Journal of Phonetics最新文献

Second language acquisition of lexical tones requires that a learner form appropriate tone categories and bind those categories to lexical representations for fluent word recognition. Research has shown that second language (L2) learners with no previous tone language experience can become highly accurate at identification of tones in isolation, but, even at advanced levels, have difficulty using tones to differentiate real words from nonwords. The present research considers the same skills in L2 learners who do have previous tone experience. Using largely the same tasks and stimuli previously used with English speakers in Pelzl, Lau, Guo, & DeKeyser (2021a) (“PLGD21”), we examined the tone identification and (tone) word recognition abilities of thirty-three Vietnamese speakers who had achieved advanced L2 proficiency in Mandarin. Results indicate that Vietnamese speakers experience different tone identification difficulties than English speakers, presumably due to interference from their native language tone categories. However, unlike English speakers in previous studies, Vietnamese speakers did not display differences in lexical decision accuracy for vowel and tone nonwords. These results provide evidence of the complexities of cross-linguistic influence, illustrating that the influence of native language tones can be illuminated by considering perception and acquisition at multiple levels.

This research presents two experiments that examine the effect of exposure to second language speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. Experiment 1a investigated whether exposure to French film aided in the ability of naïve monolingual American English speakers to shadow French words containing high rounded vowels /y/ and /u/ as tested via acoustic analyses and native French listener perceptual judgements. Experiment 1b was a crosslinguistic perceptual assimilation task completed by the same participants, designed to explore the perception of rounded vowels /y/ and /u/, before and after film exposure. The results of Experiment 1a indicated that a single session of exposure to French film had a small, but significant, effect on shadowing of French /y/, which was also perceptible to native French listeners. Shadowing of /u/, however, was not significantly affected by exposure. Experiment 1b showed that participants did not alter the patterns of perceptual assimilation between the two French vowels and native English vowels following film exposure. We conclude that exposure to non-native speech via foreign film can affect some aspects of non-native speech development and hypothesize that further sessions may compound these initial benefits, especially in those who are already learning a second language.

The acoustic characteristics of noise from fricatives and stop releases are difficult to analyze. The spectral characteristics of such noise are multi-dimensional, and popular methods for analyzing them typically rely on reducing this complex information to one or a few discrete numbers, such as spectral moments or coefficients of discrete cosine transformations. In this paper, I propose using function-on-scalar regression models as a method for analyzing and mass-comparing spectra with minimal reduction of the complexity in the signal. The method is further useful for analyzing how spectra change as a function of time. The usefulness of this method is demonstrated with a corpus analysis of Danish aspirated stop releases, using the DanPASS corpus. The analysis finds that /t/ releases are invariably affricated; /k/ releases are highly affected by coarticulatory context; and /p/ releases are almost always dominated by aspiration in the latter half of the release, but are affricated in the first half in certain contexts.

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese has lexical tone, the use of f0 as a cue to illocution type may be restricted. We investigate the prosodic differences between ISQs and RQs as well as the interplay of prosodic cues to RQs. In terms of f0, results showed that RQs were lower in f0, with the f0 range on the first word being expanded followed by f0 compression. RQs were further longer in duration and more often realized with non-modal voice quality (glottalized voice) as compared to ISQs. These prosodic cues were largely manipulated in tandem (illocutionary pairs with larger durational differences also showed larger differences in mean f0; voice quality, in turn, seemed to be an additional cue). We suggest three possible explanations (assertive force, focus, speaker attitude) that unite the present findings on RQs in Standard Chinese with the findings on RQs in other, non-tonal languages.

We examined the timing parameters in syllables of English containing word initial singleton sonorants (/l/ and /ɹ/) and stop+sonorant clusters by bilingual English- and Spanish-speaking children with cochlear implants (CImp group) and their cohorts with normal hearing (NH group). The timing parameters included: voice onset time (henceforth, VOT), vowel duration following word initial singleton consonants and vowels following word initial stop+sonorant clusters as well as lateral and rhotic duration in word initial position and in stop+sonorant clusters. Our motivation for the current study was to address whether hearing loss affects the production of the timing parameters of syllables and whether language interference in bilingual productions is modulated by hearing loss. The results of the English production tasks show effects of onset type (singleton, C, vs complex onsets, CC) on VOT, whereby VOT for word initial singleton stops was shorter than VOT in stop+sonorant clusters. To the contrary vowel duration tended to extend temporally as more consonants are added to the onset. With regard to lateral and rhotic duration in word initial singleton and complex onsets, both groups (CImp and NH) showed the typical compression effect of /l/ in complex onsets characteristic of the timing pattern for sonorants in English complex syllables, though no shortening of the rhotic was found for the NH group. Combined results suggest little effect of hearing loss on the production of the timing parameters of English syllables, and virtually no effects across groups that can be attributed to language interference.

Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics model spoken language mathematically based on dynamical systems, expressing the view that speaking is similar in nature to many other biological phenomena that have been described in this way. In this paper, we present a critical appraisal of developments in Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics in the 21st century, illustrating how this point of view addresses some fundamental questions in phonetics. Our paper identifies some of the key areas in which progress has been made, and others in which more progress is warranted. We thereby touch on recent work contributing to the empirical underpinning of some assumptions of the Task Dynamic model, then consider recent proposals of how Articulatory Phonology can deal with linguistically structured macro- and microscopic variation in constriction gestures induced by syllabic and phrasal prosodic structure. Part and parcel of these developments is the integration of the dynamical expression of phonological contrast into a model of utterance planning, and the structuring of the timeflow of speech by prosody. We finish our overview with a discussion on how a stronger link between articulation and acoustics could further enhance the dynamical approach to spoken language.

Studies that quantify speech tempo tend to use one of various available rate measures. The relationship between these measures and perceived tempo as elicited through listening experiments remains poorly understood. This study furthers our understanding of the relationship between measured articulation rates and perceived speech tempo, and the impact of syllable and phone deletions on speech tempo perception. We follow previous work in using stimuli from a corpus of unscripted speech, and in sampling stimuli in distinct ‘global tempo’ ranges. Within our stimulus sets, the differences between canonical and surface rate measurements are directly due to syllable or phone deletions. Our results for syllable rates suggest that listeners use both canonical and surface rates to estimate speech tempo: that is, deletions do not have a consistent effect on perceived tempo. Our results for phone rates suggest that surface phone rate also influences judgements, but canonical phone rate does not. Our results also confirm previously-reported effects of f0 and intensity on speech tempo perception, plus an effect of stimulus duration, but no effect of listeners’ own tempo production tendencies.

This introductory article for the Special Issue on Vocal Accommodation in Speech Communication provides an overview of prevailing theories of vocal accommodation and summarizes the ten papers in the collection. Communication Accommodation Theory focusses on social factors evoking accent convergence or divergence, while the Interactive Alignment Model proposes cognitive integration of perception and production as an automatic priming mechanism driving convergence language production. Recent research including most of the papers in this Special Issue indicates that a hybrid or interactive synergy model provides a more comprehensive account of observed patterns of phonetic convergence than purely automatic mechanisms. Some of the fundamental questions that this special collection aimed to cover concerned (1) the nature of vocal accommodation in terms of underlying mechanisms and social functions in human–human and human–computer interaction; (2) the effect of task-specific and talker-specific characteristics (gender, age, personality, linguistic and cultural background, role in interaction) on degree and direction of convergence towards human and computer interlocutors; (3) integration of articulatory, perceptual, neurocognitive, and/or multimodal data to the analysis of acoustic accommodation in interactive and non-interactive speech tasks; and (4) the contribution of short/long-term accommodation in human–human and human–computer interactions to the diffusion of linguistic innovation and ultimately language variation and change.