A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF VOICE ONSET TIME (VOT) IN MADURESE AND ENGLISH WORD-INITIAL PLOSIVES

Artikel ini membahas Voice Onset Time (VOT) bunyi hambat bahasa Madura dan dikomparasikan dengan bunyi hambat bahasa Inggris. Tujuannya adalah untuk mengetahui apakah kedua bahasa tersebut memiliki konfigurasi VOT yang sama mengingat baik bahasa Madura maupun bahasa Inggris memiliki konsonan letup beraspirasi tak bersuara

VOT-F0 coarticulation in Japanese:Production-biased or misparsing?

International audienceIn production, word-initial voicing contrast of plosives in Tokyo Japanese is not robustly based on VOT, since young speakers tend to devoice previously voiced plosives. Meanwhile, speakers rely heavily on f0. The present study aims to examine the role of VOT and f0 cues in perception. We conducted an identification test using resynthesized stimuli along a VOT continuum (-60 to +40 ms) orthogonal to an f0 continuum. Results suggested a categorical perception of VOT, while f0 was especially useful when VOT was around 0 ms. Higher f0 contours affected the response rate more than lower f0 contours, suggesting that the perceptual role of f0 raising was more important than f0 lowering. Hence, plosive devoicing in production is not preceded by listeners' misparsing of low f0 and prevoicing. Their misattribution of high f0 to voicelessness may play a more important role in the shift of VOT-f0 cue weighting in perception and production

Korean speech sound development in children from bilingual Japanese-Korean environments

PurposeThis study investigates Korean speech sound development, including articulatory error patterns, among the Japanese-Korean children whose mothers are Japanese immigrants to Korea.MethodsThe subjects were 28 Japanese-Korean children with normal development born to Japanese women immigrants who lived in Jeonbuk province, Korea. They were assessed through Computerized Speech Lab 4500. The control group consisted of 15 Korean children who lived in the same area.ResultsThe values of the voice onset time of consonants /ph/, /t/, /th/, and /k*/ among the children were prolonged. The children replaced the lenis sounds with aspirated or fortis sounds rather than replacing the fortis sounds with lenis or aspirated sounds, which are typical among Japanese immigrants. The children showed numerous articulatory errors for /c/ and /l/ sounds (similar to Koreans) rather than errors on /p/ sounds, which are more frequent among Japanese immigrants. The vowel formants of the children showed a significantly prolonged vowel /o/ as compared to that of Korean children (P<0.05). The Japanese immigrants and their children showed a similar substitution /n/ for /ɧ/ [Japanese immigrants (62.5%) vs Japanese-Korean children (14.3%)], which is rarely seen among Koreans.ConclusionThe findings suggest that Korean speech sound development among Japanese-Korean children is influenced not only by the Korean language environment but also by their maternal language. Therefore, appropriate language education programs may be warranted not only or immigrant women but also for their children

Constraints on variability in the voice onset time of L2 English stop consonants

Non-native speech production is frequently characterized by its deviation from native pronunciation. Among segments, previous work has largely focused on describing the separation between native and non-native speakers at the level of individual phonetic categories. An additional hallmark of L1 pronunciation is the presence of systematic relationships within and among phonetic categories. For example, mean voice onset times (VOT) strongly covary among aspirated stop consonants across L1 speakers of American English. The present study examined whether L2 English speakers from various L1 backgrounds differ from native speakers in the relationship of VOT among word-initial /ptk/. Despite differences in the overall realization, L2 speakers resembled native English speakers in the degree of VOT covariation between stop-specific means and variances, as well as between /ptk/. These findings have important implications for the perception of accented speech, as listeners could employ structured relationships to facilitate adaptation despite non-native realizations of individual phonetic categories

トレーニング マエ ト アト ニオケル エイゴ スピーチ ノ オンキョウ ブンセキ ヒカク ケンキュウ

全国英語スピーチコンテストへ出場するため、約 2 か月の英語スピーチの集中指導（週 3 回～ 4 回、 1 回 2 時間程度）を受けた日本人英語学習者のトレーニング前とトレーニング後のスピーチ音声を音響分析し、英語母語話者の音声データとともに比較を行った。トレーニング後の発話音声は 3 名の英語母語話者によってトレーニング前よりも高く評価された。スピーチ内のターゲットフレーズ traffic accident(s) につきセグメントごとの時間計測および強勢母音のフォルマント計測を実施した分析結果から、音響特性には改善が示されたものと改善がはっきり示されなかったものがあり、全体として、時間計測によって測定できる音響特性はよりトレーニングの効果が上がりやすく、母音のフォルマント構造のようなスペクトラム特性はトレーニング効果が上がりにくいという傾向が見られた

Master of Arts

thesisThe goal of the present study is to measure voice onset time (VOT) in the oral stop series in Omaha, a North American Indian language of the Siouan family. The question addressed is: Does acoustic analysis using modern instrumentation support that the phonetic stop categories in Omaha are voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated at bilabial, dental, and velar places of articulation as documented in Dorsey's Dhegiha language transcriptions (c. 1890) and attested by other linguists? Then, provided that for each place of articulation, three distinct groups of VOT values form, do these values correlate with VOTs for other languages which contain the three categories listed above, or to other categories of stops? Finally, how can this information be used to improve existing Omaha language revitalization programs and Omaha language lessons? Results showed that even with a variety of cross analyses, there is evidence that the purported three way contrast does consist of voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated categories in contemporary Omaha. This can be applied to the Omaha curriculum as a pronunciation guide for students and non-native speaking teachers of Omaha

The Interaction of Domain-initial Effects with Lexical Stress: Acoustic Data from English, Spanish, and Portuguese

The phonetic implementation of domain-initial boundaries has gained considerable attention in the literature. However, most studies of the phenomenon have investigated small samples of articulatory data in which target syllables were lexically prominent and/or phrasally accented, introducing important potential confounds. This dissertation tackles these issues by examining how domain-initial effects operate on the acoustic properties of fully unstressed word-initial CV syllables in phrasally unaccented words. Similar materials were designed for a reading task in which 14 speakers of English, Spanish and Portuguese, languages that differ in how lexical prominence affects segmental makeup, took part. Results from the acoustic analyses show that domain-initial effects extend further than previously suggested, and that these interact with lexical stress in language-specific ways. These findings highlight how the marking of domain-initial boundaries relates to both the prominence and grouping functions of prosody, and suggest a linguistic, rather than purely biomechanical, motivation for domain-initial effects