The phonetics and phonology of some syllabic consonants in southern british english

This article presents new experimental data on the phonetics of syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ in Southern British English and then proposes a new phonological account of their behaviour. Previous analyses (Chomsky and Halle 1968:354, Gimson 1989, Gussmann 1991 and Wells 1995) have proposed that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ should be analysed in a uniform manner. Data presented here, however, shows that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ behave in very different ways, and in light of this, a unitary analysis is not justified. Instead, a proposal is made that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ have different phonological structures, and that these different phonological structures explain their different phonetic behaviours. This article is organised as follows: First a general background is given to the phenomenon of syllabic consonants both cross linguistically and specifically in Southern British English. In §3 a set of experiments designed to elicit syllabic consonants are described and in §4 the results of these experiments are presented. §5 contains a discussion on data published by earlier authors concerning syllabic consonants in English. In §6 a theoretical phonological framework is set out, and in §7 the results of the experiments are analysed in the light of this framework. In the concluding section, some outstanding issues are addressed and several areas for further research are suggested

Nasal codas in Standard Chinese: a study in the framework of the distinctive feature theory

Thesis (Ph.D.)—Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 2006Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147)This electronic version was prepared by the student. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.NIH Chyn Duog Shiah Memorial FellowshipPh. D

An examination of oral articulation of vowel nasality in the light of the independent effects of nasalization on vowel quality

In this paper, a summary is given of an experimental technique to address a known issue in research on the independent effects of nasalization on vowel acoustics: given that the separate transfer functions associated with the oral and nasal cavities are merged in the acoustic signal, the task of teasing apart the respective effects of the two cavities seems to be an intractable problem. The results obtained from the method reveal that the independent effects of nasalization on the acoustic vowel space are: F1-raising for high vowels, F1-lowering for non-high vowels, and F2-lowering for non-front vowels. The results from previous articulatory research performed by the author on the production of vowel nasality in French, Hindi, and English are discussed in the light of these independent effects of nasalization on vowel quality

Vowel reduction in Russian: No phonetics in phonology

Much recent work concentrates on the role of sonority in the phenomenon of vowel reduction, capitalizing on the two facts that reduction involves raising and/or shortening and that higher vowels and schwa are normally interpreted as having low sonority. This paper presents a different approach to vowel reduction in Standard Russian. It is proposed that the apparent sonority-driven effects in Russian are epiphenomenal. In particular, reduction to schwa is outside of the domain of phonological computation in Russian, being an artifact of reduced duration. Other types of neutralization arising in vowel reduction are potentially amenable to a sonority-based analysis, but I argue that current approaches to sonority-driven reduction suffer from representational shortcomings. When these shortcomings are rectified, however, sonority is unnecessary as an explicit factor in vowel reduction: standard markedness mechanisms are enough to explain the data

Phonetic Properties of Oral Stops in Three Languages with No Voicing Distinction

Almost all studies on the phonetics of oral stop voicing patterns focus on languages with a voicing distinction. This gives rise to some debate regarding which aspects of voicing patterns arise from inherent articulatory effects related to the production of a voicing distinction, and which aspects are intentional adjustments by speakers meant to enhance a phonological contrast. This study investigates the phonetic properties of oral stops in three No Voicing Distinction (NVD) languages; Bardi (bcj), Arapaho (arp), and Sierra Norte de Puebla Nahuatl (azz). NVD languages do not utilize the larynx to maintain a contrast between any two sounds in their phoneme inventory. NVD languages do not use the larynx to produce any contrasts, and therefore present an opportunity to determine whether laryngeal defaults will emerge in this situation. Although NVD languages do not have a voicing distinction, there are a number of commonly accepted acoustic correlates of laryngeal properties that are based on observations from languages with a voicing distinction. The acoustic properties of NVD languages can be compared with patterns seen in languages with laryngeal contrasts as well as compared across the three languages to determine what phonetic patterns are shared across NVD languages. Acoustic correlates of voicing distinctions were measured from labial, coronal, and velar oral stops in four phonological contexts: phrase-initial, intervocalic, post-nasal, and phrase-final. Five acoustic properties commonly associated with voicing distinctions were measured: total oral stop duration, rate of lenition, phonated and silent closure duration, voice onset time (VOT), and preceding vowel duration. Overall, the findings from this dissertation serve to bridge the gap between phonetic science and phonological approaches to laryngeal properties. Results add to the discussions which relate to universal defaults, underspecification, and markedness principles in phonological systems. The results from this study suggest that while there are general phonetic processes which pose constraints on laryngeal properties in NVD languages, each of the three languages differed with regard to the implementation of these constraints. These results challenge universalist and markedness proposals which predict more uniformity when there is a lack of a contrast. Alternative approaches to explaining laryngeal properties which can account for more language-specific variation are better suited to explaining the results found in this study.­­ Each of the three languages studied in this project are endangered, under threat, and under-documented. Thus, a secondary aim of this dissertation is to highlight the contribution that endangered and under-documented languages can make to linguistic theory by expanding our understanding of the full range of human language structures

Motor Equivalence in Speech Production

International audienceThe first section provides a description of the concepts of “motor equivalence” and “degrees of freedom”. It is illustrated with a few examples of motor tasks in general and of speech production tasks in particular. In the second section, the methodology used to investigate experimentally motor equivalence phenomena in speech production is presented. It is mainly based on paradigms that perturb the perception-action loop during on-going speech, either by limiting the degrees of freedom of the speech motor system, or by changing the physical conditions of speech production or by modifying the feedback information. Examples are provided for each of these approaches. Implications of these studies for a better understanding of speech production and its interactions with speech perception are presented in the last section. Implications are mainly related to characterization of the mechanisms underlying interarticulatory coordination and to the analysis of the speech production goals

Motor Equivalence in Speech Production

International audienceThe first section provides a description of the concepts of “motor equivalence” and “degrees of freedom”. It is illustrated with a few examples of motor tasks in general and of speech production tasks in particular. In the second section, the methodology used to investigate experimentally motor equivalence phenomena in speech production is presented. It is mainly based on paradigms that perturb the perception-action loop during on-going speech, either by limiting the degrees of freedom of the speech motor system, or by changing the physical conditions of speech production or by modifying the feedback information. Examples are provided for each of these approaches. Implications of these studies for a better understanding of speech production and its interactions with speech perception are presented in the last section. Implications are mainly related to characterization of the mechanisms underlying interarticulatory coordination and to the analysis of the speech production goals

Modeling of oropharyngeal articulatory adaptation to compensate for the acoustic effects of nasalization

Hypernasality is one of the most detrimental speech disturbances that lead to declines of speech intelligibility. Velopharyngeal inadequacy, which is associated with anatomic defects such as cleft palate or neuromuscular disorders that affect velopharygneal function, is the primary cause of hypernasality. A simulation study by Rong and Kuehn [J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 55(5), 1438–1448 (2012)] demonstrated that properly adjusted oropharyngeal articulation can reduce nasality for vowels synthesized with an articulatory model [Mermelstein, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 53(4), 1070–1082 (1973)]. In this study, a speaker-adaptive articulatory model was developed to simulate speaker-customized oropharyngeal articulatory adaptation to compensate for the acoustic effects of nasalization on /a/, /i/, and /u/. The results demonstrated that (1) the oropharyngeal articulatory adaptation effectively counteracted the effects of nasalization on the second lowest formant frequency (F2) and partially compensated for the effects of nasalization on vowel space (e.g., shifting and constriction of vowel space) and (2) the articulatory adaptation strategies generated by the speaker-adaptive model might be more efficacious for counteracting the acoustic effects of nasalization compared to the adaptation strategies generated by the standard articulatory model in Rong and Kuehn. The findings of this study indicated the potential of using oropharyngeal articulatory adaptation as a means to correct maladaptive articulatory behaviors and to reduce nasalit

The phonetics and phonology of retroflexes : Fonetiek en fonologie van retroflexen (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands)

At the outset of this dissertation one might pose the question why retroflex consonants should still be of interest for phonetics and for phonological theory since ample work on this segmental class already exists. Bhat (1973) conducted a quite extensive study on retroflexion that treated the geographical spread of this class, some phonological processes its members can undergo, and the phonetic motivation for these processes. Furthermore, several phonological representations of retroflexes have been proposed in the framework of Feature Geometry, as in work by Sagey (1986), Pulleyblank (1989), Gnanadesikan (1993), and Clements (2001). Most recently, Steriade (1995, 2001) has discussed the perceptual cues of retroflexes and has argued that the distribution of these cues can account for the phonotactic restrictions on retroflexes and their assimilatory behaviour. Purely phonetically oriented studies such as Dixit (1990) and Simonsen, Moen & Cowen (2000) have shown the large articulatory variation that can be found for retroflexes and hint at the insufficiency of existing definitions