Variability in within-category implementation of stop consonant voicing in American English-speaking children

This study is an acoustic investigation of the nature and extent of consonant voicing of the stop /b/ in two dialectal varieties of American English spoken in south-central Wisconsin and western North Carolina. The stop /b/ occurred at the juncture of two words such assmall bids, in a position between two voiced sonorants, i.e. the liquid /l/ and a vowel. Twenty women participated, ten representing the Wisconsin and ten the North Carolina variety, respectively. Significant dialectal differences were found in the voicing patterns. The Wisconsin stop closures were usually not fully voiced and terminated in a complete silence followed by a closure release whereas North Carolina speakers produced mostly fully voiced closures. Further dialectal differences included the proportion of closure voicing as a function of word emphasis. For Wisconsin speakers, the proportion of closure voicing was smallest when the word was emphasized and it was greatest in non-emphatic positions. For North Carolina speakers, the degree of word emphasis did not have an effect on the proportion of closure voicing. The results suggest different mechanisms by which closure voicing is maintained in these two dialects, pointing to active articulatory maneuvers in North Carolina speakers and passive in Wisconsin speakers.

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Adult perception of stop consonant voicing in American-English-learning toddlers: Voice onset time and secondary cues

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America ◽

10.1121/10.0005595 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 150 (1) ◽

pp. 460-477

Author(s):

Elaine R. Hitchcock ◽

Laura L. Koenig

Keyword(s):

Voice Onset Time ◽

American English ◽

Onset Time ◽

Stop Consonant ◽

English Learning ◽

Consonant Voicing

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

Second language Research ◽

10.1177/02676583211008951 ◽

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.

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Structure in talker-specific phonetic realization: Covariation of stop consonant VOT in American English

Journal of Phonetics ◽

10.1016/j.wocn.2017.01.001 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 61 ◽

pp. 30-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

Eleanor Chodroff ◽

Colin Wilson

Keyword(s):

American English ◽

Stop Consonant ◽

Phonetic Realization

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Lip and Jaw Kinematics in Bilabial Stop Consonant Production

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/jslhr.4004.877 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 40 (4) ◽

pp. 877-893 ◽

Cited By ~ 50

Author(s):

Anders Löfqvist ◽

Vincent L. Gracco

Keyword(s):

Control Strategy ◽

High Velocity ◽

Stop Consonant ◽

Movement Variability ◽

Upper Lip ◽

Lower Lip ◽

Vowel Context ◽

Virtual Target ◽

Contextual Variability ◽

Consonant Voicing

This paper reports two experiments, each designed to clarify different aspects of bilabial stop consonant production. The first one examined events during the labial closure using kinematic recordings in combination with records of oral air pressure and force of labial contact. The results of this experiment suggested that the lips were moving at a high velocity when the oral closure occurred. They also indicated mechanical interactions between the lips during the closure, including tissue compression and the lower lip moving the upper lip upward. The second experiment studied patterns of upper and lower lip interactions, movement variability within and across speakers, and the effects on lip and jaw kinematics of stop consonant voicing and vowel context. Again, the results showed that the lips were moving at a high velocity at the onset of the oral closure. No consistent influences of stop consonant voicing were observed on lip and jaw kinematics in five subjects, nor on a derived measure of lip aperture. The overall results are compatible with the hypothesis that one target for the lips in bilabial stop production is a region of negative lip aperture. A negative lip aperture implies that to reach their virtual target, the lips would have to move beyond each other. Such a control strategy would ensure that the lips will form an air tight seal irrespective of any contextual variability in the onset positions of their closing movements.

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On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing

Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0022226700010598 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 145-166 ◽

Cited By ~ 102

Author(s):

John R. Westbury ◽

Patricia A. Keating

Keyword(s):

Stop Consonant ◽

Formal Theory ◽

Linguistic Theory ◽

The World ◽

Articulatory Features ◽

Consonant Voicing

A long recognized problem for linguistic theory has been to explain why certain sounds, sound oppositions, and sound sequences are statistically preferred over others among languages of the world. The formal theory of markedness, developed by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the early 1930's, and extended by Chomsky and Halle (1968), represents an attempt to deal with this problem. It is at least implicit in that theory that sounds are rare when (and because) they are marked, and common when (and because) they are not. Whether sounds are marked or unmarked depends – in the latter version of the theory, particularly – upon the ‘intrinsic content’ of acoustic and articulatory features which define them. There was, however, no substantive attempt among early proponents of the theory to show what it was about the content of particular features and feature combinations that caused them to be marked, and others not.

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Corpus-based analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged

Linguistik Online ◽

10.13092/lo.81.3647 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 81 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Liana Markelova

Keyword(s):

Public Perception ◽

American English ◽

Public Attitude ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Web Pages ◽

Gradual Change ◽

Web Based ◽

English Speaking ◽

The Difference ◽

Semantic Prosody

The present study aims to trace the evolution of public attitude towards the mentally challenged by means of the corpus-based analysis. The raw data comes from the two of the BYU corpora: Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The former is comprised of 1.8 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries (Davies/Fuchs 2015: 1) and provides an opportunity to research at a cross-cultural level, whereas the latter, containing 400 million words from more than 100,000 texts ranging from the 1810s to the 2000s (Davies 2012: 121), allows to carry on a diachronic research on the issue. To identify the difference in attitudes the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged were created. Having analysed them in terms of their semantic prosody one might conclude that there are certain semantic shifts that occurred due to the modern usage preferences and gradual change in public perception of everything strange, unusual and unique.

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