scholarly journals Respect the surroundings: Effects of phonetic context variability on infants' learning of minimal pairs

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 024401
Author(s):  
Barbara Höhle ◽  
Tom Fritzsche ◽  
Natalie Boll-Avetisyan ◽  
Marc Hullebus ◽  
Adamantios Gafos
Keyword(s):  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Phonetic Context

Final Consonant Deletion in African American Children Speaking Black English

1993 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Moran
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black English ◽  
African American Children ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Speech Evaluation ◽  
American Children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether African American children who delete final consonants mark the presence of those consonants in a manner that might be overlooked in a typical speech evaluation. Using elicited sentences from 10 African American children from 4 to 9 years of age, two studies were conducted. First, vowel length was determined for minimal pairs in which final consonants were deleted. Second, listeners who identified final consonant deletions in the speech of the children were provided training in narrow transcription and reviewed the elicited sentences a second time. Results indicated that the children produced longer vowels preceding "deleted" voiced final consonants, and listeners perceived fewer deletions following training in narrow transcription. The results suggest that these children had knowledge of the final consonants perceived to be deleted. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

scholarly journals Regional differences in the evolution of the merger of /ʃ/ and /ç/ in Luxembourgish

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
François Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
The South ◽  
Data Set ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
The North ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Old Men ◽  
Middle Generation

The merger of post-alveolar /ʃ/ and palatal /ç/ into alveolopalatal /ɕ/ has recently gained growing interest in sociophonetic research, especially in the Middle German dialect area. In Luxembourgish, a Continental West Germanic language, the sound change has been linked to age differences, while its origins remain unclear. Two studies with a regional focus are presented in this paper. The first study examines the merger in the Centre and the South of Luxembourg. The acoustic examination of both the spectral peak and the centre of gravity of a spoken data set of five minimal pairs embedded in read and orally translated sentences from 48 speakers (three generations (old generation, 65–91 years; middle generation, 40–64 years; young generation, 20–39 years; each generation, n = 16), men and women) reveals interesting results related to their regional background. In the old generation, the merger is further advanced in the speech of old men from the former mining region in the South compared to their peers in the Centre, the former leading this sound change. On the other hand, young speakers in both regions produce only alveolopalatal /ɕ/, the merger being complete in this generation. The second study presents exploratory data from the East and the North of the country. The analysis of this smaller sample (n = 6 speakers) reveals patterns similar to the central region. Pointing to language contact with Romance in the South as cradle and/or catalyser of the merger, these results not only give further clues as to the development in Luxembourg, but also add to a deeper understanding of sound changes in process in complex sibilant systems.

scholarly journals Rapid learning of minimally different words in five- to six-year-old children: effects of acoustic salience and hearing impairment

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCEL R. GIEZEN ◽  
PAOLA ESCUDERO ◽  
ANNE E. BAKER
Keyword(s):  
Cochlear Implant ◽  
Hearing Impairment ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Object Matching ◽  
Rapid Learning ◽  
Minimal Pairs

AbstractThis study investigates the role of acoustic salience and hearing impairment in learning phonologically minimal pairs. Picture-matching and object-matching tasks were used to investigate the learning of consonant and vowel minimal pairs in five- to six-year-old deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and children of the same age with normal hearing (NH). In both tasks, the CI children showed clear difficulties with learning minimal pairs. The NH children also showed some difficulties, however, particularly in the picture-matching task. Vowel minimal pairs were learned more successfully than consonant minimal pairs, particularly in the object-matching task. These results suggest that the ability to encode phonetic detail in novel words is not fully developed at age six and is affected by task demands and acoustic salience. CI children experience persistent difficulties with accurately mapping sound contrasts to novel meanings, but seem to benefit from the relative acoustic salience of vowel sounds.

Aspirates and ejectives in Quechua-influenced Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Babel
Keyword(s):  
Small Scale ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Andean Spanish ◽  
Mayan Languages ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Spanish Phonology ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article describes the use of aspirates and ejectives in a variety of Spanish with significant Quechua contact influence that is spoken in the Santa Cruz valleys of central Bolivia. Aspirates and ejectives occur primarily on Quechua loanwords, making these ‘intermediate phonological relationships’ (Hall 2013) that are hard to categorize with respect to their status as phonetic vs. phonological features. Results from a small-scale perception and shadowing task show that language users are able to distinguish between these sounds and canonical Spanish consonants in minimal pairs, but that there is variation among speakers in the way these sounds are reproduced. While the use of aspirates and glottal stops in Spanish in contact with Mayan languages has been documented (Michnowicz 2015; Michnowicz and Kagan 2016) previous studies of Andean Spanish phonology have not reported the use of aspirates and ejectives as part of the sound system (Boynton 1981; Cassano 1974; Pyle 1981).

Preceding phonetic context affects perception of nonspeech (L)

2003 ◽  
Vol 114 (6) ◽  
pp. 3036-3039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph D. W. Stephens ◽  
Lori L. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Phonetic Context

A Variationist Analysis of Second Language Spanish Trill Production

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Danielle Daidone ◽  
Sara Zahler
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Phonetic Context

Abstract The current study examines the production of the Spanish trill by advanced second language (L2) learners using a variationist approach. Findings indicate that learners produced less multiple occlusion trills than native speakers and their variation was not constrained by the same factors as native speakers. Phonetic context conditioned the use of the multiple occlusion variant for native speakers, whereas frequency and speaker sex conditioned this variation for learners, and in the opposite direction of effect as expected from previous native speaker research. Nevertheless, the majority of tokens produced by learners were other variants also produced by native speakers, and when the variation between native and non-native variants was examined, learners’ variation was conditioned not only by frequency, but also phonetic context. Some of the phonetic contexts in which learners produced non-native variants were comparable to those in which native speakers were least likely to produce the multiple occlusion trill, indicating that articulatory constraints governed variation in trill production similarly for both groups. Thus, although L2 learners do not exhibit native-like trill variation, they appear to be developing toward a more native-like norm. These insights provide support for adopting a multifaceted variationist approach to the study of L2 phonological variable structures.

Development of Velar Consonants among Normal Two-Year-Olds

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice T. Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Frequency Of Occurrence ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Total Group ◽  
Word Position ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Phonetic Context

This study examined the frequency of occurrence of velar deviations in spontaneous single-word utterances over a 6-month period for 40 children who ranged in age from 1:11 (years:months) to 3:1 at the first observation. The productions of a subset of 14 children whose percentage of occurrence of velar deviations was greater than the mean of the total group were examined further to describe the types of velar deviations and the effects of word position and phonetic context. Results indicated that velars presented difficulty for less than half of the children. In the subgroup the type of deviation and the percentage of correct velars appeared to vary with the position in the word, the vowel environment, and the velar's function as a singleton or as one segment of a cluster.

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