Journal of Phonetics最新文献

{"title":"Constraints on articulation rate: utterance length, age, and gender across North American and British Isles Englishes","authors":"James Tanner,&nbsp;Morgan Sonderegger,&nbsp;Jane Stuart-Smith,&nbsp;Tyler Kendall,&nbsp;Jeff Mielke,&nbsp;Robin Dodsworth,&nbsp;Erik Thomas","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101533","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101533","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines how articulation rate is structured across a large and heterogeneous set of English varieties with respect to both speech production constraints and social factors. Through Bayesian distributional regression modelling of articulation rate mean and variance across 33 varieties of British and North American English drawn from 16 spontaneous speech corpora collected as part of the SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project, we observe that the within-speaker utterance length effect on articulation rate (whereby longer utterances are produced at a faster rate and with less between-utterance variance) is large and broadly consistent across varieties. Specifically, the effect on mean rate exhibits modest variability across varieties, and between-utterance variance shows high cross-variety consistency. Small but consistent effects of speaker gender and age on articulation rate are observed across all varieties in both size and direction, and neither effect can be attributed to differences in the length of utterances, indicating that the source of these social differences lies outside of any systematic variability in utterance length. These findings across 33 hetereogeneous varieties show that the constraints imposed by utterance length on articulation rate are largely invariant across the regional and stylistic diversity of naturally-occurring English speech, while social factors exert consistent, independent influences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"118 ","pages":"Article 101533"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148935164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Corrigendum to “Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Intonation” [J. Phonet. 114C (2026) 101459]","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101532","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101532","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"118 ","pages":"Article 101532"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148854115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Intonation","authors":"Amalia Arvaniti,&nbsp;Martine Grice,&nbsp;Mariapaola D’Imperio","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101531","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101531","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intonation, the linguistic use of voice pitch, is critical for acquisition, phonetic organization at the phrasal level and subsequent speech processing. By indicating syntactic constituency and encoding information structure and conversational implicatures, intonation is not only crucial for communication, but also for understanding grammatical phenomena such as information structure and syntax. Nevertheless, existing research has not always done justice to the roles that intonation plays in grammar, acquisition, and communication. Here, we first present an overview of what intonation is (and what it is not), and briefly discuss the essential tenets of the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology, currently the most influential and widely used approach to intonation. We critically review the standard methods of conducting intonation research within AM and present newer methodologies developed in response to shortcomings of the standard methods. We conclude by reviewing potential changes to AM in light of the findings stemming from these newer methods, followed by suggestions for future research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"118 ","pages":"Article 101531"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148854116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bidialectal experience affects cue weighting in Mandarin tone perception among older adults","authors":"Qianwen Jin,&nbsp;Wanting Shang,&nbsp;Yang Li,&nbsp;Wencui Liu,&nbsp;Xiaohu Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101515","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101515","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>It has been observed that older listeners reweight acoustic cues to compensate for age-related sensory decline in speech perception. However, whether the compensation in cue weighting is modulated by lifelong bidialectal experience, a phenomenon found in many older individuals, remains unclear. The present study investigated how bidialectal experience affects Standard Mandarin tone perception among older adults in Shanghai. We compared younger and older Shanghainese-Mandarin bidialectals with monodialectal Mandarin speakers across two experiments. Experiment 1 examined the effects of dialect experience on age-related tone perceptual patterns. Results showed that for older bidialectals, D2-Mandarin tone perception was more resistant to aging than D1-Shanghainese. However, they underperformed monodialectal peers in Mandarin tone identification, indicating potential dialect-specific cue compensatory mechanisms. Experiment 2 further tested this in two tasks by manipulating the acoustic cues (i.e., pitch contour and duration) to create a series of synthetic continua parametrically modeled after the Mandarin T2-T3 contrast. In the phonemic identification task, the older bidialectals showed greater reliance on pitch contours but were less affected by duration cues than the monodialectal group. However, this group difference disappeared in the non-phonemic identification task. Taken together, these findings indicate that lifelong experience with cue weighting in one’s native dialect exerts a top-down influence on tone perception in a second dialect in older adulthood.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 101515"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148582467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Acoustic representations of different dimensions of the gendered self. An analysis of nonbinary and cisgender speakers","authors":"Leah Nieber,&nbsp;Sven Kachel,&nbsp;Mathias Scharinger","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101512","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101512","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When representing relations of gender and speech, there is a long tradition of conceiving gender as a binary construct (women vs. men). Although there is a growing interest in acoustic gender markers beyond the mere difference between female and male speech, the complex interrelations between acoustic markers and the different dimensions of the gendered self (e.g., gender identity, gender socialization) are not yet fully disentangled. Within-group variation due to gender-role self-concept further complicates the picture. We therefore acoustically analyzed semi-spontaneous speech of cis female (<em>n</em> = 17), cis male (<em>n</em> = 17), and nonbinary speakers (<em>n</em> = 18) and collected data of multiple gender dimensions (gender identity, gender assigned at birth, gender-role self-concept, gender socialization). Our exploratory factor analysis revealed that for these groups, the measures of the acoustic analysis can be subsumed into three factors, which relate to source and filter information (SourceFilter), to high spectral energy distribution (HighSpectrum), and to voice quality parameters (VoiceQuality). For the factor SourceFilter, nonbinary speakers showed broader distributions than both cis groups, for the factor HighSpectrum a more flexible use and a departure from <em>cis</em>-normative speech patterns. Every gender dimension is acoustically represented in the voices and speech patterns of this sample but not all dimensions in the same way. Also, different dimensions of the gendered self are highly correlated, which emphasizes the difficulty of exact assignments of individual acoustic markers to individual gender dimensions. However, by combining several acoustic markers and different dimensions of the gendered self, the present study extends previous knowledge on the complex interrelations of voice and gender. This interaction is of broad relevance for sociophonetic research and serves as a foundation for future studies, e.g., on voice gender perception and processing of acoustic representations of gender. The results also provide further evidence for theories of more nuanced speaker voice representations beyond the gender binary.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 101512"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148582466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How does coarticulation play a role at the end of a sound change? A dynamic-acoustic study of historical ł-vocalization in the Polish film chronicle (1944–1994)","authors":"Juliusz Cęcelewski,&nbsp;Jane Stuart-Smith,&nbsp;Cédric Gendrot","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101513","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101513","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study presents a real-time acoustic-dynamic analysis of ł-vocalisation in Polish newsreel speech broadcast between 1944 and 1994. Using a 150,000-token dataset, we examined three phonetic variants—[ł], [Ł] (reduced velarised lateral), and [w]—in postconsonantal onset (C/V), intervocalic onset (V/V), and postvocalic coda (V/C) positions, across three recording periods. We measured F2-F1 trajectories as a proxy for acoustic darkness, modelled using Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) as a function of time, adjacent phonetic context, lexical stress, sequence duration, and lexical frequency. Results confirm a diachronic shift from the initial [ł, Ł, w] system to a reduced [(Ł), w] system, with the change progressing fastest in V/C position and latest in C/V position, with V/V position showing signs of an earlier merger of phonetic variants than in C/V position. Across all positions, darker variants were favoured adjacent to /ɔ, u/, while the influence of adjacent consonants proved more Polish-specific, with labial and velar consonants not yielding darker lateral realisations, contrary to findings from prior English-language studies. Our findings demonstrate that, in the lenition of [ł] at its very late stages through to completion, the sound change continues to be shaped by the position of the segment within the syllable, but without being driven by the coarticulatory factors that typically initiate earlier stages, namely the influence of the adjacent segment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 101513"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148554173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tone, stress, quantity, and quality: prosodic patterns and tonal wug-tests in Žiri Slovenian","authors":"Gašper Beguš,&nbsp;Peter Jurgec","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101482","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101482","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we report on the prosodic system of Žiri Slovenian, which displays an intricate set of interactions between tone, stress, quantity, and vowel quality. The prosodic restrictions are complex, exceeding the patterns observed in most other pitch-accented languages. Some of the patterns are well-motivated (e.g. the preference of High tone syllables to be stressed; the requirement for long vowels to have High tone) while others lack phonetic or phonological motivation (e.g. the requirement of long vowels to be footed). Žiri also displays a rare case of interaction of prosody with vowel quality: long [ɛɛ] must always be stressed and prefers the High tone on the second mora, which is not the case for any other vowel. To confirm the productivity of the observed patterns, we conduct a tonal wug experiment that tests the dependence of stress on vowel quality, word length, and tone. This paper brings forth a new instance of a phonetically unmotivated phonological process at the suprasegmental level, which appears to be less discussed than at the segmental level. We also discuss methodological issues arising from artificial experiments on tonal processes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 101482"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148554174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The effects of menopause on voice onset time in Spanish Plosives","authors":"Filipa M.B. Lã,&nbsp;Nuria Polo,&nbsp;Inigo Urrestarazu-Porta,&nbsp;Pluvio J. Coronado","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101514","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101514","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Voice onset time (VOT) is a well-known temporal aspect of speech production that is affected by a person’s language, age and sex. However, knowledge on the effects of female reproductive hormones on VOT is still scarce, especially concerning menopause, a biological developmental stage when reproductive endocrinological profiles change significantly. The present investigation compares VOT for voiced and voiceless consonants between pre- (n = 25) and postmenopausal (n = 27) Spanish speakers who are professional voice users with and without voice training, i.e., singers and schoolteachers, respectively. Clinical examinations, hormonal samples and audio recordings were carried out. The latter included carrier sentences containing three pairs of Spanish plosives (/b-p/; /d-t/; /g-k/) in an initial position of a word, followed by the vowel /a/. A principal component analysis and a subsequent hierarchical clustering analysis on principal components were both carried out to confirm correct allocation of participants into pre- and postmenopausal groups. High concentrations of pituitary hormones and low concentrations of androgens and progesterone defined hormonal clustering, confirming post-menopause and explaining 60 % of data variation. A Bayesian hierarchical beta regression distribution model was fitted to the data. For the postmenopausal group, a higher probability for a greater proportion of VOT was found, especially for consonants /b/ and /g/. One may conclude that females’ reproductive hormonal profiles influence VOT at menopause, an effect that seems to precede effects of ageing. Possible implications on work-related performance of singers and schoolteachers are discussed.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 101514"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148582531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Speaking rate effects on Japanese vowel and consonant length contrasts","authors":"Hironori Katsuda,&nbsp;Yoonjung Kang","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101473","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101473","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the sensitivity of vowels and consonants to speaking rate variations in both production and perception, using Japanese as a case study. In contrast to prior studies, which suggest that vowels are more responsive to speaking rate changes than consonants in production, our results indicate a more nuanced distinction between vowels and stops versus fricatives and nasals, with the former group exhibiting greater sensitivity to speaking rate changes. Furthermore, this production pattern was also generally reflected, though to a lesser extent, in the perception results. These findings point to the need for further research into factors such as the presence or absence of length distinctions, language-specific prosodic and rhythmic characteristics, and the relationship between the ratios of long to short segments and slow to fast speaking rates.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 101473"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146174678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Context-dependent coupling and dissociation between speech production and perception in Mandarin tones","authors":"Xiaojuan Zhang ,&nbsp;Bing Cheng ,&nbsp;Yang Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101485","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101485","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The mechanisms linking speech production and perception remain underspecified, particularly in how segmental and suprasegmental features are processed across different contextual variations. This study investigated whether perceptual cue weighting could be predicted by distributional reliability of acoustic cues in production, focusing on the Mandarin Tone 2–Tone 3 contrast across both gradient coarticulatory (T1, T2, T4) and categorical T3 sandhi contexts. We quantified production distributional reliability using the Bhattacharyya coefficient and assessed perceptual cue weighting through relative weight analysis. Bayesian mixed-effects modeling showed strong evidence for context-dependent acoustic distributions in production and cue weighting in perception. Critically, production–perception coupling emerged selectively. In gradient contexts, higher production reliability strongly predicted perceptual weighting, with robust correlations for critical cues in the T2 and T4 contexts, though this pattern was less evident in the T1 context. No such coupling was observed for secondary cues across contexts. In contrast, in the categorical T3 sandhi context, production statistics did not predict perceptual weights. These findings reveal a context-sensitive production–perception relationship: tightly coupled in gradient coarticulatory contexts, but dissociated in categorical rule-governed environments. This pattern suggests that tone processing involves a dynamic interplay between bottom-up sensitivity to statistical regularities and top-down phonological constraints, rather than relying on a uniform statistical mapping mechanism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 101485"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146174748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}