PhoneticaPub Date : 2025-01-20DOI: 10.1515/phon-2024-0032
Lư Giang Đinh, Marc Brunelle, Thành Tấn Tạ
{"title":"Relating production and perception in two Raglai dialects at different stages of registrogenesis.","authors":"Lư Giang Đinh, Marc Brunelle, Thành Tấn Tạ","doi":"10.1515/phon-2024-0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2024-0032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores the perception of two diachronically related and mutually intelligible phonological oppositions, the onset voicing contrast of Northern Raglai and the register contrast of Southern Raglai. It is the continuation of a previous acoustic study that revealed that Northern Raglai onset stops maintain a voicing distinction accompanied by weak formant and voice quality modulations on following vowels, while Southern Raglai has transphonologized this voicing contrast into a register contrast marked by vowel and voice quality distinctions. Our findings indicate that the two dialects partially differ in their use of identification cues, Northern Raglai listeners using both voicing and F1 as major cues while Southern Raglai listeners largely focus on F1. Production and perception are thus not perfectly aligned in Northern Raglai, because F1 plays a stronger role in perception than production in this dialect. We conclude that mutual intelligibility between dialects is possible because they both use F1 for identification.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143016669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2025-01-07DOI: 10.1515/phon-2024-0023
Marc Brunelle, Lư Giang Đinh, Thành Tấn Tạ
{"title":"Redundant voicing and register in Mnong Râlâm.","authors":"Marc Brunelle, Lư Giang Đinh, Thành Tấn Tạ","doi":"10.1515/phon-2024-0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2024-0023","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Mnong Râlâm is a South Bahnaric language (Austroasiatic) that is traditionally described as preserving a voicing contrast in onset obstruents, contrary to other languages of the Mnong/Phnong continuum. Acoustic results yield evidence that this voicing distinction is less robust than previously suggested and is redundant with a register contrast realized on following vowels through modulations of F1 at vowel onset (and more limited variations of F2 and voice quality). A perception experiment also shows that F1 weighs heavier than closure voicing in identification. The existence of a language in which voicing and register are redundant allows us to revisit previous models of registrogenesis. It suggests that the acoustic properties of register may develop and become distinctive while voicing is still present rather than as a direct consequence of devoicing. The unexpected discovery of register in Mnong Râlâm also challenges previous reconstructions of Proto-South-Bahnaric, in which only voicing is postulated, based on hitherto limited available descriptive materials.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142933663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-11-18DOI: 10.1515/phon-2024-2002
Oliver Niebuhr
{"title":"Books available for review.","authors":"Oliver Niebuhr","doi":"10.1515/phon-2024-2002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2024-2002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142683745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-10-02DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0017
Daniel Duran, Peter Auer
{"title":"The vowel space of multiethnolectal (Stuttgart) German.","authors":"Daniel Duran, Peter Auer","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2023-0017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The emergence of multiethnolects, i.e. specific speaking styles or varieties associated with second and third generation speakers from immigrant backgrounds, has been observed and studied in several major cities in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The multiethnolect that is the focus of this study is one such variety of colloquial German. Most previous research on multiethnolectal German has focused on grammatical features. This paper reports on the first comprehensive study of the vowel system (vowel quality and global vowel space size) of multiethnolectal German, based on data from Stuttgart. The results show that the vowel space of multiethnolectal speakers is in generally more centralized than that of a comparison group. A more detailed analysis reveals that the linguistic background plays an important role, as speakers with a Turkish or South Slavonic language background are responsible for this effect.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142367649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-09-16Print Date: 2024-10-28DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0023
Shuwen Chen, Douglas H Whalen, Peggy Pik Ki Mok
{"title":"What R Mandarin Chinese /ɹ/s? - acoustic and articulatory features of Mandarin Chinese rhotics.","authors":"Shuwen Chen, Douglas H Whalen, Peggy Pik Ki Mok","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0023","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0023","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rhotic sounds are well known for their considerable phonetic variation within and across languages and their complexity in speech production. Although rhotics in many languages have been examined and documented, the phonetic features of Mandarin rhotics remain unclear, and debates about the prevocalic rhotic (the syllable-onset rhotic) persist. This paper extends the investigation of rhotic sounds by examining the articulatory and acoustic features of Mandarin Chinese rhotics in prevocalic, syllabic (the rhotacized vowel [ɚ]), and postvocalic (r-suffix) positions. Eighteen speakers from Northern China were recorded using ultrasound imaging. Results showed that Mandarin syllabic and postvocalic rhotics can be articulated with various tongue shapes, including tongue-tip-up retroflex and tongue-tip-down bunched shapes. Different tongue shapes have no significant acoustic differences in the first three formants, demonstrating a many-to-one articulation-acoustics relationship. The prevocalic rhotics in our data were found to be articulated only with bunched tongue shapes, and were sometimes produced with frication noise at the start. In general, rhotics in all syllable positions are characterized by a close F2 and F3, though the prevocalic rhotic has a higher F2 and F3 than the syllabic and postvocalic rhotics. The effects of syllable position and vowel context are also discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"509-552"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11449382/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142301710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-06-13Print Date: 2024-08-27DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0049
Huichao Bi, Samad Zare, Rong Yan
{"title":"The development of English language connected speech perception skills: an empirical study on Chinese EFL children.","authors":"Huichao Bi, Samad Zare, Rong Yan","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0049","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0049","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Connected speech processes (CSPs) occur randomly in everyday conversations of native speakers; however, such phonological variations can bring about challenges for non-native listeners. Looking at CSP literature, there seems to be very few studies that involved young foreign language learners. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the development of connected speech perception skills by focusing on 201 9- to 12-year-old Chinese EFL children. It also incorporated systematic error analysis to further probe into the specific perceptual difficulties. The results indicate that: (1) Despite a significantly ascending trend for the overall growth of perception skills, no significant differences were found between 11 and 12 year olds in elision and contraction, which suggests that the developmental trend varied depending on different CSP types; (2) Although random errors decreased with age, the number of lexicon and syntax errors gradually increased, and the distribution of perceptual errors shifted from the level of words and syllables to that of phonemes; (3) The primary types of errors resulting in the perception difficulties for elision and contraction were consonant errors, grammatical errors and morphology errors. Ergo, this study enhances the understanding of connected speech perception among EFL children and provides some implications for EFL/ESL listening instructions.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"421-443"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141312394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-02-27Print Date: 2024-04-25DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0029
Joshua Penney, Felicity Cox, Andy Gibson
{"title":"Hiatus resolution and linguistic diversity in Australian English.","authors":"Joshua Penney, Felicity Cox, Andy Gibson","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0029","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0029","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Vowel hiatus is typically resolved in Australian English through complementary strategies of liaison (j-gliding/w-gliding/linking-r) and glottalisation. Previous work suggests a change in progress towards increased use of glottalisation as an optimal hiatus-breaker, which creates syntagmatic contrast between adjacent vowels, particularly when the right-edge vowel is strong (i.e. at the foot boundary). Liaison continues to be used when right-edge vowels are weak, but glottalisation as a hiatus resolution strategy in general appears to be increasing and may be more common in speakers from non-English speaking backgrounds raising the question of whether exposure to linguistic diversity could be driving the change. We examine hiatus resolution in speakers from neighbourhoods that vary according to levels of language diversity. We elicited gliding and linking-r hiatus contexts to determine how prosodic strength of flanking vowels and speakers' exposure to linguistic diversity affect hiatus resolution. Results confirm that glottalisation occurs most frequently with strong right-edge vowels, and gliding/linking-r are more likely with weak right-edge vowels. However, strategies differ between gliding and linking-r contexts, suggesting differing implementation mechanisms. In addition, speakers from ethnolinguistically diverse areas produce increased glottalisation in all contexts supporting the idea that change to the hiatus resolution system may be driven by language contact.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"119-152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139974752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-02-19Print Date: 2024-06-25DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0011
Yanjiao Zhu, Jiehui Hu
{"title":"The effects of watching subtitled videos on the perception of L2 connected speech by L1 Chinese-L2 English speakers.","authors":"Yanjiao Zhu, Jiehui Hu","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0011","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0011","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The current study explores whether watching subtitled videos could facilitate L1 Chinese-L2 English speakers' perception of L2 English connected speech. Three hundred ninty seven Chinese college students of L2 English completed a video-based spot dictation task after watching English videos with or without L1/L2 subtitles, featuring various connected speech types (e.g., linking, deletion, and their combinations). Results suggested an overall facilitation effect of watching videos on L2 connected speech perception, which was modulated by proficiency, subtitle form, and the complexity of connected speech. First, subtitled videos were more facilitative than non-subtitled videos in L2 perception. Second, participants with higher L2 proficiency better perceived English connected speech than those with lower proficiency. Third, the more connective devices an item used, the more difficult it was for L2 perception. When this complexity was controlled, the L2 perception was not influenced by connected speech type. Finally, the complexity of connected speech also mediated the subtitle facilitation effects. When the connected speech involved triple connective devices, L2 speakers benefited more from L1 subtitles than L2 subtitles. The findings can provide insights into multi-modal speech perception and English connected speech learning.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"351-379"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139742785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2024-02-15Print Date: 2024-04-25DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0013
Wael Almurashi, Jalal Al-Tamimi, Ghada Khattab
{"title":"Dynamic specification of vowels in Hijazi Arabic.","authors":"Wael Almurashi, Jalal Al-Tamimi, Ghada Khattab","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0013","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0013","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research on various languages shows that dynamic approaches to vowel acoustics - in particular Vowel-Inherent Spectral Change (VISC) - can play a vital role in characterising and classifying monophthongal vowels compared with a static model. This study's aim was to investigate whether dynamic cues also allow for better description and classification of the Hijazi Arabic (HA) vowel system, a phonological system based on both temporal and spectral distinctions. Along with static and dynamic F1 and F2 patterns, we evaluated the extent to which vowel duration, F0, and F3 contribute to increased/decreased discriminability among vowels. Data were collected from 20 native HA speakers (10 females and 10 males) producing eight HA monophthongal vowels in a word list with varied consonantal contexts. Results showed that dynamic cues provide further insights regarding HA vowels that are not normally gleaned from static measures alone. Using discriminant analysis, the dynamic cues (particularly the seven-point model) had relatively higher classification rates, and vowel duration was found to play a significant role as an additional cue. Our results are in line with dynamic approaches and highlight the importance of looking beyond static cues and beyond the first two formants for further insights into the description and classification of vowel systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"185-220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139736849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
PhoneticaPub Date : 2023-12-14Print Date: 2024-04-25DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0012
Julia Muschalik, Gero Kunter
{"title":"Do letters matter? The influence of spelling on acoustic duration.","authors":"Julia Muschalik, Gero Kunter","doi":"10.1515/phon-2023-0012","DOIUrl":"10.1515/phon-2023-0012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present article describes a modified and extended replication of a corpus study by Brewer (2008. <i>Phonetic reflexes of orthographic characteristics in lexical representation</i>. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona PhD thesis) which reports differences in the acoustic duration of homophonous but heterographic sounds. The original findings point to a quantity effect of spelling on acoustic duration, i.e., the more letters are used to spell a sound, the longer the sound's duration. Such a finding would have extensive theoretical implications and necessitate more research on how exactly spelling would come to influence speech production. However, the effects found by Brewer (2008) did not consistently reach statistical significance and the analysis did not include many of the covariates which are known by now to influence segment duration, rendering the robustness of the results at least questionable. Employing a more nuanced operationalization of graphemic units and a more advanced statistical analysis, the current replication fails to find the reported effect of letter quantity. Instead, we find an effect of graphemic complexity. Speakers realize consonants that do not have a visible graphemic correlate with shorter durations: the /s/ in <i>tux</i> is shorter that the /s/ in <i>fuss</i>. The effect presumably resembles orthographic visibility effects found in perception. In addition, our results highlight the need for a more rigorous approach to replicability in linguistics.</p>","PeriodicalId":55608,"journal":{"name":"Phonetica","volume":" ","pages":"221-264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138812060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}