Language and Speech最新文献

Previous studies have demonstrated that focus significantly alters sentential prosody in Persian. However, research on the phonetic realization of non-corrective narrow focus is scarce compared to that on broad and corrective focus. This paper presents a systematic production study investigating whether Persian speakers distinguish between three focus structures on target words that bear a pitch accent, that is, broad, narrow, and corrective focus. In a multidimensional phonetic analysis, we investigated the parameters of intensity, duration, and F0. Taking a local perspective, results show that the duration of the target word is a robust cue for focus marking in both syllables of the word, exhibiting a three-step pattern (corrective > narrow > broad). In the first syllable, intensity is a reliable cue to distinguish broad focus from the other two focus types, with higher intensities in broad focus. In the accented syllable, a different two-step pattern is observed, with narrow and corrective focus showing larger F0 spans than broad focus. Taking a global perspective that considers the parts of the utterance before and after the target word, we find a lowering of F0 and decreased intensity for narrow and corrective focus in the pre-target region. In the post-target region, we find strong evidence for differences in mean F0 and intensity with lower F0 in corrective focus than in broad and narrow focus, while the intensity is lower in narrow and corrective focus than in broad focus. Our analysis deepens our understanding of Persian prosody.

Research in the last few decades has examined the intersection between phonetics and politeness in multiple languages. While most of the studies have analyzed the role of politeness on suprasegmental features (i.e., pitch or duration), few have considered the key contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition. This study investigates the systematic effects of power, distance, and imposition on the final intonational contours of polar questions in Central Peninsular Spanish native speakers. A total of 36 native speakers from Madrid completed a contextualized reading-sentence task in which they read aloud paragraph-length contextualizing situations and the target polar questions. The situations were balanced for two levels of power (high/low), distance (high/low), and imposition (high/low). The results from the contextualized reading-sentence task showed that the low-rising final intonational contour (L*H%) was the most employed intonational contour in every context, while the remaining contours were H*H%, H*L%, L*L%. The results confirm that L*H% is the prevailing final intonational contour in Spanish polar questions while also shedding light on the variability of other intonational configurations. In addition, the study determines whether final nuclear contours are impacted by power, distance, and impositions. The findings are discussed within the framework of Politeness Theory and the work on the phonetics and pragmatics interface.

Tonal coarticulation occurs when adjacent tones affect the production of each other, and this often induces changes in both F0 and voice quality of the tones. In Mandarin, F0 height of the target tone is affected by adjacent tones through both carryover assimilation and anticipatory dissimilation. In addition, voice quality is found to be largely dependent on F0, such that lower F0 induces creakier quality, regardless of tone. Given this dependency of voice quality on F0, it is unclear how this interaction manifests in the context of coarticulated tones. This study investigates the relationship between F0 and voice quality changes in coarticulated tones in three-tone sequences. Voice quality is assessed both acoustically and articulatorily using electroglottography (EGG). Our study confirms both carryover and anticipatory effects on F0. Changes in voice quality are largely expected from the direction of F0 changes. However, tone-specific exceptions especially in the dipping Tone 3 and falling Tone 4 are present, which we interpret as support for the (potential) independence of voice quality from F0.

Whispering is a common adverse hearing condition. However, it is still unclear whether older adults have more difficulty perceiving emotions in whispered speech, and whether hearing loss contributes to these difficulties. To fill this research gap, we compared emotional prosody perception under phonated and whispered conditions in three groups of participants (younger adults, and older adults with and without hearing loss). The results revealed that both older adult groups were less accurate when processing emotions in whispered speech. Moreover, older adults with hearing loss performed worse than normal-hearing peers and younger adults in both phonated and whispered conditions. This study presented the first empirical data on the ability of older adults with hearing loss to recognize emotions in whispered speech. The findings highlighted the negative impact of whispering on emotional prosody recognition among older adults, with hearing loss exacerbating these difficulties.

While the field of sociophonetics generally views social meanings of linguistic features as indexical and socially constructed, prosodic features have long been argued to have supposedly natural, iconic, universal associations, according to "biological codes," for example, the frequency code that links high versus low pitch with small versus large body size, female versus male gender (via sexual dimorphism), and hence, affective meanings like uncertainty versus confidence. This study looks at affective meanings of two features of New Zealand English associated with opposing pitch extremes: Uptalk with high pitch and creaky voice with low. In a matched-guise experiment, listeners of different ages were asked to rate short speech samples from young women containing uptalk and creaky voice on a series of affective meaning scales. Results showed that while uptalk was rated more negatively overall, ratings largely aligned with predicted iconic associations of pitch for each scale. However, there were differences by listener age, especially for creak. We argue these results show that the availability of iconic associations of pitch depends on social factors such as the listeners' beliefs and experience, such as group differences related to age, which affect the seeming naturalness of a given iconic link.

One of the predominant questions asked in phonological research refers to the way in which strings of vowels and consonants are perceived and processed by native speakers. In this paper, we make an attempt at uncovering the mental processes that underlie the online processing of phonotactics in Polish; a language featuring an unusual array of strings of consonants. We report on a reaction time experiment using nonce monosyllables with final consonant clusters and identify phonological factors that determine their acceptability. The factors include cluster (non-)existence in the lexicon of Polish, cluster well-formedness in terms of the universally preferred sonority slope, and the quality of the nuclear vowel. The findings testify to the facilitative role of cluster existence and well-formedness on phonotactic intuitions. That is, universally preferred and existent clusters are easily identified as possible and involve the shortest reaction times. Moreover, we detected a systematic perceptual contribution of vowels, whereby the front-back dimension (rather than sonority-related high-low dimension) seems to facilitate the decision-making process.

American singing accents are prevalent in popular music throughout the English-speaking world. Singing with an American-influenced phonological style is a supralocal norm, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE). This article presents two perception experiments that explore New Zealand (NZ) listeners' speech processing in musical and non-musical contexts. An analysis of the Phonetics of Popular Song corpus provides the foundation for the first experiment, revealing that sung dress and spoken trap have similar values for F1 in NZ. Experiment 1 then examines the categorization of these phonemes for words that fall on a continuum between bed and bad. In Experiment 2, a lexical decision task, NZ listeners hear words and nonwords produced by a New Zealand and an American speaker. In both experiments, results show that listeners are influenced by the presence of music, undergoing a perceptual style-shift. In Experiment 1, their perceptual phoneme boundary shifts to a more open position in the Music condition, and in Experiment 2, they exhibit a facilitation in reaction time to the US voice in the musical compared with the non-musical conditions. PSE is thus not only the norm for singing in NZ, it is also a norm for listening to song, represented in the minds of the general music-listening public. This finding extends our understanding of how speech perception depends on context. Speech and song are two highly distinct and perceptually contrastive contexts of language use, and listeners employ knowledge of how linguistic variation maps onto these contexts to resolve ambiguities in the speech signal.

This study examines the effect of language attitudes and stereotypes on vowel perceptions by two groups of listeners from Asturias, Spain that differ in their relationship with the languages present in their communities: Spanish, the national majority language, and Asturian, the regional minority language. The responses of 165 participants from the Nalón Valley (a mining area in the region) were compared with those of 156 listeners from Gijón (the largest urban area) as they categorized words containing synthesized productions of Spanish [o] and Asturian [u] in a task that combined binary forced-choice identification and visual priming. The results of a mixed-effects regression model reveal that, for the Nalón Valley group, positive attitudes toward Asturian result in higher rates of /u/ selection, while, for the Gijón group, positive attitudes toward Asturian intersect with negative stereotypes about urban Asturians who avoid the regional language. We propose that spreading activation and weighting in exemplar-based models can account for these different findings: the greater use of Asturian in the Nalón Valley results in weaker and more varied links between vowel exemplars and social properties, limiting the effect of visual priming. However, a heavier weight exists between stereotypes of urban Asturians and Spanish exemplars in the city, resulting in a priming effect in Gijón that does not emerge in the Nalón Valley. We conclude that individual experience, attitudes, and stereotypes work together to condition speech perception uniquely in light of the local context.

The study explored the relationship between L2 utterance fluency and perceived fluency in monologic and dialogic speaking. A total of 136 Chinese university English learners with diverse L2 proficiency levels and three experienced raters participated in the study. The study employed a mixed-methods approach integrating quantitative (regression analysis) and qualitative (stimulated recalls) analyses. In the monologic task, all utterance fluency dimensions (speed, breakdown, and repair fluency measures) significantly predicted perceived fluency ratings, except for filled pause rate and false start rate. Breakdown fluency measures, particularly silent pause measures, had the most substantial impact on perceived fluency ratings. In the dialogic task, breakdown fluency emerged as the sole significant predictor for perceived fluency scores, overshadowing the predictive impact of speed and repair fluency measures. The temporal measure of turn-taking did not significantly affect perceived fluency scores. Stimulated recalls were generally consistent with the quantitative results and revealed additional factors-content quality, pronunciation, and comprehensibility-that influenced fluency perceptions. The study highlighted the contextual effect on the relationship between utterance fluency and perceived fluency, suggesting that L2 speaking proficiency rating rubrics should be adjusted to account for differences between monologic and dialogic speaking.

This study investigates if two groups of experienced late bilinguals (Arabic-English, English-Arabic) produce the Arabic vowels /ɪ, u, a/ and the English vowels /ɪ, ʊ, æ/ with nativelike formant values (F1, F2) compared with Arabic and English monolinguals, respectively. We aimed to characterize the relationship between second-language (L2) acquisition and first-language (L1) attrition of vowels, that is, does nativelike acquisition of an L2 vowel correspond to attrition of a phonetically similar L1 vowel, and vice versa? Moreover, we explored if nativelikeness of bilingual vowel productions is influenced by the predictor variable sound discrimination aptitude. Results show that bilinguals who produce nativelike L2 vowels are also able to maintain native L1 productions, suggesting that an increased L2 proficiency does not inevitably entail a decline in L1 proficiency.