scholarly journals The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Stuart-Smith ◽  
Morgan Sonderegger ◽  
Tamara Rathcke ◽  
Rachel Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Speaking Rate ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Naturally Occurring

AbstractWhile voice onset time (VOT) is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about VOT in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, in sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from unaspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested. This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analyzing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real- and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. We confirm significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. With respect to time, our results are not consistent with previous work reporting generally shorter VOT in elderly speakers, since our results from models which control for local speech rate show lengthening over real-time in the elderly speakers in our sample. Overall, our findings suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.

Speech Rate Mediated Vowel and Stop Voicing Distinctiveness in Parkinson's Disease

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Thea Knowles ◽  
Scott G. Adams ◽  
Mandar Jog
Keyword(s):  
Parkinson’S Disease ◽  
Parkinson's Disease ◽  
Deep Brain Stimulation ◽  
Brain Stimulation ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Speaking Rate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Deep Brain

Purpose The purpose of this study was to quantify changes in acoustic distinctiveness in two groups of talkers with Parkinson's disease as they modify across a wide range of speaking rates. Method People with Parkinson's disease with and without deep brain stimulation and older healthy controls read 24 carrier phrases at different speech rates. Target nonsense words in the carrier phrases were designed to elicit stop consonants and corner vowels. Participants spoke at seven self-selected speech rates from very slow to very fast, elicited via magnitude production. Speech rate was measured in absolute words per minute and as a proportion of each talker's habitual rate. Measures of segmental distinctiveness included a temporal consonant measure, namely, voice onset time, and a spectral vowel measure, namely, vowel articulation index. Results All talkers successfully modified their rate of speech from slow to fast. Talkers with Parkinson's disease and deep brain stimulation demonstrated greater baseline speech impairment and produced smaller proportional changes at the fast end of the continuum. Increasingly slower speaking rates were associated with increased temporal contrasts (voice onset time) but not spectral contrasts (vowel articulation). Faster speech was associated with decreased contrasts in both domains. Talkers with deep brain stimulation demonstrated more aberrant productions across all speaking rates. Conclusions Findings suggest that temporal and spectral segmental distinctiveness are asymmetrically affected by speaking rate modifications in Parkinson's disease. Talkers with deep brain stimulation warrant further investigation with regard to speech changes they make as they adjust their speaking rate.

scholarly journals Perception of Incongruent Audiovisual Speech: Distribution of Modality-Specific Responses

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sandhya ◽  
Vinay ◽  
Manchaiah, V
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Video Segment ◽  
Visual Responses ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Naturally Occurring

Purpose Multimodal sensory integration in audiovisual (AV) speech perception is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Modality-specific responses such as auditory left, auditory right, and visual responses to dichotic incongruent AV speech stimuli help in understanding AV speech processing through each input modality. It is observed that distribution of activity in the frontal motor areas involved in speech production has been shown to correlate with how subjects perceive the same syllable differently or perceive different syllables. This study investigated the distribution of modality-specific responses to dichotic incongruent AV speech stimuli by simultaneously presenting consonant–vowel (CV) syllables with different places of articulation to the participant's left and right ears and visually. Design A dichotic experimental design was adopted. Six stop CV syllables /pa/, /ta/, /ka/, /ba/, /da/, and /ga/ were assembled to create dichotic incongruent AV speech material. Participants included 40 native speakers of Norwegian (20 women, M age = 22.6 years, SD = 2.43 years; 20 men, M age = 23.7 years, SD = 2.08 years). Results Findings of this study showed that, under dichotic listening conditions, velar CV syllables resulted in the highest scores in the respective ears, and this might be explained by stimulus dominance of velar consonants, as shown in previous studies. However, this study, with dichotic auditory stimuli accompanied by an incongruent video segment, demonstrated that the presentation of a visually distinct video segment possibly draws attention to the video segment in some participants, thereby reducing the overall recognition of the dominant syllable. Furthermore, the findings here suggest the possibility of lesser response times to incongruent AV stimuli in females compared with males. Conclusion The identification of the left audio, right audio, and visual segments in dichotic incongruent AV stimuli depends on place of articulation, stimulus dominance, and voice onset time of the CV syllables.

Voice Onset Time in Speech Produced During Simultaneous Communication

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Schiavetti ◽  
Robert L. Whitehead ◽  
Dale Evan Metz ◽  
Brenda Whitehead ◽  
Megan Mignerey
Keyword(s):  
Fine Structure ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Speaking Rate ◽  
Temporal Fine Structure ◽  
Clear Speech ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Voicing Contrast

This study investigated speaking rate and voice onset time (VOT) in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) by speakers with normal hearing. Stimulus words initiated with voiced and voiceless plosives were embedded in a sentence that was spoken and produced with SC. VOT measures were calculated from acoustic recordings and results indicated significant differences between speech-only and SC conditions, with speech produced during SC demonstrating both slower speaking rate and increased VOT of voiceless consonants. VOTs produced during both SC and speech-only conditions followed English voicing rules and varied appropriately with place of articulation. The somewhat enlarged voicing contrast during SC was consistent with previous findings regarding the influence of rate changes on the temporal fine structure of speech (Miller, 1987) and was similar to the voicing contrast results reported for clear speech by Picheny, Durlach, and Braida (1986).

The perceptual acquisition of Thai phonology by English speakers: task and stimulus effects

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Pater
Keyword(s):  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Task Effects ◽  
Stimulus Effects ◽  
Parallel Effect ◽  
Native Speakers Of English

This article presents a follow-up to Curtin et al.’s study of the perceptual acquisition of Thai laryngeal contrasts by native speakers of English, which found that subjects performed better on contrasts in voice than aspiration. This finding - surprising in light of earlier cross-linguistic voice onset time (VOT) research - was attributed to the fact that the task tapped lexical representations, which are unspecified for aspiration according to standard assumptions in generative phonology. The present study further investigated possible task effects by examining the discrimination and categorization of the same stimuli in various experimental conditions. Stimulus effects were also investigated by performing token-based analyses of the results, and by comparing them to acoustic properties of the tokens. The outcome of the discrimination experiment was the opposite of the earlier study, with significantly better performance on contrasts in aspiration than voice, even on a lexical task. A second finding of this experiment is that place of articulation interacts with the perception of the laryngeal distinctions; the aspiration distinction is discriminated better on the labials, and voice on alveolars. A parallel effect of place of articulation was also found in a categorization experiment.

scholarly journals Phonetic structures of Turkish Kabardian

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gordon ◽  
Ayla Applebaum
Keyword(s):  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Spectral Characteristics ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Aerodynamic Characteristics ◽  
Rare Type ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Closure Duration ◽  
Phonetic Study ◽  
Phonetic Realization

This paper reports results of a quantitative phonetic study of Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language that is of typological interest from a phonetic standpoint. A number of cross-linguistically rare properties are examined. These features include the phonetic realization of Kabardian's small vowel inventory, which contains only three contrastive vowel qualities (two short vowels and one long vowel), spectral characteristics of the ten supralaryngeal voiceless fricatives of Kabardian, as well as the acoustic, palatographic, and aerodynamic characteristics of ejective fricatives, an extremely rare type of segment cross-linguistically. In addition, basic properties of the consonant stop series are explored, including closure duration and voice onset time, in order to test postulated universals linking these properties to place of articulation and laryngeal setting.

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