54 research outputs found

    Aerodynamic and durational cues of phonological voicing in whisper

    No full text
    International audienceThis study concerns the phonologization process of fine phonetic details in French, such as segmental durations used as a secondary phonetic information in obstruents voicing. Phonologization is expected when phonetic properties are at least partly dissociated from their physical conditioning. Due to a lack of a physical voicing constraint, the whisper could provide a new paradigm to study this process, by assessing the weight of physical vs linguistic conditioning of the segmental duration of obstruents as function of their phonological voicing. In many languages, the voiced obstruents show shorter durations than unvoiced ones. On the one hand, this phonetic durational difference is usually attributed to the Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint in the vibration of the vocal folds during obstruents. However, this duration contrast due to voicing specification is also phonetically preserved in production in whispered phonation, i.e. without any physical voicing due to the open glottis. On the other hand, it is largely seen as linguistically controlled, because of the important durational difference observed and the role of C duration in the perception of voicing contrast in modal or whispered speech. It is assumed that if the durational contrast of voicing in whisper is produced in absence of a physiological constraint, it would be the evidence of the phonologization of such fine phonetic details

    Aerodynamic tool for phonology of voicing

    Get PDF
    International audienceThe paper addresses the question of the phonetic implementation of phonological voicing in French. It is investigated by means of aerodynamic measures made at the subglottal, glottal and supraglottal stages of the production of fricatives in modal voice and in soft and loud whisper for one speaker. The results show that the [±voice] feature is systematically associated only with the categorical constrictions of the glottis, even without vocal fold vibration

    AccÚs lexical et reconnaissance du voisement en voix chuchotée

    No full text
    International audienceThe recognition of the voicing feature of whispered obstruant consonants was examined in a cross modal semantic priming paradigm. A priming effect of similar magnitude to that observed in modal voice was found only when the whispered prime includes a voiceless obstruant (e.g. dessert primes CHOCOLAT). No priming effect was found when the whispered prime includes a voiced obstruant (dĂ©sert) neither on the target word SABLE semantically related to desert, nor on the target word CHOCOLAT semantically related to dessert. Hence, although a few studies have shown that whispered voiced obstruent consonants retain phonetic traces of their underlying identity, our study shows that these consonants are ambiguous for the listeners, and that their recognition is not immediate.La reconnaissance du trait de voisement de consonnes obstruantes chuchotĂ©es en français a Ă©tĂ© examinĂ©e via un paradigme d'amorçage sĂ©mantique auditif-visuel. Un effet d'amorçage d'amplitude similaire Ă  celui mesurĂ© en voix modale a Ă©tĂ© observĂ© uniquement lorsque l'obstruante du mot amorce chuchotĂ© est sourde (dessert-CHOCOLAT). Aucun effet d'amorçage n'a Ă©tĂ© notĂ© quand l'obstruante du mot amorce est voisĂ©e (dĂ©sert) que ce soit sur le mot cible SABLE associĂ© sĂ©mantique de dĂ©sert ou sur le mot cible CHOCOLAT associĂ© sĂ©mantique de dessert. Ainsi, mĂȘme si certaines travaux ont mis en Ă©vidence qu'en voix chuchotĂ©e les consonnes obstruantes voisĂ©es maintiennent des traces phonĂ©tiques de leur identitĂ© sous-jacente, notre Ă©tude montre que ces consonnes sont ambigĂŒes pour l'auditeur et que leur reconnaissance n'est pas immĂ©diate

    Non-normative preaspirated voiceless fricatives in Scottish English: Phonetic and phonological characteristics

    Get PDF
    This series consists of unpublished working- papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference. All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication. Comments to authors are welcome.Preaspiration is usually associated with stops rather than fricatives, both at phonological and phonetic levels of description. This study reports the occurrence of phonetic (nonnormative)preaspiration of voiceless fricatives in Scottish Standard English (SSE)spoken in the Central Belt of Scotland. We classify it as non-normative because it is variably present in different speakers, but the distribution is nevertheless understandable on phonetic grounds. The paper analyses the phonetic distribution of preaspiration and its functions in SSE. Preaspiration is shown to occur more frequently after open vowels and phrase-finally. Sociophonetic conditioning by speaker's sex is not found to be relevant. Functional analysis shows that preaspiration (reflected in the amount of noise in mid/high spectralfrequencies) is a systematic correlate of phonological fricative /voice/ contrast phrase finally. In this context, it appears to be even stronger predictor of /voice/ than such traditionally-considered correlates as voicing offset and segmental duration. The results show that abstract non-neutralised /voice/ is phonetically multidimensional such that fricative preaspiration can maintain the contrast in the contexts where phonetic voicing is demoted. The extent and functioning of preaspiration in SSE suggests that it is a varietyspecific optional characteristic resulting from a learned dissociation of lingual and laryngeal stricture gestures in voiceless fricatives.caslpub154pu

    Mechanisms of vowel devoicing in Japanese

    Get PDF
    The processes of vowel devoicing in Standard Japanese were examined with respect to the phonetic and phonological environments and the syllable structure of Japanese, in comparison with vowel reduction processes in other languages, in most of which vowel reduction occurs optionally in fast or casual speech. This thesis examined whether Japanese vowel devoicing was a phonetic phenomenon caused by glottal assimilation between a high vowel and its adjacent voiceless consonants, or it was a more phonologically controlled compulsory process. Experimental results showed that Japanese high vowel devoicing must be analysed separately in two devoicing conditions, namely single and consecutive devoicing environments. Devoicing was almost compulsory regardless of the presence of proposed blocking factors such as type of preceding consonant, accentuation, position in an utterance, as long as there was no devoiceable vowel in adjacent morae (single devoicing condition). However, under consecutive devoicing conditions, blocking factors became effective and prevented some devoiceable vowels from becoming voiceless. The effect of speaking rate was also generally minimal in the single devoicing condition, but in the consecutive devoicing condition, the vowels were devoiced more at faster tempi than slower tempi, which created many examples of consecutively devoiced vowels over two morae. Durational observations found that vowel devoicing involves not only phonatory change, but also slight durational reduction. However, the shorter duration of devoiced syllables were adjusted at the word level, so that the whole duration of a word with devoiced vowels remained similar to the word without devoiced vowels, regardless of the number of devoiced vowels in the word. It must be noted that there was no clear-cut distinction between voiced and devoiced vowels, and the phonetic realisation of a devoiced vowel could vary from fully voiced to completely voiceless. A high vowel may be voiced in a typical devoicing environment, but its intensity is significantly weaker than those of vowels in a non-devoicing environment, at all speaking tempi. The mean differences of vowel intensities between these environments were generally higher at faster tempi. The results implied that even when the vowel was voiced, its production process moved in favour of devoicing. However, in consecutive devoicing conditions, this process did not always apply. When some of the devoiceable vowels were devoiced in the consecutive devoicing environment, the intensities of devoiceable vowels were not significantly lower than those of other vowels. The results of intensity measurements of voiced vowels in the devoicing and nondevoicing environments suggested that Japanese vowel devoicing was part of the overall process of complex vowel weakening, and that a completely devoiced vowel was the final state of the weakening process. Japanese vowel devoicing is primarily a process of glottal assimilation, but the results in the consecutive devoicing condition showed that this process was constrained by Japanese syllable structure

    Speech motor control variables in the production of voicing contrasts and emphatic accent

    Get PDF
    This dissertation looks at motor control in speech production. Two specific questions emerging from the speech motor control literature are studied: the question of articulatory versus acoustic motor control targets, and the question of whether prosodic linguistic variables are controlled in the same way as segmental linguistic variables. In the first study, I test the utility of whispered speech as a tool for addressing the question of articulatory or acoustic motor control targets. Research has been done probing both sides of this question. The case for articulatory specifications is developed in depth in the Articulatory Phonology framework of Haskins researchers (eg. Browman & Goldstein 2000), based on the task-dynamic model of control presented by Saltzman & Kelso (1987). The case for acoustic specifications is developed in the work of Perkell and others (eg Perkell, Matthies, Svirsky & Jordan 1993, Guenther, Espy-Wilson, Boyce, Matthies, Zandipour & Perkell 1999, Perkell, Guenther, Lane, Matthies, Perrier, Vick,Wilhelms-Tricarico & Zandipour 2000). It has also been suggested that some productions are governed by articulatory targets while others are governed by acoustic targets (Ladefoged 2005). This study involves two experiments. In the first, I make endoscopic video recordings of the larynx during the production of phonological voicing contrasts in normal and whispered speech. I discovered that the glottal aperture differences between voiced obstruents (ie, /d) and voiceless obstruents (ie, /t) in normal speech was preserved in whispered speech. Of particular interest was the observation that phonologically voiced obstruents tended to exhibit a narrower glottal aperture in whisper than vowels, which are also phonologically voiced. This suggests that the motor control targets of voicing is different for vowels than for voiced obstruents. A perceptual experiment on the speech material elicited in the endoscopic recordings elicited judgements to see whether listeners could discriminate phonological voicing in whisper, in the absence of non-laryngeal cues such as duration. I found that perceptual discrimination in whisper, while lower than that for normal speech, was significantly above chance. Together, the perceptual and the production data suggest that whispered speech removes neither the acoustic nor the articulatory distinction between phonologically voiced and voiceless segments. Whisper is therefore not a useful tool for probing the question of articulatory versus acoustic motor control targets. In the second study, I look at the multiple parameters contributing to relative prominence, to see whether they are controlled in a qualitatively similar way to the parameters observed in bite block studies to contribute to labial closure or vowel height. I vary prominence by eliciting nuclear accents with a contrastive and a non-contrastive reading. Prominence in this manipulation is found to be signalled by f0 peak, accented syllable duration, and peak amplitude, but not by vowel de-centralization or spectral tilt. I manipulate the contribution of f0 in two ways. The first is by eliciting the contrastive and non-contrastive readings in questions rather than statements. This reduces the f0 difference between the two readings. The second is by eliciting the contrastive and non-contrastive readings in whispered speech, thus removing the acoustic f0 information entirely. In the first manipulation, I find that the contributions of both duration and amplitude to signalling contrast are reduced in parallel with the f0 contribution. This is a qualitatively different behaviour from all other motor control studies; generally, when one variable is manipulated, others either act to compensate or do not react at all. It would seem, then, that this prosodic variable is controlled in a different manner from other speech motor targets that have been examined. In the whisper manipulation, I find no response in duration or amplitude to the manipulation of f0. This result suggests that, like in the endoscopy study, perhaps whisper is not an effective means of perturbing laryngeal articulations

    Experimental phonetic study of the timing of voicing in English obstruents

    Get PDF
    The treatment given to the timing of voicing in three areas of phonetic research -- phonetic taxonomy, speech production modelling, and speech synthesis -- Is considered in the light of an acoustic study of the timing of voicing in British English obstruents. In each case, it is found to be deficient. The underlying cause is the difficulty in applying a rigid segmental approach to an aspect of speech production characterised by important inter-articulator asynchronies, coupled to the limited quantitative data available concerning the systematic properties of the timing of voicing in languages. It is argued that the categories and labels used to describe the timing of voicing In obstruents are Inadequate for fulfilling the descriptive goals of phonetic theory. One possible alternative descriptive strategy is proposed, based on incorporating aspects of the parametric organisation of speech into the descriptive framework. Within the domain of speech production modelling, no satisfactory account has been given of fine-grained variability of the timing of voicing not capable of explanation in terms of general properties of motor programming and utterance execution. The experimental results support claims In the literature that the phonetic control of an utterance may be somewhat less abstract than has been suggestdd in some previous reports. A schematic outline is given, of one way in which the timing of voicing could be controlled in speech production. The success of a speech synthesis-by-rule system depends to a great extent on a comprehensive encoding of the systematic phonetic characteristics of the target language. Only limited success has been achieved in the past thirty years. A set of rules is proposed for generating more naturalistic patterns of voicing in obstruents, reflecting those observed in the experimental component of this study. Consideration Is given to strategies for evaluating the effect of fine-grained phonetic rules In speech synthesis

    Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on The Phonetics of Laughter : Saarland University, SaarbrĂŒcken, Germany, 4-5 August 2007

    Get PDF

    The role of imitation in learning to pronounce.

    Get PDF
    Timing patterns and the qualities of speech sounds are two important aspects of pronunciation. It is generally believed that imitation from adult models is the mechanism by which a child replicates them. However, this account is unsatisfactory, both for theoretical reasons and because it leaves the developmental data difficult to explain. I describe two alternative mechanisms. The first explains some timing patterns (vowel length changes, 'rhythm', etc.) as emerging because a child's production apparatus is small, immature and still being trained. As a result, both the aerodynamics of his speech and his style of speech breathing differ markedly from the adult model. Under their constraints the child modifies his segmental output in various ways which have effects on speech timing but these effects are epiphenomenal rather than the result of being modelled directly. The second mechanism accounts for how children learn to pronounce speech sounds. The common, but actually problematic, assumption is that a child does this by judging the similarity between his own and others' output, and adjusting his production accordingly. Instead, I propose a role for the typical vocal interaction of early childhood where a mother reformulates ('imitates') her child's output, reflecting back the linguistic intentions she imputes to him. From this expert, adult judgment of either similarity or functional equivalence, the child can determine correspondences between his production and adult output. This learning process is more complex than simple imitation but generates the most natural of forms for the underlying representation of speech sounds. As a result, some longstanding problems in speech can be resolved and an integrated developmental account of production and perception emerges. Pronunciation is generally taught on the basis that imitation is the natural mechanism for its acquisition. If this is incorrect, then alternative methods should give better results than achieved at present
    • 

    corecore