Journal of Phonetics最新文献

The two languages of a bilingual speaker are interconnected and mutually influence linguistic forms and structures. This study presents a case in which two languages in contact exhibit phonotactic asymmetries but converge on abstract phonological units by bilingual speakers. The specific case examined here concerns the change-in-progress of unreleased final stops among young Mandarin-Min bilingual speakers in Taiwan. Phonotactically, obstruent finals are illegal in Taiwan Mandarin, whereas Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), a local substratum language, allows obligatorily unreleased final stops. In the discrimination of stimuli modeled after TSM, bilingual listeners were consistently outperformed by Korean listeners, a non-native reference group without restrictions against obstruent finals. A follow-up production study revealed that final stops produced by the bilingual speakers were prone to deletion accompanied by vowel lengthening, similar to a long vowel in an open syllable, as well as frequent substitution. Furthermore, strong correlations were found between bilingual speakers’ perception and production accuracy, indicating a bidirectional co-evolution between perception and production during language development. Taken together, the results suggest that a loss of unreleased final stops is underway in TSM through the structural convergence of two interacting phonological systems within bilingual individuals.

Previous research has suggested a relationship between musical abilities and the perception of speech prosody. However, effect sizes and significance differ across studies. In a meta-analysis, we assessed the overall size of this relation across 109 studies and investigated which factors moderated the effect. We found a significant, medium-sized positive correlation between musical abilities and speech prosody perception. This correlation was larger for studies on non-native compared to native prosody perception. We attribute this difference to ceiling performance in native perception, while non-native perception may be more difficult and can thus be facilitated by musical abilities. In addition, prosody perception was more strongly correlated with music perception than with music training, possibly because training metrics disregard untrained individuals with naturally strong musical abilities. Further analyses showed a stronger correlation for prosodic pitch compared to prosodic timing perception, and a stronger correlation for behavioural accuracy measures compared to reaction times. We did not find differences in effects between linguistic and emotional prosody, between L1 tone language users or non-tone language users, or between adults and children. This meta-analysis generally supports theories proposing a connection between music and speech prosody. Furthermore, this study highlights the potential importance of individuals’ musical abilities for the acquisition of second language prosody.

Phonetic imitation has been found to be mediated by phonological contrast. For features whose values vary around a phonological prototype, the imitation is distorted by the phonological category, i.e., the imitation is nonlinear. This phonological mediation effect was mostly found in segmental features such as VOT and formants. Supra-segmental features, on the contrary, are generally found to be easy to imitate, i.e., the imitation is linear. Nevertheless, whether the phonological effect exists in the imitation of supra-segmental features is not fully understood. This study, through an imitation experiment of Mandarin flat-falling tonal continua, examined whether a supra-segmental feature would be linearly imitated when it is the primary cue (F0 range) and the non-primary cue (duration) to the tonal contrast, respectively. Results showed that F0 range imitation was non-linear while duration imitation was linear. This reveals that the phonological effect is stronger in mediating imitation than would be predicted by the general hypothesis that supra-segmental features are easier to imitate.

How do listeners understand what they are hearing? Humans hearing speech perform spoken word recognition, recognizing what words they are hearing in a speech stream in order to understand the meaning. Phonetics refers to the properties of the speech at a detailed level, particularly below the level of segmental phonemic distinctions. In order to recognize spoken words, listeners have to extract information from the detailed acoustic signal in some way, but theories differ about whether listeners extract phonemes, whole words, or other units, by what mechanism, and they differ on what kinds of information are stored in the lexicon. The process of spoken word recognition can be affected by any number of situations such as the speaker or listener being a non-native of the language or dialect, being a child, having a speech/hearing disability, hearing speech in noise, the speech itself containing variability, or many other situations. Any of these situations can shed light on theoretical questions by giving a fuller picture of how listeners recognize words. This chapter examines what we have learned in these first ∼21 years of the 21st century about how phonetics interacts with spoken word recognition.

This is the first study to examine stop voicing perception in the societal (English) and heritage language (Spanish) of bilingual preschoolers. The study a) compares bilinguals’ English perception patterns to those of monolinguals; b) it examines how child-internal (age) and external variables (input quantity and input diversity) predict English and Spanish perceptual performance; and c) it compares bilinguals’ perception patterns across languages. Perception was assessed through a forced-choice minimal-pair identification task in which children heard synthesized audio stimuli that varied systematically along a /p-b/ and /t-d/ Voice Onset Time (VOT) continuum and were asked to match them with one of two pictures for each contrast. The results of Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analyses indicate that the bilinguals’ category boundary for English stops was impacted by their experience with Spanish, with more short-lag VOT tokens being perceived as voiceless consistent with Spanish VOT. Age solely predicted English perceptual skills, whereas input quantity was the only moderator of Spanish perceptual performance. Finally, the bilingual children showed separate stop voicing contrasts in each language, although perceptual performance was already more mature in English by preschool age. Implications for theories of bilingual speech learning and the role of sociolinguistic variables are discussed.

This acoustic study explores compensatory influences of foot structure on segmental duration and quantity in the foot nuclei of 22 trisyllabic and four disyllabic structures in vanishing Soikkola Ingrian (Finnic). A robust ternary quantity contrast of consonants is confirmed for both disyllables and trisyllables. While in the shortest disyllables the contrast is “pure” (i.e., not significantly reinforced by the durations of other segments), in all trisyllables it is enhanced through the durationally inverse (compensatory) effects in other segments. In this, the situation in trisyllables is closer to that attested in other languages with ternary consonantal quantity than the situation in disyllables. The phonological quantity contrast has been lost from the second syllable vowel of trisyllables, and its duration is now inversely related to the first syllable complexity. In the segments preceding this vowel, all compensatory effects are purely phonetic. Shorter segmental durations and stronger compensatory effects in trisyllables than in disyllables indicate tendencies for both polysegmental and polysyllabic shortening. We discuss a potential relation of observed compensatory effects of shortening and lengthening (a “half-long” vowel) to foot isochrony and metrical stress.

This paper describes a method for quantifying temporally local variation in the relative rates of speech signals, based on warping curves obtained from dynamic time warping. Although the use of dynamic time warping for signal alignment is well established in speech science, its use to estimate local rate variation is quite rare. Here we introduce an extension of the local relative rate method that supports the quantification of variability in local relative rate, both within and across a set of events. We show how measures of temporal variation derived from this analysis method can be used to characterize the internal temporal structure of events. In order to achieve this, we first provide an overview of the standard dynamic time warping algorithm. We then introduce the local relative rate measure and describe our extensions, applying them to an articulatory and acoustic dataset of consonant-vowel-consonant syllable productions.

The current study investigated second language (L2) vowel learning influence on first language (L1) vowel perception. We examined how late L2-English learners’ perception of L1-Japanese vowels is influenced by learning to perceive a new L2-English vowel. The study compared L1/L2 perception task results from 60 late L1-Japanese learners of L2-English with those of monolingual Japanese (N = 21) and English speakers (N = 16). To further test hypotheses put forward in the revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r: Flege & Bohn, 2021), that L2 input distribution is associated with L1/L2 phonetic learning, information on L2-learner participants’ L2 dominance was gathered. The results showed clear L1 perceptual drift in a subgroup of L2-learner participants who were NOT nativelike in L2 English /i-ɪ/ categorization but were L2 dominant. The results support the claim that L2 input plays an important role in reorganizing the L1 phonetic system. However, they also highlight the importance of separating L2 dominance related factors (e.g., L2 input/use) and L2 perceptual ability in investigating L1-L2 phonetic interaction.