated by their synchronization with the accented-vowel onset. Perception experiments were carried out, showing that the function-based identification of the peak categories is not only influenced by peak synchronization, but also by peak shape and height. While the complete spectrum of findings is not...
Source: Phonetica - October 5, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Niebuhr O Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Phonetic typology and positional allophones for alveolar rhotics in Catalan.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The present study reports electropalatographic and acoustic data on the positional and contextual characteristics of alveolar taps and trills in Majorcan, Valencian and Eastern Catalan. The two consonant classes are invariably opposed by degree of tongue dorsum contact and F2, but only differentiated by place of articulation when constriction location for the trill is sufficiently retracted. Trills are produced with less than three contacts and may exhibit a single contact in utterance-initial position and, less often, in /Cr, VrV/ sequences. Word-final and, to a lesser extent, preconsonantal rhotics are implemented as...
Source: Phonetica - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Recasens D, Espinosa A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Analysis of tones in Cantonese speech based on the command-response model.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
As one of the major Chinese dialects, Cantonese has a tone system consisting of nine lexical tones and three additional changed tones, which is considerably more complex than that of Mandarin. The most important acoustic feature characterizing these tones is the contour of the voice fundamental frequency (the F(0) contour). In this article we present an approach to modeling F(0) contours of Cantonese utterances, based on an extension of the command-response model. Analysis-bysynthesis of F(0) contours of the utterances with a fixed carrier frame, in which a target syllable with each tone type is embedded, shows that ea...
Source: Phonetica - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Gu W, Hirose K, Fujisaki H Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Language-Specific Articulatory Settings: Evidence from Inter-Utterance Rest PositionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:220-233 (DOI:10.1159/000084159) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - April 26, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

The Stop Voicing Contrast in French Sentences: Contextual Sensitivity of Vowel Duration, Closure Duration, Voice Onset Time, Stop Release and Closure VoicingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:201-219 (DOI:10.1159/000084158) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - April 26, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

Phonology and Language UseEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:252-253 (DOI:10.1159/000085154) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - April 7, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

Stroboscopic-Cine MRI Data on Korean Coronal Plosives and Affricates: Implications for Their Place of Articulation as AlveolarEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:234-251 (DOI:10.1159/000084160) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - March 26, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

Publications Received for ReviewEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:254-255 (DOI:10.1159/000085155) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - February 7, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

Index autorum Vol. 61, 2004Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phonetica 2004;61:256-256 (DOI:10.1159/000085156) (Source: Phonetica)
Source: Phonetica - February 7, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: journals

Exploratory study of some acoustic and articulatory characteristics of sad speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines acoustic and articulatory EMA data of two female speakers (American and Japanese) spontaneously producing emotional speech while engaged in an informal telephone-type conversation. A set of control data in which the speakers imitated or read the original emotional utterance was also recorded; for the American speaker, the intonation pattern was also imitated. The results suggest (1) acoustic and articulatory characteristics of spontaneous sad speech differ from that of read speech or imitated intonation speech, (2) spontaneous sad speech and imitated sad speech seem to have similar acoustic characterist...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Erickson D, Yoshida K, Menezes C, Fujino A, Mochida T, Shibuya Y Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Emotions in vowel segments of continuous speech: analysis of the glottal flow using the normalised amplitude quotient.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Emotions in short vowel segments of continuous speech were analysed using inverse filtering and a recently developed glottal flow parameter, the normalised amplitude quotient (NAQ). Simulated emotion portrayals were produced by 9 professional stage actors. Separated /a:/ vowel segments were inverse filtered and parameterized using NAQ. Statistical analyses showed significant differences among most of the emotions studied. Results also demonstrated clear gender differences. Inverse filtering, together with NAQ, was shown to be a promising method for the analysis of emotional content in continuous speech. PMID: 16514...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Airas M, Alku P Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Production of weak elements in speech -- evidence from F(0) patterns of neutral tone in Standard Chinese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Many weak elements in speech, such as schwa in English and neutral tone in Standard Chinese, are commonly assumed to be unspecified or underspecified phonologically. The surface phonetic values of these elements are assumed to derive from interpolation between the adjacent phonologically specified elements or from the spreading of the contextual phonological features. In the present study, we re-evaluate this view by investigating detailed F(0) contours of neutral-tone syllables in Standard Chinese, which are widely accepted as toneless underlyingly. We recorded sentences containing 0-3 consecutive neutral-tone syllabl...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Chen Y, Xu Y Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Schwa elision in fast speech: segmental deletion or gestural overlap?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, 28 different [#CeC-] sequences are examined to define appropriate acoustic criteria for 'elision', to establish whether elision is a deletion process or the endpoint of a continuum of increasing overlap, and to discover whether elision rates vary for individual speakers. Results suggest that the acoustic patterns for elision are consistent with an overlap account. Individual speakers differ as to whether they increase elision only at faster speech rates, or elide regardless of rate. Phonotactic legality per se does not affect elision rates, but speech rate may affect the phonological system by causing a modi...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Davidson L Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Testing licensing by cue: a case of Russian palatalized coronals.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The hypothesis 'licensing by cue' by Steriade holds that phonological contrasts are maintained in environments that provide better acoustic cues to the contrasts and are neutralized in environments that provide poorer acoustic cues or no cues. This paper tests the hypothesis by examining the distribution of a phonological contrast--the Russian plain/palatalized coronal stops /t/ and /tj/ in various syllable-final contexts. The results of a series of acoustic and perceptual experiments presented in this paper provide some support for the hypothesis: the relative salience of releases in different word boundary contexts (...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kochetov A Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

On the prosody of Orkney and Shetland dialects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The aim of this study is to find experimental support for impressionistic claims that there are prosodic differences between the dialects of Orkney and Shetland. It was found that native listeners had no difficulty in discriminating between Orkney and Shetland dialects when presented with speech fragments containing only melodic information. The results of a subsequent acoustic investigation revealed that there is a striking difference in pitch-peak location, which can be characterised as a shift in the location of the entire rise, i.e. both the onset and the peak. Shetland has early alignment, whereas the accent-lendi...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Leyden K, van Heuven VJ Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Prosodic shaping of consonant gemination in Cypriot Greek.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper presents an experimental investigation of durational variation in lexical and post-lexical geminate alveolar laterals, under different stress conditions, in Cypriot Greek. Lexical geminates are found to be longer than post-lexicals, and both geminates and non-geminates are longer in word-initial position. The durational distinction is robust in all conditions, but particularly for word-initial lexical geminates. Post-lexical geminates and word-initial lexical geminates are significantly longer when pre-stress. Word-initial geminates are longer when preceded by a word-final nasal (the condition for post-lexic...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Payne E, Eftychiou E Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Is vowel normalization independent of lexical processing?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Vowel normalization in speech perception was investigated in three experiments. The range of the second formant in a carrier phrase was manipulated and this affected the perception of a target vowel in a compensatory fashion: A low F2 range in the carrier phrase made it more likely that the target vowel was perceived as a front vowel, that is, with a high F2. Recent experiments indicated that this effect might be moderated by the lexical status of the constituents of the carrier phrase. Manipulation of the lexical status in the present experiments, however, did not affect vowel normalization. In contrast, the range of ...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Mitterer H Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Children's production of word accents in Swedish revisited.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The two word accents in Stockholm Swedish (Accent I and Accent II) are distinguished by a consistent falling pitch contour on the stressed syllable of Accent II words. The current study presents new types of evidence that this feature of word accent can be systematically found in words produced by 16- to 18-month-old Swedish-speaking children. Compared to other disyllabic productions, the stressed syllable in Accent II words have a larger F0 decline, more sequences of high-low turning points identified by a stylized contour algorithm and an earlier F0 peak. In addition, a negative correlation is found between the value...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ota M Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The contribution of prosody to the perception of foreign accent.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what is meant by 'foreign accent'. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timing and melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, including diphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment 2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as a foreign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which ...
Source: Phonetica - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Boula de Mareüil P, Vieru-Dimulescu B Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Parallel encoding of focus and interrogative meaning in Mandarin intonation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite much research, disagreements abound regarding the detailed characteristics of question intonation in different languages or even in the same language. The present study investigates question intonation in Mandarin by also considering the role of focus that is frequently ignored in previous research. In experiment 1, native speakers of Mandarin produced statements, yes/no questions, particle questions, wh-questions, rhetorical questions and confirmation questions with narrow focus on the initial, medial or final word of the sentence, or on none of the words. Detailed F(0) contour analyses showed that focus gener...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Liu F, Xu Y Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Timing and communicative functions of pitch contours.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A new research paradigm is applied to F(0) synchronization with articulation, in peak and valley contours, under four principles: (a) Timing of F(0) contours enters the definitions of the pitch categories. (b) These phonetic exponents are linked to communicative functions. (c) The listener plays a pivotal role. (d) Contextualization of test stimuli is essential for pitch data collection. Data are presented and interpreted from an experimental investigation of the substance-function relationship in the perception of peak and valley shift series by German listeners, using the semantic differential technique. The findings...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kohler KJ Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Exploring the influence of vocal emotion expression on communicative effectiveness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred participants rated their current emotional state and gave a description of a route on a simple map. The quality of the linguistic content of the descriptions was assessed using Latent Semantic Analysis. Six hundred participants provided route drawings based on the map descriptions. Median route deviation served as a measure of communicative effectiveness. Eighty additional participants rated invariant parts of the descriptions for perceived speaker happiness. Path analysis revealed that while speaker emotion did not affect the l...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Biersack S, Kempe V Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Methodological imperatives for investigating the phonetic organization and phonological structures of spontaneous speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integrated account of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its relationship with interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach by documenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone 'so' in a corpus of recorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - which encompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate with different communicative functions and have different consequences for the interactional- sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to be t...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Local J, Walker G Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

From words to actions: the phonetics of eigenlijkin two communicative contexts.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper presents the results of an investigation into the distribution of phonetic variants of the Dutch discourse marker eigenlijk, combining phonetic and conversation analytic methods. The paper shows that the phonetic form of eigenlijk depends to some extent on the sequential environment in which the item is used; moreover, it shows that in the case of two such environments, the forms of eigenlijk are representative of tempo and reduction patterns spanning entire turns or turn-constructional units. These patterns can be related to the interactive function of the turns; thus, the findings presented here contribute...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Plug L Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes ...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Pluymaekers M, Ernestus M, Baayen RH Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals

The communicative functions of final rises in Finnish intonation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper considers the communicative function of final rises in Finnish conversational talk between pairs of teenage girls. Final rises are fairly common, occurring approximately twice a minute, predominantly on declaratives and in narrative sequences. We briefly consider the interplay between voice quality (known to be a marker of transition relevance) and rising intonation in Finnish. We argue that in narrative sequences, rising terminals manage two main interactional tasks: they provide a place for a coparticipant to mark recipiency, and they project more talk by the current speaker. Using a methodology which comb...
Source: Phonetica - April 1, 2005 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ogden R, Routarinne S Tags: Phonetica Source Type: journals