At the edge of intonation: the interplay of utterance-final F0 movements and voiceless fricative sounds

The paper is concerned with the 'edge of intonation' in a twofold sense. It focuses on utterance-final F0 movements and crosses the traditional segment-prosody divide by investigating the interplay of F0 and voiceless fricatives in speech production. An experiment was performed for German with four types of voiceless fricatives: /f/, /s/, /ʃ/ and /x/. They were elicited with scripted dialogues in the contexts of terminal falling statement and high rising question intonations. Acoustic analyses show that fricatives concluding the high rising question intonations had higher mean centres of gravity (CoGs), larger CoG ranges and higher noise energy levels than fricatives concluding the terminal falling statement intonations. The different spectral-energy patterns are suitable to induce percepts of a high 'aperiodic pitch' at the end of the questions and of a low 'aperiodic pitch' at the end of the statements. The results are discussed with regard to the possible existence of 'segmental intonation' and its implication for F0 truncation and the segment-prosody dichotomy, in which segments are the alleged troublemakers for the production and perception of intonation

Cross-language study of voicing contrasts of stop consonants in Asian languages

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D96488 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Phonological and phonetic properties of nasal substitution in Sasak and Javanese

Austronesian languages such as Sasak and Javanese have a pattern of morphological nasal substitution, where nasals alternate with homorganic oral obstruents—except that [s] is described as alternating with [ɲ], not with [n]. This appears to be an abstract morphophonological relation between [s] and [ɲ] where other parts of the paradigm have a concrete homorganic relation. Articulatory ultrasound data were collected of productions of [t, n, ʨ, ɲ], along with [s] and its nasal counterpart from two languages, from 10 Sasak and 8 Javanese speakers. Comparisons of lingual contours using a root mean square analysis were evaluated with linear mixed-effects regression models, a method that proves reliable for testing questions of phonological neutralization. In both languages, [t, n, s] exhibit a high degree of articulatory similarity, whereas postalveolar [ʨ] and its nasal counterpart [ɲ] exhibited less similarity. The nasal counterpart of [s] was identical in articulation to [ɲ]. This indicates an abstract, rather than concrete, relationship between [s] and its morphophonological nasal counterpart, with the two sounds not sharing articulatory place in either Sasak or Javanese.published_or_final_versio

The perception of lexical stress in German: effects of segmental duration and vowel quality in different prosodic patterns

Several decades of research, focusing on English, Dutch and German, have set up a hierarchy of acoustic properties for cueing lexical stress. It attributes the strongest cue to criterial-level f0 change, followed by duration, but low weight to energy and to stressed-vowel spectra. This paper re-examines the established view with new data from German. In the natural productions of the German word pair Kaffee 'coffee' - Café 'locality' (with initial vs. final stress in a North German pronunciation), vowel duration was manipulated in a complementary fashion across the two syllables in five steps, spanning the continuum from initial to final stress on each word. The two base words provided different vowel qualities as the second variable, the intervocalic fricative was varied in two values, long and short, taken from Café and Kaffee, and the generated test words were inserted in a low f0 tail and in a high f0 hat-pattern plateau, which both eliminated f0 change as a cue to lexical stress. The sentence stimuli were judged in two listening experiments by 16 listeners in each as to whether the first or the second syllable of the test word was stressed. The results show highly significant effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and fricative duration. The combined vowel-quality and fricative variable can outweigh vowel duration as a cue to lexical stress. The effect of the prosodic frame is only marginal, especially related to a rhythmic factor. The paper concludes that there is no general hierarchy with a fixed ranking of the variables traditionally adduced to signal lexical stress. Every prosodic embedding of segmental sequences defines the hierarchy afresh

Eesti ja vene emakeelega kõnelejate eesti keele palatalisatsiooni hääldamine

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneOlen huvitatud keele väikseimatest tähenduslikest üksustest – häälikutest. Sõnad koosnevad häälikutest ja sõnadel on tähendus, mis võib kergesti muutuda, kui teha väikeseid muudatusi nende hääldusviisis. Ühte sellist muudatust nimetatakse palatalisatsiooniks ehk peenenduseks. Selle käigus muutub kaashäälikute häälduskoht sarnaseks lähedal asuva täishäälikuga. Näiteks on meil palataliseerimise tulemusel eesti keeles hulk pealtnäha sarnaseid sõnapaare nagu palk (palga) ja palk (palgi) või sulg (sulu) ning sulg (sule). Oma doktoritöös otsisin vastust küsimustele: kas kaashääliku palataliseerimine hõlmab ainult konkreetset kaashäälikut või on see osa suuremast kõne planeerimise protsessist ja millised on peamised häälduslikud tunnused, mis eesti keele palatalisatsiooni kirjeldavad? Uurisin ka seda, kuidas Eestis sündinud ja siin elavate vene keelt emakeelena kõnelejad tulevad eesti keele palatalisatsiooniga toime. Töö lähtub hüpoteesist, et see on neile problemaatiline ja tekitab kõneaktsenti. Keele omandamise teooriad ütlevad, et aktsent tekib, kuna me oleme oma häälduses mõjutatud oma emakeelest. Seetõttu on teist keelt õppides tihti vaja oma hääldust kohandada, et see vastaks õpitavale keelele. Analüüsin ka lühidalt hääldustreeningu potentsiaali palatalisatsiooni häälduse parendamisel. Tulemustest selgus, et palatalisatsiooni planeeritakse juba alates sõna algusest ning keel on juba alguses palju kõrgemas asendis. Selle põhjus on seotud kõne ökonoomsuse printsiibiga. Me üritame kulutada kõnelemisel vähe energiat ning väldime järske häälduslikke hüppeid, et kõne oleks sujuvam. Tööst selgus, et kõige suuremad muutused olid näha peamiselt konsonandile eelnevas täishäälikus, mitte palataliseeritud kaashäälikus endas. Andmetest oli ka näha, et kõneleja emakeelel on tema hääldusele tugev mõju ning see põhjustab aktsenti. Vene emakeelega kõnelejad, kes palataliseerisid eesti keele kaashäälikuid, ei hääldanud neid tihti nii nagu emakeelsed kõnelejad. Vene emakeelega kõnelejate grupis oli ka palju varieerumist – osad palataliseerisid seal, kus vaja, teised mitte. Saadud doktoritöö tulemusi võib kasutada, et anda suuniseid keeleõpetajatele ja keeleõppijatele.I am interested in phonemes – the smallest meaningful units of a language. Words are made up of phonemes, and words have meanings that can easily be changed by making small adjustments in pronunciation. Sometimes the changes in vowels or consonants occur when they are adjacent to other phonemes. For instance, a consonant can be palatalized near a high vowel. Palatalization is the reason Estonian has several orthographically similar word pairs like palk (palga) and palk (palgi) or sulg (sulu) and sulg (sule). My thesis concentrated on questions like: does the palatalization of a consonant only affects the consonant itself, or is it a part of a more extensive speech planning process? What are the main articulatory properties that describe Estonian palatalization? I also wanted to know how native Russian speakers produce Estonian palatalization. The thesis is based on the hypothesis that Estonian palatalization is difficult for the native Russian learners of Estonian and contributes to their speech accent. Language acquisition models state that speech accent is present because of the effect that our native language has on our pronunciation. When we learn another language, we have to constantly adjust our pronunciation to sound more natural. The results of the thesis showed that we unconsciously plan ahead of the movements of the tongue while speaking. We are constantly trying to be economical in the way we speak, and we try to be quicker and smoother in the way we articulate words and sentences. The results also showed that the changes that palatalization caused were mainly observable in the preceding vowel. The data also showed that the native language of the speaker affects the way we produce another language and contributes to speech accent. There was a lot of variation in the native Russian group. Some speakers did not use palatalization where necessary, and others did. The ones that did palatalize had a slightly different pronunciation than native speakers.https://www.ester.ee/record=b552436

Coordination and timing of speech gestures in Parkinson’s disease

Many individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience articulatory difficulties, which often have a considerable impact on their quality of life. It is currently poorly understood which mechanisms underlie these articulatory difficulties. In order to learn more about these mechanisms, this dissertation examined the coordination and timing of speech gestures in PD speech. Both these aspects are intrinsic to articulation, but at current it is unknown how they relate to the articulatory difficulties observed in PD speech. The studies in this dissertation address this issue using state-of-the-art methods. In the first study of this thesis, the effect of levodopa on vowel articulation in PD was examined. The results from this study suggest that articulation of vowels is not influenced by levodopa. In the following two studies, spatial and temporal aspects of speech gestures have been examined. The results from these studies suggest that the timing of speech gestures, and also the coupling between speech gestures is impaired in PD. In the final study of this dissertation, the prevalence and nature of tongue tremor in individuals with PD were investigated. Using a computer algorithm, we found different types of tongue tremor in our data, which we believe may affect the timing of speech gestures. Together, the studies in this dissertation show that coordination and timing are indeed impaired in the speech of (at least some) individuals with PD. We believe that this impairment may be caused by the presence of malfunctioning regulatory mechanisms in PD speech

Sampling the progression of domain-initial denasalization in Seoul Korean

Word-initial nasals in Korean are known to exhibit prosody-sensitive denasalization. The literature on the subject is still scarce and even the basic description of the process is debated. This study tested the speculation that inconsistencies in the literature may be explained if certain features of denasalization have developed relatively recently as part of an ongoing sound change. Based on apparent-time data from thirty-two speakers of Seoul Korean, the study explored the development of denasalization over a fifty-year period. The phonetic manifestations of domain-initial nasals were examined, along with the effects of prosodic position, place of articulation, and the height of the following vowel. The results revealed that denasalization has advanced rapidly over time, acquiring more plosive-like features of devoicing as well as a complete lack of nasality. Alveolar nasals before a high vowel were most likely to show denasalization and devoicing. Interestingly, the cumulative effect of prosody became weakest and partial denasalization was least likely for the younger group. Based on these results, we speculate that Korean denasalization is in the process of being stabilized into a discrete phrase-level process from a more general, gradient phenomenon of domain-initial strengthening, consistent with the theory of the life cycle of phonological processes. Keywords: denasalization; domain-initial strengthening; articulatory strengthening; fortition; Korean; sound change; rule scattering; life cycle of phonological processes; apparent tim

A Likelihood-Ratio Based Forensic Voice Comparison in Standard Thai

This research uses a likelihood ratio (LR) framework to assess the discriminatory power of a range of acoustic parameters extracted from speech samples produced by male speakers of Standard Thai. The thesis aims to answer two main questions: 1) to what extent the tested linguistic-phonetic segments of Standard Thai perform in forensic voice comparison (FVC); and 2) how such linguistic-phonetic segments are profitably combined through logistic regression using the FoCal Toolkit (Brümmer, 2007). The segments focused on in this study are the four consonants /s, ʨh, n, m/ and the two diphthongs [ɔi, ai]. First of all, using the alveolar fricative /s/, two different sets of features were compared in terms of their performance in FVC. The first comprised the spectrum-based distributional features of four spectral moments, namely mean, variance, skew and kurtosis; the second consisted of the coefficients of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCTs) applied to a spectrum. As DCTs were found to perform better, they were subsequently used to model the consonant spectrum of the remaining consonants. The consonant spectrum was extracted at the center point of the /s, ʨh, n, m/ consonants with a Hamming window of 31.25 msec. For the diphthongs [ɔi] - [nɔi L] and [ai] - [mai HL], the cubic polynomials fitted to the F2 and F1-F3 formants were tested separately. The quadratic polynomials fitted to the tonal F0 contours of [ɔi] - [nɔi L] and [ai] - [mai HL] were tested as well. Long-term F0 distribution (LTF0) was also trialed. The results show the promising discriminatory power of the Standard Thai acoustic features and segments tested in this thesis. The main findings are as follows. 1. The fricative /s/ performed better with the DCTs (Cllr = 0.70) than with the spectral moments (Cllr = 0.92). 2. The nasals /n, m/ (Cllr = 0.47) performed better than the affricate /tɕh/ (Cllr = 0.54) and the fricative /s/ (Cllr = 0.70) when their DCT coefficients were parameterized. 3. F1-F3 trajectories (Cllr = 0.42 and Cllr = 0.49) outperformed F2 trajectory (Cllr = 0.69 and Cllr = 0.67) for both diphthongs [ɔi] and [ai]. 4. F1-F3 trajectories of the diphthong [ɔi] (Cllr = 0.42) outperformed those of [ai] (Cllr = 0.49). 5. Tonal F0 (Cllr = 0.52) outperformed LTF0 (Cllr = 0.74). 6. Overall, better results were obtained when DCTs of /n/ - [na: HL] and /n/ - [nɔi L] were fused. (Cllr = 0.40 with the largest consistent-with-fact SSLog10LR = 2.53). In light of the findings, we can conclude that Standard Thai is generally amenable to FVC, especially when linguistic-phonetic segments are being combined; it is recommended that the latter procedure be followed when dealing with forensically realistic casework

The phonological development of adult Japanese learners of English : a longitudinal study of perception and production.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042757 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo