Social Influences on the Degree of Stop Voicing in Inland California

This paper examines social influences on the realization of voiced stops in inland California. We analyzed sociolinguistic interviews with 62 white residents from Redding, Merced, and Bakersfield (which mark the northern, middle, and southern points of California’s Central Valley), balanced for sex, class, age, and whether a speaker earns their livelihood off the land. We follow Jaciewicz, Fox, and Lyle (2009) in examining the extent of voicing during stop closures (duration of voicing during closure relative to total duration of closure), and also adopt a novel measure of the magnitude of voicing, which captures the intensity of a stop closure relative to the following vowel. Mixed effects linear regression models were constructed for both voicing measures, with a number of linguistic and social predictors considered in addition to random effects. Results show that the extent of voicing measure was insufficiently sensitive to differentiate speakers, as nearly everyone exhibited voicing throughout the closure. The voicing intensity measure, however, was shown to reveal significant effects of place of articulation, closure duration, and ties to the land. Most importantly, speakers who earn their livelihood off the land exhibit significantly stronger voiced stops than those who do not. We argue that even though strongly voiced stops likely entered California during a large-scale in-migration of Southerners during the Dust Bowl (Jaciewicz et al. 2009 report more extensive voicing among women from the South compared to the Midwest), they have since taken on locally significant indexicalities reflecting the values and ideals of land-oriented communities throughout the Central Valley (and do not simply mean “Southern”). Our findings also raise questions about where the linguistic limits of socially structured variation lie, given the systematic social patterning observed here for low-level phonetic details (i.e., voicing intensity) that likely operate far below the level of consciousness

The weight of phonetic substance in the structure of sound inventories

In the research field initiated by Lindblom & Liljencrants in 1972, we illustrate the possibility of giving substance to phonology, predicting the structure of phonological systems with nonphonological principles, be they listener-oriented (perceptual contrast and stability) or speaker-oriented (articulatory contrast and economy). We proposed for vowel systems the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory (Schwartz et al., 1997b). With the DFT, we can predict vowel systems using two competing perceptual constraints weighted with two parameters, respectively λ and α. The first one aims at increasing auditory distances between vowel spectra (dispersion), the second one aims at increasing the perceptual salience of each spectrum through formant proximities (focalisation). We also introduced new variants based on research in physics - namely, phase space (λ,α) and polymorphism of a given phase, or superstructures in phonological organisations (Vallée et al., 1999) which allow us to generate 85.6% of 342 UPSID systems from 3- to 7-vowel qualities. No similar theory for consonants seems to exist yet. Therefore we present in detail a typology of consonants, and then suggest ways to explain plosive vs. fricative and voiceless vs. voiced consonants predominances by i) comparing them with language acquisition data at the babbling stage and looking at the capacity to acquire relatively different linguistic systems in relation with the main degrees of freedom of the articulators; ii) showing that the places “preferred” for each manner are at least partly conditioned by the morphological constraints that facilitate or complicate, make possible or impossible the needed articulatory gestures, e.g. the complexity of the articulatory control for voicing and the aerodynamics of fricatives. A rather strict coordination between the glottis and the oral constriction is needed to produce acceptable voiced fricatives (Mawass et al., 2000). We determine that the region where the combinations of Ag (glottal area) and Ac (constriction area) values results in a balance between the voice and noise components is indeed very narrow. We thus demonstrate that some of the main tendencies in the phonological vowel and consonant structures of the world’s languages can be explained partly by sensorimotor constraints, and argue that actually phonology can take part in a theory of Perception-for-Action-Control

Dialect Variation in Stop Consonant Voicing

Recent sociophonetic research has shown significant differences in the pronunciation of vowels among dialects. However, dialectal differences in stop consonant productions have not been as widely researched. This study examines the differences between speakers from south-central/southeastern Wisconsin and westernmost North Carolina, specifically in terms of the way the voiced stop /b/ is produced. Twenty female speakers were selected from recordings, ten from Wisconsin and ten from North Carolina. Each subject read two sets of thirty sentences that included five sets of target words. Acoustic measurements of the consonant /b/ and the target word itself were completed. From these measurements the following variables were calculated: closure duration, word duration, proportion of closure duration to word duration, duration of voicing during closure, proportion of voicing in closure and frequency of complete voicing through closure. The results of these analyses show there are significant differences in the ways the consonant /b/ is produced in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The greatest differences were found in the total duration of voicing during consonant closure, proportion of voicing in closure and the proportion of times the stop closure was completely voiced. The present results provide a comprehensive set of data for a detailed dialect comparison of stop production in these two dialects of American English.The Ohio State University College of Social and Behavioral SciencesThe Ohio State University College of Arts and SciencesNo embarg

A mathematical model of speech aerodynamics

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How do voiced retroflex stops evolve? Evidence from typology and an articulatory study

The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/

What it means to be phonetic or phonological : The case of Romanian devoiced nasals

phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ 'fairy-tale'). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodic boundaries, phonetic paradigm uniformity and assimilation influence Romanian nasal devoicing. It provides instrumental phonetic documentation of devoiced nasals, a phenomenon that has not been widely studied experimentally, in a phonetically underdocumented language. We argue that sound patterns should not be separated into phonetics and phonology as two distinct systems, but neither should they all be grouped together as a single, undifferentiated system. Instead, we argue for viewing the distinction between phonetics and phonology as a largely continuous multidimensional space, within which sound patterns, including Romanian nasal devoicing, fall

Some data on North German stops and affricates

The present paper presents some data on voicing (3.1), duration (3.2), intra-oral air pressure (3.3), airflow (3.4), subglottal pressure (3.5), and lip pressure (3.6) of German stops and affricates. On the basis of these data the last section discusses some more general problems, viz. the features distinguishing ptk and bdg (4.1), the reduction of aspiration after s (4.2), the distinction between stops and affricates (4.3), differences due to place of articulation (4.4), "heightened subglottal pressure" (4.5), and the relation between air pressure and airflow (4.6)

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the 20th Century

How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ to language change, has been a key focus over fifty years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering ‘structured variability’—how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in nonrandom ways—as part of the long-standing goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community’s language that illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This article examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues—voice onset time and closure voicing—along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, toward a more aspiration-based and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation

Influences of tongue biomechanics on speech movements during the production of velar stop consonants: a modeling study

This study explores the following hypothesis: forward looping movements of the tongue that are observed in VCV sequences are due partly to the anatomical arrangement of the tongue muscles and how they are used to produce a velar closure. The study uses an anatomically based 2D biomechanical tongue model. Tissue elastic properties are accounted for in finite-element modeling, and movement is controlled by constant-rate control parameter shifts. Tongue raising and lowering movements are produced by the model with the combined actions of the genioglossus, styloglossus and hyoglossus. Simulations of V1CV2 movements were made, where C is a velar consonant and V is [a], [i] or [u]. If V1 is one of the vowels [a] and [u], the resulting trajectories describe movements that begin to loop forward before consonant closure and continue to slide along the palate during the closure. This prediction is in agreement with classical data published in the literature. If V1 is vowel [i], we observe a small backward movement. This is also in agreement with some measurements on human speakers, but it is also in contradiction with the original data published by Houde (1967). These observations support the idea that the biomechanical properties of the tongue could be the main factor responsible for the forward loops when V1 is a back vowel. In the left [i] context, it seems that additional factors have to be taken into considerations, in order to explain the observations made on some speaker