Developmental Use of Vowel Duration as a Cue to Postvocalic Stop Consonant Voicing

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Ellen Krause
Keyword(s):  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Production Experiment ◽  
Normal Language ◽  
Vowel Lengthening ◽  
Consonant Voicing

This developmental study investigated vowel duration as a cue to postvocalic consonant voicing. Ten trials of six test words, spoken by 10 3-year-olds, 10 6-year-olds, and 10 adults, all with normal language and articulation and hearing, were analyzed. A significant interaction between the speaker's age and the voicing feature of the postvocalic consonant was found on measures of total vowel duration. The duration of vowels preceding voiceless stops was similar across ages, but vowel duration preceding voiced stops decreased sharply with age. In addition, decreased variability of vowel duration was observed with increasing age. Consideration is given to processes of exaggerated vowel lengthening and vowel shortening to describe children's acquisition of this voicing cue. The same subjects and stimulus words used in the production experiment were used in a previous perception experiment. Qualitative comparisons between the production and perception data revealed parallel refinement in the use of vowel duration as a function of age.

Conflicting and Cooperating Cues

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Eilers ◽  
D. K. Oller ◽  
Richard Urbano ◽  
Debra Moroff
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Extended Duration ◽  
Infant Perception ◽  
Relative Salience ◽  
Consonant Voicing

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the relative salience of two cues for final consonant voicing in infants and adults. Experiment 1 was designed to investigate infant perception of periodicity of burst, vowel duration, and the two cues combined in a cooperating pattern. Experiment 2 was designed to examine infant perception of these same cues but in a conflicting pattern, that is, with extended duration associated with the voiceless final plosive. Experiment 3 examined perception of the stimuli from Experiments 1 and 2 with adult subjects. Results indicate that in both adults and infants combined cues facilitate discrimination of the phonemic contrast regardless of whether the cues cooperate or conflict. The three experiments taken together do not support a phonetic interpretation of conflicting/cooperating cues for the perception of final stop consonant voicing. Potential psychoacoustic explanations are discussed.

Effects of Syllable Affiliation and Consonant Voicing on Temporal Adjustment in a Repetitive Speech-Production Task

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 826-840 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth J. de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Repetition Rate ◽  
Temporal Patterns ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Timing Constraints ◽  
Temporal Consistency ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Production Experiment ◽  
Consonant Voicing

This paper presents the results of an acoustic speech-production experiment in which speakers repeated simple syllabic forms varying in consonantal voicing in time to a metronome that controlled repetition rate. Speakers exhibited very different patterns of tempo control for syllables with onsets than for syllables with codas. Syllables with codas exhibited internal temporal consistency, leaving junctures between the repeated syllables to take up most of the tempo variation. Open syllables with onsets, by contrast, often exhibited nearly proportional scaling of all of the acoustic portions of the signal. Results also suggest that phonemic use of vowel duration as a cue to voicing acted to constrain temporal patterns with some speakers. These results are discussed with respect to possible models of local temporal adjustment within a context of global timing constraints.

Effects of age and experience on the production of English word-final stops by Korean speakers

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
WENDY BAKER
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Word ◽  
Perceptual Judgment ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Closure Duration ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Consonant Voicing

This study examined the effect of second language (L2) age of acquisition and amount of experience on the production of word-final stop consonant voicing by adult native Korean learners of English. Thirty learners, who differed in amount of L2 experience and age of L2 exposure, and 10 native English speakers produced 8 English monosyllabic words ending in voiced and voiceless stops. These productions were presented to 10 English listeners for perceptual judgment and subjected to acoustic analyses to determine how well learners produced vowel duration and closure (stop gap) duration, two cues to stop consonant voicing. Results revealed that even learners with 10 years of L2 experience did not always produce stop consonant voicing accurately, that learners' age of acquisition influenced their production of both cues, that vowel duration was easier to learn than closure duration, and that English listeners used both these cues in their judgments of production accuracy.

A Developmental Study of Intonation Recognition

1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn M. Corlew
Keyword(s):  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Multiple Choice ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Choice Test ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Multiple Choice Test ◽  
The Third ◽  
Matching Test ◽  
Better Than

Two experiments investigated the information conveyed by intonation from speaker to listener. A multiple-choice test was devised to test the ability of 48 adults to recognize and label intonation when it was separated from all other meaning. Nine intonation contours whose labels were most agreed upon by adults were each matched with two English sentences (one with appropriate and one with inappropriate intonation and semantic content) to make a matching-test for children. The matching-test was tape-recorded and given to children in the first, third, and fifth grades (32 subjects in each grade). The first-grade children matched the intonations with significantly greater agreement than chance; but they agreed upon significantly fewer sentences than either the third or fifth graders. Some intonation contours were matched with significantly greater frequency than others. The performance of the girls was better than that of the boys on an impatient question and a simple command which indicates that there was a significant interaction between sex and intonation.

Lip and Jaw Kinematics in Bilabial Stop Consonant Production

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 877-893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Löfqvist ◽  
Vincent L. Gracco
Keyword(s):  
Control Strategy ◽  
High Velocity ◽  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Movement Variability ◽  
Upper Lip ◽  
Lower Lip ◽  
Vowel Context ◽  
Virtual Target ◽  
Contextual Variability ◽  
Consonant Voicing

This paper reports two experiments, each designed to clarify different aspects of bilabial stop consonant production. The first one examined events during the labial closure using kinematic recordings in combination with records of oral air pressure and force of labial contact. The results of this experiment suggested that the lips were moving at a high velocity when the oral closure occurred. They also indicated mechanical interactions between the lips during the closure, including tissue compression and the lower lip moving the upper lip upward. The second experiment studied patterns of upper and lower lip interactions, movement variability within and across speakers, and the effects on lip and jaw kinematics of stop consonant voicing and vowel context. Again, the results showed that the lips were moving at a high velocity at the onset of the oral closure. No consistent influences of stop consonant voicing were observed on lip and jaw kinematics in five subjects, nor on a derived measure of lip aperture. The overall results are compatible with the hypothesis that one target for the lips in bilabial stop production is a region of negative lip aperture. A negative lip aperture implies that to reach their virtual target, the lips would have to move beyond each other. Such a control strategy would ensure that the lips will form an air tight seal irrespective of any contextual variability in the onset positions of their closing movements.

On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing

1986 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Westbury ◽  
Patricia A. Keating
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Formal Theory ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Articulatory Features ◽  
Consonant Voicing

A long recognized problem for linguistic theory has been to explain why certain sounds, sound oppositions, and sound sequences are statistically preferred over others among languages of the world. The formal theory of markedness, developed by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the early 1930's, and extended by Chomsky and Halle (1968), represents an attempt to deal with this problem. It is at least implicit in that theory that sounds are rare when (and because) they are marked, and common when (and because) they are not. Whether sounds are marked or unmarked depends – in the latter version of the theory, particularly – upon the ‘intrinsic content’ of acoustic and articulatory features which define them. There was, however, no substantive attempt among early proponents of the theory to show what it was about the content of particular features and feature combinations that caused them to be marked, and others not.

Acoustic correlates of stop consonant voicing in English and Spanish

2012 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 1937-1937
Author(s):  
Olga Dmitrieva ◽  
Amanda A. Shultz ◽  
Fernando Llanos ◽  
Alexander L. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Stop Consonant ◽  
Acoustic Correlates ◽  
Consonant Voicing
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