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.

Word-initial consonant–vowel coordination in a lexical pitch-accent language

Previous research has acknowledged the effect of prosody on inter-gestural coordination, but specifically the effect of tones is still understudied. This paper has a two-fold purpose. First, it aims to explore effects of the Swedish word accents on word-initial consonant–vowel (CV) coarticulation. Second, it aims to revisit the existing evidence for tonal integration. Based on Articulatory Phonology, it has been suggested that tones – in tone languages – are integrated in the gestural organization of a syllable-initial CV sequence in the same manner as would an additional consonant (CCV), indicated by a time lag between the gestural onsets of the C and the V gesture (CV onset time lag). However, we argue that the existing evidence is inconclusive, because previous cross-linguistic research has used small-scale data sets (one to seven speakers), and we still lack a well-grounded consensus on how gestural onsets are to be measured. This study uses Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) to investigate word-initial CV coordination in a lexical pitch-accent language (Swedish) with a binary tonal word accent distinction: a tonal fall and a tonal rise, respectively. A selection of 13 spatial, temporal or coordinative measures of bilabial and tongue body data from 19 speakers, and acoustic f o data, were examined to study the CV sequence /ma/. Mixed effects regression models revealed a longer tongue body movement in the rising tone context and small but significant differences in tongue body height, in the closing and the opening of the lips, as well as in the CV onset time lag between the two tonal contexts. We argue that these effects are biomechanical in nature, due to the physiological connections between the tongue, the jaw, and the larynx. In addition, our results suggest either synchronized CV onsets or a CV onset time lag (as in tone languages), depending on the timing landmarks used. In order to evaluate such results as evidence for or against the integration of tone in CV coarticulation, we argue that future research needs to compare data from a variety of languages using a considerable number of speakers. The present study provides new reference values for such comparisons.

More on the articulation of devoiced [u] in Tokyo Japanese: effects of surrounding consonants

Past work investigating the lingual articulation of devoiced vowels in Tokyo Japanese has revealed optional but categorical deletion. Some devoiced vowels retained a full lingual target, just like their voiced counterparts, whereas others showed trajectories that are best modelled as targetless, i.e., linear interpolation between the surrounding vowels. The current study explored the hypothesis that this probabilistic deletion is modulated by the identity of the surrounding consonants. A new EMA experiment with an extended stimulus set replicates the core finding of Shaw, Jason & Shigeto Kawahara. 2018b. The lingual gesture of devoiced [u] in Japanese. Journal of Phonetics 66. 100–119. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2017.09.007 that Japanese devoiced [u] sometimes lacks a tongue body raising gesture. The current results moreover show that surrounding consonants do indeed affect the probability of tongue dorsum targetlessness. We found that deletion of devoiced vowels is affected by the place of articulation of the preceding consonant; deletion is more likely following a coronal fricative than a labial fricative. Additionally, we found that the manner combination of the flanking consonants, fricative–fricative versus fricative–stop, also has an effect, at least for some speakers; however, unlike the effect of C1 place, the direction of the manner combination effect varies across speakers with some deleting more often in fricative–stop environments and others more often in fricative–fricative environments.

Phonetic and phonological vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese

The present study examines the phonetic and phonological status of vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese. In order to compare the effects of duration and metrical structure, we tested the influence of duration on the realization of /a/ in five prosodic positions: word-initial pretonic, word-medial pretonic, tonic, word-medial posttonic, and word-final posttonic. The results revealed that, while both phonetic duration and prosodic position had effects on F1 values for /a/, the categorical effect of prosodic position was much stronger and more reliable. In particular, F1 values for /a/ were best predicted by a two-way distinction between posttonic and non-posttonic syllable positions. Correlations between a vowel’s duration and its F1 frequency were statistically significant but generally weak in all positions. We argue that these findings suggest that vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese primarily reflects phonological patterning rather than phonetic undershoot, although there was also evidence for some amount of undershoot. Brazilian Portuguese can therefore be said to have a mixed system of phonological and phonetic reduction. The present study discusses the results in the context of Brazilian Portuguese metrical organization, sound change, and the relation between phonetics and phonology.

Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English

This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: compression of the prevocalic consonant and reduction of CV timing in the word-medial cluster case compared to its singleton paired word in both stop-lateral and s-stop clusters, early vowel initiation (as permitted by the clusters’ phonetic properties), and presence of compensatory relations between phonetic properties of different segments or intersegmental transitions within each cluster. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these word-medial tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed in multiple phonetic exponents rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure employed in previous works.

Japanese orthographic complexity and speech duration in a reading task

The number of letters in a word’s orthographic form can affect speech duration (Brewer, Jordan B. 2008. Phonetic reflexes of orthographic characteristics in lexical representation. University of Arizona Doctoral Dissertation; Warner, Natasha, Allard Jongman, Joan Sereno & Rachèl Kemps. 2004. Incomplete neutralization and other sub-phonemic durational differences in production and perception: Evidence from Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 32(2). 251–276. Previous research in this area has been limited to studies of languages with alphabets. The current study expands upon this previous research by investigating effects on speech duration from units of orthographic complexity potentially analogous to letter length in Japanese, a language with a logography. In a modified version of Brewer, Jordan B. 2008. Phonetic reflexes of orthographic characteristics in lexical representation. University of Arizona Doctoral Dissertation, reading task, native Japanese-speaking participants were audio-recorded reading pairs of homophonous words that varied by: 1) number of pen strokes in a single character; or 2) number of whole characters in their orthographic forms. Two-character words were produced significantly longer than one-character words. No significant effect was found from pen strokes on speech duration. These results are presented as evidence that the orthographic duration effect observed in previous studies is not limited to languages with alphabetic writing systems.

Articulatory settings and L2 English coronal consonants

Background/aims: We explore the potential contribution of Articulatory Settings (AS) theory to L2 speech production research, testing the hypothesis that L2 segmental speech learning should involve a gradual, overall shift in both place and constriction degree, simultaneously affecting all consonants of a series as opposed to a set of parallel but unrelated changes in learners’ production of individual sounds. Methods: We conducted an electropalatography study of four francophone learners’ production of French and English word-initial and -medial /t d s z n l/ via carrier-sentence reading tasks. Results: L1–L2 differences in tongue shape are more common than those in constriction location, first and foremost for sonorants, and, thus, our results are not completely consistent with AS theory’s claims. Conclusions: AS theory provides a potentially rich framework for exploring the L2 speech learning of consonantal phenomena including low-level L1–L2 differences in place of articulation. We propose that the observed lack of systematic between-language articulatory differences could be attributed to a number of factors to be explored in future research, such as the targeting of voicing and manner differences before the adjustment of small place differences as well as individual patterns of entrenchment of L1 articulatory routines.

Detecting protagonists and antagonists in the voice quality of American cartoon characters: a quantitative LTAS-based analysis

The voices of heroes and villains in cartoons contribute to their uniqueness and helps shape how we perceive them. However, not much research has looked at the acoustic properties of character voices and the possible contributions these have to cartoon character archetypes. We present a quantitative examination of how voice quality distinguishes between characters based on their alignment as either protagonists or antagonists, performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the Long-term Average Spectra (LTAS) of concatenated passages of the speech of various characters obtained from four different animated cartoons. We then assessed if the categories of “protagonists” and “antagonists” (determined via an a priori classification) could be distinguished using a classification algorithm, and if so, what acoustic characteristics could help distinguish the two categories. The overall results support the idea that protagonists and antagonists can be distinguished by their voice qualities. Support Vector Machine (SVM) analysis yielded an average classification accuracy of 96% across the cartoons. Visualisation of the spectral traits constituting the difference did not yield consistent results but reveals a low-versus-high frequency energy dominance pattern segregating antagonists and protagonists. Future studies can look into how other variables might be confounded with voice quality in distinguishing between these categories.