Journal of PhoneticsPub Date : 2023-03-17eCollection Date: 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/awf.2023.27
Michael W Brunt, Daniel M Weary
{"title":"Perceptions of laboratory animal veterinarians regarding institutional transparency.","authors":"Michael W Brunt, Daniel M Weary","doi":"10.1017/awf.2023.27","DOIUrl":"10.1017/awf.2023.27","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Institutions using animals for research typically have a veterinarian who is responsible for the veterinary care programme and compliance with regulatory obligations. These veterinarians operate at the interface between the institution's animal research programme and senior management. Veterinarians have strong public trust and are well positioned to share information about animals used for scientific purposes, but their perspectives on sharing information with the public are not well documented and their perceptions of transparency may influence how institutional policies are developed and applied. The objective of our study was to analyse the perceptions of institutional transparency among laboratory animal veterinarians working at different universities. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were used to describe perceptions of 16 attending veterinarians relating to animal research transparency. Three themes were drawn from the interviews: (i) reflections on transparency; (ii) reflections on culture; and (iii) reflections on self. Veterinarians reflected on their personal priorities regarding transparency and when combined with barriers to change within the institutions, sometimes resulted in reported inaction. For example, sometimes veterinarians chose not to pursue available opportunities for change at seemingly willing universities, while others had their initiatives for change blocked by more senior administrators. The sharing of information regarding the animals used for scientific purposes varied in how it was conceptualised by attending veterinarians: (i) true transparency; communication of information for the sake of openness; (ii) strategic transparency; attempt to educate people about animal research because then they will support it; (iii) agenda-driven transparency; selective release of positive stories to direct public opinion; and (iv) fearful non-transparency; not communicating any information for fear of negative opposition to animal research. Transparency was not perceived as an institutional priority by many of the veterinarians and a cohesive action plan to increase transparency that involves multiple universities was identified as a promising avenue to overcome existing barriers.</p>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"10 1","pages":"e32"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10936364/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77894212","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}
Yizhou Wang , Rikke L. Bundgaard-Nielsen , Brett J. Baker , Olga Maxwell
{"title":"Same vowels but different contrasts: Mandarin listeners’ perception of English /ei/-/iː/ in unfamiliar phonotactic contexts","authors":"Yizhou Wang , Rikke L. Bundgaard-Nielsen , Brett J. Baker , Olga Maxwell","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101221","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The study presented here examines how adult L2 listeners’ L1 phonotactics interferes with L2 vowel perception in different consonantal contexts. We examined Mandarin listeners’ perception of the English /ei/-/iː/ vowel contrast in three onset consonantal contexts, /p f w/, which represent different phonotactic scenarios with respect to the permissibility of Mandarin phonology. L1 Mandarin listeners (<em>N</em> = 42) completed a series of three tasks: a categorisation task, a vowel identification task, and an AXB discrimination task. The results show that English /ei/-/iː/ are perceived as highly contrastive in the /p/ context because both /pei/ and /piː/ constitute a licit sequence in Mandarin phonology. However, participants experience substantial /ei/-/iː/ category confusion in the /f/ and /w/ contexts, where Mandarin listeners repair perceptually by modifying the vowel quality in illicit (unattested) consonant–vowel sequences, i.e., */fiː/ → /fei/ and */wiː/ → /wei/. Further exploratory analyses indicate that L2 listeners’ vowel perception in unfamiliar phonotactic contexts is associated with their target language experience, typically indicated by their L2 vocabulary size. The findings thus suggest that the acquisition of novel phonotactic regularities is tied to increased experience with the L2 lexicon.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101221"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816842","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}
Gerrit Kentner , Isabelle Franz , Christine A. Knoop , Winfried Menninghaus
{"title":"The final lengthening of pre-boundary syllables turns into final shortening as boundary strength levels increase","authors":"Gerrit Kentner , Isabelle Franz , Christine A. Knoop , Winfried Menninghaus","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101225","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Phrase-final syllable duration and pauses are generally considered to be positively correlated: The stronger the boundary, the longer the duration of phrase-final syllables, and the more likely or longer a pause. Exploring a large sample of complex literary prose texts read aloud, we examined pause likelihood and duration, pre-boundary syllable duration, and the pitch excursion at prosodic boundaries. Comparing these features across six predicted levels of boundary strength (level 0: no break; 1: simple phrase break; 2: short comma phrase break; 3: long comma phrase break; 4: sentence boundary; 5: direct speech boundary), we find that they are not correlated in a simple monotonic fashion. Whereas pause duration monotonically increases with boundary strength, both pre-boundary syllable duration and the pitch excursion on the pre-boundary syllable are largest for level-2 breaks and decrease significantly through levels 3 to 5. Our analysis suggests that pre-boundary syllable duration is partly contingent on the tonal realization, which is subject to f0 declination as the utterance progresses. We also surmise that pre-boundary syllable duration reflects differences in planning complexity for the different prosodic and syntactic boundaries. Overall, this study shows that a simple monotonic correlation between pause duration and pre-boundary syllable duration is not valid.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816845","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":"Prosodic marking of information status in Italian","authors":"Simona Sbranna, Caterina Ventura, Aviad Albert, Martine Grice","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101212","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Previous studies on the prosodic marking of information status argue that Italian tends to resist deaccentuation of given elements. In particular, Italian reportedly always accents post-focal given information within noun phrases (NPs), so that it is not possible to reliably reconstruct the information status of the items from the acoustic signal. However, descriptions have so far been concerned with categorical accent patterns, lacking crucial information about continuous phonetic parameters and their distribution in the utterance in ways that can contribute to prosodic marking. In this paper, we use a novel approach based on periodic-energy-related measures to explore how speakers of the Neapolitan variety of Italian modulate continuous prosodic parameters to differentiate information structure. We show that, contrary to previous findings, Italian speakers of the Neapolitan variety do mark information status prosodically within noun phrases. The discrepancy with previous work is explained by the fact that the prosodic marking of post-focal givenness is not achieved through the categorical presence or absence of a pitch accent on one specific syllable, but through the gradual modulation of phonetic parameters at various locations. Moreover, we find that these modulations occur early in the noun phrase. We also show that native speakers can make use of their knowledge of these modulations to reliably identify post-focal given elements in the absence of the pragmatic context, that is, directly from the acoustic signal.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101212"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49864738","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":"Flexibility and stability of speech sounds: The time course of lexically-driven recalibration","authors":"Yi Zheng , Arthur G. Samuel","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101222","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Perceptual stability is obviously advantageous, but being able to adjust to the prevailing environment is also adaptive. Previous research has identified ways in which the categorization of speech sounds shifts as a function of recently heard speech. Dozens of studies have examined “lexically driven recalibration”, an adjustment to categorization after listeners hear a number of words with a particular speech sound designed to be perceptually ambiguous. Despite the large number of these studies, little is known about how long the adjustment endures. Using two different stimulus sets, we assess the recovery time after lexically driven recalibration. In addition, we examine whether the size of the recalibration effect diminishes during the identification test used to measure it, and whether the recalibration effect is stronger for one side of a tested contrast or the other. The effect did in fact decline during its measurement, and one side of the contrast (/s/) produced stronger shifts than others (/ʃ/ or /θ/) under the conditions typically examined in recalibration studies. Recalibration was quite robust after 24 hours for both stimulus sets, and still measurable after one week for one of them. This time course is strikingly different than the recovery times reported in previous studies for two other adjustment processes – selective adaptation and audiovisually driven recalibration. The vastly different time courses pose a major challenge for models that ascribe these phenomena to the same adjustment function. Thus, such models will need to be substantially modified, or alternative models will need to be developed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101222"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816843","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}
Luis M.T. Jesus , Sara Castilho , Aníbal Ferreira , Maria Conceição Costa
{"title":"Discriminative segmental cues to vowel height and consonantal place and voicing in whispered speech","authors":"Luis M.T. Jesus , Sara Castilho , Aníbal Ferreira , Maria Conceição Costa","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101223","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Purpose</h3><p>The acoustic signal attributes of whispered speech potentially carry sufficiently distinct information to define vowel spaces and to disambiguate consonant place and voicing, but what these attributes are and the underlying production mechanisms are not fully known. The purpose of this study was to define segmental cues to place and voicing of vowels and sibilant fricatives and to develop an articulatory interpretation of acoustic data.</p></div><div><h3>Method</h3><p>Seventeen speakers produced sustained sibilants and oral vowels, disyllabic words, sentences and read a phonetically balanced text. All the tasks were repeated in voiced and whispered speech, and the sound source and filter analysed using the following parameters: Fundamental frequency, spectral peak frequencies and levels, spectral slopes, sound pressure level and durations. Logistic linear mixed-effects models were developed to understand what acoustic signal attributes carry sufficiently distinct information to disambiguate /i, a/ and /s, ʃ/.</p></div><div><h3>Results</h3><p>Vowels were produced with significantly different spectral slope, sound pressure level, first and second formant frequencies in voiced and whispered speech. The low frequencies spectral slope of voiced sibilants was significantly different between whispered and voiced speech. The odds of choosing /a/ instead of /i/ were estimated to be lower for whispered speech when compared to voiced speech. Fricatives’ broad peak frequency was statistically significant when discriminating between /s/ and /ʃ/.</p></div><div><h3>Conclusions</h3><p>First formant frequency and relative duration of vowels are consistently used as height cues, and spectral slope and broad peak frequency are attributes associated with consonantal place of articulation. The relative duration of same-place voiceless fricatives was higher than voiced fricatives both in voiced and whispered speech. The evidence presented in this paper can be used to restore voiced speech signals, and to inform rehabilitation strategies that can safely explore the production mechanisms of whispering.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101223"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816846","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":"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices","authors":"Valerie Freeman","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101213","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101213","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Vowel merger production is quantified with gradient acoustic measures, while phonemic perception methods are often coarser, complicating comparisons within mergers in progress. This study implements a perception experiment in two-dimensional formant space (F1 × F2), allowing unified plotting, quantification, and statistics with production data. Production and perception are compared within 20 speakers for a two-part prevelar merger in progress in Pacific Northwest English, where mid-front /ɛ, e/ approximate or merge before voiced velar /ɡ/ (<span>leg–vague</span> merger), and low-front prevelar /æɡ/ raises toward them (<span>bag-</span>raising). Distributions are visualized with kernel density plots and overlap quantified with Pillai scores and confusion matrices from linear discriminant analysis models. Results suggest that <span>leg–vague</span> merger is perceived as more complete than it is produced (in both the sample and community), while <span>bag-</span>raising is highly variable in production but rejected in perception. Relationships between production and perception varied by age, with raising and merger progressing across two generations in production but not perception, followed by younger adults perceiving <span>leg–vague</span> merger but not producing it and varying in (minimal) raising perception while varying in <span>bag</span>-raising in production. Thus, prevelar raising/merger may be progressing among some social groups but reversing in others.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101213"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9879351/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10576296","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":"Speakers coarticulate less in response to both real and imagined communicative challenges: An acoustic analysis of the LUCID corpus","authors":"Zhe-chen Guo, Rajka Smiljanic","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101210","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Overlap of adjacent articulatory gestures leads to coarticulation. Understanding how hyperarticulated intelligibility-enhancing clear speech modifications affect coarticulation can inform theories of phonetic variation and speech intelligibility. However, prior research yielded mixed findings regarding the relationship between hyperarticulation and coarticulatory patterns. This study extends previous work by analyzing the degree of coarticulation across several different communicative conditions in the LUCID corpus (<span>Baker & Hazan, 2010</span>). Southern British English speakers completed an interactive spot-the-difference task with a partner with and without a communicative barrier (e.g., speech degraded by talker babble). They also read sentences without an interlocutor casually and clearly. Diphones in keywords produced in both tasks were analyzed using two whole-spectrum measures, with greater spectral distance and shorter coarticulatory overlap between the diphones indexing less coarticulation. Results revealed that speakers coarticulated less in response to both real (interactive task) and imaginary (sentence-reading) communicative challenges. Speakers furthermore varied the degree of coarticulatory resistance in different real communicative barriers. Diphones with greater consonant articulatory constraint were less sensitive to differences between the conditions, suggesting a limit to the hyperarticulation-induced phonetic variation. The findings agree with the models of targeted speaker adaptations assuming coarticulatory resistance in hyperarticulated clear speech (the H&H theory: <span>Lindblom, 1990</span>).</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101210"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816840","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}
Vincent Hughes , Amanda Cardoso , Paul Foulkes , Peter French , Amelia Gully , Philip Harrison
{"title":"Speaker-specificity in speech production: The contribution of source and filter","authors":"Vincent Hughes , Amanda Cardoso , Paul Foulkes , Peter French , Amelia Gully , Philip Harrison","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101224","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study examines the extent to which speaker-specific information is encoded in different features of vocal output and the relationships between those features. A range of acoustic features, grouped as source (laryngeal voice quality measures and fundamental frequency) and filter features (formants and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients; MFCCs), were extracted from the vocalic portion of the hesitation marker <em>um</em> for 90 male speakers of Standard Southern British English. Little overall correlation between the sets of features was observed, suggesting no strong interdependence between source and filter in our data. Although filter features were consistently better at discriminating between same- and different-speaker pairs compared with source features, combining source and filter has the potential of producing the lowest error rates and the strongest speaker discrimination scores. Taken together, results show that source and filter provide complementary speaker-specific information. However, the extent of the improvements in speaker discrimination performance when combining source and filter varied across speakers. We explore potential explanations for this finding and discuss the implications for source-filter theory, and for applied fields such as speaker recognition and forensic speech science.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 101224"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49816844","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}
Anita Lorenc , Marzena Żygis , Łukasz Mik , Daniel Pape , Márton Sóskuthy
{"title":"Articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflexes compared with plain ones","authors":"Anita Lorenc , Marzena Żygis , Łukasz Mik , Daniel Pape , Márton Sóskuthy","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101181","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The present paper investigates articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflex sibilants compared with their plain counterparts. It tests the hypothesis advanced by Hamann (2003: 44) that palatalised retroflexes are non-existent and that retroflexes in Polish change to palato-alveolars [ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ] when being palatalised. Based on articulatory data from 20 speakers we provide evidence that at least part of the data (53.5%) are palatalised retroflexes [ʂʲ ʐʲ ʈ͡ʂʲ ɖ͡ʐʲ]. The plain counterparts are shown to be retroflex, as proposed by Hamann (2003).</p><p>Our averaged results indicate that both palatalised and plain retroflexes show a convex tongue shape. However, individual data reveals a wide range of realisations, from a bunched dorsum to flat and even hollowed tongue shapes. Taking this variability into account, we propose a new tongue shape classification based on Heron’s Formula – i.e. concave, slightly concave, flat, convex and slightly convex. The different tongue shapes are also visualised in the form of videos created using GAMMs.</p><p>Regarding acoustic results, our analysis reveals that the strongest correlate of palatalised retroflex sibilants is longer duration of frication in palatalised sibilants followed by higher Centre of Gravity (COG) and m1 spectral slope.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 101181"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49754776","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}