{"title":"Expanding the gestural model of lexical tone: evidence from two dialects of Serbian","authors":"Robin Karlin","doi":"10.31234/osf.io/ztf9a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ztf9a","url":null,"abstract":"Featural and gestural models of tone differ on the degree to which they include timing information in the representation. However, both assume some kind of simultaneity between tones and their tone-bearing units, where featural models emphasize the role of acoustic relationships and gestural models instead emphasize articulatory coordination. We present the results of two acoustic production studies on two dialects of Serbian, a lexical pitch accent language. In the Belgrade dialect, pitch accents are aligned relatively late in the tone-bearing unit, while in the Valjevo dialect, pitch accents are phonetically retracted, sometimes into the preceding syllable. We varied the syllable onsets of tone-bearing units in falling (experiment 1) and rising (experiment 2) pitch accents, and measured the effects on F0 contours. Despite these differences in phonetic alignment, the phonological system is the same in both dialects. We argue that this apparent mismatch between the phonology and phonetics can be expressed straightforwardly in the Articulatory Phonology framework by allowing tone gestures to coordinate with other gestures in all the ways that segmental gestures can, rather than restricting tone to c-center coordination.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46706645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Locating de-lateralization in the pathway of sound changes affecting coda /l/","authors":"Patrycja Strycharczuk, D. Derrick, Jason A. Shaw","doi":"10.5334/labphon.236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.236","url":null,"abstract":"‘Vocalization’ is a label commonly used to describe an ongoing change in progress affecting coda /l/ in multiple accents of English. The label is directly linked to the loss of consonantal constriction observed in this process, but it also implicitly signals a specific type of change affecting manner of articulation from consonant to vowel, which involves loss of tongue lateralization, the defining property of lateral sounds. In this study, we consider two potential diachronic pathways of change: an abrupt loss of lateralization which follows from the loss of apical constriction, versus slower gradual loss of lateralization that tracks the articulatory changes to the dorsal component of /l/. We present articulatory data from seven speakers of New Zealand English, acquired using a combination of midsagittal and lateral EMA, as well as midsagittal ultrasound. Different stages of sound change are reconstructed through synchronic variation between light, dark, and vocalized /l/, induced by systematic manipulation of the segmental and morphosyntactic environment, and complemented by comparison of different individual articulatory strategies. Our data show a systematic reduction in lateralization that is conditioned by increasing degrees of /l/-darkening and /l/-vocalization. This observation supports the idea of a gradual diachronic shift and the following pathway of change: /l/-darkening, driven by the dorsal gesture, precipitates some loss of lateralization, which is followed by loss of the apical gesture. This pathway indicates that loss of lateralization is an integral component in the changes in manner of articulation of /l/ from consonantal to vocalic.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48660544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foxes, deer, and hedgehogs: The recall of focus alternatives in Vietnamese","authors":"Annika Tjuka, Huong Thi Thu Nguyen, K. Spalek","doi":"10.5334/labphon.253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.253","url":null,"abstract":"In tonal languages, the role of intonation in information-structuring has yet to be fully investigated. Intuitively, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies with Vietnamese native speakers show that intonation contours vary across different contexts and are used to mark certain types of information, for example, focus (Jannedy, 2007). In non-tonal languages (e.g., English), the marking of focus by intonation can influence the processing of focus alternatives (Fraundorf, Watson, & Benjamin, 2010). If Vietnamese also uses intonation to mark focus, the question arises whether the behavioral consequences of prosodic focus marking in Vietnamese are comparable to languages such as English or German. To test this, we replicate a study on memory for focus alternatives, originally carried out in German (Koch & Spalek, in progress), with Vietnamese language stimuli. In the original study, memory for focus alternatives was improved in a delayed recall task for focused elements produced with contrastive intonation in female speakers. Here, we replicate this finding with Northern Vietnamese native speakers: Contrastive intonation seems to improve later recall for focus alternatives in Northern Vietnamese, but only for female participants, in line with the findings by Koch and Spalek (in progress). These results indicate that prosodic focus marking in Vietnamese makes alternatives to the focused element more salient.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2020-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45701747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Carignan, P. Hoole, E. Kunay, M. Pouplier, Arun A. Joseph, Dirk Voit, J. Frahm, J. Harrington
{"title":"Analyzing speech in both time and space: Generalized additive mixed models can uncover systematic patterns of variation in vocal tract shape in real-time MRI","authors":"C. Carignan, P. Hoole, E. Kunay, M. Pouplier, Arun A. Joseph, Dirk Voit, J. Frahm, J. Harrington","doi":"10.5334/labphon.214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.214","url":null,"abstract":"We present a method of using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to analyze midsagittal vocal tract data obtained from real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) video of speech production. Applied to rt-MRI data, GAMMs allow for observation of factor effects on vocal tract shape throughout two key dimensions: time (vocal tract change over the temporal course of a speech segment) and space (location of change within the vocal tract). Examples of this method are provided for rt-MRI data collected at a temporal resolution of 20 ms and a spatial resolution of 1.41 mm, for 36 native speakers of German. The rt-MRI data were quantified as 28-point semi-polar-grid aperture functions. Three test cases are provided as a way of observing vocal tract differences between: (1) /aː/ and /iː/, (2) /aː/ and /aɪ/, and (3) accentuated and unstressed /aː/. The results for each GAMM are independently validated using functional linear mixed models (FLMMs) constructed from data obtained at 20% and 80% of the vowel interval. In each case, the two methods yield similar results. In light of the method similarities, we propose that GAMMs are a robust, powerful, and interpretable method of simultaneously analyzing both temporal and spatial effects in rt-MRI video of speech.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70691259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ΔF method of vocal tract length normalization for vowels","authors":"Keith Johnson","doi":"10.5334/labphon.196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.196","url":null,"abstract":"Given the acoustic consequences of physiological differences between talkers, there is a practical need for effective and theoretically motivated procedures of vowel normalization to facilitate comparison of speech produced by people who differ by dialect or language. In addition, there is a question whether listeners might utilize a normalization procedure during speech perception. This paper reports the results of two studies that explore these questions—with particular focus on vocal tract length normalization. Drawing on research in speech engineering, where accurate estimates of vocal tract length are needed in some approaches to automatic speech recognition and speaker verification, a new model of vowel normalization is introduced. The model uses a direct measure of average formant spacing (the ΔF) which can be used to measure vocal tract length. The acoustic consequences of vocal tract length differences are removed from vowel measurements by scaling vowel formant measurements by ΔF. Study 1 found that this method is comparable to Nearey’s (1978) uniform normalization method, while providing an explicit vocal tract length interpretation, and a rationalized unit of measure. Study 2 found that uniform normalization measures (which let each formant serve as a noisy estimator of ΔF) improve vowel classification even with only a couple of randomly selected vowel tokens. This suggests that vocal tract length normalization could be involved in speech perception.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138506020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The interplay of information structure, semantics, prosody, and word ordering in Spanish intransitives","authors":"S. Calhoun, E. L. Cruz, Ana Olssen","doi":"10.5334/LABPHON.65","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/LABPHON.65","url":null,"abstract":"A production experiment was run to examine how information structure and verbal semantics affect word ordering and nuclear stress placement in intransitive sentences in Venezuelan Spanish. Unaccusative verbs in Spanish are said to be more likely to be subject final (VS order) than unergative verbs, while in languages like English, this is marked with stress shift (i.e., Sv, caps show the nuclear stress). It has long been contended, however, that the semantic factors underlying split intransitivity actually affect information structure, rather than syntax directly. If so, then the effect of verbal semantics on word ordering/nuclear stress placement should be able to be overridden by information structure. Venezuelan Spanish speakers described pictures using a printed unaccusative or unergative verb in response to a question manipulating the information structure type of the subject, i.e., broad focus, theme, QUD-focus, or contrastive focus. Results showed that QUD- and contrastively focused subjects were more likely to carry nuclear stress. Subject stress was also more likely for unaccusatives, but this effect was weaker. Overall stress shift was much more frequent than subject final placement, with neither information structure type nor verb type affecting the likelihood of either response type. These results raise challenges for standard assumptions about the relationship between information structure and unaccusativity, and between final subject placement and stress shift.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2018-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49162394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Online perception of glottalized coda stops in American English","authors":"Adam J. Chong, M. Garellek","doi":"10.5334/LABPHON.70","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/LABPHON.70","url":null,"abstract":"In American English, voiceless codas /t/ and /p/ are often glottalized: They have glottal constriction that results in creaky voice on the preceding vowel. Previous claims suggest that such glottalization can serve to enhance /t/ or, more generally, voicelessness of coda stops. In this study, we examine the timecourse of word recognition to test whether glottalization facilitates the perception of words ending in voiceless /t/ and /p/, which is expected if glottalization is in fact enhancing. Sixty American English listeners participated in an eye-tracking study, where they heard resynthesized glottalized and non-glottalized versions of CVC English words ending in /p, t, b, d/ while looking at a display with two words presented orthographically. Target words were presented with a minimal pair differing in place of articulation (e.g., cop-cot), or voicing, (e.g., bat-bad, cap-cab). Although there is little evidence that glottalization facilitates recognition of words ending in /t/ or /p/, there is a strong inhibitory effect: Words ending in voiced stops are recognized more slowly and poorly when the preceding vowel was glottalized. These findings lend little support to a listener-driven, enhancement-based explanation for the occurrence of coda glottalization in American English. On the other hand, they suggest that glottalized instances of coda /t/ and /p/, but not of coda /d/ and /b/, are perceived as equally good variants of these sounds.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2018-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49460055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Duration, vowel quality, and the rhythmic pattern of English","authors":"Anya Lunden","doi":"10.5334/LABPHON.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/LABPHON.37","url":null,"abstract":"Languages with binary stress systems frequently tolerate a stress lapse over the final two syllables, but almost none tolerate a word-initial stress lapse. Lunden (to appear) argues that this lapse asymmetry can be explained by the presence of word-level final lengthening, which can then create the perception of prominence alternation in languages that use duration as stress correlate. The results of a production and a perception study with English speakers are presented which compare /ɑ/s that occur under stress lapse to /ɑ/s in non-stress-lapse positions. While word-final unstressed /ɑ/ is always longer than non-final unstressed /ɑ/, it is significantly longer when immediately following an unstressed syllable. Similarly, unstressed word-final /ɑ/ has a higher F1 and lower F2 than non-final unstressed /ɑ/, but word-finally this less-reduced vowel is closer to a full vowel when the final syllable is part of a stress lapse. The perception study finds that these differences have perceptual consequences that can lead to a perceived continued rhythm in stress lapse. The phonetic differences explain why a word-final unstressed vowel can be perceived as relatively strong when following an unstressed syllable but as relatively weak when following a stressed syllable.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2017-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44605912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of sentence types: Evidence from European Portuguese varieties","authors":"Marisa Cruz, M. Swerts, Sónia Frota","doi":"10.5334/LABPHON.110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/LABPHON.110","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we explore the role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of statements and questions in two varieties of European Portuguese—the standard (SEP) and the insular variety of Azores, Ponta Delgada (PtD)—previously shown to convey sentence type contrasts by different uses of intonational means and/or facial gestures, namely eyebrow movements. Forty native speakers (20 from each variety) were exposed to SEP and PtD stimuli in a perception task with three conditions (audio only, video only, and audiovisual). The audiovisual condition includes congruent and incongruent (both original and manipulated) stimuli, where there is either a match or a mismatch between the auditory and visual features as potential cues for a specific sentence type. We concluded that both SEP and PtD participants rely more on intonation than on eyebrow movement to identify sentence types, even when exposed to incongruent audiovisual stimuli. In the absence of audio information, unexpectedly, participants do not interpret eyebrow raising as a question marker, not even when perceiving stimuli from their native variety. When exposed to non-native audiovisual stimuli, both SEP and PtD participants present longer reaction times (RTs), especially for incongruent stimuli. Finally, although we confirm the strength of intonation over visual cues, RTs in the audiovisual condition are significantly shorter than in the audio condition, thus pointing to the relevance of visual cues for structural/linguistic marking.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2017-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44218096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Individual differences and patterns of convergence in prosody perception","authors":"Joseph Roy, J. Cole, Tim Mahrt","doi":"10.5334/LABPHON.108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/LABPHON.108","url":null,"abstract":"The challenge of prosodic annotation is reflected in commonly reported variability among trained annotators in the assignment of prosodic labels. The present study examines individual differences in the perception of prosody through the lens of prosodic annotation. First, Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) reveal the non-linear pattern of some acoustic cues on the perception of prosodic features. Second, these same models reveal that while some of the untrained annotators are using these cues to determine prosodic features, the magnitude of effect differs quite dramatically across the annotators. Finally, the trained annotators follow the same cues as subsets of the untrained annotators, but present a much stronger effect for many of the cues. The findings show that while prosody perception is systemically related to acoustic and contextual cues, there are also individual differences that are limited to the selection and magnitude of the factors that influence prosodic rating, and the relative weighting among those factors.","PeriodicalId":45128,"journal":{"name":"Laboratory Phonology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2017-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44007878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}