scholarly journals The sounds of prehistoric speech

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Everett
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Word Lists ◽  
Voiceless Stop

Evidence is reviewed for widespread phonological and phonetic tendencies in contemporary languages. The evidence is based largely on the frequency of sound types in word lists and in phoneme inventories across the world's languages. The data reviewed point to likely tendencies in the languages of the Upper Palaeolithic. These tendencies include the reliance on specific nasal and voiceless stop consonants, the relative dispreference for posterior voiced consonants and the use of peripheral vowels. More tenuous hypotheses related to prehistoric languages are also reviewed. These include the propositions that such languages lacked labiodental consonants and relied more heavily on vowels, when contrasted to many contemporary languages. Such hypotheses suggest speech has adapted to subtle pressures that may in some cases vary across populations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

Phonetic feature size in second language acquisition: Examining VOT in voiceless and voiced stops

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110089
Author(s):  
Daniel J Olson
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Acoustic Similarity ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Voiceless Stop ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in speech perception, debate remains as to the fundamental scope or ‘size’ of featural units. The current study examines potential featural relationships between voiceless and voiced stop consonants, as expressed through the voice onset time cue. Native English-speaking learners of Spanish received targeted training on Spanish voiceless stop consonant production through a visual feedback paradigm. Analysis focused on the change in voice onset time, for both voiceless (i.e. trained) and voiced (i.e. non-trained) phonemes, across the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest. The results demonstrated a significant improvement (i.e. reduction) in voice onset time for voiceless stops, which were subject to the training paradigm. In contrast, there was no significant change in the non-trained voiced stop consonants. These results suggest a limited featural relationship, with independent voice onset time (VOT) cues for voiceless and voices phonemes. Possible underlying mechanisms that limit feature generalization in second language (L2) phonetic production, including gestural considerations and acoustic similarity, are discussed.

Timing differences in articulation between voiced and voiceless stop consonants: an analysis of cine-MRI data

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masako Fujimoto ◽  
Tatsuya Kitamura ◽  
Hiroaki Hatano ◽  
Ichiro Fujimoto
Keyword(s):  
Cine Mri ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Voiceless Stop

scholarly journals Hominin evolutionary thanatology from the mortuary to funerary realm: the palaeoanthropological bridge between chemistry and culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1754) ◽  
pp. 20180212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Pettitt
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Core Set ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Animal Community ◽  
Palaeolithic Archaeology

Palaeoanthropology, or more precisely Palaeolithic archaeology, offers the possibility of bridging the gap between mortuary activities that can be observed in the wider animal community and which relate to chemistry and emotion; to the often-elaborate systems of rationalization and symbolic contextualisation that are characteristic of recently observable societies. I draw on ethological studies to provide a core set of mortuary behaviours one might expect hominoids to inherit, and on anthropological observations to explore funerary activity represented in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, in order to examine how a distinctly human set of funerary behaviours arose from a more widespread set of mortuary behaviours. I suggest that the most profound innovation of the hominins was the incorporation of places into the commemoration of the dead, and propose a falsifiable mechanism for why this came about; and I suggest that the pattern of the earliest burials fits with modern hunter–gatherer belief systems about death, and how these vary by social complexity. Finally, I propose several research questions pertaining to the social context of funerary practices, suggesting how a hominin evolutionary thanatology may contribute not only to our understanding of human behavioural evolution, but to a wider thanatology of the animal kingdom. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals’.

Aerodynamic Interactions Associated with Voiced-Voiceless Stop Consonants

1979 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Murry ◽  
William S. Brown, jr.
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Voiceless Stop

scholarly journals Knowledge‐based recognition of voiceless stop consonants

1983 ◽  
Vol 73 (S1) ◽  
pp. S102-S102
Author(s):  
Gary E. Kopec ◽  
Marcia A. Bush
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Voiceless Stop

scholarly journals Gravettian hand stencils as sign language formatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Etxepare ◽  
Aritz Irurtzun
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Plains Indians ◽  
Cave Wall

Several Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites from the Gravettian period display hand stencils with missing fingers. On the basis of the stencils that Leroi-Gourhan identified in the cave of Gargas (France) in the late 1960s, we explore the hypothesis that those stencils represent hand signs with deliberate folding of fingers, intentionally projected as a negative figure onto the wall. Through a study of the biomechanics of handshapes, we analyse the articulatory effort required for producing the handshapes under the stencils in the Gargas cave, and show that only handshapes that are articulable in the air can be found among the existing stencils. In other words, handshape configurations that would have required using the cave wall as a support for the fingers are not attested. We argue that the stencils correspond to the type of handshape that one ordinarily finds in sign language phonology. More concretely, we claim that they correspond to signs of an ‘alternate’ or ‘non-primary’ sign language, like those still employed by a number of bimodal (speaking and signing) human groups in hunter–gatherer populations, like the Australian first nations or the Plains Indians. In those groups, signing is used for hunting and for a rich array of ritual purposes, including mourning and traditional story-telling. We discuss further evidence, based on typological generalizations about the phonology of non-primary sign languages and comparative ethnographic work, that points to such a parallelism. This evidence includes the fact that for some of those groups, stencil and petroglyph art has independently been linked to their sign language expressions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

scholarly journals EFFECT OF AGE AND GENDER ON ARTICULATION OF VOICED AND VOICELESS STOP CONSONANTS IN CZECH

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-101
Author(s):  
Martin Kaňok ◽  
Michal Novotný
Keyword(s):  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Significant Negative Correlation ◽  
Male Gender ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Voiceless Stop ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Healthy Participants ◽  
Effect Of Age

<p class="BodyTextNext"><em>Evaluation of precision of consonant articulation is commonly used metric in assessment of pathological speech. </em><em>However, up to date most of the research on consonant characteristics was performed on English while there are obvious language-specific differences. The aim of the current study was therefore to investigate the patterns of consonant articulation in Czech across 6 stop consonants with respect to age and gender. The database used consisted of 30 female and 30 male healthy participants. Four acoustic variables including voice onset time (VOT), VOT ratio and two spectral moments were analyzed. The Czech plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ were found to be characterized by short voicing lag (average VOT ranged from 14 to 32 ms) while voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/ by long voicing lead (average VOT ranged from -79 to -91 ms). </em><em>Furthermore, we observed significantly longer duration of both VOT </em><em>(p &lt; 0.05) </em><em>and VOT ratio </em><em>(p &lt; 0.01) </em><em>of voiceless plosives in female compared to male gender. Finally, we revealed a significant negative correlation between age and duration of voiceless </em><em>(</em><em>r = -0.36, p </em><em>&lt; 0.05) </em><em>as well as voiced VOT </em><em>(</em><em>r = -0.45, p =</em><em> 0.01) </em><em>in female but not in male participants.</em></p>

The Role of Consonant-Vowel Amplitude Ratio in the Recognition of Voiceless Stop Consonants by Listeners With Hearing Impairment

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Sammeth ◽  
Michael F. Dorman ◽  
Carol J. Stearns
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Impairment ◽  
State Energy ◽  
Amplitude Ratio ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Broadband Noise ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Vowel Reduction ◽  
Sensorineural Hearing Impairment ◽  
Voiceless Stop

Several authors have evaluated consonant-to-vowel ratio (CVR) enhancement as a means to improve speech recognition in listeners with hearing impairment, with the intention of incorporating this approach into emerging amplification technology. Unfortunately, most previous studies have enhanced CVRs by increasing consonant energy, thus possibly confounding CVR effects with consonant audibility. In this study, we held consonant audibility constant by reducing vowel transition and steady-state energy rather than increasing consonant energy. Performance-by-intensity (PI) functions were obtained for recognition of voiceless stop consonants (/p/, /t/, /k/) presented in isolation (burst and aspiration digitally separated from the vowel) and for consonant-vowel syllables, with readdition of the vowel /α/. There were three CVR conditions: normal CVR, vowel reduction by 6 dB, and vowel reduction by 12 dB. Testing was conducted in broadband noise fixed at 70 dB SPL and at 85 dB SPL. Six adults with sensorineural hearing impairment and 2 adults with normal hearing served as listeners. Results indicated that CVR enhancement did not improve identification performance when consonant audibility was held constant, except at the higher noise level for one listener with hearing impairment. The re-addition of the vowel energy to the isolated consonant did, however, produce large and significant improvements in phoneme identification.

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