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This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners’ phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners’ ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners’ productive usage of such non-native distinctions.

The identification of English consonants in quiet and multi-talker babble was examined for three groups of young adult listeners: Chinese in China, Chinese in the USA (CNU), and English-native listeners. As expected, native listeners outperformed non-native listeners. The two non-native groups had similar performance in quiet, whereas CNU listeners performed significantly better than Chinese in China listeners in babble. It is concluded that CNU listeners may benefit from English experience, for example, better use of temporal variation in noise and better capacity against informational masking, to perceive English consonants better in babble. Possible explanations regarding the differential noise effect on the three groups are discussed.

Both segmental and suprasegmental properties of the South Kyungsang dialect of Korean have changed under the influence of standard Seoul Korean. This study examines how such sound change affects acoustic cues to the three-way laryngeal contrast among Korean stops across Kyungsang generations through a comparison with Seoul Korean. Thirty-nine female Korean speakers differing in dialect (Kyungsang, Seoul) and age (older, younger) produced words varying in initial stops and lexical accent patterns, for which voice onset time and fundamental frequency (F0) at vowel onset were measured. This study first confirms previous findings regarding age and dialectal variation in distinguishing the three Korean stops. In addition, we report age variation in the use of voice onset time and F0 for the stops in Kyungsang Korean, with younger speakers using F0 more than older speakers as a cue to the stop distinction. This age variation is accounted for by the reduced lexical tonal properties of Kyungsang Korean and the increased influence of Seoul Korean. A comparison of the specific cue weighting across speaker groups also reveals that younger Kyungsang speakers pattern with Seoul speakers who arguably follow the enhancing F0 role of the innovative younger Seoul speakers. The shared cue weighting pattern across generations and dialects suggests that each speaker group changes the acoustic cue weighting in a similar direction.

Stuttering is a multifactorial disorder that is characterized by disruptions in the forward flow of speech believed to be caused by differences in the motor and linguistic systems. Several psycholinguistic theories of stuttering suggest that delayed or disrupted phonological encoding contributes to stuttered speech. However, phonological encoding remains difficult to measure without controlling for the involvement of the speech-motor system. Eye-tracking is proposed to be a reliable approach for measuring phonological encoding duration while controlling for the influence of speech production. Eighteen adults who stutter and 18 adults who do not stutter read nonwords under silent and overt conditions. Eye-tracking was used to measure dwell time, number of fixations, and response time. Adults who stutter demonstrated significantly more fixations and longer dwell times during overt reading than adults who do not stutter. In the silent condition, the adults who stutter produced more fixations on the nonwords than adults who do not stutter, but dwell-time differences were not found. Overt production may have resulted in additional requirements at the phonological and phonetic levels of encoding for adults who stutter. Direct measurement of eye-gaze fixation and dwell time suggests that adults who stutter require additional processing that could potentially delay or interfere with phonological-to-motor encoding.

Recent studies have provided evidence for both a positive and a negative effect of orthography on second language speech learning. However, not much is known about whether orthography can trigger a McGurk-like effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976) in second language speech learning. This study examined whether exposure to auditory and orthographic input may lead to a McGurk-like effect in naïve English-speaking participants learning a second language with Spanish phonology and orthography. Specifically, it reports on (a) production of non-target-like combinations such as [lj] as in [poljo] for -[pojo], where the auditory Spanish [j] and the first language English [l] that correspond to the shared digraph are integrated, and (b) fusion quantified in terms of [z] devoicing such as [z̥apito] for -[zapito]. Moreover, the effects of (a) type of grapheme-to-sound correspondence, (b) position in the word, and (c) condition of training and testing were examined. Participants were assigned to four groups: (a) auditory only, (b) orthography at training and production, (c) orthography at training, and (d) orthography at production. The positions included word-initial and word-medial. The grapheme-to-sound correspondences consisted of -[b], -[δ], -[s] and -[j]. Results were indicative of a McGurk-like effect only for the Spanish digraph . The highest rate of combination productions was attested in the orthography-training condition in the word-medial position.

This paper introduces a conversational speech corpus collected during the completion of a map-matching task that is available for research purposes via the Montclair State University Digital Commons Data Repository. The Montclair Map Task is a new, role-neutral conversational task that involves paired iconic maps with labeled landmarks and a path drawn from a start point, around various landmarks, to a finish mark. One advantage of this task-oriented corpus is the ability to derive independent objective measures of task performance for both members of a conversational pair that can be related to aspects of communicative style. A total of 96 native English speakers completed the task in 16 same-sex female, 16 same-sex male, and 16 mixed-sex pairings. Conversations averaged 32 minutes in duration, yielding approximately 217,000 words. The transcription protocol delineates events such as speaking turns, inter-turn intervals, landmark phrases, fillers, pauses, overlaps, and backchannels, making this corpus a useful tool for investigating dynamics of conversational interaction. Analyses of communication efficacy and efficiency reveal that male pairs of talkers were less efficient than female and mixed-sex pairs with respect to partner map-matching task performance.

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the acoustic characteristics of second language (L2) speech which give rise to the perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from American English and Mandarin Chinese speakers ( n = 16 in each group) studying Japanese. The L2 participants and native speakers ( n = 10) provided speech samples modeling after six short sentences. Segmental (vowels and stops) and prosodic features (rhythm, tone, and fluency) were examined. Native Japanese listeners ( n = 10) rated the samples with regard to degrees of foreign accent. The analyses predicting accent ratings based on the acoustic measurements indicated that one of the prosodic features in particular, tone (defined as high and low patterns of pitch accent and intonation in this study), plays an important role in robustly predicting accent rating in L2 Japanese across the two first language (L1) backgrounds. These results were consistent with the prediction based on phonological and phonetic comparisons between Japanese and English, as well as Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. The results also revealed L1-specific predictors of perceived accent in Japanese. The findings of this study contribute to the growing literature that examines sources of perceived foreign accent.

This work describes a methodology of collecting speech errors from audio recordings and investigates how some of its assumptions affect data quality and composition. Speech errors of all types (sound, lexical, syntactic, etc.) were collected by eight data collectors from audio recordings of unscripted English speech. Analysis of these errors showed that: (i) different listeners find different errors in the same audio recordings, but (ii) the frequencies of error patterns are similar across listeners; (iii) errors collected “online” using on the spot observational techniques are more likely to be affected by perceptual biases than “offline” errors collected from audio recordings; and (iv) datasets built from audio recordings can be explored and extended in a number of ways that traditional corpus studies cannot be.

This study investigated the role of different cognitive abilities—inhibitory control, attention control, phonological short-term memory (PSTM), and acoustic short-term memory (AM)—in second language (L2) vowel learning. The participants were 40 Azerbaijani learners of Standard Southern British English. Their perception of L2 vowels was tested through a perceptual discrimination task before and after five sessions of high-variability phonetic training. Inhibitory control was significantly correlated with gains from training in the discrimination of L2 vowel pairs. However, there were no significant correlations between attention control, AM, PSTM, and gains from training. These findings suggest the potential role of inhibitory control in L2 phonological learning. We suggest that inhibitory control facilitates the processing of L2 sounds by allowing learners to ignore the interfering information from L1 during training, leading to better L2 segmental learning.

Recent work by Chang has shown that even at the very earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition, the phonetic implementation of speakers’ native English phoneme categories is slightly modified by contact with L2 Korean, which is referred to as “phonetic drift.” This study investigates whether rapid phonetic drift generalizes to another pairing of languages. We examined naïve American English learners of French, who were recorded producing both American English and French vowels after one and six weeks of a study abroad program in Paris. In addition, the Study Abroad group is compared with proficient American English L1 speakers of French who have been residents of Paris for at least five years, to investigate the impact of long-term use of an L2 on the vowel categories of L1. Whereas the Study Abroad group showed no evidence of phonetic drift after six weeks, the Paris Residents’ American English vowel space shifted along F1 and several English vowels demonstrated clear movement toward French monolingual norms. A closer look at the high vowels provides insight into how phonetic categories are influenced both by drift and by a pressure to keep vowel categories distinct between the languages. The results are also discussed with respect to potential effects of the size of the vowel inventory and the amount of input required to cause phonetic drift.

This study used the perceptual-migration paradigm to explore whether Mandarin tones and syllable rhymes are processed separately during Mandarin speech perception. Following the logic of illusory conjunctions, we calculated the cross-ear migration of tones, rhymes, and their combination in Chinese and English listeners. For Chinese listeners, tones migrated more than rhymes. For English listeners, the opposite pattern was found. The results lend empirical support to autosegmental theory, which claims separability and mobility between tonal and segmental representations. They also provide evidence that such representations and their involvement in perception are deeply shaped by a listener’s linguistic experience.

We compare the roles of overt accent and default focus marking in processing ellipsis structures headed by focus-sensitive coordinators (such as Danielle couldn’t pass the quiz, let alone the final/Kayla). In a small auditory corpus study of radio transcripts, we establish that such structures overwhelmingly occur with contrastive pitch accents on the correlate and remnant ( the quiz and the final, or Danielle and Kayla), and that there is a strong bias to pair the remnant with the most local plausible correlate in production. In two auditory naturalness ratings experiments, we observe that marking a non-local correlate with contrastive pitch accent moderates, but does not fully overturn, the bias for local correlates in comprehension. We propose that the locality preference is due to a sentence-final default position for sentence accent, and that auditory processing is subject to “enduring focus,” in which default positions for focus continue to influence the focus structure of the sentence even in the presence of overt accents. The importance of these results for models of auditory processing and of the processing of remnants in ellipsis structures is discussed.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of temporal rhythm in native American English talkers and Spanish-accented English talkers producing clear (hyperarticulated) speech and typical, conversational-style speech. Five acoustic measures of comparative vocalic and consonantal interval duration (“temporal metrics”) were obtained from speech samples of 40 adult men and women (half native and half Spanish-accented talkers). In conversational-style speech, vocalic-based metrics differed significantly between native and Spanish-accented talkers, consistent with phonotactic differences between the two native languages. In clear speech, however, all metric values from the Spanish-accented talkers became more English-like and no longer differed significantly from those observed in the native English talkers. Post-hoc analysis revealed that native English talkers increased the duration of both weak and strong vowels in clear speech, whereas the Spanish-accented talkers increased the duration of strong vowels without changing the duration of weak vowels. Listener ease of understanding, as perceived by monolingual English speakers, was significantly improved in clear- compared with conversational-style speech for all talkers. The acoustic data help to explain the changes that result from use of clear speech in nonnative speakers. Together with the improved listener ease of understanding, these data strongly support the further exploration of clear speech as a clinical tool to improve prosody and hence, interpersonal communication, in nonnative speakers.

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant–vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

Listeners weight acoustic cues in speech according to their reliability, but few studies have examined how cue weights change across the lifespan. Previous work has suggested that older adults have deficits in auditory temporal discrimination, which could affect the reliability of temporal phonetic cues, such as voice onset time (VOT), and in turn, impact speech perception in real-world listening environments. We addressed this by examining younger and older adults’ use of VOT and onset F0 (a secondary phonetic cue) for voicing judgments (e.g., /b/ vs. /p/), using both synthetic and naturally produced speech. We found age-related differences in listeners’ use of the two voicing cues, such that older adults relied more heavily on onset F0 than younger adults, even though this cue is less reliable in American English. These results suggest that phonetic cue weights continue to change across the lifespan.

In natural production, adults differentiate homophones prosodically as a function of the frequency of their intended meaning. This study compares adult and child productions of homophones to determine whether prosodic differentiation of homophones changes over development. Using a picture-based story-completion paradigm, isolated tokens of homophones were elicited from English-learning children and adult native English speakers. These tokens were measured for duration, vowel duration, pitch, pitch range, and vowel quality. Results indicate that less frequent meanings of homophones are longer in duration than their more frequent counterparts in both adults and children. No other measurement differed as a function of meaning frequency. As speakers of all ages produce longer tokens of lower frequency homophones, homophone differentiation does not change over development, but is included in children’s early lexicons. These findings indicate that production planning processes alone may not fully account for differences in homophone duration, but rather that the differences could be learned and represented from experience even in the early stages of lexical acquisition.

The present study examines how vulnerable perception of second language prosody is to increased task demands. German learners of Japanese, German non-learners without exposure to Japanese, and Japanese native listeners were tested in their ability to discriminate consonant length contrasts (compared to vowel length contrasts that served as a control condition). Memory load was increased by a longer inter-stimulus interval (2500 ms compared to 300 ms) and the demand on attention control was enhanced through the addition of the acoustic complexity of the stimuli (i.e., through a task-irrelevant pitch fall that occurred simultaneously with a consonant length contrast). The results showed high discrimination abilities, in all groups, when task demands were lowest. With increased task demands, only non-native listeners’ discrimination abilities decreased: non-learners were strongly affected by both increased memory load and higher demand on attention control, while learners were only affected by the latter. The task-irrelevant acoustic complexity of the stimuli had a stronger impact on performance than increased memory load did. The findings suggest that second language learners established novel phonological representations but that the ability to use them could only be applied in the absence of distracting acoustic information. The non-native listeners’ reduced sensitivity under increased task demands explains why even advanced learners still face difficulties in daily listening situations with numerous distractions.

Contains fulltext : 194916.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) In natural conversations, words are generally shorter and they often lack segments. It is unclear to what extent such durational and segmental reductions affect word recognition. The present study investigates to what extent reduction in the initial syllable hinders word comprehension, which types of segments listeners mostly rely on, and whether listeners use word duration as a cue in word recognition. We conducted three experiments in Dutch, in which we adapted the gating paradigm to study the comprehension of spontaneously uttered conversational speech by aligning the gates with the edges of consonant clusters or vowels. Participants heard the context and some segmental and/or durational information from reduced target words with unstressed initial syllables. The initial syllable varied in its degree of reduction, and in half of the stimuli the vowel was not clearly present. Participants gave too short answers if they were only provided with durational information from the target words, which shows that listeners are unaware of the reductions that can occur in spontaneous speech. More importantly, listeners required fewer segments to recognize target words if the vowel in the initial syllable was absent. This result strongly suggests that this vowel hardly plays a role in word comprehension, and that its presence may even delay this process. More important are the consonants and the stressed vowel. 26 p.

This study examines the discrimination of Mandarin vowels and tones by native English speakers with varying amounts of Mandarin experience, aiming to investigate the relative difficulty of these two types of sounds for English speakers at different learning stages, and the source of their difficulty. Seventeen advanced learners of Mandarin (Ex group), eighteen beginning learners (InEx group), and eighteen English speakers naïve to Mandarin (Naïve group) participated in an AXB discrimination task. The stimuli were two Mandarin vowel contrasts, /li–ly/ and /lu–ly/, and two tonal contrasts, T1–T4 and T2–T3. The predicted difficulty for each contrast was hypothesized based on the assimilation of these sounds to English reported in previous work. The results showed that the Naïve group was more accurate with vowel contrasts than with tones, suggesting that non-tonal language speakers without any Mandarin training are less sensitive to tonal distinction than to vowels. The two learner groups, on the other hand, were highly accurate with all contrasts except for the T2–T3 pair, and achieved significantly higher accuracy than the Naïve group on /li–ly/ and T1–T4. This lends support to the view that experience in Mandarin improves English speakers’ sensitivity to tonal distinction, helping them discriminate some tones as accurately as vowels. However, all three groups achieved low accuracy in discriminating T2 and T3, suggesting that this contrast may be inherently difficult and resistant to improvement. This study shows that various factors in addition to the native language experience may affect the perception of non-native vowels and tones.

The perception of the lexical pitch accents was examined in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian. Based on a production study, a categorization of stimuli with manipulated pitch contours was conducted. The experiment tested which acoustic cues (height and alignment of fundamental frequency (F0) minimum, and alignment of F0 maximum and turning point from maximum to minimum) are necessary for the perception of the tonal contrast. The results are consistent with the production findings in that changes in all of the examined acoustic cues contributed to the shift in accent categorization. The later alignment of the main F0 landmarks (F0 maximum, F0 minimum and turning point from maximum to minimum) induced accent 2 identification. Raising F0 minimum height also led to more accent 2 responses. The analysis of the perception patterns furthermore revealed that the effect of a later alignment of F0 minimum was weak unless combined with a later alignment of the other F0 landmarks, or a higher F0 minimum level, all of which contributed to more accent 2 responses. These results indicate that accent 1 is characterized by an early fall, and accent 2 by a salient initial high tone. Implications of these findings for the phonological analysis of the tonal contrasts in the Trøndersk dialect are also discussed.

Certain English intonational contours facilitate a conversational implicature that a relevant alternative to the stated proposition does not hold true. We evaluated how frequently and how quickly naïve participants achieved such pragmatically enriched meanings when their attention had not already been drawn to a set of alternatives. Sentences with L+H* L-H% intonational contours, along with broad focus affirmative and negative counterparts, were tested in a pair of experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that most interpretations of the L+H* L-H% sentences evidenced the expected implicature, but a substantial number did not. Experiment 2 mapped the activation levels across time for the asserted state and a contradictory/implicated alternative for the same three sentence types, using a picture-naming paradigm. The results revealed that lexical negation produced a contrast in activation levels between the two alternatives at an earlier time point than the L+H* L-H% contour, and that the relative activation of the two states shifted over time for L+H* L-H% sentences, such that an intonationally implicated alternative was highly activated at a time point when the activation for the asserted meaning had declined. These results further our understanding of the pragmatic processes involved in the interpretation of negation and intonation.

Three different nuclear pitch accents can be found in Castilian Spanish polar interrogatives. In addition to the ‘canonical’ low-rise pattern, there are two marked interrogative contours featuring high-rise and rise–fall pitch accents. The aim of this paper is to explain how each contour contributes to the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. I argue that this contribution is to be sought at the semantic, not at the pragmatic-illocutionary, attitudinal-level. My proposal is that the low-rise contour is the expression of unspecified sentence polarity (corresponding to the interrogative operator), whereas the two marked contours add indications about the information source—that is, they encode evidential distinctions. The high-rise pattern indicates that the Self is the source of the information; the rise–fall tone indicates that Other is the source. The whole range of pragmatic interpretations that have been described in the literature can be easily accommodated into the present proposal as inferential developments of the encoded meaning together with contextual information. This view has implications for a theory of interrogatives, for the phonology of intonation and for the articulation of the semantics/pragmatics interface.

The current study set out to examine the role of learner motivation in second language (L2) speech learning in English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms. The motivational orientations of 40 first-year university Japanese students were surveyed via a tailored questionnaire and linked to their spontaneous speech development, elicited via a timed picture description task at the onset and end of one academic semester, in terms of perceived comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding) and accentedness (i.e., linguistic nativelikeness). Significant improvement in comprehensibility (but not accentedness) was found among certain individuals. These students likely showed a strong motivation to study English for their future career development as a vague and long-term goal, as well as a high degree of concern for improving comprehensibility, grammatical accuracy and complexity.

Right Dislocation (RD) has been suggested to be a focus marking device carrying an affective function motivated by limited planning time in conversation. The current study investigated the effects of genre type, planning load and affective function on the use of RD in Cantonese monologues. Discourse data were extracted from a recently developed corpus of oral narratives in Cantonese Chinese containing language samples from 144 native Cantonese speakers evenly distributed in age, education levels and gender. Three genre types representing different structures, styles and degrees of topic familiarity were chosen for an RD analysis: procedural description, story-telling and recount of personal event. The results revealed that genre types and planning load influenced the rate of RD occurrence. (1) Specifically, the lowest proportion of RD occurred in procedural description, assumed to be the most structured genre; whereas the highest rate was found in personal event recount, considered to be the most stylized and less structured genre. (2) The highest proportion of RD appeared near the end of a narrative, where heavier cognitive load is demanded compared with the beginning of a narrative; moreover, RD also tended to co-occur with disfluency. (3) There was a high percentage of RD tokens in the personal event recount for expressing explicit emotions; and (4) a lower rate of occurrence of RD was found in monologues than previous studies based on conversations. The overall findings suggest that the use of RD is sensitive to genre structure and style, as well as planning load effects.

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low–high register tone continua—from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)—imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue—loss of breathiness in production—is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors.

Speech convergence is the tendency of talkers to become more similar to someone they are listening or talking to, whether that person is a conversational partner or merely a voice heard repeating words. To elucidate the nature of the mechanisms underlying convergence, this study uses different levels of task difficulty on speech convergence within dyads collaborating on a task. Dyad members had to build identical LEGO® constructions without being able to see each other’s construction, and with each member having half of the instructions required to complete the construction. Three levels of task difficulty were created, with five dyads at each level (30 participants total). Task difficulty was also measured using completion time and error rate. Listeners who heard pairs of utterances from each dyad judged convergence to be occurring in the Easy condition and to a lesser extent in the Medium condition, but not in the Hard condition. Amplitude envelope acoustic similarity analyses of the same utterance pairs showed that convergence occurred in dyads with shorter completion times and lower error rates. Together, these results suggest that while speech convergence is a highly variable behavior, it may occur more in contexts of low cognitive load. The relevance of these results for the current automatic and socially-driven models of convergence is discussed.

Prosody has often been identified alongside syntax as a cue to turn hold or turn transition in conversational interaction. However, evidence for which prosodic cues are most relevant, and how strong those cues are, has been somewhat scattered. The current study addresses prosodic cues to turn transition in Swedish. A perception study looking closely at turn changes and holds in cases where the syntax does not lead inevitably to a particular outcome shows that Swedish listeners are sensitive to duration variations, even in the very short space of the final unstressed syllable of a turn, and that they may use pitch cues to a lesser extent. An investigation of production data indicates that duration, and to some extent segmental reduction, demonstrate consistent variation in relation to the types of turn boundaries they accompany, while fundamental frequency and glottalization do not. Taken together, these data suggest that duration may be the primary cue to turn transition in Swedish conversation, rather than fundamental frequency, as some other studies have suggested.

Musical experience has been demonstrated to play a significant role in the perception of non-native speech contrasts. The present study examined whether or not musical experience facilitated the normalization of speaking rate in the perception of non-native phonemic vowel length contrasts. Native English musicians and non-musicians (as well as native Thai control listeners) completed identification and AX (same–different) discrimination tasks with Thai vowels contrasting in phonemic length at three speaking rates. Results revealed facilitative effects of musical experience in the perception of Thai vowel length categories. Specifically, the English musicians patterned similarly to the native Thai listeners, demonstrating higher accuracy at identifying and discriminating between-category vowel length distinctions than at discriminating within-category durational differences due to speaking rate variations. The English musicians also outperformed non-musicians at between-category vowel length discriminations across speaking rates, indicating musicians’ superiority in perceiving categorical phonemic length differences. These results suggest that musicians’ attunement to rhythmic and temporal information in music transferred to facilitating their ability to normalize contextual quantitative variations (due to speaking rate) and perceive non-native temporal phonemic contrasts.

Typically-developing children, 4 to 6 years of age, and adults participated in discrimination and identification speech perception tasks using a synthetic consonant–vowel continuum ranging from /da/ to /ga/. The seven-step synthetic /da/–/ga/ continuum was created by adjusting the first 40 ms of the third formant frequency transition. For the discrimination task, listeners participated in a Change/No–Change paradigm with four different stimuli compared to the endpoint-1 /da/ token. For the identification task, listeners labeled each token along the /da/–/ga/ continuum as either “DA” or “GA.” Results of the discrimination experiment showed that sensitivity to the third-formant transition cue improved for the adult listeners as the stimulus contrast increased, whereas the performance of the children remained poor across all stimulus comparisons. Results of the identification experiment support previous hypotheses of age-related differences in phonetic categorization. Results have implications for normative data on identification and discrimination tasks. These norms provide a metric against which children with auditory-based speech sound disorders can be compared. Furthermore, the results provide some insight into the developmental nature of categorical and non-categorical speech perception.

We hypothesized that speakers adjust co-articulation in vowel–consonant (VC) sequences in order to provide listeners with enhanced perceptual cues to C, and that they do so specifically in those situations where primary cues to C place of articulation tend to be diminished. We tested this hypothesis in a speech production study of American English, measuring the duration and extent of VC formant transitions in five conditioning environments – consonant voicing, phrasal position, sentence accent, vowel quality, and consonant place – that modulate primary cues to C place in different ways. Results partially support our hypothesis. Although speakers did not exhibit greater temporal co-articulation in contexts that tend to diminish place cues, they did exhibit greater spatial co-articulation. This finding suggests that co-articulation serves specific communicative goals.

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and priming effects between emotion and emotion-laden words, with faster RTs and larger priming effects with emotion words than with emotion-laden words. These findings were consistent across unmasked (Experiment 1) and masked (Experiment 2) versions of a lexical decision task, where participants either explicitly or implicitly processed the prime words of each prime-target word pair. Findings from Experiment 2 have been previously replicated by Kazanas and Altarriba with a Spanish–English bilingual sample, when tested in English, the participants’ functionally dominant language. The current study was designed to extend these previous findings, using a l000-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), which was longer than the 250-ms SOA originally used by Kazanas and Altarriba. Findings from the current study supported the division between emotion and emotion-laden words, as they replicated those previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In addition, the current study determined that negative words were processed significantly slower in this experiment, with a long SOA (replicating findings by Rossell and Nobre).

Previous experiments have demonstrated the impact of speech prosody on syntactic processing. The present study was designed to examine how listeners use specific acoustic properties of prosody for grammatical interpretation. We investigated the independent contributions of two acoustic properties associated with the pitch and rhythmic properties of speech; the fundamental frequency and temporal envelope, respectively. The effect of degrading these prosodic components was examined by testing listeners’ ability to parse early-closure garden-path sentences. A second aim was to investigate how effects of prosody interact with semantic effects of sentence plausibility. Using a task that required both a comprehension and a production response, we were able to determine that degradation of the speech envelope more consistently affects syntactic processing than degradation of the fundamental frequency. These effects are exacerbated in sentences with plausible misinterpretations, showing that prosodic degradation interacts with contextual cues to sentence interpretation.

Previous studies have shown that non-native speakers of Korean not only have difficulty producing the word-initial three-way stop contrast, but also exhibit a wide range of production patterns. Because these studies have only investigated native (L1) speakers of English and Mandarin and given the overall paucity of research on non-native Korean, it is not yet clear how dependent these findings are on the particular native language under investigation. The current paper reinforces our empirical grounding via extension to L1 speakers of Japanese. It is shown that although naïve Japanese listeners consistently perceive Korean fortis stops as voiced, and Korean lenis and aspirated stops as voiceless, novice second language learners do not produce any significant difference among the three stop categories, despite producing clear differences between their native Japanese stop categories. Unlike in previous studies of L1 speakers of English and Mandarin, there was very little inter-speaker variation, and all speakers produced all Korean stops with long lag voice onset time.

Taiwanese tonal alternation is realized in a circular chain shift fashion for both smooth and checked syllables. Debate regarding the processes of less productive Taiwanese tonal alternation has centered on whether a surface tone is derived from an underlying tone, or whether a surface tone is selected without undergoing any derivation. The current study investigates this controversial issue by examining Taiwanese checked tone and smooth tone sandhi neutralization in production. In particular, we analyzed whether checked citation and sandhi tone 53 (C21→C53), checked citation and sandhi tone 21 (C53→C21), smooth citation and sandhi tone 55 (S51→S55), and smooth citation and sandhi tone 21 (S33→S21) are acoustically completely neutralized in fundamental frequency (F0) height, contour, and duration. A non-sandhi exception was also included to evaluate the effect of position-in-word on F0 height and duration given that citation tones always appear in phrase-final position. Any trace of influence from the underlying representation would indicate a computational mechanism, whereas the absence of any trace would suggest a lexical mechanism for the production of Taiwanese tonal alternation. Results did not show any influence of F0 height, F0 contour, or tone duration from the underlying representation for both checked and smooth tones, supporting a lexical mechanism in speech production for less productive tonal alternations.

This study investigates anticipatory vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Arabic, and seeks to determine the degree to which it is affected by the pharyngealization and length of intervening consonants. Speakers of Egyptian Arabic were recorded saying sentences containing nonsense sequences of the form /baɁabaCV:/, where C was chosen from {/t/, /tˤ/, /t:/, /tˤ:/} and V was a long vowel /i:/, /a:/ or /u:/. Analysis of the first and second formants of the recorded vowels revealed that (a) vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects could sometimes extend to a distance of three vowels before the context vowel; (b) the consonant-to-vowel effects associated with pharyngealization were consistently seen at similar distances, while also decreasing in magnitude at greater distances from the triggering consonant; and (c) effects related to intervening consonant length were idiosyncratic, and in particular did not lead to consistent blocking of vowel-to-vowel effects. In contrast, one speaker showed significant vowel-to-vowel effects at all three measured distances that were effectively blocked in the pharyngealized consonant condition. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by a Qatar University grant awarded to Michael Grosvald (QUSG-CAS-DELL-14\15-24). Scopus

Languages vary in the type of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish and Czech noun phrases. The results show that in both languages, focus and givenness are marked prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Like Germanic languages, Polish and Czech patterns show prosodic focus marking in a broad range of contexts and differ in this regard from other fixed-word-stress languages such as French. This suggests that (a) Polish and Czech are similar to Germanic languages and are unlike Romance languages in marking a variety of types of focus prosodically; (b) there is no close correlation between fixed word stress and lack of prosodic focus marking because Polish, which has fixed stress on the penult, shows prosodic focus marking for all types of focus; and (c) there is no straightforward relationship between flexible word order and whether focus and givenness are prosodically marked, contrary to earlier claims, because both Czech and Polish, with their relatively flexible word order, are more similar to English than Romance languages.

Purpose: Voluntary stuttering techniques involve persons who stutter purposefully interjecting disfluencies into their speech. Little research has been conducted on the impact of these techniques on the speech pattern of persons who stutter. The present study examined whether changes in the frequency of voluntary stuttering accompanied changes in stuttering frequency, articulation rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort. Method: In total, 12 persons who stutter aged 16–34 years participated. Participants read four 300-syllable passages during a control condition, and three voluntary stuttering conditions that involved attempting to produce purposeful, tension-free repetitions of initial sounds or syllables of a word for two or more repetitions (i.e., bouncing). The three voluntary stuttering conditions included bouncing on 5%, 10%, and 15% of syllables read. Friedman tests and follow-up Wilcoxon signed ranks tests were conducted for the statistical analyses. Results: Stuttering frequency, articulation rate, and speech naturalness were significantly different between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Speech effort did not differ between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Stuttering frequency was significantly lower during the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition, and speech effort was significantly lower during two of the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition. Conclusions: Due to changes in articulation rate across the voluntary stuttering conditions, it is difficult to conclude, as has been suggested previously, that voluntary stuttering is the reason for stuttering reductions found when using voluntary stuttering techniques. Additionally, future investigations should examine different types of voluntary stuttering over an extended period of time to determine their impact on stuttering frequency, speech rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort.

Catalan, like other Romance languages, has two pairs of phonemic mid vowels (/be/ “well” vs. /bɛ/ “lamb”; /os/ “bear” vs. /ɔs/ “bone”). However, these contrasts do not function like others in the language: they are partially phonologically conditioned, and evidence shows that words may be pronounced with different mid vowels by speakers of the same variety or even by the same speaker. Spanish may influence this instability, as first-language Spanish Catalan-Spanish bilinguals struggle to perceive and produce the contrast. This paper investigates the mid vowel contrasts in an Internet survey of vowel height judgments in 220 words by 146 Central Catalan-speaking individuals who also self-reported their language history. Results confirm that certain phonological contexts condition mid vowel height, typically favoring low mid judgments; where phonological conditioning occurs, speakers judge quality with increased consistency and confidence. Many words lacking phonological conditioning environments, however, are variable across speakers. Bilingualism levels and age have an effect: among Catalan-dominant participants, choice of mid vowel is affected by age, while participants with the highest Catalan dominance have greatest confidence in their intuitions. Variably-judged words are also phonetically variable, indicating a word-specific association between strength of phonological representation and realization.

A longstanding hypothesis about the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying stuttering suggests that stuttered speech dysfluencies result from a lack of coarticulation. Formant-based measures of either the stuttered or fluent speech of children and adults who stutter have generally failed to obtain compelling evidence in support of the hypothesis that these individuals differ in the timing or degree of coarticulation. Here, we used a sensitive acoustic technique–spectral coefficient analyses–that allowed us to compare stuttering and nonstuttering speakers with regard to vowel-dependent anticipatory influences as early as the onset burst of a preceding voiceless stop consonant. Eight adults who stutter and eight matched adults who do not stutter produced C1VC2 words, and the first four spectral coefficients were calculated for one analysis window centered on the burst of C1 and two subsequent windows covering the beginning of the aspiration phase. Findings confirmed that the combined use of four spectral coefficients is an effective method for detecting the anticipatory influence of a vowel on the initial burst of a preceding voiceless stop consonant. However, the observed patterns of anticipatory coarticulation showed no statistically significant differences, or trends toward such differences, between the stuttering and nonstuttering groups. Combining the present results for fluent speech in one given phonetic context with prior findings from both stuttered and fluent speech in a variety of other contexts, we conclude that there is currently no support for the hypothesis that the fluent speech of individuals who stutter is characterized by limited coarticulation.

The present study seeks to answer the question of whether consonant duration is perceived differently across consonants of different manners of articulation and in different contextual environments and whether such differences may be related to the typology of geminates. The results of the cross-linguistic identification experiment suggest higher perceptual acuity in labeling short and long consonants in sonorants than in obstruents. Duration categories were also more consistently and clearly labeled in the intervocalic than in the preconsonantal environment, in the word-initial than in the word-final position, and after stressed vowels than between unstressed vowels. These perceptual asymmetries are in line with some typological tendencies, such as the cross-linguistic preference for intervocalic and post-stress geminates, but contradict other proposed cross-linguistic patterns, such as the preference for obstruent geminates and the abundance of word-final geminates.

This study examines how French listeners segment and learn new words of artificial languages varying in the presence of different combinations of sublexical segmentation cues. The first experiment investigated the contribution of three different types of sublexical cues (acoustic-phonetic, phonological and prosodic cues) to word learning. The second experiment explored how participants specifically exploited sublexical prosodic cues. Whereas complementary cues signaling word-initial and word-final boundaries had synergistic effects on word learning in the first experiment, the two manipulated prosodic cues redundantly signaling word-final boundaries in the second experiment were rank-ordered with final pitch variations being more weighted than final lengthening. These results are discussed in light of the notions of cue type, cue position and cue efficiency.