Vowel Reduction in Kermanian Accent

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is investigating vowel reduction in Kermanian accent. Vowel reduction is a process which occurs in an unstressed syllable. It leads to change unstressed vowels and tend them to other vowels. In order to investigate vowel reduction in Kermanian accent, 6 male native speakers of Persian are participating which 3 of them are native speakers of Kerman and 3 others, speakers of standard Persian accent. The data included 12 words were recorded by a Shure microphone in the acoustic room of the linguistic department of Sharif University of Technology. Then duration, intensity, F1, F2, COG and f0 of the vowels were measured. The results show that duration, intensity and fundamental frequency of the vowels are less in Kermanian accent than in standard Persian accent. Also, the results of studying F1 and F2 of [æ, i, o] prove that these vowels in Kermanian accent are tending to center. So, this kind of vowel reduction in Kermanian accent is called centripetal

Duration and formant values of unstressed vowels in Russian as acoustic cues for segmentation: a perceptive experiment based on nonce words

The research deals with natural perception of word boundaries by native speakers of Standard Russian. A specific feature of Russian word rhythmic structure is a so-called “prosodic core”: not only stressed, but also first pre-stressed vowels differ in duration and quality from vowels that occur in other positions, a phenomenon that is also commonly described as two degrees of reduction. The purpose of this study is to find out whether native Russian speakers are able to use acoustic differences between vowels [ɐ] (Degree 1 reduction) and [ə] (Degree 2 reduction) in order to recognize word boundaries correctly. The stimuli for the experiment were nonce words, five-syllable sequences including two stressed vowels; they were presented to the participants of the experiment in a form of fictional foreign names. The listeners were asked to choose between two possible ways of segmentation of these fivesyllable sequences into a first name and a second name of a person. The results of the experiment show that native Russian speakers used the acoustic differences between vowels for segmentation, but the results were statistically significant only for some of the stimuli. However, for half of stimuli the listeners performed correct segmentation at chance level. In addition, artificial modification of first pre-stressed vowel duration was performed for some of the stimuli; the participants’ responses show that vowel duration influences the degree of success in the segmentation task

Vowel reduction and loss: challenges and perspectives

This introduction gives an overview of a workshop on vowel reduction and loss held at SLE 2017 and the resulting papers collected here. It also discusses the present state of research on vowel reduction and loss in a number of perspectives and outlines the main themes dealt with throughout the course of this special issue

Vowels of Beryozovka Ewen: An Acoustic Phonetic Study

This study acoustically analyzes 13,540 vowel tokens of Beryozovka Ewen with the aid of automated post-transcriptional processing technique. The focus of the analysis is on the acoustic correlates of [RTR], which is the harmonic feature of the language. In addition to the first three formants, acoustic values representing spectral tilt such as H1−H2, H1−A2, and B1 are measured as potential acoustic cues of [RTR]. The results show that F1, F3, and B1 are the most reliable cues of the feature and that H1− H2 and H1−A2 are nearly reliable. These acoustic cues are also shown to interact with length and position. In general, the acoustic distance between [−RTR] and [+RTR] vowels are farther in long and word-initial vowels than in short and non-initial vowels, respectively. We claim that [RTR] is more appropriate for the harmonic feature of Ewen than [ATR], and that the greater perceptibility of word-initial vowels is understood as a means to facilitate the lexical access in a language with vowel harmony

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Is speech rhythmic? In the absence of evidence for a traditional view that languages strive to coordinate either syllables or stress-feet with regular time intervals, we consider the alternative that languages exhibit contrastive rhythm subsisting merely in the alternation of stronger and weaker elements. This is initially plausible, particularly for languages with a steep ‘prominence gradient’, i.e. a large disparity between stronger and weaker elements; but we point out that alternation is poorly achieved even by a ‘stress-timed’ language such as English, and, historically, languages have conspicuously failed to adopt simple phonological remedies that would ensure alternation. Languages seem more concerned to allow ‘syntagmatic contrast’ between successive units and to use durational effects to support linguistic functions than to facilitate rhythm. Furthermore, some languages (e.g. Tamil, Korean) lack the lexical prominence which would most straightforwardly underpin prominence alternation. We conclude that speech is not incontestibly rhythmic, and may even be antirhythmic. However, its linguistic structure and patterning allow the metaphorical extension of rhythm in varying degrees and in different ways depending on the language, and that it is this analogical process which allows speech to be matched to external rhythms

Szótagok automatikus osztályozása spontán beszédben spektrális és prozódiai jellemzők alapján

A beszédfolyam automatikus, szavaknak vagy néhány szóból álló szócsoportoknak megfelel szintaktikai egységekre való tagolásában bizonyítottan fontos szerepe van a prozódiai jegyeknek, az alapfrekvenciának és az intenzitásnak. A prozódiai jegyek mellett a magánhangzó minsége is alkalmazható lehet, elssorban a szótag eleji–nem szótag eleji szótagok osztályozására, másodsorban pedig a szóhatár meghatározására is. A jelen kutatásban azt vizsgáljuk, lehetséges-e a magánhangzó-minség alapján a redukálódott magánhangzók automatikus elkülönítése spontán beszédben, illetve magánhangzóminség alapján elvégezhet-e a hangsúlyos szótagok automatikus detektálása

On some distributional pecurialities of the high unrounded volwes in russian

The article aims at the explanation of some distributional peculiarities of two high unrounded vowels [i] and [È] in Russian. More generally, it looks at some phonotactic constraints of Russian vowels which are directly related to a broader topic of palatalization and vowel reduction in this language. Although the discussion in this paper concerns only a tiny section of Russian phonology, which is the distribution of high unrounded vowels, it is necessary to introduce several facts from Russian phonology, such as palatalization, velarization, stress and vowel reduction. They, at first sight, may look pretty much irrelevant to the main topic of the paper but, as it will become evident, are closely related and actually indispensable to the understanding of vowel distribution including the two high unrounded vowels in Russian

Mayak and the Typology of Labial Harmony

Mayak (Western Nilotic) exhibits a pattern of regressive labial harmony that is typologically unique in that non-high vowels undergo cross-height harmony while high vowels do not. This pattern is exceptional under contemporary analyses of labial harmony. This paper demonstrates that harmony in Mayak is not exceptional, but rather necessitates a redefinition of contrast in terms of auditory similarity rather than abstract features. Moreover, it is argued herein that harmony is preferentially triggered by perceptually similar contrasts and also preferentially targets perceptually similar contrasts. A formal analysis using phonetically-enriched representations is able to account for the Mayak pattern.  Under this analysis, syntagmatic identity is predicted to predominate the typology of labial harmony. A statistical analysis of harmony from a survey of over sixty languages corroborates this prediction. Thus, the analysis presented herein can account for the seemingly exceptional pattern in Mayak while maintaining key generalizations present in other contemporary analyses of labial harmony