A crosslinguistic study of voiceless fricative sibilants in Galician and European Portuguese

This study examines the sibilant fricatives produced by seventeen Galician and twenty-two Portuguese speakers. Galician and Portuguese are closely related languages that present important continuities, although it is in their phonological and phonetic systems that they diverge most obviously. By means of the analysis of spectra and spectral moments, chiefly the spectral mean, postalveolar sibilants and front (alveolar or alveolo-dental) sibilants are differentiated in both Galician and Portuguese. Much variation has been found in front sibilant realizations among speakers and even between different realizations by the same speaker. This variation is especially striking among male Galician speakers, where it was possible to distinguish three different articulations, identified here as an apico-aveolar [s̺], a lamino-alveolar [s], and a lamino-dental [s̪] sibilant. The research results point to a loss of phonetic diversity on the Portuguese side of the political border, while in Galicia it is better preserved, although it is losing groundThis paper was written within the project “Cambio lingüístico no galego actual”, funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitivity of the Spanish Government (FFI2012-33845), and within the Tecnoloxías e Análise dos Datos Lingüísticos network, funded by the Xunta de Galicia (R2014/007

Acoustic Classification of Russian Plain and Palatalized Sibilant Fricatives: Spectral vs. Cepstral Measures

This study compares two methods for classifying voiceless sibilant fricatives forming a 4-way phonemic contrast found in Russian, but otherwise cross-linguistically rare. One method uses spectral measures, i.e. vowel formants, COG, duration and intensity of frication. The second method uses cepstral coefficients extracted from different regions inside fricatives and neighboring vowels. The corpus comprises 1,431 plain and palatalized fricatives from two places of articulation, produced by 10 speakers. Logistic regression was used to classify the productions of males and females together and separately. The productions of females yielded higher correct classification rates (highest 91.9%). Cepstral measures outperformed spectral measures across-the-board

Perception of voicing in English fricatives by Spanish listeners

Los contrastes fonémicos que no son funcionalmente distintivos en la lengua materna son difíciles de diferenciar para oyentes no nativos. En el presente trabajo se exponen los resultados del segundo experimento de la investigación enfocada a analizar la percepción de contrastes no nativos por parte de 26 oyentes hispanohablantes, que se utilizaron como informantes. Un grupo de hablantes ingleses sirvió como el grupo de control. Los oyentes fueron expuestos al contraste inglés /s/ vs /z/, que no es fonémico en español, en dos palabras sintentizadas, Sue y zoo. Los resultados mostraron que parte de los oyentes habían adquirido el contraste; además, se apreciaron diferencias en el uso de ciertos índices acústicos que señalaban el contraste, posiblemente causadas por la influencia de la L1.Asimismo, los resultados no tuvieron correlación ni con la edad ni el tiempo de aprendizaje de la L2, ni la edad del participante. Las conclusiones finales recogen los resultados obtenidos en el presente trabajo así como las del trabajo sobre las diferencias basadas en el lugar de articulación.Speech contrasts which are not functionally distinctive in the mother tongue are difficult to differentiate perceptually for non-native listeners. A two-fold experiment was carried out in order to investigate the L2 perception by 26 Spanish listeners of English, with an English group used as a control. In the present paper, listeners were exposed to the English contrast /s/ vs. /z/, which is not phonemic in Spanish, in two synthesized words, Sue and zoo. The results showed that there were listeners who had already acquired the contrast with some language-specific differences in the use of some of the acoustic cues that signalled this contrast. Furthermore there was no correlation between the results obtained and the variables age of L2 learning, length of L2 learning, or listener’s age. Final conclusions will be drawn from this research and the previous work devoted to place of articulation differences

Learning to Produce Speech with an Altered Vocal Tract: The Role of Auditory Feedback

Modifying the vocal tract alters a speaker’s previously learned acoustic–articulatory relationship. This study investigated the contribution of auditory feedback to the process of adapting to vocal-tract modifications. Subjects said the word /tɑs/ while wearing a dental prosthesis that extended the length of their maxillary incisor teeth. The prosthesis affected /s/ productions and the subjects were asked to learn to produce ‘‘normal’’ /s/’s. They alternately received normal auditory feedback and noise that masked their natural feedback during productions. Acoustic analysis of the speakers’ /s/ productions showed that the distribution of energy across the spectra moved toward that of normal, unperturbed production with increased experience with the prosthesis. However, the acoustic analysis did not show any significant differences in learning dependent on auditory feedback. By contrast, when naive listeners were asked to rate the quality of the speakers’ utterances, productions made when auditory feedback was available were evaluated to be closer to the subjects’ normal productions than when feedback was masked. The perceptual analysis showed that speakers were able to use auditory information to partially compensate for the vocal-tract modification. Furthermore, utterances produced during the masked conditions also improved over a session, demonstrating that the compensatory articulations were learned and available after auditory feedback was removed

End-to-End Acoustic Feedback in Language Learning for Correcting Devoiced French Final-Fricatives

International audienceThis work aims at providing an end-to-end acoustic feedback framework to help learners of French to pronounce voiced frica-tives. A classifier ensemble detects voiced/unvoiced utterances, then a correction method is proposed to improve the perception and production of voiced fricatives in a word-final position. Realizations of voiced fricatives contained in French sentences uttered by French and German speakers were analyzed to find out the deviations between the acoustic cues realized by the two groups of speakers. The correction method consists in substituting the erroneous devoiced fricative by TD-PSOLA concate-native synthesis that uses exemplars of voiced fricatives chosen from a French speaker corpus. To achieve a seamless concatena-tion the energy of the replacement fricative was adjusted with respect to the energy levels of the learner's and French speaker's preceding vowels. Finally, a perception experiment with the corrected stimuli has been carried out with French native speakers to check the appropriateness of the fricative revoicing. The results showed that the proposed revoicing strategy proved to be very efficient and can be used as an acoustic feedback

The articulatory and acoustic characteristics of Polish sibilants and their consequences for diachronic change

The study is concerned with the relative synchronic stability of three contrastive sibilant fricatives /s (sic)/ in Polish. Tongue movement data were collected from nine first-language Polish speakers producing symmetrical real and non-word CVCV sequences in three vowel contexts. A Gaussian model was used to classify the sibilants from spectral information in the noise and from formant frequencies at vowel onset. The physiological analysis showed an almost complete separation between /s (sic)/ on tongue-tip parameters. The acoustic analysis showed that the greater energy at higher frequencies distinguished /s/ in the fricative noise from the other two sibilant categories. The most salient information at vowel onset was for /(sic)/, which also had a strong palatalizing effect on the following vowel. Whereas either the noise or vowel onset was largely sufficient for the identification of /s (sic)/ respectively, both sets of cues were necessary to separate /(sic)/ from /s (sic)/. The greater synchronic instability of /(sic)/ may derive from its high articulatory complexity coupled with its comparatively low acoustic salience. The data also suggest that the relatively late stage of /(sic)/ acquisition by children may come about because of the weak acoustic information in the vowel for its distinction from /s/