THE VOT OF THE HUNGARIAN VOICELESS PLOSIVES IN CAREFUL AND SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

This paper aims at investigating the acoustic properties ofVOTs of the three Hungarian voice/ess stops (using the (SL50 device) when appearing in isolation (in syllahles and in words) but a/so when occurring in spontaneous speech (5 female teachers served as subjeets). The results of the acoustic analysis show a clear dijference between careful and spontaneous speech. Bilabials and velars are signijicantly shorter in fluent speech vvhile dentals seem to be unehanged. Therefore, the actual duration ofVOTis characteristic of the place of the articulation of stops in spontaneous speech while VOTs of bilabials and dentals do not differ from each other in careful speech. Vovels following the stops influence the tri more in careful than in spontaneous speech, which can also be explained by the experimentally confirmed phenomenon of the ehanging quality of the present-dav Hungarian vowels into the neutral vowel. Voice onset time is a specific feature of the Hungarian plosive consonants and its values significantly differ from those of most languages in the world

Voice onset time in language acquisition: Data from Hungarian

VOT provides important information about the language acquisition especially how the motor speech skill is being refined. Our hypotheses were the following: 1) If the age increases, the mean and standard deviation of VOTs decrease. 2) The VOTs of Hungarian-speaking children become similar to adults' VOTs at the age of 11. 3) The differences between genders depend on the age and the types of plosives. In this study 30 Hungarian-speaking children were participated in three age groups (9-, 11- and 13-year-olds). The VOTs of voiceless plosives ([p], [t], [k]) were analyzed in spontaneous speech. Our hypotheses were only partially proved by the results. There were significant differences between VOTs of the different plosives in all age groups. There were age differences in VOTs of all three plosives: with increasing age, the means of the VOTs of [p], [k] decreased, and the mean of the VOTs of [t] increased. Gender differences in VOTs depended on the age of the speakers

Barras de explosión múltiples en inglés no nativo e inglés nativo: datos provenientes de doce primeras lenguas

Voiceless plosives are frequently produced with multiple bursts (MBs), a phenomenon that has substantial implications for voice onset time measurement (VOT) of these consonants. MBs have been noted in previous research, but have not been systematically quantified. The objective of this study was to analyze MBs in non-native English (with data from twelve first languages) and native English, and to discern the effect of MBs on VOT measurement. Further, the potential effects of place of articulation (PoA), gender, speech rate, and age on MBs were explored. Results showed that VOT measurement method in the presence of MBs had a significant effect on the VOT values obtained for the plosives. In addition, MBs were influenced to a large extent by PoA, but not by gender, speech rate, or age. Comparisons between non-native English and native English revealed some significant differences, but in both varieties the analyses of MBs showed overall similar tendencies.Las oclusivas sordas se producen con frecuencia con barras de explosión múltiples, un fenómeno que tiene implicaciones sustanciales para la medición del tiempo de inicio de la sonoridad (VOT) de estas consonantes. Las barras de explosión múltiples se han observado en investigaciones anteriores, pero no se han cuantificado sistemáticamente. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar las barras de explosión múltiples en inglés no nativo (con datos de doce idiomas como primera lengua) e inglés nativo, y discernir el efecto de las barras de explosión múltiples en la medición del tiempo de inicio de la sonoridad (VOT). Además, se exploraron los efectos potenciales del lugar de articulación (PoA), el género, la velocidad del habla y la edad en las barras de explosión múltiples. Los resultados mostraron que el método de medición de VOT en presencia de barras de explosión múltiples tuvo un efecto significativo en los valores de VOT obtenidos para las oclusivas. Además, las barras se explosión múltiples se vieron influenciadas en gran medida por el PoA, pero no por el género, la velocidad del habla o la edad. Las comparaciones entre el inglés no nativo y el inglés nativo revelaron algunas diferencias significativas, pero en ambas variedades los análisis de MB mostraron tendencias similares en general

Measurement of the VOT of voiceless plosives: multiple bursts in Western Andalusian Spanish

Multiple bursts (MBs) of plosives have been frequently reported but not sufficiently quantified. This study sought to examine experimentally MBs in a Spanish variety and to reveal the role of MBs when analyzing the VOT of voiceless plosives. 567 productions of /p t k/ by twenty-one speakers were analyzed. Findings indicated that two VOT measurement methods in the presence of MBs produced substantially different VOT values. MBs were also conditioned to different degrees by place of articulation, vowel height, and speech rate. This study has significant implications for research on VOT of voiceless plosives

THE VOT OF THE HUNGARIAN VOICELESS PLOSIVES IN CAREFUL AND SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

This paper aims at investigating the acoustic properties ofVOTs of the three Hungarian voice/ess stops (using the (SL50 device) when appearing in isolation (in syllahles and in words) but a/so when occurring in spontaneous speech (5 female teachers served as subjeets). The results of the acoustic analysis show a clear dijference between careful and spontaneous speech. Bilabials and velars are signijicantly shorter in fluent speech vvhile dentals seem to be unehanged. Therefore, the actual duration ofVOTis characteristic of the place of the articulation of stops in spontaneous speech while VOTs of bilabials and dentals do not differ from each other in careful speech. Vovels following the stops influence the tri more in careful than in spontaneous speech, which can also be explained by the experimentally confirmed phenomenon of the ehanging quality of the present-dav Hungarian vowels into the neutral vowel. Voice onset time is a specific feature of the Hungarian plosive consonants and its values significantly differ from those of most languages in the world

THE ACQUISITION OF HUNGARIAN PHONOLOGV BY TRILINGUAL CHILDREIN

The mciin question of this paper is vhether the phonological development of hi - or trilingual ehildren is occurring in a common place. whether they share one common phonemic set vvhich is later separated according to languages or the phonemic systems are separated from the very first moment of accjuisition. I am most interestecl in the way trilingual ehildren actpiire Hnngarian phonology. and in the order of the accjuisition of phonemes. The subjects are a trilingual pair of sibling7s whose Hnngarian phonological development will be under investigation. Underextension can be observed since there is no conscious discrimination in the usage of the allophones. Some phonetic/phonological pecidiarities are identical with the ones made by Hungarian monolinguals, others are strange to the Hnngarian car ancl. as a result, a certain accent can be felt in the ehildren \u27s speech

Role of Regional Language Background and Speech Styles on the Production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in English among Indonesian Multilinguals

This paper seeks to contribute to the nature of cross-linguistic transfer in the production of English Voice Onset Time (VOT) by adult multilingual speakers in Indonesia in view of how different regional home languages and speech settings shape the phonetic realizations. Three adult multilinguals participated in this pilot project. They are all learners of English as the third language (L3) at the Department of English of a state university in Malang, Indonesia who acquire different regional home languages – Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese – as the first language (L1) and speak Indonesian as the second language (L2). The participants’ production of bilabial stop consonants of English /p/ and /b/ were elicited from two different speech settings; a careful speech via text readings (monologue and dialogue) and wordlist reading, and a spontaneous speech through natural conversation among participants. 21 tokens from each participant were then analyzed acoustically in Praat. The findings show that the bilingual speaker with L1 Sundanese consistently produced the shortest VOT values of both /p/ and /b/. The Javanese speaker produced the intermediate lag, whereas the Madurese speaker produced the longest aspiration interval. It is shown that the Sundanese language provides the strongest transfer effect, while Madurese gives the least effect. In light of cross-linguistic transfer, however, the overall VOT productions clearly put forth evidence of L1 phonological transfer. The production of non-native bilabial stop VOTs of English is largely due to the absence of this phonetic property in Javanese and Sundanese while Madurese shows marginal similarities. The findings also demonstrate that speech styles play only a marginal role in determining the production of VOTs that the VOTs of /p/ and /b/ in careful speech is found to be slightly longer than in the spontaneous settings. This study makes an original contribution to the area of phonological acquisition in adult speakers by giving attention to the understudied languages of Indonesia in order to more fully understand the interaction of different language systems in multilingual language acquisition and development

Variability in the articulation and perception of a word

The words making up a speaker’s mental lexicon may be stored as abstract phonological representations or else they may be stored as detailed acoustic-phonetic representations. The speaker’s articulatory gestures intended to represent a word show relatively high variability in spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to explore the acoustic-phonetic patterns of the Hungarian word akkor ‘then, at that time’. Ten speakers’ recorded spontaneous speech with a total duration of 255 minutes and containing 286 occurrences of akkor were submitted to analysis. Durational and frequency patterns were measured by means of the Praat software. The results obtained show higher variability both within and across speakers than it had been expected. Both the durations of the words and those of the speech sounds, as well as the vowel formants, turned out to significantly differ across speakers. In addition, the results showed considerable within-speaker variation as well. The correspondence between variability in the objective acoustic-phonetic data and the flexibility and adaptive nature of the mental representation of a word will be discussed.For the perception experiments, two speakers of the previous experiment were selected whose 48 words were then used as speech material. The listeners had to judge the quality of the words they heard using a five-point scale. The results confirmed that the listeners used diverse strategies and representations depending on the acoustic-phonetic parameters of the series of occurrences of akkor