Phonation Types in Marathi: An Acoustic Investigation

This dissertation presents a comprehensive instrumental acoustic analysis of phonation type distinctions in Marathi, an Indic language with numerous breathy voiced sonorants and obstruents. Important new facts about breathy voiced sonorants, which are crosslinguistically rare, are established: male and female speakers cue breathy phonation in sonorants differently, there are an abundance of trading relations, and--critically--phonation type distinctions are not cued as well by sonorants as by obstruents. Ten native speakers (five male, five female) were recorded producing Marathi words embedded in a carrier sentence. Tokens included plain and breathy voiced stops, affricates, nasals, laterals, rhotics, and approximants before the vowels [a] and [e]. Measures reported for consonants and subsequent vowels include duration, F0, Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), and corrected H1-H2*, H1-A1*, H1-A2*, and H1-A3* values. As expected, breathy voice is associated with decreased CPP and increased spectral values. A strong gender difference is revealed: low-frequency measures like H1-H2* cue breathy phonation more reliably in male speech, while CPP--which provides information about the aspiration noise included in the signal--is a more reliable cue in female speech. Trading relations are also reported: time and again, where one cue is weak or absent another cue is strong or present, underscoring the importance of including both genders and multiple vowel contexts when testing phonation type differences. Overall, the cues that are present for obstruents are not necessarily mirrored by sonorants. These findings are interpreted with reference to Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995; Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972; Lindblom 1986, 1990). While various incarnations of Dispersion Theory focus on different aspects of perceptual and auditory distinctiveness, a basic claim is that one requirement for phonological contrasts is that they must be perceptually distinct: contrasts that are subject to great confusability are phonologically disfavored. The proposal, then, is that the typology of breathy voiced sonorants is due in part to the fact that they are not well differentiated acoustically. Breathy voiced sonorants are crosslinguistically rare because they do not make for strong phonemic contrasts

Capturing Breathy Voice: Durational Measures of Oral Stops in Marathi

The present study investigates a series of techniques used to capture the durational differences of oral stops in Marathi, an Indic language that exhibits a four-way phonemic distinction among oral stops

The Effect of Bilingual Proficiency in Indian English on Bilabial Plosive

Background: Bilingual speech production studies have highlighted that level of proficiency influences the acoustic-phonetic representation of phonemes in both languages (MacKay, Flege, Piske, & Schirru 2001; Zárate-Sández, 2015). The results for bilingual speech production reveal that proficient/early bilinguals produce distinct acoustic properties for the same phoneme in each language, whereas less proficient/late bilinguals produce acoustic properties for a phoneme that is closer to the native language (Flege et al., 2003; Fowler et al., 2008). Acoustic-phonetic studies for Hindi (L1) and Indian English (L2) for bilingual speakers have been understudied, and the level of proficiency has not been considered in Hindi and Indian English bilingual speakers. The present study aimed to measure the acoustic differences produced by bilingual speakers of varying proficiencies for Indian English on bilabial plosive and determine how the bilabial plosives are different from American English bilabial plosives. Methods: The sample size for this study was twenty-four. However, only twenty participants (eleven females) between the ages of eighteen and fifty, with normal speech and hearing, were recruited. The lack of recruitment of four more participants was due to the inability to find bilingual speakers who spoke Hindi as their first language and Indian English as their second language and COVID-19 restrictions imposed on recruitment (n=4). The participants were divided into three groups based on language and proficiency: a monolingual American English group, a proficient bilingual Hindi-Indian English group, and a less-proficient bilingual Hindi-Indian English group. The bilinguals were divided into a proficient and less proficient group based on the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (Marian, Blumenfeld, & Kaushanskaya, 2007). Following the screening, participants took part in a Nonword Repetition Task. Data were analyzed using Praat and Voice Sauce software. A linear mixed-effects model using R statistics was used for the statistical analysis. Results: Data from 20 participants (seven proficient bilingual speakers, five less-proficient bilingual speakers, and eight monolingual speakers) were included in the data analysis. Approximately four thousand repetitions were evaluated across the remaining participants. There were no significant main effects across the four dependent variables, but there was an interaction effect between group and phoneme on two dependent variables. The closure duration for proficient bilingual speakers compared to less-proficient bilingual speakers were significantly different between the voiceless unaspirated bilabial plosive (VLE) and voiceless aspirated bilabial plosive (VLH), as well as voiced unaspirated bilabial plosive (VE) and voiced aspirated bilabial plosive (VH). For spectral tilt, there was a significant difference between the VLE and VLH for proficient bilingual speakers compared to less proficient bilingual speakers. Discussion: The results of this study suggest that proficient bilingual speakers have a faster rate of speech in both their first language and second language. Therefore, it is difficult to provide information on whether this group has separate acoustic-phonetic characteristics for each phoneme for each language. In contrast, the less-proficient bilingual speakers seem to have a unidirectional relationship (i.e., first language influences the second language). Furthermore, the results of the acoustic characteristics for the control group i.e., monolingual American English speakers suggest that they may have acoustic-phonetic characteristics that represent a single acoustic-phonetic representation of bilabial plosive with their voicing contrast

Acoustic cues for the korean stop contrast-dialectal variation

In this study, cross-dialectal variation in the use of the acoustic cues of VOT and F0 to mark the laryngeal contrast in Korean stops is examined with Chonnam Korean and Seoul Korean. Prior experimental results (Han & Weitzman, 1970; Hardcastle, 1973; Jun, 1993 &1998; Kim, C., 1965) show that pitch values in the vowel onset following the target stop consonants play a supplementary role to VOT in designating the three contrastive laryngeal categories. F0 contours are determined in part by the intonational system of a language, which raises the question of how the intonational system interacts with phonological contrasts. Intonational difference might be linked to dissimilar patterns in using the complementary acoustic cues of VOT and F0. This hypothesis is tested with 6 Korean speakers, three Seoul Korean and three Chonnam Korean speakers. The results show that Chonnam Korean involves more 3-way VOT and a 2-way distinction in F0 distribution in comparison to Seoul Korean that shows more 3-way F0 distribution and a 2-way VOT distinction. The two acoustic cues are complementary in that one cue is rather faithful in marking 3-way contrast, while the other cue marks the contrast less distinctively. It also seems that these variations are not completely arbitrary, but linked to the phonological characteristics in dialects. Chonnam Korean, in which the initial tonal realization in the accentual phrase is expected to be more salient, tends to minimize the F0 perturbation effect from the preceding consonants by taking more overlaps in F0 distribution. And a 3-way distribution of VOT in Chonnam Korean, as compensation, can be also understood as a durational sensitivity. Without these characteristics, Seoul Korean shows relatively more overlapping distribution in VOT and more 3-way separation in F0 distribution

Cross-Linguistic Tendencies and Durational Contrasts in Geminate Consonants: An Examination of Guinaang Bontok Geminates

In Guinaang Bontok, there is a phonological contrast between singletons and geminates in all consonants (/p t k / b d g m n l s w j/) (Reid 1963, 1973; Thurgood 1997). All phonological geminates except for the oral voiced stop geminates are phonetically long consonants (Reid 1963), allowing a phonological distinction which is primarily based on phonetic duration for nasals, fricatives, liquids, glides and voiceless stops. In a cross-linguistic examination of geminates (Thurgood 1993), there were more languages listed as examples for having stop and nasal geminates than for glide geminates, and it was suggested that alveolar was the cross-linguistically preferred place of articulation for geminate consonants. In this study, it was hypothesized that the cross-linguistically less common length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides, were phonetically less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop and nasal consonants. Similarly, it was hypothesized that contrasts in the cross-linguistically common place of articulation (i.e. alveolar) is phonetically clearer than less common contrasts (e.g. velar). In order to test these hypotheses, duration measurements were conducted on single and geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok. The average durational contrast between short and long glides was smaller than the contrast in stop and nasal consonants. The hypothesis was therefore partially supported

The production and perception of peripheral geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Arabic

Gemination is typologically common word-medially but is rare at the periphery of the word (word-initially and -finally). In line with this observation, prior research on production and perception of gemination has focused primarily on medial gemination. Much less is known about the production and perception of peripheral gemination. This PhD thesis reports on comprehensive articulatory, acoustic and perceptual investigations of geminate-singleton contrasts according to the position of the contrast in the word and in the utterance. The production component of the project investigated the articulatory and acoustic features of medial and peripheral gemination of voiced and voiceless coronal stops in Modern standard Arabic and regional Arabic vernacular dialects, as produced by speakers from two disparate and geographically distant countries, Morocco and Lebanon. The perceptual experiment investigated how standard and dialectal Arabic gemination contrasts in each word position were categorised and discriminated by three groups of non-native listeners, each differing in their native language experience with gemination at different word positions. The first experiment used ultrasound and acoustic recordings to address the extent to which word-initial gemination in Moroccan and Lebanese dialectal Arabic is maintained, as well as the articulatory and acoustic variability of the contrast according to the position of the gemination contrast in the utterance (initial vs. medial) and between the two dialects. The second experiment compared the production of word-medial and -final gemination in Modern Standard Arabic as produced by Moroccan and Lebanese speakers. The aim of the perceptual experiment was to disentangle the contribution of phonological and phonetic effects of the listeners’ native languages on the categorisation and discrimination of non-lexical Moroccan gemination by three groups of non-native listeners varying in their phonological (native Lebanese group and heritage Lebanese group, for whom Moroccan is unintelligible, i.e., non-native language) and phonetic-only (native English group) experience with gemination across the three word positions. The findings in this thesis constitute important contributions about positional and dialectal effects on the production and perception of gemination contrasts, going beyond medial gemination (which was mainly included as control) and illuminating in particular the typologically rare peripheral gemination

Consonant gemination in Italian: the affricate and fricative case

Consonant gemination in Italian affricates and fricatives was investigated, completing the overall study of gemination of Italian consonants. Results of the analysis of other consonant categories, i.e. stops, nasals, and liquids, showed that closure duration for stops and consonant duration for nasals and liquids, form the most salient acoustic cues to gemination. Frequency and energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by gemination in a systematic way for all consonant classes. Results on fricatives and affricates confirmed the above findings, i.e., that the primary acoustic correlate of gemination is durational in nature and corresponds to a lengthened consonant duration for fricative geminates and a lengthened closure duration for affricate geminates. An inverse correlation between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations was present for both consonant categories, and also for both singleton and geminate word sets when considered separately. This effect was reinforced for combined sets, confirming the hypothesis that a durational compensation between different phonemes may serve to preserve rhythmical structures. Classification tests of single vs. geminate consonants using the durational acoustic cues as classification parameters confirmed their validity, and highlighted peculiarities of the two consonant classes. In particular, a relatively poor classification performance was observed for affricates, which led to refining the analysis by considering dental vs. non-dental affricates in two different sets. Results support the hypothesis that dental affricates, in Italian, may not appear in intervocalic position as singletons but only in their geminate form.Comment: Submitted to Speech Communication. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2005.0696

A computational model for studying L1’s effect on L2 speech learning

abstract: Much evidence has shown that first language (L1) plays an important role in the formation of L2 phonological system during second language (L2) learning process. This combines with the fact that different L1s have distinct phonological patterns to indicate the diverse L2 speech learning outcomes for speakers from different L1 backgrounds. This dissertation hypothesizes that phonological distances between accented speech and speakers' L1 speech are also correlated with perceived accentedness, and the correlations are negative for some phonological properties. Moreover, contrastive phonological distinctions between L1s and L2 will manifest themselves in the accented speech produced by speaker from these L1s. To test the hypotheses, this study comes up with a computational model to analyze the accented speech properties in both segmental (short-term speech measurements on short-segment or phoneme level) and suprasegmental (long-term speech measurements on word, long-segment, or sentence level) feature space. The benefit of using a computational model is that it enables quantitative analysis of L1's effect on accent in terms of different phonological properties. The core parts of this computational model are feature extraction schemes to extract pronunciation and prosody representation of accented speech based on existing techniques in speech processing field. Correlation analysis on both segmental and suprasegmental feature space is conducted to look into the relationship between acoustic measurements related to L1s and perceived accentedness across several L1s. Multiple regression analysis is employed to investigate how the L1's effect impacts the perception of foreign accent, and how accented speech produced by speakers from different L1s behaves distinctly on segmental and suprasegmental feature spaces. Results unveil the potential application of the methodology in this study to provide quantitative analysis of accented speech, and extend current studies in L2 speech learning theory to large scale. Practically, this study further shows that the computational model proposed in this study can benefit automatic accentedness evaluation system by adding features related to speakers' L1s.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Speech and Hearing Science 201

Covariants of Gemination in Eastern Andalusian Spanish: /t/ following Underlying /s/, /k/, /p/ and /ks/

In Eastern Andalusian Spanish, consonants are deleted in syllable-final position, triggering regular gemination of a following consonant, even across word boundaries. This paper investigates five underlying phonemic contexts involving /t/, including singleton /t/ and four different underlying /C+t/ sequences that typically surface as [t:], by analyzing how durational and formant differences vary depending on the presence and identity of the preceding underlying consonant. Following the acoustic and statistical analyses of 444 instances of /ˈeta/, /ˈesta/, /ˈekta/, /ˈepta/ and /ˈeksta/, a Discriminant Function Analysis shows that differences in the total duration of /t/ and in the duration of the closure of /t/ are the strongest cues to distinguishing singletons from geminated consonants, with 91.9% and 90.6% accurate classifications, respectively. Cues indicating which specific consonants have been deleted before /t/ are much less robust and more varied in nature. It is unclear, however, whether this outcome is due to different compensation strategies in each case or whether they are affected by some kind of underlying coarticulatory effect. Given that gemination in this language variety is the result of regular /C1C2/ to [Cː] assimilation, and that its underlying phonemic status has not been demonstrated, Eastern Andalusian Spanish is unusual amongst languages studied with respect to gemination, making this study typologically interesting

Production, Perception, and Distribution of Breathy Sonorants in Marathi

Breathy sonorants are crosslinguistically rare, and while a small amount of existing work has focused on their acoustic properties much remains to be learned about their perception and their language-internal distribution. Herein, breathy sonorants in Marathi are investigated via instrumental acoustic analysis, a perception experiment, and corpus analysis. Results reveal that breathy sonorants are under-represented language-internally in addition to being typologically rare. The acoustic differences associated with sonorant phonation contrasts are less robust than those in obstruents. They are also prone to more perception errors than obstruents, and breathy sonorants are more heavily restricted phonotactically than breathy obstruents. These data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of breathy sonorants, and lend potential insight into their typology.