Effect of Age and Gender on Voice Onset Time: Data from Sinhalese

Objective: To documenting the voice onset time in voiced and unvoiced stop consonants in Sinhala and to investigating the effects of age and gender on voice onset time values in Sinhalese speakers. Methods: Three groups of participants were employed. Group 1 included 20 children, Group 2 included 20 adults and Group 3 consisted of 20 elderly subjects. All the subjects spoke the dialect of central province of Sri Lanka. Words consisting of three Sinhala short vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ in were recorded. Voice onset time values from two voiced and voiceless stop consonants were extracted. Results: Voiced stop consonants had significantly longer voice onset time values compared to voiceless stop consonants. Significant effect of age as well as gender on voice onset time values were also observed. Conclusion: Supplementary investigations on the normative aspects of voice onset time among the Sinhala population would provide additional insights and validated tools for indexing the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of stop consonants in Sinhalese. Keywords: Voice Onset Time, Sinhalese, Elderly, Sinhala, Acoustic analysis

Acoustic classification of coronal stops of Eastern Punjabi

Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language which contrasts a rich set of coronal stops at dental and retroflex places of articulation across three laryngeal configurations. Moreover, all these stops occur contrastively in various positions (word-initially, -medially, and -finally). The goal of this study is to investigate how various coronal place and laryngeal contrasts are distinguished acoustically both within and across word positions. A number of temporal and spectral correlates were examined in data from 13 speakers of Eastern Punjabi: Voice Onset Time, release and closure durations, fundamental frequency, F1-F3 formants, spectral center of gravity and standard deviation, H1*-H2*, and cepstral peak prominence. The findings indicated that higher formants and spectral measures were most important for the classification of place contrasts across word positions, whereas laryngeal contrasts were reliably distinguished by durational and voice quality measures. Word-medially and -finally, F2 and F3 of the preceding vowels played a key role in distinguishing the dental and retroflex stops, while spectral noise measures were more important word-initially. The findings of this study contribute to a better understanding of factors involved in the maintenance of typologically rare and phonetically complex sets of place and laryngeal contrasts in the coronal stops of Indo-Aryan languages.

De LaurentESE

An increasing amount of sociolinguistic research has been concentrated on diachronic idiolect change: the change of an individual’s dialect over time. This paper adds to this growing topic by analyzing the English idiolect change of Giada De Laurentiis, a heritage speaker of Italian. The study analyzes De Laurentiis’ LOT, START, and GOAT vowels, as well as the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops [k] and [p] by measuring the utterances of the code-switched word ‘mascarpone’ across 20 seasons on television. The data reflect the influence of L2 US English (rhoticity, diphthongization, lengthened VOTs) on heritage Italian in De Laurentiis’ idiolect.

Individual variation in acquisition of voicing contrasts by classroom learners of French

The present study examines the production of voicing by English-speaking learners of French in a traditional classroom environment, focusing on the juxtaposition between group patterns and individual tendencies. Thirty-one intermediate-level learners completed word-reading production tasks in French and English, and voice onset time was measured in word-initial bilabial stops. At the group level, results demonstrated strong interference from English in participants’ French, especially in the production of voiceless stops. In contrast, voiced stops overall were more target-like, revealing an asymmetry in the acquisition of the two members of the phonological distinction. At the individual level, much variability was observed both in the relative attainment of pronunciation targets and in the alignment between participants first and second language pronunciation patterns, ultimately highlighting the need for future research to consider individual trends in order to understand L2 speech acquisition in a more comprehensive manner.

Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years generalized voicing to /ɡ/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children’s production of /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children’s production of /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production.

Effect of emphasis spread on VOT in coronal stops in Qatari Arabic

Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic co-articulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /ṭ/ adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.

Voice onset time and vowel quality in Madurese

Madurese exhibits a three-way laryngeal contrast in its plosive inventory, distinguishing voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated plosives. Previous studies have investigated some acoustic characteristics of the contrast but have not examined possible dialectal variation in this contrast. The present study aims to discuss the contrast by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vowel quality (F1). Twenty participants (10 Western Madurese speakers and 10 Eastern Madurese speakers) were recruited and instructed to read 150 Madurese words containing plosives. The results showed that an interaction of dialect and gender were significantly correlated with VOT: male Western Madurese speakers produced shorter VOT for voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives than their Eastern counterparts. There was also variation in F1 between gender across dialects: male Western Madurese speakers produced [ə] with a lower F1 than their Eastern counterparts. It was suggested that the variation was possibly due to language contact with Javanese.

A Study of the Vowel Context Effect on Initial Stops of Mandarin Produced by Native and Nonnative Speakers

This study, based on corpus materials, investigates the “voice onset time” (VOT) of Mandarin word-initial stops in isolated syllables according to the effect of vowel contexts produced by native and nonnative speakers. Here, 1250 monosyllables of word-initial plosives /p/, /t/, /k/, /p[Formula: see text]/, /t[Formula: see text]/, and /k[Formula: see text]/ were uttered in combination with the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in four tone contexts except /ki/ and /k[Formula: see text]i/ that are phonetically illegal in Mandarin by 20 participants (10 native Chinese speakers and 10 Urdu learners of Chinese). Results show that for native Chinese speakers, the VOTs of aspirated stops followed by the high vowels /i/ and /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/, and unaspirated stops followed only by the high back vowel /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/. For native Urdu speakers, the mean VOTs of word-initial stops in Mandarin monosyllables have no significant effect for both aspirated and unaspirated ones in combination with different vowels. Understanding the results of this study will be of assistance to second language learning and teaching.