Experimental Phonetics

Stress is one of suprasegmental feature in language and is included in the study of acoustic phonetics. Tontemboanese is a language spoken in several areas in Minahasa, and in this research, the word stress in Tontemboanese is done through the approach of experimental phonetics by employing the software Praat in data analysis. The data are collected through recording from interview, cut the recording into several one-word recordings, and then the data are analyzed with Praat to determine the pitch, duration, and intensity of each syllable. Through the data analysis, it is found that the Tontemboanese word stress is a fixed word stress, and the position of the stress is generally in the penultimate syllables. The result is still similar with the results by Schwarz (1908) and Tambuwun (1986) which states that the word stress in Tontemboanese is in the penultimate syllable.

In this paper we describe acoustic characteristics of aspi-ration, explosiveness and tension of plosives within the framework of consonant sequences at boundaries of two words extracted from German read speech. In these sequences (66 types) the prejuncture consonants (in fi-nal position in the preceding word) were limited to the plosives p/t/k, whereas the post-juncture consonants (in initial position in the following word) could consist of the entire set of German consonants. The proposed order of sounds at word boundaries enables to trace modifica-tions of the plosives in question and degree of their cor-relation with a number of positional-combinatory and prosodic factors, namely type of following consonant, presence of pause inside the sequence, position of plo-sives in rhythmic groups with regards to tone syllable.

The paper investigates the phonological aspects of syllable structure including the syllable templates, the number of consonants at syllable onset, medial, coda, word boundary and the phonotactic constraints in Sindhi. This
is the first-ever descriptive-cum-synchronic study on the investigation of syllable structure in Northern Sindhi1
. The key purpose of this paper is to determine the proper mechanism in identifying the rules of syllabification through a
word recognition algorithm, syllable inventory, epenthesis phenomenon in consonant clusters of indigenous and
loanwords at syllable onset word-initially.

Postcolonial varieties of English, used in countries such as Nigeria, India and Singapore, are subject to both local ("endonormative") and external ("exonormative") forces, the latter often in the form of British/American English. This gives rise to a stylistic continuum, where informal speech is more endonormatively oriented than formal/educated speech, which, nevertheless, is clearly distinguishable from British/American English. The formal end of the continuum is often regarded as the incipient local standard. Nigerian English (NigE) is the most widely spoken African variety of English, but empirical/quantitative descriptions are rare. In this pilot study, we present an acoustic analysis of eight phonological diphthongs produced in formal contexts by nine educated speakers of NigE with L1 Yoruba and drawn from the ICE Nigeria corpus. Results show that the NigE speakers produced more monophthongal realisations of English phonological diphthongs than speakers of British English (BrE) do, as measured by trajectory length in F1-F2 space. Phonetically, most of these vowels can be considered monophthongs. The results can be explained through two factors at work during the foundation phase of NigE: (1) historical L1 influence and (2) the native English input present in the country, which involved more monophthongal realisations of some phonological diphthongs than in present-day BrE.

This chapter discusses past and present methods, theories and questions in the study of the phonology of English. The first section explores reasons why English phonology is relevant, on a practical and social level as well as on a theoretical level. After a brief review of historical developments in the study of English phonology, the main part of the chapter discusses current trends and approaches, especially the use of acoustic phonetics to address phonological questions. Key areas of debate and future developments that are addressed include how both phonological research and language teaching deal with variation in varieties of English. The final section explores future developments, specifically, how technological change might influence research practices in English phonology and the viability of intelligibility as a goal in language teaching.

Both diphthongization and metaphony per se, and the interaction between the two, are among the most investigated topics in Romance historical linguistics. In this paper, I suggest that the two do not originally belong together, in the sense that a) the so-called Romance diphthongization, which affected PRom /ɛ ɔ/ in most Romance languages, was not originally sensitive to the quality of the final unstressed vowel; and b) the different types of metaphony observed across (Italo-)Romance, often involving diphthongi-zation, are most economically explained as changes which all first arose as assimilatory raising, not as diphthongization. These data provide an interesting case study in what one might call the division of labor of phonetics and (morpho)phonology for the explanation of sound change. In this connection, experimental phonetic evidence from Southern Italian dialects will prove crucial.

This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one's native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.

This book addresses the question whether Educated Indian English is more syllable-timed than British English from two standpoints: production and perception. Many post-colonial varieties of English, which are mostly spoken as a second language in countries such as India, Nigeria and the Philippines, are thought to have a syllable-timed rhythm, whereas first language varieties such as British English are characterized as being stress-timed. While previous studies mostly relied on a single acoustic correlate of speech rhythm, usually duration, the author proposes a multidimensional approach to the production of speech rhythm that takes into account various acoustic correlates. The results reveal that the two varieties differ with regard to a number of dimensions, such as duration, sonority, intensity, loudness, pitch and glottal stop insertion. The second part of the study addresses the question whether the difference in speech rhythm between Indian and British English is perceptually relevant, based on intelligibility and dialect discrimination experiments. The results reveal that speakers generally find the rhythm of their own variety more intelligible and that listeners can identify which variety a speaker is using on the basis of differences in speech rhythm.

One of the central issues in contemporary phonetics is that of coarticulation. Speech segments do not and cannot occur isolated in real speech. As elements of a multisegmental utterance in continuous speech, all segments have neighbors which exert a certain degree of influence upon them. The vast array of articulatory adaptations that occurs as a result of the influence of one phonetic structure on another is what constitutes coarticulation in its broadest sense. Because of its ubiquitous nature in continuous speech, coarticulation has been and continues to be a central research area in experimental and theoretical articulatory phonetics. Naturally then, any integral theory or model of speech production, and to a lesser degree speech perception, must account for coarticulation. In this chapter we provide a general introduction to coarticulation, to the techniques used to measure it, and to the major theoretical and experimental contributions in explaining the nature and principles that govern it. Depending on the theoretical approach, the definition and scope of coarticulation may vary significantly, thus we aim to review and assess some of the more influential models of coarticulation, which constitute a fundamental part of contemporary phonetics. Theories and models of coarticulation also have significant consequences on phonological theory, especially the phonology-phonetics interface. Modelling coarticulation is central to understanding how the categorical, timeless and context-independent units suggested by phonology and the gradual, dynamic and context- dependent characteristics of continuous speech are related to each other. Therefore, in this chapter we also explore the place of coarticulation in the phonology/phonetics dichotomy, relating coarticulation to what may in essence be viewed as its phonological counterpart – assimilation.

During the last few years, experimental phonetics has shed light on the majority of the uncharted areas of the universe of the allophones of the Spanish language. However, the middle and prepalatal point of articulation are still far from being clear for the academic world due to the doubts risen over the allophones of the palatal fricative phoneme. In the present work, we carried out an acustic analysis of the various allophones of the Greek voiced palatal fricative produced by monolingual Spanish or bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers. The limited presence of voiced midpalatal fricatives aparently proves the marginality of midpalatal fricative allophones against the preemince of spirant aproximant and semivocalic sounds.

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
"

Recordings for acoustic research should ideally be made in a lossless format. However, in some cases pre-existing data may be available in a lossy format such as mp3, prompting the question in how far this compromises the accuracy of acoustic measurements. In order to determine whether this is the case, we compressed 10 recordings of read speech in different compression rates (16-320 kbps), and reconverted them to wav in order to examine the effect of compression on commonly used suprasegmental measures of fundamental frequency (f0), pitch range and level. Results suggest that at compression rates between 56 and 320 kbps, measures of f0 and most measures of pitch range and level remain reliable, with mean errors below 2% and often better than that. The skewness of the distribution of f0 measurements , however, shows much greater measurement errors, with mean errors of 6.9%-7.6% at compression rates between 96 kbps and 320 kbps, and 44.8% at 16 kbps. We conclude that mp3 compressed recordings can be subjected to the acoustic measurements tested here. Nevertheless, the indeterminacy added by mp3 compression needs to be taken into account when interpreting measurements.

The study investigated the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 Cantonese-English bilinguals. The analysis of their production accuracy and modification strategies found an asymmetry in onset and coda productions, a lack of vowel epenthesis, reduction clusters to unmarked syllable structure, English-accented initial /ʃ/, /v/, and postvocalic /l/, and varied repair strategies. Such patterns are collectively caused by syllable complexity and language transfer, but influence from L2 seems to be the more salient one.

Since scientists’ individual epistemological preferences infallibly shape the output of their research, this thesis starts with a presentation of the author’s position with respect to a number of methodological issues pertaining to the field of contemporary phonetics. Such concepts as corpora, experimental techniques, quantitative methods, and the role of technology are discussed with the aim of making the author’s scientific values and biases more explicit. The following chapters offer a selection of research works the author has carried out since his PhD in 2008. They show an evolution from corpus-based acoustic phonetics to more experimental protocols involving a great diversity of instruments and data types. From the automatic classification and acoustic-articulatory description of British Isles accents to the development of the gradient phonemicity hypothesis; from the study of speech rhythm to psycholinguistic experiments with French learners of English, the thesis covers the main findings and highlights how this wide array of interests and methods has served two consistent goals: an agnostic approach to new puzzles, and the possibility to efficiently help students develop their own scientific identity. The final part of the thesis addresses the forthcoming paradigm shift that deep learning will bring about in many academic fields with illustrations from the author’s recent work.

The objective of this paper is to critically review previous studies on the consequences of speaking more than one language on language processing and to draw useful implications for languages in education policy of Ethiopia. More than one hundred research and review articles from authoritative sources have been thoroughly reviewed, by focusing on cognitive control in bilingual and multilingual speakers. The results of the review indicate that the findings of the existent research are not consistent and thus the debate in favor of or against bilingual or multilingual advantages over monolingualism in cognitive control has continued. Focusing on points of convergence of the majority of the research reports and avoiding the temptation to get into the debate is the wisdom followed in the course of the review. The early view that speaking more one language is detrimental to cognitive functions or a useless mental exercise has been not supported by strong empirical evidence. Researchers generally accept that bilingual and multilingual speakers employ cognitive control to use one of their languages, by managing interference from the other(s). Cognitive control is more enhanced and effective in early acquirers, proficient speakers, and persistent users of all languages. A bilingual experience in cognitive control is by far more useful than a monolingual experience in multilingual cognitive functions. Multilingual processing is the most complex and demanding mental activity, which recruits more brain regions and involves more spatially distributed activations. The studies reviewed suggest that sequentially learning new languages gives children the most optimal condition to enjoy acquiring or learning multiple languages. Consequently, the relative roles languages play in academic and occupational settings, and the level of proficiency such settings require should be seriously considered in the sequence and timing of the languages to be learned.

В данной работе описаны основные вехи истории науки tajweed, описана фонетика арабского языка, произведены экспериментальное исследование и анализ некоторых явлений различных стилей (murattal и mujawwad) Коранической рецитации на примере отдельных записей высокочтимого чтеца Махмуд Халиль аль-Хусари.

W artykule opisano wyniki badań, dotyczące automatycznego rozpoznawania mowy zaburzonej. Badania przeprowadzono dla kilku polskich fonemów sprawiających największe problemy dzieciom z wadami wymowy. Zbadano trzy rodzaje współczynników cepstralnych: standardowe (CC), mel-cepstralne MFCC oraz współczynniki HFCC jako cechy sygnału mowy. Jako klasyfikatorów użyto klasycznego algorytmu nieliniowej transformacji czasowej (ang. Dynamic Time Warping) oraz średniego wektora cech. Zastosowanie cech HFCC wpłynęło na znaczącą poprawę wyników rozpoznawania. Przebadano szeroki zakres wartości parametrów w procesie obliczania HFCC w celu znalezienia ich optymalnych wartości dla różnych zadań rozpoznawania.

A reconstruction of the history of the Institute of the Live Word (Institut Zhivogo Slova, IZhS), as well as The Laboratory for the Study of Literary Speech (Kabinet po izucheniiu khudozhestvennogo iazyka, KIKhR) at the Institute of Art History reveals little known aspects of the early phase of Russian Formalism by foregrounding the importance of kinesthetic experience of articulation for the literary analyses of OPOIaZ scholars associated with these research centers. Their emphasis on the physical sensations evoked by the pronunciation of literary texts ties back the questions of aesthetics to nuances of human perception, which is a rather surprising position for a theoretical school known for insisting on understanding the intrinsic properties of literary texts without a recourse to the author.

This paper has two aims: (1) To contribute to the discussion on what the acoustic correlates of stress and accent in English are, a question on which there is currently no universal agreement; (2) To determine whether vowels in function words receive less stress than similarly unstressed vowels in content words. To this purpose, the study analyses 614 occurrences of the lax high front vowel /I/ in read speech produced by 10 male speakers of Standard Southern British English. 14 different acoustic features are investigated. Results indicate that (1) there are two acoustic correlates of accent (duration and f0 slope), four acoustic correlates of stress (spectral balance/tilt, intensity/loudness, amplitude of voicing (H1) and amplitude of the first harmonic (A1)), three acoustic correlates of prominence in general (F1, H1-A2 and H1-A3), and four acoustic features that appear to be unrelated to the expression of accent, stress or prominence (F2, HNR, glottal leakage (B1) and the open quotient (H1-H2)). Regarding question (2), there is also limited evidence that British English function words might be less prominent than unstressed syllables in content words.

"The aim of the experiment described in this paper was to devise and test a procedure that would allow identification of a phoneme on the basis of only tongue-to-palate and labial (EPGL) contacts that accompanied its realization in continuous read speech. The hypothesis underlying this study was that the articulatory correlates of the phonemic distinctive features, despite the unstable character of these correlates in comparison to acoustic realisations, can be induced statistically from dimensionality-reduced EPGL data. Most phoneme recognition studies so far have used posterior probabilities of symbolic articulatory features rather than physical data as observations in their classifiers and none has used EPG as the only source of data.
        The system used to obtain EPGL data was the CompleteSpeech Palatometer (CompleteSpeech 2013). The system was used on a single subject, a 24-year-old female speaker of General American, reading sentences that used specific phonemes at the same frequency they appear in English (see Section 3) plus the alphabet and numerals. The recordings were segmented and annotated with phoneme labels using Penn Forced Aligner (Jiahong and Liberman 2008). The EPGL information was transformed into a set of linguistically meaningful and computationally manageable parameters – dimensionality reduction indices (DRI) using modified techniques developed by Hardcastle et al. (1991). 11 DRI’s were calculated for each EPGL matrix: the number of electrode activations in the alveolar (ALV), palatal (PAL) and velar regions (VEL), total number of contacts (TOT), centre of gravity (COG), posterior centre of gravity (POS), anterior centre of gravity (ANT), laterality (LAT), asymmetry (ASY), frication (FRI) and labiality (LAB).
        Two classification methods were used to predict the phonemic category of each token based on its EPGL parameters: forward-selection linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and a probabilistic neural network (PNN). Better classification results were obtained by PNN model (32.1%). LDA made it possible to establish which DRI’s had a significant influence on the classification result in the decreasing order of the influence: VEL TOT PAL ALV FRI POS BIL ASY COG LAT ANT. Average pair-wise phoneme LDA classification rate was 88.2%.

Table of pair-wise phoneme classifications by means of LDA: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/~krynicki/pub/apap/"

The article reports the commencement of the process of change of the syllable pattern in Polish, consisting in the syllabification of liquid sonorants in some contexts in less sono-rous segmental environment (in final clusters with an obstruent in the first position). A short pilot study was conducted, in which the pronunciation of the word wiatr 'wind' was analysed. Keywords syllable pattern, syllabic liquids. Streszczenie Wymowa wygłosowych grup spółgłoskowych typu-tr w języku polskim. Artykuł rejestruje rozpoczęcie procesu zmiany struktury sylabicznej w języku polskim. Zmianę tę zwiastują pojawiające się sylabifikacje sonantów płynnych w niektórych kontekstach, gdzie so-nanty występują w mniej sonornym otoczeniu (po obstruencie w wygłosowych grupach spółgłoskowych). Artykuł przedstawia wyniki krótkiego badania sondażowego, w którym przeanalizo-wano wymowę wyrazu wiatr. Słowa kluczowe struktura sylaby, sylabiczne sonanty płynne.

In the paper recently proposed Human Factor Cepstral Coefficients (HFCC) are used to automatic recognition of pathological phoneme pronunciation in speech of impaired children and efficiency of this approach is compared to application of the standard Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) as a feature vector. Both dynamic time warping (DTW), working on whole words or embedded phoneme patterns, and hidden Markov models (HMM) are used as classifiers in the presented research. Obtained results demonstrate superiority of combining HFCC features and modified phoneme-based DTW classifier.

Abstract Vowels are traditionally described according to three articulatory dimensions: height, frontness and rounding. Despite the linguistic importance of vowel height in many languages, there is still disagreement about its physiological implementation and its acoustic consequences. One area of controversy is whether the jaw or the tongue dorsum is the main contributor to this linguistic distinction. In American English, height is highly contrastive, distinguishing five front and five back vowels in most dialects.

Статья посвящена практически неизученному вопросу: анализу интонации двух основных коммуникативных типов интонации – повествования и вопроса – в египетском диалекте арабского языка с использованием методов экспериментальной фонетики и последующего дисперсионного анализа данных. В арабском языке классификатором вопроса и повествования может служить интонационный контур фразы, причём наибольший вклад вносит конечная часть фразы, а начальный участок фразы в этом отношении иррелевантен. Средний уровень повышения тона в вопросительном предложении по методу наименьших квадратов составил примерно 37 положительных единиц, а понижения тона в утвердительном предложении — около 30 отрицательных единиц.

In this paper, the perception of the /æ/-/ɛ/ vowel continuum was analysed in British and United States English speakers by testing their perception of the pan-pen continuum in a word identification task. A clear difference was found between the two speaker groups, with the U.S. speakers continuing to perceive ‘pan’ beyond the British speakers, presumably due to /æ/-tensing in U.S. dialects, particularly before nasal codas (Labov et al., 2006). It was found that the amount of /æ/-tensing across phonetic environments in a U.S. speaker’s dialect as well as their exposure to British English affected how they perceived the continuum. The results prove Bell Berti’s (et al., 1979) argument that speech production and perception are closely related, and the steep drop in perception from ‘pan’ to ‘pen’ displayed by both speaker groups may prove that vowel perception is categorical, in contrast to popular opinion (Fry et al., 1962), though a discrimination task would have to be run before any reliable claim can be made.

Understanding the development of spoken language in young children has become increasingly important for advancing basic theories of language acquisition and for clinical practice. However, such a goal requires refined measurements of speech articulation (e.g., from the tongue), which are difficult to obtain from young children. In recent years though, technological advances have allowed developmental researchers to make significant steps in that direction. For instance, movements of the tongue, an articulator that is essential for spoken language, can now be tracked and recorded in children with ultrasound imaging. This technique has opened novel research avenues in (a)typical language acquisition, enabling researchers to reliably capture what has long remained invisible in the speech of young children. Within this context, we have designed an experimental platform for the recording and the processing of kinematic data: SOLLAR (Sonographic and Optical Linguo-Labial Articulatory Recording system). The method has been tailored for children, but it is suitable for adults. In the present article, we introduce the recording environment developed to record over 100 children and 30 adults within SOLLAR. We then describe SOLLAR’s data processing framework, providing examples of data visualization and a summary of strengths and limitations