The effect of word-initial glottalization on word monitoring in Slovak speakers of English

The study investigates the impact of glottal elements before word-initial vowels on the speed of processing of the phrases taken from natural continuous speech. In many languages a word beginning with a vowel can be preceded by a glottal stop or a short period of creaky voice. However, languages differ in the extent of use and functions of this glottalization: it may be used to mark the word boundary, for instance, or to add special prominence to the word. The aim of the experiment was to find out whether the presence of the glottal element can influence reaction times in a word-monitoring paradigm. Users of different languages - Slovak and Czech learners of English, as well as native speakers of English - were participating in perception testing so that the influence of the mother tongue could be determined. The results confirm the effect of both glottalization and the L1 of the listeners. In addition, a significant effect of test item manipulations was found. Although the phrases with added or deleted glottal stops displayed no obvious acoustic artefacts, they produced longer reaction times than items with naturally present or absent glottalizations. We believe that this finding underlines the importance of inherent stress patterns, whose alterations lead to the increase in processing load

Monitoring English Sandhi Linking – A Study of Polish Listeners’ L2 Perception

This paper presents a set of word monitoring experiments with Polish learners of English. Listeners heard short recordings of native English speech, and were instructed to respond when they recognized an English target word that had been presented on a computer screen. Owing to phonological considerations, we compared reaction times to two types of vowel-initial words, which had been produced either with glottalization, or had been joined via sandhi linking processes to the preceding word. Results showed that the effects of the glottalization as a boundary cue were less robust than expected. Implications of these findings for models of L2 speech are discussed. It is suggested that the prevalence of glottalization in L1 production makes listeners less sensitive to its effects as a boundary cue in L2

Investigating the Effect of Mother Tongue on the Iraqi Undergraduates’ Use of English Segmentals and Syllables

This study investigates the effect of mother tongue on the Iraqi undergraduates’ use of English segmentals and Syllables. English segmentals and Syllables are two basic topics that are studied under the domains of phonetics and phonology. Those Iraqi undergraduates consist of Iraqi EFL learners (the two terms are used interchangeably in this study). English segmentals and Syllables involve consonants, vowels, diphthongs, consonant clusters and vowel clusters. The problem of the study is that EFL Iraqi students have no capacity to recognize English consonants and syllables. However, the following questions are focused upon in this study:1) What are the English consonants and vowels which are not recognized by Iraqi undergraduates under the effect of their mother tongue?2) What are the types of consonant and vowel clusters which are not recognized by Iraqi undergraduates under the effect of their mother tongue?The aims of the study include investigating the effect of learners’ mother tongue on their recognition of English segmentals and syllables, knowing whether Iraqi learners at the university level face difficulties in the recognition of consonants and vowels, ensuring whether EFL Iraqi students have difficulties in the recognition of consonant clusters and vowel clusters, and determining whether the difficulties faced by Iraqi EFL learners are caused by the learners’ mother tongue.It is hypothesized that Iraqi EFL undergraduates do not recognize some English consonants, English vowels, diphthongs, some types of consonant clusters and vowel clusters. In addition, it is hypothesized that the incorrect answers of Iraqi learners’ recognition of consonants, simple vowels, diphthongs, consonant clusters and vowel clusters are more than the correct ones.To achieve its aims and verify its hypotheses, the study adopts a quantitative method of investigation. The study chooses a sample for the present study, designs the test containing items concerned with consonants, vowels, and consonant clusters and vowel clusters. It includes only a recognition question. After applying the test on 100 undergraduate students of fourth stage/Department of English/College of Education for Humanities/University of Thi-Qar, the study arrives at some conclusions, some of which include that most Iraqi EFL learners find difficulty in recognizing some consonants, they appeared to be efficient in recognizing some simple vowels and diphthongs, they have the capacity to distinguish only some consonants but they are unable to recognize other consonant clusters and they appeared to be also inefficient in recognizing all vowel clusters

Not all geminates are created equal : evidence from Maltese glottal consonants

Many languages distinguish short and long consonants or singletons and geminates. At a phonetic level, research has established that duration is the main cue to such distinctions but that other, sometimes language-specific, cues contribute to the distinction as well. Different proposals for representing geminates share one assumption: The difference between a singleton and a geminate is relatively uniform for all consonants in a given language. In this paper, Maltese glottal consonants are shown to challenge this view. In production, secondary cues, such as the amount of voicing during closure and the spectral properties of frication noises, are stronger for glottal consonants than for oral ones, and, in perception, the role of secondary cues and duration also varies across consonants. Contrary to the assumption that gemination is a uniform process in a given language, the results show that the relative role of secondary cues and duration may differ across consonants and that gemination may involve language-specific phonetic knowledge that is specific to each consonant. These results question the idea that lexical access in speech processing can be achieved through features.peer-reviewe

Prevocalic t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English

Rates of t-glottaling across word boundaries in both preconsonantal and prevocalic contexts have recently been claimed to be positively correlated with the frequency of occurrence of a given word in preconsonantal contexts (Eddington & Channer, 2010). Words typically followed by consonants have been argued to have their final /t/s glottaled more often than words less frequently followed by consonants. This paper includes a number of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ predictors in a mixed-effects logistic regression model and has two goals: (1) to replicate the positive correlation of the frequency of occurrence of a word in preconsonantal contexts (its ‘contextual frequency’) with its rates of t-glottaling in both preconsonantal and prevocalic contexts postulated by Eddington and Channer (2010), and (2) to quantify the factors influencing the likelihood of t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English. The effect of contextual frequency has been confirmed. This result is argued to support a hybrid view of phonological storage and processing, one including both abstract and exemplar representations. T-glottaling has also been found to be negatively correlated with bigram frequency and speech rate deviation, while positively correlated with young age in female speakers.NCN; UMO-2017/26/D/HS2/0002711112313Laboratory Phonolog

Perception of allophonic cues to English word boundaries by Polish learners: Approximant devoicing in English

The study investigates the perception of devoicing of English /w, r, j, l/ after /p, t, k/ as a word-boundary cue by Polish listeners. Polish does not devoice sonorants following voiceless stops in word-initial positions. As a result, Polish learners are not made sensitive to sonorant devoicing as a segmentation cue. Higher-proficiency and lower-proficiency Polish learners of English participated in the task in which they recognised phrases such as buy train vs. bite rain or pie plot vs. pipe lot. The analysis of accuracy scores revealed that successful segmentation was only above chance level, indicating that sonorant voicing/devoicing cue was largely unattended to in identifying the boundary location. Moreover, higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation. The analysis of reaction times showed an unclear pattern in which higher-proficiency listeners segmented the test phrases faster but not more accurately than lower-proficiency listeners. Finally, #CS sequences were recognised more accurately than C#S sequences, which was taken to suggest that the listeners may have had some limited knowledge that devoiced sonorants appear only in word-initial positions, but they treated voiced sonorants as equal candidates for word-final and word-initial position

Speech Communication

Contains research objectives, summary of research and reports on three research projects.U. S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-67-A-0204-0064)U. S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-67-A-0204-0069)National Science Foundation (Grant GK-31353)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS04332-10)Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DAAB07-71-C-0300Bell Telephone Laboratories Fellowshi

Speech Communication

Contains reports on two research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant GK-31353)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS04332-10)U. S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-67-A-0204-0069

Speech Communication

Contains reports on four research projects.U. S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories under Contract F19628-69-C-0044National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS 04332-08

Statistical distributions of consonant variants in infant-directed speech: evidence that /t/ may be exceptional

Statistical distributions of phonetic variants in spoken language influence speech perception for both language learners and mature users. We theorized that patterns of phonetic variant processing of consonants demonstrated by adults might stem in part from patterns of early exposure to statistics of phonetic variants in infant-directed (ID) speech. In particular, we hypothesized that ID speech might involve greater proportions of canonical /t/ pronunciations compared to adult-directed (AD) speech in at least some phonological contexts. This possibility was tested using a corpus of spontaneous speech of mothers speaking to other adults, or to their typically-developing infant. Tokens of word-final alveolar stops – including /t/, /d/, and the nasal stop /n/ – were examined in assimilable contexts (i.e., those followed by a word-initial labial and/or velar); these were classified as canonical, assimilated, deleted, or glottalized. Results confirmed that there were significantly more canonical pronunciations in assimilable contexts in ID compared with AD speech, an effect which was driven by the phoneme /t/. These findings suggest that at least in phonological contexts involving possible assimilation, children are exposed to more canonical /t/ variant pronunciations than adults are. This raises the possibility that perceptual processing of canonical /t/ may be partly attributable to exposure to canonical /t/ variants in ID speech. Results support the need for further research into how statistics of variant pronunciations in early language input may shape speech processing across the lifespan