Tolowa Peak Pitch Alignment: Perspectives from an Autosegmental-Metrical Framework

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The role of orienting attention for learning novel phonetic categories

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ORIENTING ATTENTION WHILE TRAINING HINDI SEGMENTS

ABSTRACT The current experiment tests for an effect of attention during phonetic learning by manipulating attentional allocation to different aspects of the phonetic signal during training. In an identification task, two native English speaking participant groups were trained on novel Hindi words containing unfamiliar consonants and vowels. Both groups were presented with the same auditory stimuli. One group was instructed to attend to the Hindi consonants and the other to the Hindi vowels presented in these words. The group oriented toward consonants showed greater consonant discrimination ability than the group oriented toward vowels in a post-test/pre-test comparison

Phonetic correlates of tongue root vowel contrasts in Maa

Maa, a Nilo-Saharan language, exhibits a cross-height vowel harmony system known as 'tongue root harmony'.The high and mid vowels participate in this system, but the low vowel does not. The Maa harmony system is briefly described, followed by an investigation into the phonetic properties of the vowels. Five Maa speakers were recorded producing 100 example words three times each. The [+ATR] vowels were found to have consistently lower first formant values and relatively less energy in the higher frequency regions than their [-ATR] counterparts. An investigation of the differences between the auditorily quite similar [-ATR] high and [+ATR] mid vowels revealed durational differences for the back vowels and much inter-speaker variation for the front vowels. Electroglot tographic data obtained from one speaker indicated a slightly less constricted glottis for [+ATR] than [-ATR] vowels. This phonation difference is not readily detectable auditorily in the current data, but has been reported previously for Maa. The results contribute to typological knowledge about the phonetics of tongue root vowel contrasts, as very little data is currently available for Nilo-Saharan languages. A possible origin of stronger voice quality distinctions common to other tongue root harmony languages is offered from the theory of Auditory Enhancement