Turkish /h/ deletion : evidence for the interplay of speech perception and phonology

It has been hypothesized that sounds which are less perceptible are more likely to be altered than more salient sounds, the rationale being that the loss of information resulting from a change in a sound which is difficult to perceive is not as great as the loss resulting from a change in a more salient sound. Kohler (1990) suggested that the tendency to reduce articulatory movements is countered by perceptual and social constraints, finding that fricatives are relatively resistant to reduction in colloquial German. Kohler hypothesized that this is due to the perceptual salience of fricatives, a hypothesis which was supported by the results of a perception experiment by Hura, Lindblom, and Diehl (1992). These studies showed that the relative salience of speech sounds is relevant to explaining phonological behavior. An additional factor is the impact of different acoustic environments on the perceptibility of speech sounds. Steriade (1997) found that voicing contrasts are more common in positions where more cues to voicing are available. The P-map, proposed by Steriade (2001a, b), allows the representation of varying salience of segments in different contexts. Many researchers have posited a relationship between speech perception and phonology. The purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence for this relationship, drawing on the case of Turkish /h/ deletion

Ultrasound and Corpus Study of a Change from Below: Vowel Rhoticity in Canadian French

While phonetically-motivated change from below is a fundamental concept in contemporary approaches to phonology and variation, empirical data is sparse (Cedergren, 1973; Trudgill, 1974; Labov 2001), partly because changes usually go unnoticed until long after their inception, and because articulatory data (which can shed light on phonetic motivations) is often unavailable. This paper documents the inception of a change from below using corpus data and ultrasound imaging of the tongue. The variable under investigation is the rhoticity with which some speakers of Canadian French produce the vowels /ø/, /œ/ and /œ̃/, making them sound like English [ɹ] (i.e., heureux, docteur, and commun sound like [ɹ̩ʀɹ̩], [dɔktʌɹʀ] and [kɔmɹ̩̃]. When asked, native speakers are completely unaware of the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic pronunciations, suggesting that rhoticity is a change from below. Previous reports of retroflex-sounding variants of Canadian French vowels date back to the early 1970s in Montreal (Dumas 1972, 100, Sankoff, p.c.) and a retroflex-sounding variant of /ö/ has also been observed (Sankoff and Blondeau, 2007), but there has been no previous articulatory study of these sounds. North American English /ô/ can be produced with various tongue shapes, including bouched and retroflex variants (Delattre and Freeman, 1968) raising the question of whether French rhotic vowels are also produced with these categorically different tongue shapes

Display Screen with Animated Graphical User Interface for Line Graph

This disclosure relates to a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows a user to interact with a line graph, line chart, a run chart, or the like. The user interface may show a macro view and a selected, micro view of the chart. When a user moves a cursor over the macro view, the user interface may display selection bars on the macro view, which may be used to control which portion of the macro view data is shown in the micro view. The user interface may allow a user to select and drag the selection bars to the desired start and end points for the micro view

The Diachronic Influences of Perception: Experimental Evidence from Turkish

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003

Large-scale Acoustic Analysis of Dialectal and Social Factors in English /s/-retraction

The retraction of /s/ in /str/, eg street, is a sound change found in certain English dialects. Previous work suggests that /s/-retraction arises from lower spectral frequency /s/ in /str/. The extent to which /s/-retraction differs across English dialects is unclear. This paper presents results from a large-scale, acoustic phonetic study of sibilants in 420 speakers, from 6 spontaneous speech corpora (9 dialects) of North American and Scottish English. Spectral Centre of Gravity was modelled from automatic measures of word-initial sibilants. Female speakers show higher frequency sibilants than males, but more so for /s/ than /S/; /s/ is also higher in American than Canadian/Scottish dialects; /S/ is surprisingly variable. /s/-retraction, modelled as retraction ratios, is generally greater for /str/ than /spr skr/, but varies by dialect; females show more retraction in /str/ than males. Dialectal and social factors clearly influence /s/-retraction in English clusters /sp st sk/, /spr skr/, and /str/

Age Vectors vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically From Several English Speech Corpora

To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction of diachronic change, we compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation in F1 and F2 for vowel phonemes in several corpora of North American and Scottish English. These vowels were measured automatically with a scheme (tested on hand-measured vowels) that considers the frequency, bandwidth, and amplitude of the first three formants in reference to a prototype. In the corpus data, we find that the axis of intraspeaker variation is typically aligned vertically, presumably corresponding to the degree of jaw opening for individual tokens, but for the North American GOOSE vowel, the axis of intraspeaker variation is aligned with the (horizontal) axis of diachronic change for this vowel across North America. This may help to explain why fronting and unrounding of high back vowels are common shifts across languages