Search

Madurese exhibits a three-way laryngeal contrast in its plosive inventory, distinguishing voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated plosives. Previous studies have investigated some acoustic characteristics of the contrast but have not examined possible dialectal variation in this contrast. The present study aims to discuss the contrast by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vowel quality (F1). Twenty participants (10 Western Madurese speakers and 10 Eastern Madurese speakers) were recruited and instructed to read 150 Madurese words containing plosives. The results showed that an interaction of dialect and gender were significantly correlated with VOT: male Western Madurese speakers produced shorter VOT for voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives than their Eastern counterparts. There was also variation in F1 between gender across dialects: male Western Madurese speakers produced [ə] with a lower F1 than their Eastern counterparts. It was suggested that the variation was possibly due to language contact with Javanese.

The approach proposed in this study includes methods specifically dedicated to the detection of allophonic variation in English. This study aims to find an efficient method for automatic evaluation of aspiration in the case of Polish second-language (L2) English speakers' pronunciation when whole words are analyzed instead of particular allophones extracted from words. Sample words including aspirated and unaspirated allophones were prepared by experts in English phonetics and phonology. The datasets created include recordings of words pronounced by nine native English speakers of standard southern British accent and 20 Polish L2 English users. Complete unedited words are treated as input data for feature extraction and classification algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, naive Bayes method, long-short term memory, and convolutional neural network (CNN). Various signal representations, including low-level audio features, the so-called mid-term and feature trajectory, and spectrograms, are tested in the context of their usability for the detection of aspiration. The results obtained show high potential for an automated evaluation of pronunciation focused on a particular phonological feature (aspiration) when classifiers analyze whole words. Additionally, CNN returns satisfying results for the automated classification of words containing aspirated and unaspirated allophones produced by Polish L2 speakers.

Research on Western Armenian (WA) has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and voiced stops (Fairbanks 1948; Vaux 1998; Baronian 2017). Since there is no monolingual community of WA, all speakers are part of a minority language community, and also speak the majority language. The current study examines speakers from two heritage communities of WA: one in Lebanon, where the majority language is Arabic, and one in the US, where the majority language is English. The speakers in Lebanon were found to have a contrast between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, in line with Lebanese Arabic. The speakers in the US were more variable, some having the English pattern of voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops, while others had voiceless aspirated stops, but their voiced stops were variable between voiced and voiceless unaspirated. These results indicate L2 transfer in both communities, leading to two different patterns of voicing in WA.

This paper on the Mithilanchal Urdu, a dialect of the Indo-Aryan language family, would be an interesting study in the time of the Corona Pandemic, as it may be considered a minority language or dialect and such languages and dialects have been found to be especially vulnerable in the times of calamities like the present COVID-19 pandemic. However, this paper would basically provide a baseline upon which post-pandamic studies can be based for exploring the effect of the pandemic. The present study reflects the segmental phonology of Maithili Urdu, a dialect of the Indo-Aryan language family, spoken mainly in the Mithilanchal region of the state of Bihar in India. Maithili Urdu does not have its own script or literature, yet it has maintained an oral history over many centuries. It has contributed in enriching the Maithili, Hindi and Urdu language and literature very profoundly. There are ten vowels in Maithili Urdu. It would be very interesting to know that out of these, there are four front vowels, four back vowels, and two central vowels. Lip rounding is not distinctive, but only the back vowels are rounded. Out of these ten vowels, three are short and seven are long. Length, thus, is a distinctive feature in Maithili Urdu, where short and long vowels show full phonological opposition in all positions. These are all pure vowels, non-nasalized. All vowels in Maithili Urdu can be nasalized. Consonantal phonemes in Maithili Urdu show four-way contrast between voiceless and voiced and unaspirated and aspirated at bilabial, dental, retroflex, palatal, velar, and glottal places of articulation. Phonetically, affricates also behave like stops. Similarly, the taps, laterals, and nasals also show a two-way contrast between unaspirated and aspirated. Aspiration, thus, is an overriding characteristic of the Maithili Urdu sound system. This study has greatly benifited from the similar work done by Dixit, 1963; Halle & Mohannan 1985; Masud Husain Khan, 1986; Hyman, 2003. In this paper, a brief overview of segmental phonology of Maithili Urdu will be presented wherein vowels and consonants and their phonotactic behavior will be described in detail.

Burushaski is an endangered language isolate spoken in Hunza, Nager, and Yasin valleys of Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Hunza Burushaski’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated) across five places of articulation (bilabial, dental, retroflex, palatal, and velar). A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), fundamental frequency (f0), first four formants (F1, F2, F3, and F4), spectral moments of stop release bursts (spectral center of gravity, spectral standard deviation, spectral skewness, and spectral kurtosis), and spectral tilt (H1*–H2*, H1*–A1*, H1*–A2*, and H1*–A3*). The data were collected from four Burushaski speakers. The findings indicated that voiceless aspirated consonants exhibited longer Voice Onset Time and higher spectral tilt onsets than their voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated counterparts. The fundamental frequency was raised in both voiceless series. Some acoustic measures (e.g., Voice Onset Time and fundamental frequency) were better indicators of the laryngeal contrasts while others (spectral moments) more reliably distinguished the place contrasts. The results of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) showed that a combination of spectral tilt and Voice Onset Time are the best descriptors of the three laryngeal categories of Burushaski.

The present study has been carried out to investigate the perturbation effect of the voicing of initial stops on the fundamental frequency (F0) of the following vowels in Pahari. Results show that F0 values are significantly higher following voiceless unaspirated stops than voiced stops. F0 contours indicate an initially falling pattern for vowel [a:] after voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops. A rising pattern after voiced stops and a falling pattern after voiceless unaspirated stops is observed after [i:] and [u:]. These results match Umeda (1981) who found that F0 of a vowel following voiceless stops starts high and drops sharply, but when the vowel follows a voiced stop, F0 starts at a relatively low frequency followed by a gradual rise. The present data show no statistically significant difference between the F0 values of vowels with different places of articulation. Place of articulation is thus the least influencing factor.

The electrolarynx (EL) is an electromechanical device that enables patients to produce voice following the surgical removal of their larynx. The purpose of this study is to understand the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Mandarin consonants produced by EL speakers. First, the acoustic characteristics (including speech intensity, consonant duration, spectral peak, and F2 onset) of Mandarin EL consonants are investigated by comparing the EL and normal consonants. Then, a perceptual evaluation of EL consonants is conducted to identify the relationship between acoustical characteristics and perceptual intelligibility. The results suggest three consonant confusion types are mainly responsible for the poor intelligibility of Mandarin EL consonants: (1) the “unaspirated-for-aspirated” confusion caused by the significantly shortened voice onset time of aspirated consonants; (2) the “voiced-for-voiceless” confusion caused by the continuous pulsing of the EL device and low consonant intensity; and (3) the “perceptual omission” caused by low intensity of consonants and / or consonant omission. The results obtained are promising and potential for further improvements in Mandarin EL speech intelligibility.

International audience; English aspiration is influenced by word structure: in general, a voiceless stop following s is unaspirated (des[t]royed), but it can be aspirated if a prefix-stem boundary intervenes (dis[tʰ]rusts) (Baker, Smith & Hawkins 2007). In a production study of 110 words prefixed with dis-or mis-, we show that even in prefixed words, there is variation (dis[k]laimers ~ dis[kʰ]laimers), and that aspiration in such words is correlated with word and stem frequency. The more frequent the word, the less likely aspiration, but the more frequent the stem, the more likely aspiration. This contrasting frequency effect is characteristic of the type of competition Hay posits between whole-word lexical access and morphologically decomposed lexical access (Hay 2003): frequent words will tend to be accessed as wholes (and therefore behave as though there is no prefix-stem boundary), but frequent stems will encourage decomposed, prefix + stem access. In order to test whether there is active online competition, as opposed to simply frequency effects that are somehow lexicalized, we also conduct a priming experiment. We find that exposing participants to other prefixed words encourages them to aspirate target words, as compared to when they have been exposed to similar but non-prefixed words. These results provide evidence for active online competition.

The Northwestern group of Indo-Aryan (Dardic) languages is generally known to have undergone consonantal shift, which resulted in the loss of voiced aspirated (VDA) stops and affricates of Sanskrit. Kalasha, an endangered Dardic language spoken in Chitral (Northern Pakistan), still preserves the Old Indo-Aryan four-way laryngeal system. The current study examines acoustic and articulatory correlates of Kalasha's four-way laryngeal contrast across places and manners of articulation, using lingual ultrasound-imaging and several acoustic measures. The analysis included the standard acoustic [voice onset time (VOT), after prevoicing interval (API), fundamental frequency onset, first four spectral moments] and articulatory (smoothing spline analysis of variance) measures, which capture laryngeal, place, and manner differences in consonants. The results showed that VOT reliably differentiated the four-way laryngeal contrast of Kalasha. VDA stops and affricates are characterized by shorter voicing lead VOT, higher API, and lower fundamental frequency onset than their voiced unaspirated (VDUA) counterparts. However, the first four spectral moments did not distinguish the two VDUA and VDA stop series. The tongue root retraction distinguishes the voiceless stops and affricates from the voiced ones.

The Ganong effect-more identifications of a certain phoneme in a context where that phoneme would yield a real word than a context where that phoneme would yield a pseudoword-has been widely replicated. Few studies, however, have tested whether this effect occurs for frequency contrasts. In the present study, participants' likelihood of identifying an ambiguous sound as aspirated was tested in acoustically identical continua in contexts where the identification of the sound as aspirated would either yield a lower- or higher-frequency word than the identification of the sound as unaspirated would. No frequency-based Ganong effect was found.

Shina is an endangered Indo-Aryan (Dardic) language spoken in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Shina’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast across five places of articulation. A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured including fundamental frequency (F0), spectral tilt (H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, and H1*-A3*), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). Voiceless aspirated stops were characterized by higher fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence, compared to voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated stops. These results suggest that Shina is among those languages which have a raising effect of aspiration on the pitch and spectral tilt onsets of the following vowels. Positive correlations among fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence were observed. The findings of this study will contribute to the phonetic documentation of endangered Dardic languages.

The present paper is part of a series of articles dealing with the Sino-Mongol glossary Dada yu 韃靼語/Beilu yiyu 北虜譯語, a little-known lexicographical work dated between 1567 and 1603. The author concentrates on the Chinese transcription of Mongol affricates in connection with the problem of their phonemic qualities and position in the sound system of a transitional late Middle Mongol to early Modern Mongolian dialect as reflected in the glossary. The influence of different historical varieties of Chinese on the glossary’s system of transcriptions is emphasized, such as: (1) the northern koine pronunciation system of the 16th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Northern Pronunciation” (beyin 北音), an ancestor form of Modern Standard Chinese; (2) standard Late Ming Guanhua 官話 sound system of the 15th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Southern Pronunciation” (nanyin 南音), based on Nankingese and other Yangtze watershed Mandarin dialects; and (3) Old Mandarin, a spoken koine of the 12th to 14th centuries that reflects the pronunciation used at the Yuan 元 dynasty capital, Dadu 大都 (later to become Peking). On the basis of the Chinese transcriptions, two series of affricates, an aspirated one ([ʧh], [ʨh], [tsh]) and an unaspirated one ([ʧ], [ʨ], [ts]), can be identified in the sound system of the Mongol dialect of the glossary. An interesting feature of the latter is the presence of voiceless aspirated alveopalatal affricates ʨ [ʨh] and ʥ [ʨ] that may have developed from earlier Middle Mongol palato-alveolars c [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ] before an original *i. As for c [tsh] and ʒ [ts], they are attested in just a few lexical items and may be considered to be marginal allophones of the phonemes c [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ], respectively. The author comes to the conclusion that the structures of both aspirated and unaspirated series are fully identical: each of them consists of a basic allophone ([ʧh] vs. [ʧ]) and two non-basic positional allophones, one of which ([tsh] vs. [ts]) may furthermore be viewed as marginal or problematic due to its highly restricted distribution.

The present study reports a novel case where a simple one-to-one category mapping may develop into a systematic one-to-two mapping over the course of second language acquisition. We examined the split in category mapping of the Mandarin unaspirated stops conditioned by tone by Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese (e.g. Mandarin /ta35/ to Korean lenis [ta] vs. Mandarin /ta55/ to Korean fortis [t’a]). Korean L2 learners and naïve listeners participated in identification tasks in whichf0contours of Mandarin words containing unaspirated stops with short-lag VOTs were digitally manipulated. In word-initial position, learners showed a near-categorical perception from lenis to fortis asf0increased, while most stimuli were identified as fortis by naïve listeners. The effect off0was much smaller in word-medial position, but the group difference remained the same, confirming the two groups’ differential use of phonetic cues for stop identification. Taken together, a substantial reorganization of perceptual cues, namely the promotion off0concurrent with significant underweighting of VOT cues, seems to have taken place during L2 acquisition. The findings were discussed with reference to PAM-L2 whereby the knowledge of the L2 phonological system along with particular phonetic properties of the L2 sounds may have driven a perceptual regrouping of the L2 stop categories.

Consonants in /CV/ (i.e., a consonant + a vowel) syllables usually have potential influence on onset fundamental frequency (i.e., onset f0) of the following vowel. Previous research on effects of consonant's aspiration on onset f0 has mainly considered the stops. This study investigates not only the effects of aspiration with evidence from affricates, but also the effects of different language speakers (Japanese vs Chinese), on the onset f0 of the following vowel. Through examining acoustic data of f0 realization and perception data of two physical continua of f0 contours, it is observed that the onset f0 following aspirated affricates was higher than that following unaspirated affricates, but the magnitudes of differences varied with tones. Perception data of two physical continua indicated that a tone carried by aspirated affricates (or unaspirated affricates) tended to be perceived as the tone which has relatively lower (or higher) onset f0. Both the realization and perception performance of Japanese speakers resembled that of Chinese speakers, which may further confirm the hypothesis that the f0 perturbation caused by aspiration belongs to phonemic processing instead of phonological processing.

Unlike aspiration in stops, occurrence of aspiration in non-stop consonants is quite rare. Most of the languages that have aspirated non-stop consonants are low-resource languages. Hence, data driven, quantitative, and statistical analysis of their aspiration phenomena is fairly limited. Rabha and Angami are considered in this study, as previous studies have confirmed the existence of aspiration contrast in fricatives and nasals. This study reports the acoustic characteristics of aspiration in stops, fricatives, and nasals. Among them, distinguishing the aspirated fricatives and aspirated nasals from their unaspirated counterparts is a challenging task. A set of acoustic features is proposed to automatically detect the presence of aspiration in fricatives and nasals. Acoustic features, such as vocal tract constriction (VTC), normalized autocorrelation peak strength (NAPS), strength of excitation (SoE), and variance of successive epoch intervals (VSEI) are used to detect aspiration in fricatives and nasals. These features are extracted from zero-frequency filtered signal of the speech sounds, as it preserves the aspiration information. Results show that VTC, NAPS, and SoE can detect aspiration in nasals, whereas SoE and VSEI can detect aspiration in fricatives. The proposed method improves the performance of an automatic phoneme recognizer by reducing the confusion between aspirated and unaspirated counterparts.

A general feature observed in foreign language classroom is the usage of communication strategies by the learners in their attempts to manipulate a limited linguistics system to communicate. This research aims to investigate the usage of similar sounding words as a written communication strategy in learning Mandarin. The respondents were 59 second- and third-year Malaysian students learning Mandarin as a foreign language at a public university. An open-ended questionnaire was set to gauge respondents’ perception on the strategies used, and was divided into four parts, namely the demographic data and 3 parts of written tasks. The respondents were required to write a dialogue, answer questions on their hobbies and construct sentences using the words given. A total of 77 data of similar sounding words were found. The results showed that similar sounding words strategy was mostly applied to retroflex, alveolar, affricate, fricative, plosive, aspirated and unaspirated sounds. Another one third of the data consisted of syllables which were formed based on the learners’ understanding of the pronunciation. It was found that the strategy provides constructive help in getting the message across despite the inaccurate pronunciation. The findings also mirror the constructive learning attitude and aggressive struggle put in by the learners, and therefore, a positive strategy that should be encouraged.

This study investigates three aspirated voiceless stop consonants and their unaspirated counterparts produced in Taiwan's Southern Min dialect by 10 laryngeal speakers (LA), 10 speakers with pneumatic artificial larynxes (PA), and 10 oesophageal speakers (ES). Listeners' perceptions of the accuracy of the three groups in producing these six stop consonants were also examined. Each of the voiceless stop consonants /p, pʰ, t, tʰ, k, kʰ/, followed by the vowel /a/, was represented by a Southern Min character and appeared three times on a list in random order. Each character had a consonant-vowel syllable structure, and all were read with Tone 1 (high and level). Voice onset time (VOT) was measured for each stop consonant. A separate group of 20 listeners was then asked to identify the consonants produced by the LA, PA, and ES speakers. The VOT values of aspirated voiceless stop consonants from PA and ES were shorter than those from LA. Although PA and ES had aspiration contrast in their VOT values, perceived accuracy was low for PA (/pʰ/: 16.3%; /tʰ/: 13.5%; /kʰ/: 22.8%) and ES (/pʰ/: 33.7%; /tʰ/: 25.9%; /kʰ/: 31.9%). The mean percentages of correctly identified /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ produced by PA were at chance level. In terms of VOT values, it is recommended that, when producing aspirated voiceless stop consonants, PA and ES elongate the duration between the release of the oral constriction and the onset of their vibratory sound source. Moreover, it is also recommended that further investigation into other phonetic properties that support stop contrast is needed.

This study is to investigate how the beginner Korean language learners who speak Vietnamese perceive the Korean stops through perception experiments with an OpenSesame and a questionnaire. Subjects (6 female, 3 male) heard 108 stimuli consisting of Korean stops and then selected corresponding Korean phonemes. The results showed 383 (39.4%) perceptual errors from 972 response and the error rate is in the order of bilabial ≥ velar > alveolar consonants; fortis ≥ lenis > aspirated consonants and CV > VCV, but the combining vowels ‘a, i, and u’ did not significantly affect the perception of consonants. The Questionnaire on the phonological awareness showed that subjects transfer or reinterpret L2 phoneme with a similar L1 and split or coalesce L2 phonemes which are absent in L1. These results indicate that aspirated consonants are easy to perceive whereas it is difficult to distinguish between fortis and lenis due to the inadequate L2 perceptual categorization. Therefore, learners should be instructed to be conscious of distinctive acoustic characteristics and allophonic phenomena in the phonological environment. (Korea University)

Consonantal effects on onset f0 are implemented differently in different languages, namely, the duration of consonantal effect, the direction of f0 change and its perceptual importance vary cross-linguistically. This study aims to investigate consonantal effects of aspiration in a tone language, Cantonese. The results showed that aspiration had a raising effect on onset f0, that is, onset f0 after aspirated stops was higher than after unaspirated stops. Besides, the aspiration-related f0 perturbations can extend to around 100ms after voicing. However, unlike f0 as a secondary cue for stop contrasts in English, when voice onset time (VOT) becomes ambiguous, f0 was not strengthened for contrast enhancement in Cantonese as well as in L2 English. This indicates that although consonantal effects in Cantonese showed phonetically similar directions and comparable duration with native English, onset f0 was not used for phonological contrast enhancement.

This study, based on corpus materials, investigates the “voice onset time” (VOT) of Mandarin word-initial stops in isolated syllables according to the effect of vowel contexts produced by native and non-native speakers. 1250 monosyllables of word-initial plosives /p/, /t/, /k/, /ph/, /th/, and /kh/ were uttered in combination with the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in four tone contexts except /ki/ and /khi/ that are phonetically illegal in Mandarin by 20 participants (10 native Chinese speakers and 10 Urdu learners of Chinese). Results show that for native Chinese speakers, VOTs of aspirated stops followed by the high vowels /i/ and /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/, and unaspirated stops followed only by the back high vowel /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/. For native Urdu speakers, it can be said that mean VOTs of word-initial stops in Mandarin monosyllables have no significant effect for both aspirated and unaspirated ones in combination with different vowels. Understanding the results of this study will be of assistance to second language learning and teaching.

COVID-19 is transmitted through sneezing and coughing, which constitute its basic symptoms, due to the high velocity of droplets produced by these activities; however, recent studies have demonstrated that a large quantity of droplets may be produced even by talking or breathing [2], [3]. Studies with respect to the effect of phoneme type (the main sound unit of speech) on the production of droplets are only few in number. For example [1], argued that SARS, which could be transmitted through droplets, did not infect one to three millions of Japanese who travelled to China in 2000, while American visitors in China at the same period were infected. The author added that Japanese aspirated stops like /p/, which are said to produce a lot of droplets, are not used that much in Japanese compared to English. Therefore, he concluded that the fact that Chinese shop assistants who might have been speaking to Japanese tourists in Japanese but to American tourists in English might explain the zero infection of Japanese tourists. In this paper, we support the hypothesis reported in Inouye [1] that aspirated consonants might produce more droplets in comparison to unaspirated consonants. To check this hypothesis, we have taken the 26 countries mostly infected (more than 1000 cases) by the COVID-19 as of 23rd of March. We excluded Switzerland since there are many official languages in its territory. Also, we excluded outliers, that is, countries with many cases (e.g., Italy) or very few cases (e.g., Japan) per million of population. The independent t-test analysis conducted in R showed no significant differences in cases of inflected individuals between the languages with aspiration (M = 254.9, SD = 159.5) and the languages without aspiration (M = 206, SD = 121.9), [t(18) = 0.73, p > .05]. Open in a separate window Although no statistical differences were found between the two types of languages, we observed that in countries in which the dominant language has aspirated consonants there were more cases of individuals infected by COVID-19 in comparison to countries in which the dominant language does not have aspirated consonants. These findings can offer epidemiological implications for COVID-19 transmission in each country since this transmission may be based to some extent on whether there are or no aspirated consonants in the dominant language spoken in each country.

This paper investigates the relative importance of plosive cues in the effect of vocal cord polyp on Mandarin tones recognition. There are two sections in this research, i.e., acoustic analysis and perceptual analysis. In acoustic analysis, VOTs of plosives were measured in Praat. And in perception analysis, identification results of Mandarin tones before and after the surgeries of vocal cord polyp would be analyzed from the perspective of unaspirated plosive and aspirated plosive. The research results in this research are as follows: first, unaspirated plosives before the surgery of vocal cord polyp have longer VOT than those after the surgery. Second, aspirated plosives before the surgery of vocal cord polyp have shorter VOT than those after the surgery. Third, vocal cord polyp has a significant effect on VOT of aspirated plosives in Tone 2 and Tone 3 before and after the surgeries. Fourth, aspirated plosives are relative important cues in significantly affecting identification rate of Mandarin CV syllables with aspirated plosives in Tone 1 and Tone 2 before and after the surgeries of vocal cord polyp. Fifth, before and after the surgeries of vocal cord polyp, significant difference of VOT in Tone 2 of aspirated plosive is a relative important cue in significantly influencing identification rate of Mandarin CV syllables with aspirated plosives in Tone 2. It is concluded that aspirated plosives are relative important cues in affecting identification rate of Mandarin tones with plosives as their initials before and after the surgeries of vocal cord polyp, but not unaspirated plosives.

In our study, older velopharyngeal insufficiency (posterior velopharyngeal insufficiency) patients were defined as those older than 6 years of age. This study aimed to evaluate the abnormal acoustic features of older velopharyngeal insufficiency patients before and after posterior pharyngeal flap surgery. A retrospective medical record review was conducted for patients aged 6 years and older, who underwent posterior pharyngeal flap surgery between November 2011 and March 2015. The audio records of patients were evaluated before and after surgery. Spectral analysis was conducted by the Computer Speech Lab (CSL)-4150B acoustic system with the following input data: The vowel /i/, unaspirated plosive /b/, aspirated plosives /p/, aspirated fricatives /s/ and /x/, unaspirated affricates /j/ and /z/, and aspirated affricates /c/ and /q/. The patients were followed up for 3 months. Speech outcome was evaluated by comparing the postoperatively phonetic data with preoperative data. Subjective and objective analyses showed significant differences in the sonogram, formant, and speech articulation before and after the posterior pharyngeal flap surgery. However, the sampled patients could not be considered to have a high speech articulation (

Madurese, a Malayo-Polynesian language of Indonesia, is of interest both areally and typologically: it is described as having a three-way laryngeal contrast between voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated plosives, along with a strict phonotactic restriction on consonant voicing-vowel height sequences. An acoustic analysis of Madurese consonants and vowels obtained from the recordings of 15 speakers is presented to assess whether its voiced and aspirated plosives might share acoustic properties indicative of a shared articulatory gesture. Although voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives in word-initial position pattern together in terms of several spectral balance measures, these are most likely due to the following vowel quality, rather than aspects of a shared laryngeal configuration. Conversely, the voiceless (aspirated and unaspirated) plosives share multiple acoustic properties, including F0 trajectories and overlapping voicing lag time distributions, suggesting that they share a glottal aperture target. The implications of these findings for the typology of laryngeal contrasts and the historical evolution of the Madurese consonant-vowel co-occurrence restriction are discussed.

This study examines the acoustic properties concerning tonal split and stop onsets in an under-documented Wu Chinese variety, Lili Wu, using speech production data collected from field research. Lili Wu Chinese has been reported to demonstrate an unusual tonal split phenomenon known as "aspiration-induced tonal split" (ATS). ATS refers to the distinct lowering of f0 of a lexical tone over syllables beginning with a voiceless aspirated obstruent, compared to that of syllables beginning with an unaspirated obstruent. Two debates lingering in the existing literature are discussed: (i) is ATS an on-going change or a completed change? and (ii) is it onset aspiration or vowel breathiness that directly triggers ATS? Results suggest that ATS is a completed change, which, however, is conditioned by tonal contexts. Regarding the second debate, results suggest that neither aspiration nor breathiness serves as the direct trigger for tonal split. Moreover, one unexpected on-going sound change was observed: The breathiness of vowels after voiced onsets seems to be disappearing among the younger generation. These findings extend the understanding of the acoustic properties of tonal development in a complex system and highlight the importance of experimental methods in understanding the sound structure and changes of under-documented languages.

The effects of language contact extend well beyond the borrowing of lexical items, and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common structural outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009: 222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, which has been in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one example of this phenomenon: Jones (1984) observes that younger speakers of Patagonian Welsh may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /ptk/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper measures the voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /ptk/ using contemporary conversational speech data from both Patagonia and Wales, for speakers in three age groups (0–29, 30–59, and 60+ years), to examine the effects of Spanish contact on Patagonian Welsh. Results indicate that the tendencies seen in Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /ptk/ with significantly shorter VOT than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.

Vowels are longer before voiced than voiceless obstruents in many languages. Work on how this effect interacts with aspiration has been limited. This study presents data from Hindi and Telugu on vowel duration and other acoustic characteristics as influenced by following consonants. Hindi vowels were significantly longer before voiced stops than voiceless stops, with no significant effect of aspiration. Telugu vowels were only slightly longer before voiced than voiceless stops; more crucially, they were shorter before aspirated stops than unaspirated stops. The Telugu results provide a parallel demonstrating the phonetic plausibility of the sound change proposed in Winter’s Law, with vowel lengthening before voiced unaspirated stops but not before voiced aspirated stops in Proto-Balto-Slavic. While the exact processes causing the voicing and aspiration effects remain unclear, this data contributes to evaluating the phenomenon. Phonetic differences between in Hindi and Telugu may also suggest characteristics of how the Proto-Balto-Slavic stop contrasts were realized.

This study analyzed Vietnamese speakers’ production of Korean consonants and the pronunciation errors that occurred. For this study, I collected natural utterances from 26 Vietnamese marriage immigrant women in Korea. The results of this study indicate that Vietnamese speakers have difficulty distinguishing lax from tense consonants at word-initial onset position and aspirated consonants from others at word-medial onset position. At coda position, the most frequent occurrence was that the lateral /l/ was replaced with the nasal /n/. This is mainly due to the difference between phonemic systems of the speaker’s native tongue and Korean. Because there is no discrimination between lax and tense consonants, and the lateral /l/ is not allowed at coda position in the phonemic system of Vietnamese. However, phonemic correspondence between first language and second language can not account for all the observed errors. For example, /n, m, ŋ/ at coda positions were often confused in place of articulation even though the phonemic system of their native tongue has the consonants corresponding to each nasal.

Yerevan Armenian is a variety of Eastern Armenian with a three-way voicing contrast that includes voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops, but previous work has not converged on a description of how voice quality is involved in the contrast. We demonstrate how voice quality can be assessed in a two-dimensional acoustic space using a spectral tilt measure in conjunction with a measure of spectral noise. Eight speakers produced a list of words with prevocalic word-initial and postvocalic word-final plosives. The results suggest that Yerevan Armenian has breathy-voiced plosives which are produced with closure voicing and a relatively spread glottis that is maintained into a following vowel. These qualitatively differ from some Indic ones in that they do not have an extended interval of voiced aspiration after the closure. For the voiceless unaspirated plosives, most speakers produced acoustically modal voiceless plosives, although two showed evidence for some glottal constriction and tensing. Many acoustic cues contribute to overall reliable discriminability of the three-way contrast in both initial and final position. Nevertheless, closure voicing intensity and aspiration duration together provide a robust separation of the three categories in both positions. We also find that back vowels are fronted after the breathy-voiced plosives, which supports a historical analysis in which early Armenian voiced stops were also breathy, rather than plain voiced.

This study explores the phonetic nature of phonological stop voicing contrast in American English by investigating how phonetic implementation of the voicing contrast is modulated by the prosodic structure along the continuum of phonetic voicing. In particular, the present study examines (1) the effects of two kinds of prosodic strengthening that can arise with prosodic structuring, a boundary-related domain-initial strengthening (DIS) and a prominence-induced strengthening, and (2) the possible enhancement types of linguistic contrasts that can underlie prosodic strengthening. The phonetic voicing was estimated using the Integrated Voicing Index (IVI), taking into account both the voicing lag (positive VOT) and the voiced interval during the closure. Results obtained with initial stops in both trochaic and iambic words are encapsulated as follows. Under the influence of DIS, both voiced and voiceless stops were produced with an increase in voicelessness, showing an enhancement of structurally motivated syntagmatic (CV) contrast. The effect size was larger for voiced stops, yielding a boundary-induced phonetic reduction of voicing contrast. Under the influence of prominence (focus), both voiced and voiceless stops showed an increase in voicelessness only in trochaic words, but this time, it was voiceless stops that showed a far greater effect, resulting in a maximization of voicing contrast—i.e., an enhancement of paradigmatic contrast. Moreover, the reduced voicing for voiced stops under prominence even in the medial position indicates that voiced stops are realized in reference to the phonetic feature {vl. unaspirated} rather than {voiced}. These findings imply that seemingly non-contrastive low-level variation is indeed systematically modulated by the prosodic structure in reference to phonetic representations that regulate the phonetic implementation of phonological contrast in a given language. An alternative account is also discussed in the framework of Articulatory Phonology.

The stop consonants of Indo-Iranian languages are categorized into two to maximum five laryngeal categories. The present study investigates whether Voice Onset Time (VOT) reliably differentiates the word-initial stop laryngeal categories and how it covaries with different places of articulation in ten languages (two Iranian: Pashto and Wakhi; seven Indo-Aryan: Dawoodi, Punjabi, Shina, Jangli, Urdu, Sindhi, and Siraiki; and one Isolate: Burushaski). The results indicated that there was a clear VOT distinction between the voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops. The voiceless unaspirated stops showed shorter voicing lag VOTs than voiceless aspirated stops. Voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive stops were characterized by voicing lead VOTs. In the voiceless unaspirated and aspirated categories, palatal affricates showed the longest voicing lag VOT due to the frication interval of this stop type. In contrast, voiceless unaspirated retroflex stops were characterized by the shortest voicing lag VOT. There were no clear place differences in the voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive categories. The findings of the current study suggest that VOT reliably differentiates the stop consonants of all the languages that contrast two (voiceless unaspirated vs. voiced unaspirated: Pashto and Wakhi) or three (voiceless unaspirated vs. voiceless aspirated vs. voiced unaspirated: Burushaski, Dawoodi, Punjabi, and Shina) laryngeal categories. However, VOT does not consistently distinguish the stop consonants of languages (Jangli, Urdu, Sindhi, and Siraiki) with contrastive voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive categories.

In the present study, Spanish-English bilinguals’ perceptual boundaries between voiced and voiceless stops (a /b/-/p/ continuum including pre-voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated tokens) are shown to be modulated by whether participants are “led to believe” they are classifying Spanish or English sounds. In Experiment 1, simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals and beginner second-language learners of Spanish labeled the same acoustic continuum in two experimental sessions (Spanish mode, English mode), and both groups were found to display language-specific perceptual boundaries (or session effects). In Experiment 2, early bilinguals and late second-language learners of various levels of proficiency participated in a single session in which, in random order, they labeled nonwords that were designed to prime either Spanish or English language modes. Early bilinguals and relatively proficient second-language learners, but not less proficient learners, displayed mode-specific perceptual normalization criteria even in conditions of rapid, random mode switching. Along with similar ones, the experiments reported here demonstrate that bilinguals are able to exploit language-specific perceptual processes (or norms) when processing speech sounds, which entails some degree of separation between their sound systems.

This paper aims to provide an overview of our current understanding of depressors by offering a comparative perspective of the types of depressors from Bantu, Khoisan and Chinese Wu. Depressor effects in Bantu/Khoisan, on the one hand, and Chinese, on the other, are hardly dealt with together leaving a more holistic approach untapped. This paper begins to bridge that gap by bringing together current findings to establish the full scope of depressor effects, from which future analyses can then build on. It is systematically observed that depressors in these languages are not restricted to voicing only. Rather, they range from voiced and breathy sounds – the most unmarked – to voiceless unaspirated sounds and even voiceless aspirated sounds as the most marked depressor type. The expansion of depressors to voiceless aspirated sounds is particularly interesting, since these sounds are traditionally assumed to correlate with a high pitch which is characteristic of high tone. Thus, the laryngeal configurations for voiceless depressors are examined and compared between Bantu, Khoisan and Chinese Wu. Proposed feature analyses for depressors are also discussed and compared.Keywords: depressors, Bantu, Khoisan, Chinese Wu, laryngeal specification

This study investigates how Chinese learners of Korean perceive and produce Korean lax, tense and aspirated consonants and how the perception and production are related. For this purpose an experiment was conducted in production and perception of Korean consonants with ten Chinese participants who were learning the Korean language for less than six months. According to the result, the Chinese participants had difficulties in perceiving Korean lax, aspirated, tense consonants in order and difficulties in producing Korean lax, tense and aspirated consonants in order. However, it is certain that there is correlation in perceiving and producing Korean tense consonants. In the experiment, most Chinese learners perceive Korean lax consonants as Korean aspirated consonants and produced them as Korean tense consonants. They mostly perceived Korean tense consonants as Korean lax consonants and produced them as Korean aspirated consonants. They perceived Korean aspirated consonants as Korean lax consonants and produce them as Korean lax consonants or as tense consonants.

The distribution of aspiration in Basque — with ‘aspiration’ referring to both the occurrence of [h] and of aspirated stops — shows some puzzling aspects. In some words, aspiration is ancient, in the sense that it must be assumed for the earliest reconstructable stage. In some other instances, however, it has arisen seemingly ex nihilo, as can be observed in borrowings from Latin and Romance, e.g. Latin/Romance īra > Basque hira ‘ire’, Romance taula > Basque thaula ‘board’. Most surprisingly, in some words aspiration has developed after a sonorant consonant, e.g. Romance solatz > Basque solhas ‘conversation’. Aspiration may also continue intervocalic /n/, e.g. Latin anāte > Basque ahate ‘duck’. Another unusual development is the phonologization of the contrast between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops triggered by a shift of the stress in some words without affecting the properties of consonants. Finally, an interdialectal alternation /k-/ ~ /g-/ ~ /h-/ ~ Ø in demonstratives and related adverbs appears to have involved fortition, contrary to initial expectations. Here we describe the environments in which aspiration is found in Basque and discuss the most likely historical developments that could have given rise to the state of affairs that we find, paying particular attention to what would appear to be unusual or unnatural sound changes. We build on prior scholarship, but this paper also contains some new hypotheses, especially regarding the aspiration in words like ahate ‘duck’. We have also tried to contribute to the dating of the different processes and to the understanding of in their causes.

The surface phonetic details of an utterance affect how ‘native’ a speaker sounds. However, studies have shown that children’s acquisition of context-appropriate variation (sometimes called allophones) is late. This study’s goal was to understand how caregivers use phonetic variation in the production of American English /t/ in child-directed speech (CDS), compared to in adult-directed speech (ADS). We hypothesized that mothers modify their input to children in order to produce more limited variation in CDS than in ADS, to potentially assist children in the development of contrastive phonemic categories. To this end, we recorded eight mothers of children under the age of 2 years in both ADS and CDS conditions. Results reveal that CDS contains significantly more canonical cues to /t/ than ADS does, and fewer non-canonical cue patterns, including fewer unreleased tokens and fewer glottalized tokens in utterance-medial position. Also, we found larger aspiration duration differences in CDS between aspirated singleton [th] vs. unaspirated [t] in /st/ contexts, suggesting that mothers exaggerate this cue to the phonemic context in which the /t/ occurs. Overall, the findings suggest that CDS more clearly signals the phonemic category, which could in turn assist children learn the relationship between the underlying and surface forms.

Various three-dimensional (3-D) talking heads have been developed lately for language learning, with both external and internal articulatory movements being visualized to guide learning. Mandarin pronunciation animation is challenging due to its confusable stops and affricates with similar places of articulation. Until now, less attention has been paid to the biosignal information of aspiratory airflow, which is essential in distinguishing Mandarin consonants. This study fills a research gap by presenting the quantitative analyses of airflow, and then designing an airflow model for a 3-D pronunciation system. The airflow information was collected by Phonatory Aerodynamic System, so that confusable consonants in Mandarin could be discerned by mean airflow rate, peak airflow rate, airflow duration, and peak time. Based on the airflow parameters, an airflow model using the physical equation of fluid flow was proposed and solved, which was then combined and synchronized with the existing 3-D articulatory model. Therefore, the new multimodal system was implemented to synchronously exhibit the airflow motions and articulatory movements of uttering Mandarin syllables. Both an audio-visual perception test and a pronunciation training study were conducted to assess the effectiveness of our system. Perceptual results indicated that identification accuracy was improved for both native and nonnative groups with the help of airflow motions, while native perceivers exhibited higher accuracy due to long-term language experience. Moreover, our system helped Japanese learners of Mandarin enhance their production skills of Mandarin aspirated consonants, reflected by higher gain values of voice onset time after training.

Considerable studies have addressed effects of age and sex on voice onset time (VOT) in English. However, few studies have examined these effects on Mandarin stops. This study attempts to examine effects of age and sex on VOT in Mandarin. A total of 85 Mandarin-speaking children, aged 4-18 years old, and 13 adults as reference participated in a production experiment. Productions were elicited by reading target words in carrier phrases. Results showed that children aged 6-7 years old had longer VOTs than older ones for highly aspirated stops, and the same tendency was not observed for unaspirated stops. However, no linear developmental trend was observed for both highly aspirated and unaspirated stops. In addition, females displayed longer VOTs for highly aspirated stops and shorter for unaspirated stops, whereas significant sex differences in VOTs existed from 14 years old to adulthood for highly aspirated stops, and no significant sex differences in VOTs were found for unaspirated stops in each group, indicating that sex differences in VOTs varied with age and aspiration. The findings suggest that physiological changes in and differences between males and females provide account for some, but not all differences in VOTs across age and sex.

In this paper an attempt has been made to study the effect of aspiration on steadystate vowel duration (S.S.V.D) of spoken Garhwali Hindi sounds in isolation. Subjects were considered as five males and five females in age 20-25years. The recording was done in partial acoustically treated room and speech signal was digitized at the sampling frequency of 16KHz. S.S.V.D were obtained using linear predicative coding analysis. It has been observed that the steady-state vowel duration for voiced aspirated consonants is greater than voiceless aspirated consonants.

This paper focuses on the phonetic analysis of Korean and Rabha fricatives and Angami nasals. Though aspirated consonants have been studied earlier, very few studies were found for the comparative study of aspirated fricatives and aspirated nasals. Previous literature has suggested the presence of aspirated fricatives. As there are limited studies on aspirated nasals, this paper tries to investigate the properties of aspirated nasals by comparing them with the aspiration in Korean aspirated fricative and analyses the feature that might distinguish between the aspirated and unaspirated counterparts of both the consonants. Features such as Intensity, Duration, Centre of Gravity (COG), F1 onset and Spectral tilt (H1-H2) are used to investigate whether there is a distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated fricatives and nasals. Results confirm that COG is a distinctive acoustic cue to discriminate the aspirated and unaspirated counterparts.

This paper presents experimental evidence for an additional phase in affrication in /ti, ty/ sequences in Québec French. Namely, beyond the standard stop release and fricative-like portion of what is standardly transcribed [ts], a phase resembling a partially voiceless vowel or aspiration frequently manifests itself before (or in the absence of) the full vowel. Phonetic correlates of this phase are intermediate voicing and a mid-point decline in centre of gravity, in stark contrast with target fricative /s/. This sort of multi-phased affricate tentatively lacks counterparts in the literature on unaspirated affricates. While the final representation of these segments and the motivation of their internal composition are left for future work, the potential consequences of the addition of this intermediate phase are briefly explored, in particular with reference to Q Theory.

Stop consonants in Mandarin Chinese are all voiceless at word-initial positions only showing aspirated and unaspirated distinctions. Between the two phonation types, voice onset time (VOT) shows a clear contrast in duration, whereas voice onset fundamental frequency (onset F0) does not, as seen in previous studies. This study reports our first use of improved instrumentation techniques to record speech sound, oral airflow and glottal activity to examine consonant aspiration and onset F0. Glottal abduction, adduction and vibration cycles are monitored by a new external photo-glottographic system (ePGG) refined for better signal quality to detect accurate voice onset. Experimental data on Mandarin stops obtained from two male subjects suggests that consonant aspiration results in a large variation of VOT and oral airflow at voice onset. The onset F0 shows individual variation of falling and rising contours, and it is higher in aspirated stops than in unaspirated ones.

Believed dialect influences speech perception by linguistically naïve speakers. How much accent-induced bias affects perception of linguistically trained speakers is still unclear. This study experimentally investigates the influence of believed dialect on plosive perception by subjects who were phonetically and phonologically trained. Identical syllables were presented twice to each subject. In one session, the subjects were informed that the variety was a Mandarin dialect which has voiceless unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops; and in the other session that it was a Wu dialect, which has voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and breathy stops. More breathy stops were reported if Wu was the believed dialect. Plosive phonation in Wu is related to lexical tone, and we show that lexical tone causes another bias to plosive perception. This suggests that linguistically trained transcribers are susceptible to higher order linguistic knowledge and it demonstrates the difficulty of avoiding biased perception when the coder forms a belief about the variety that he/she transcribes. We also advocate speech perception models which include a component that accounts for the role ofexpectedsounds.

Recently, the development of medical rehabilitation technology has resulted in an increased interest in speech therapy equipment. In particular, research on articulation therapy for communication disorders is being actively conducted. The existing methods for the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders, such as traditional tactile perception tests and methods based on the empirical judgment of speech therapists, have many limitations. Moreover, the position and contact force of the tongue are key factors in speech disorders with regards to articulation. This is a very important factor in the distinction of Korean characters such as lax, tense and aspirated consonants. In this study, we proposed a Korean-electropalatography (EPG) system to easily measure and monitor the position and contact force of the tongue during articulation treatment and diagnosis. In our proposed K-EPG system, a sensor was fabricated using an AgCl electrode and biocompatible silicon. Furthermore, the measured signal was analyzed by implementing a bio-signal processing module and monitoring program. In particular, the bio-signal was measured by inserting the device into the palate of an experimental healthy test group (four subjects). Through these experiments, we confirmed that our K-EPG system could be applied to clinical treatment in speech therapy.