Journal of Phonetics最新文献

This study explores the location of the p-center in Mandarin Chinese and factors that influence it. Previous research has suggested that p-center behavior in languages that lack obstruent clusters, such as Cantonese and Mandarin, will differ from that found in Indo-European languages and others that are typologically different from Chinese languages. The purposes of the current paper are to investigate (1) whether Chinese languages systematically have a different p-center location from that found in previous studies of Indo-European languages, (2) whether vowel onglides are included as part of the syllable rime as claimed in the assumed analysis of Mandarin, and (3) how the alignment of the p-center is influenced by different features of the initial consonant, different features of rime, as well as the speech rates. Six native Mandarin speakers from Taiwan participated in a syllable repetition task with two different speech rates: 60 bpm and 120 bpm. The results indicate that the p-center in Mandarin Chinese is roughly aligned with the acoustic vowel onset, when the syllable does not have an onglide, and the onglide onset, when the syllable has an onglide. The initial consonant manner did not significantly influence onglide or vowel onsets, but the initial consonant acoustic duration, rimes, and speech rates all significantly influenced the vowel onsets as previous p-center studies have found. This appears to differ markedly from the p-center found in a recent study of Cantonese. Various causes for this mismatch are discussed.

Although Bulgarian frequently appears in discussions of vowel reduction, the vowel changes and contrast neutralisation that occur in Bulgarian unstressed syllables are often not well understood and misrepresented in the literature. I report the results of an acoustic study of stressed and unstressed vowels in two present-day varieties of Bulgarian, from the West and the East of Bulgaria. The dialects differ with respect to the magnitude of reduction (how changed unstressed vowels are), its generalisation (which vowels are affected), and the resultant neutralisation patterns; overall, reduction is stronger in the eastern variety. A number of long-standing claims about Bulgarian phonology are disproven, notably that there is less reduction in immediately pretonic than in other unstressed syllables, that high vowels are lowered in unstressed position, and that western Bulgarian reduction is necessarily gradient. I further demonstrate that, although implicationally related, reduction proper (i.e. systematic differences between stressed and unstressed vowels), its potential phonologisation, and contrast neutralisation are distinct aspects of the traditional notion of ‘vowel reduction’, each of which can be fruitfully examined in its own right.

Previous research on the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB) indicates nonnative listeners may have an advantage at understanding nonnative speech of talkers with the same first language (L1) due to shared interlanguage knowledge. The present study offers a comprehensive analysis of various factors that may modulate this advantage, including the proficiency of both the listeners and the talkers, the mapping of phonemes between the L1 and second language (L2), and the acoustic properties of the phones. Accuracy scores on a lexical decision task were used to investigate both native English listeners’ and native Mandarin learners’ of English perception of native English and Mandarin-accented English speech. Results show clear ISIB-L and ISIB-T effects and demonstrate the dynamic nature of ISIB effects, with both being modulated by speaker and listener proficiency. More striking ISIB effects typically occur at the most extreme ends of accentedness. Additionally, an advantage for common-phoneme over unique-phoneme words in nonnative speech was observed. While nonnative productions of common-phoneme words are more accurate than those of unique-phoneme words, for the most accented productions, nonnative listeners are faster to respond to these unique, often mispronounced, productions.

The nonnative listener advantage at perceiving nonnative speech depends on various factors, including listener proficiency, speaker proficiency, phoneme characteristics, and the acoustics of specific speech tokens.

Many languages contrast long and short vowels, but the phonetic implementation of vowel length contrasts is not fully understood. We examine articulation of long and short vowels in Australian English to investigate whether duration contrasts involve intrinsic differences in the underlying gestures, or differences in their timing relationships with flanking consonants. We used electromagnetic articulography to track tongue dorsum and lip movement in two long-short vowel pairs /iː-ɪ/ (bead – bid) and /ɐː-ɐ/ (bard – bud) produced in /pVp/ syllables by nine speakers of Australian English. For short vowels, lingual movement towards the vowel target (formation interval) is shorter and smaller, but not stiffer, than that of long vowels. Syllables containing the short vowel /ɐ/ also exhibited more vowel-coda overlap than those containing /ɐː/. These data suggest that both vowel-intrinsic and syllable-level mechanisms are involved in the realisation of vowel length contrasts in Australian English.

Variation in speech has always been important to phonetic theory, but takes center stage in the growing area of sociophonetics, which places the role of the social at the heart of the theoretical and methodological enterprise. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of key advances and theoretical issues in sociophonetic research, in both production and perception. It reviews the foundations of sociophonetics in phonetics and sociolinguistics, and articulates several major theoretical questions that run through sociophonetic work, as well as the nature of evidence and methods in sociophonetics. It explores the many factors that underpin variation and change within individuals, such as speech accommodation and speech style, and major factors that organize group-level variation and change, including regional affiliation, social class, sex, gender, and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and age. By connecting sociophonetic research to a wide range of areas, from cognition to indexicality, the paper synthesizes cross-cutting themes from prior research, and highlights current and future directions for the field.

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.