Journal of Phonetics最新文献

This study is a preliminary investigation of intonation in Emirati Arabic (EA) (an under-researched Arabic dialect), using systematic acoustic analysis and computational modelling. First, we investigated the prosodic realisation of information focus and contrastive focus at sentence-initial, -penultimate and -final positions. The analysis of 1980 EA utterances produced by eleven EA native speakers revealed that (1) in focused words, only contrastive focus is realised with expanded excursion size, longer duration, and stronger intensity relative to their neutral focus counterparts, (2) post-focus words have a lower f₀ and weaker intensity in both contrastive focus and information focus, and (3) pre-focus words have compressed excursion size and relatively short duration. We then used computational modelling to test how much of the EA intonation could be captured by the PENTA model, with focus-defined functional categories and a number of other, putative categories. PENTAtrainer was trained on syllable-sized multi-functional targets from a subset of the production data. The model then generated f₀ contours with the learned targets and imposed them on resynthesised speech for perceptual evaluation. A comparison of the model-generated f₀ contours with the natural f₀ contours showed that not only focus but also weight, stress, position of word-level stressed syllable and prosodic word are important factors determining the fine details of EA intonation. A perceptual test with native EA listeners showed that the synthetic EA f₀ contours sounded nearly as natural as the original intonation, and could convey focus nearly as accurately as natural intonation.

It has long been understood that speakers produce and listeners perceive non-random, systematic phonetic variants that serve as the raw material for sound change. This understanding underlies much of the current research on the phonetic underpinnings of change, which includes study of (i) general phonetic principles underlying variation, (ii) specific phonetic ‘preconditions’ and biases arguably linked to specific patterns of phonological instability and change, and (iii) the production and perception of variation by speaker-listeners in situations of actual ongoing change and by interacting agents in computational simulations of change. This paper shows how findings from these three broad areas of study have led to 21st century theoretical and empirical advancements in our understanding of phonetic change. Big-picture questions about the nature of change are approached through consideration of a series of smaller, more tractable questions (e.g., about the nature of, and relation between, innovative speaking and innovative listening for both stable patterns of variation and ongoing change). The paper’s goals are to show, for these questions, their theoretical grounding, empirical challenges, preliminary answers and, in turn, the new theoretical directions emerging from those answers.

Speech sounds are generally classified as either nasal or oral, with the velopharyngeal opening (VPO) characterized as simply open or closed. This account contrasts with clinical perspectives, in which the degree of VPO is described as being more continuous. An examination of laboratory studies of French suggests a third possibility, in which the VPO may have multiple distinct degrees of opening. Based on this limited literature we predicted that the VPO of Québécois French would be largest for speech pauses, then in descending order, phonemically nasal vowels, nasal consonants, contextually nasal vowels (with carryover being larger than anticipatory), and finally oral sounds. We analyzed full sentences read by nine speakers of Québécois French from the Université Laval X-ray videofluorography database. The films were annotated, and degrees of VPO were measured from the sagittal projections of the vocal tract. We found evidence for most of the proposed distinctive VPO targets in Québécois French, with the exception that anticipatory nasalization led to greater VPO than carryover nasalization.

This study investigates the actuation and propagation of sound change in Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS) by examining the change from pre- to post-aspiration in intervocalic /s/ + voiceless stop sequences (i.e., /sp st sk/). We collected read-speech data from 30 WAS speakers and 30 comparison speakers of North-Central Peninsular Spanish (NCPS). The results show that the shift toward post-aspiration is most advanced in /st/-words, as compared to /sp/- and /sk/-words, which we take as evidence that actuation likely occurred in the coronal context. We additionally demonstrate how post-aspiration is integrating into the wider WAS sound system: (i) post-aspirated stops undergo closure voicing in a fashion akin to plain stops; and (ii) the post-aspirated pattern is now emerging in phonological environments that historically lacked coda-/s/, namely in the stop + /t/ context. An important contribution of this study concerns the likely role played by the coronal context (i.e., /st/-words) during both the actuation and propagation stages of the sound change. We situate the findings within frameworks suggesting that actuation and propagation are systematically connected phases of sound change rather than wholly independent processes.

Previous work on Singapore English prosody has focused largely on establishing the acoustic correlates of lexical stress and examining where the language falls within a rhythm-class typology. Little attention, however, has been paid to how lexical prominence, if present, interacts with phrasal prominence. In this study, we examine the extent to which f0 realizations vary across lexical items with differing stress patterns, while taking into account that prosodic phrasing requirements necessitate an f0 rise to the phrase-final syllable. We show that across target types of varying stress placement, syllable length, and constituency, f0 realizations are highly consistent, involving a rise from the start of the target word or phrase which culminates with a peak on the phrase-final syllable. The location of lexical prominence is the primary influence on the scaling of f0 across the entire target, with stress-initial targets having a higher mean f0. Exploratory analysis of duration and intensity measures further corroborates the prominence-lending nature of the phrase-final syllable, with some evidence for marking of prominence on non-final lexically stressed syllables. The findings support the primarily post-lexical role that f0 plays in marking phrase edges, instead of lexical heads, in Singapore English, in line with a previously proposed AM model of Singapore English intonation. The implications of these findings for the study of prosodic typology and sociolinguistic variation in Singapore English are also discussed.

This study investigates how word categories, namely noun and verb, influence acoustic realizations (duration, F0, intensity) in Standard Mandarin Chinese, a language having phonemically distinctive tones and a simple morphological system. Noun-verb ambiguous words were selected and presented in the final positions of typical syntactic contexts in order to avoid the interference of prosodic boundary, syntactic complexity, contextual predictability, tonal environment, F0 range and syllable properties (consonant, vowel, tone, syllable length). Linear mixed models were fitted to duration, and generative additive mixed models were fitted to F0 and intensity. The results showed that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs were still evident in duration, F0 and intensity after lexical frequency, speech rate and some other related factors were taken into consideration in the models. The second syllables of nouns were longer than those of verbs, and both syllables of nouns were higher in F0 and greater in intensity than those of verbs. Since the prosodic boundary, frequency and other factors were controlled for, the phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be attributed to their differences in information load and number of syllables. This study provided evidence that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be driven by the grammatical classes themselves and is not an epiphenomenon of other processes.

In some languages, breathy voice plays a pivotal role in tone split. After tone split, breathy voice can undergo further changes. Suzhou Wu Chinese used to have a voicing contrast in initial obstruents, which has transphonologized to a tone contrast and resulted in a two-way tone split, with breathy voice in the low register tones. This study investigates the change in breathy voice after the tone split in Suzhou Wu with apparent-time data from speakers from three age groups. Simultaneous audio and electroglottographic recordings were collected. Principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis conducted on the acoustic measurements indicate that breathy voice is used less by younger speakers. Generalized Additive Mixed Models were conducted to reveal the changes in breathy voice during the time course of the vowel with regard to different low register tones. It is also found that T2 and T8 are undergoing a decrease in breathy voice with tone changes, but breathy voice is decreasing without tone change in T6. Younger female speakers are ahead of younger male speakers in the decrease in breathy voice. This paper provides a valuable investigation of the change in breathy voice after tone split and contributes to our understanding of the development of phonation types.

The study presented here examines how adult L2 listeners’ L1 phonotactics interferes with L2 vowel perception in different consonantal contexts. We examined Mandarin listeners’ perception of the English /ei/-/iː/ vowel contrast in three onset consonantal contexts, /p f w/, which represent different phonotactic scenarios with respect to the permissibility of Mandarin phonology. L1 Mandarin listeners (N = 42) completed a series of three tasks: a categorisation task, a vowel identification task, and an AXB discrimination task. The results show that English /ei/-/iː/ are perceived as highly contrastive in the /p/ context because both /pei/ and /piː/ constitute a licit sequence in Mandarin phonology. However, participants experience substantial /ei/-/iː/ category confusion in the /f/ and /w/ contexts, where Mandarin listeners repair perceptually by modifying the vowel quality in illicit (unattested) consonant–vowel sequences, i.e., */fiː/ → /fei/ and */wiː/ → /wei/. Further exploratory analyses indicate that L2 listeners’ vowel perception in unfamiliar phonotactic contexts is associated with their target language experience, typically indicated by their L2 vocabulary size. The findings thus suggest that the acquisition of novel phonotactic regularities is tied to increased experience with the L2 lexicon.

Phrase-final syllable duration and pauses are generally considered to be positively correlated: The stronger the boundary, the longer the duration of phrase-final syllables, and the more likely or longer a pause. Exploring a large sample of complex literary prose texts read aloud, we examined pause likelihood and duration, pre-boundary syllable duration, and the pitch excursion at prosodic boundaries. Comparing these features across six predicted levels of boundary strength (level 0: no break; 1: simple phrase break; 2: short comma phrase break; 3: long comma phrase break; 4: sentence boundary; 5: direct speech boundary), we find that they are not correlated in a simple monotonic fashion. Whereas pause duration monotonically increases with boundary strength, both pre-boundary syllable duration and the pitch excursion on the pre-boundary syllable are largest for level-2 breaks and decrease significantly through levels 3 to 5. Our analysis suggests that pre-boundary syllable duration is partly contingent on the tonal realization, which is subject to f0 declination as the utterance progresses. We also surmise that pre-boundary syllable duration reflects differences in planning complexity for the different prosodic and syntactic boundaries. Overall, this study shows that a simple monotonic correlation between pause duration and pre-boundary syllable duration is not valid.