Search

Using visual spectrographic examination of vowel nasalization to diagnose the syllabic affiliation of phonologically ambisyllabic nasal consonants (e.g., gamma), Durvasula and Huang [(2017). Lang. Sci. 62, 17–36] argued that anticipatory vowel nasalization in these words patterns with word-medial codas. Using nasometry, the current study finds that anticipatory nasalization before monomorphemic and multimorphemic (scammer) ambisyllabic nasals differ from word-medial coda (gamble) and word-final nasals (scam), but not from other intervocalic nasals. Additionally, vowel nasalization is sensitive to the manner of the preceding phoneme. These findings demonstrate that quantifying anticipatory nasalization using nasometry differs from visual spectrographic criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether suprasegmental speech perception contributes unique variance in predictions of reading decoding and comprehension for prelingually deaf children using two devices, at least one of which is a cochlear implant (CI). Method: A total of 104, 5- to 9-year-old CI recipients completed tests of segmental perception (e.g., word recognition in quiet and noise, recognition of vowels and consonants in quiet), suprasegmental perception (e.g., talker and stress discrimination, nonword stress repetition, and emotion identification), and nonverbal intelligence. Two years later, participants completed standardized tests of reading decoding and comprehension. Using regression analyses, the unique contribution of suprasegmental perception to reading skills was determined after controlling for demographic characteristics and segmental perception performance. Results: Standardized reading scores of the CI recipients increased with nonverbal intelligence for both decoding and comprehension. Female gender was associated with higher comprehension scores. After controlling for gender and nonverbal intelligence, segmental perception accounted for approximately 4% and 2% of the variance in decoding and comprehension, respectively. After controlling for nonverbal intelligence, gender, and segmental perception, suprasegmental perception accounted for an extra 4% and 7% unique variance in reading decoding and reading comprehension, respectively. Conclusions: Suprasegmental perception operates independently from segmental perception to facilitate good reading outcomes for these children with CIs. Clinicians and educators should be mindful that early perceptual skills may have longterm benefits for literacy. Research on how to optimize suprasegmental perception, perhaps through hearing-device programming and/or training strategies, is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aims of this study were, for pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, (a) to determine the effect of age on their spectral modulation detection (SMD) ability and compare their age effect to that of their typically hearing (TH) peers; (b) to identify demographic, cognitive, and audiological factors associated with SMD ability; and (c) to determine the unique contribution of SMD ability to segmental and suprasegmental speech perception performance. Method: A total of 104 pediatric CI recipients and 38 TH peers (ages 6-11 years) completed a test of SMD. CI recipients completed tests of segmental (e.g., word recognition in noise and vowels and consonants in quiet) and suprasegmental (e.g., talker discrimination, stress discrimination, and emotion identification) perception, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Regressions analyses were used to examine the effects of group and age on percent-correct SMD scores. For the CI group, the effects of demographic, audiological, and cognitive variables on SMD performance and the effects of SMD on speech perception were examined. Results: The TH group performed significantly better than the CI group on SMD. Both groups showed better performance with increasing age. Significant predictors of SMD performance for the CI group were age and nonverbal intelligence. SMD performance predicted significant variance in segmental and suprasegmental perception. The variance predicted by SMD performance was nearly double for suprasegmental than for segmental perception. Conclusions: Children in the CI group, on average, scored lower than their TH peers. The slopes of improvement in SMD with age did not differ between the groups. The significant effect of nonverbal intelligence on SMD performance in CI recipients indicates that difficulties inherent in the task affect outcomes. SMD ability predicted speech perception scores, with a more prominent role in suprasegmental than in segmental speech perception. SMD ability may provide a useful nonlinguistic tool for predicting speech perception benefit, with cautious interpretation based on age and cognitive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonnative sounds and sequences are systematically adapted in both perception and production. For example, American English speakers often modify illegal word-initial clusters by inserting a vocalic transition between the two consonants (e.g., (/bdagu/ → [b ə dagu]). Previous work on such modifications has for the most part focused on relatively abstract properties of the nonnative structures, such as their phonemic content and whether they conform to sonority sequencing principles. The current study finds that fine-grained phonetic details of the stimulus can be equally important for predicting cross-language production patterns. Several acoustic–phonetic properties were manipulated to create stimulus variants that are phonemically identical (i.e., exhibit non-contrastive variation) in the target language (Russian). In a shadowing experiment, English speakers’ correct productions and detailed error patterns were significantly modulated by the acoustic manipulations. The results highlight the role of perception in accounting for cross-language production, and establish limits on the perceptual repair of nonnative sound sequences by phonetic decoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Articulatory and acoustic studies have provided evidence that in word- initial and word-final positions, English /l/ exhibits substantial differences in 'darkness-: dark [ɫ] in word-final position is produced with a more retracted tongue dorsum and lowered tongue body than light [l] in word-initial position. The darkness of intervocalic /l/, however, is variable. While Sproat and Fujimura (1993) argue that /l/ darkness is on a continuum strongly affected by duration, Hayes (2000) maintains that the morphological status of intervocalic /l/s should affect whether they are produced as light or dark variants. In this study, ultrasound imaging is used to investigate whether the morphological affiliation of the /l/ affects the degree of tongue dorsum retraction and tongue body lowering and the acoustic characteristics of /l/ darkness. Six American English speakers produced three types of stimuli which were predicted to increase in darkness in the following order: (1) when /l/ corresponded with the onset of a suffix (e.g., flaw-less), (2) when /l/ corresponded with the final position of the stem word (e.g., tall-est), and (3) when /l/ was the final consonant of a stem word (e.g., tall). For both articulatory and acoustic measures, the predicted order was upheld. The strongest articulatory correlate of darkness was tongue body lowering, and acoustic differences were mainly manifested in F1 and normalized intensity. Phonological implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that listeners have difficulty discriminating between non-native CC sequences and licit alternatives (e.g. Japanese [ebzo]-[ebuzo], English [bnif]-[bənif]) (). Some have argued that the difficulty in distinguishing these illicit–licit pairs is due to a “perceptual illusion” caused by the phonological system, which prevents listeners from accurately perceiving a phonotactically unattested consonant cluster. In this study, we explore this and other sources of perceptual illusion by presenting English listeners with non-native word-initial clusters paired with various modifications, including epenthesis, deletion, C1 change, and prothesis, in both AX and ABX discrimination tasks (e.g. [zmatu]-[zəmatu], [matu], [smatu], or [əzmatu]). For English listeners, fricative–initial sequences are most often confused with prothesis, stop–nasal sequences with deletion or change of the first consonant, and stop–stop sequences with vowel insertion. The pattern of results across tasks indicates that in addition to interference from the phonological system, sources of perceptual illusion include language-specific phonetic knowledge, the acoustic similarity of the stimulus items, the task itself, and the number of modifications to illicit sequences used in the experiment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study examines the factors affecting the production of stop releases in American English spontaneous speech. Previous research has shown that releases are conditioned by phonetic and social factors. However, previous studies either rely exclusively on read speech, or for sociolinguistic studies, focus on phrase-final stops. In this study, spontaneous speech is collected from two sources: interviews from the non-profit StoryCorps project and from sentences spontaneously generated in a picture description task. Stop releases were examined before obstruents and nasals in word-medial position (e.g. ru gb y), word-final, phrase-medial position (e.g. They cra ck n uts), and pre-pausally (e.g. I look u p ). Phonetic factors taken into account include identity of the stop, directionality of place of articulation in the consonant cluster (front-to-back vs. back-to-front) and manner of C2. For the StoryCorps data, race of the speaker was also found to be an important predictor. Results showed that approximately a quarter of the stops followed by a consonant were released, but release was strongly affected by the place of the stop and the manner of the following consonant. Release of pre-pausal stops differed between black and white speakers; the latter had double the amount of final release. Other realizations of the stops, such as deletion, lenition, and glottalization are also analyzed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Previous research in cross-language perception has shown that non-native listeners often assimilate both single phonemes and phonotactic sequences to native language categories. This study examined whether associating meaning with words containing non-native phonotactics assists listeners in distinguishing the non-native sequences from native ones. In the first experiment, American English listeners learned word-picture pairings including words that contained a phonological contrast between CC and CVC sequences, but which were not minimal pairs (e.g., [ftake], [f[schwa]talu]). In the second experiment, the word-picture pairings specifically consisted of minimal pairs (e.g., [ftake], [f[schwa]take]). Results showed that the ability to learn non-native CC was significantly improved when listeners learned minimal pairs as opposed to phonological contrast alone. Subsequent investigation of individual listeners revealed that there are both high and low performing participants, where the high performers were much more capable of learning the contrast between native and non-native words. Implications of these findings for second language lexical representations and loanword adaptation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core area of phonology is the study of phonotactics, or how sounds are linearly combined. Recent cross-linguistic analyses have shown that the phonology determines not only phonotactics but also the articulatory coordination or timing of adjacent sounds. In this article, I explore how the relation between coordination and phonotactics affects speakers producing nonnative sequences. Recent experimental results (Davidson 2005, 2006) have shown that English speakers often repair unattested word-initial sequences (e.g., /zg/, /vz/) by producing the consonants with a less overlapping coordination. A theoretical account of the experimental results employs Gafos's (2002) constraint-based grammar of coordination. In addition to Gafos's Alignment constraints establishing temporal relations between consonants, a family of Release constraints is proposed to encode phonotactic restrictions. The interaction of Alignment and Release constraints accounts for why speakers produce nonnative sequences by failing to adequately overlap the articulation of the consonants. The optimality theoretic analysis also incorporates floating constraints to explain why speakers are not equally accurate on all unattested clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]