Figure 2 - uploaded by Mateusz Jekiel
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Non-sibilant dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ are highly marked sounds: they are rare in the world’s languages, occurring in 43 (7.6%) out of 566 UPSID languages (Maddieson 2005: 83), they bear a low functional load (few minimal pairs, e.g. thigh~thy) (Smith 2008: 1), are difficult and problematic in first and second language acquisition (Cruttenden 2...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... order to clarify such confusions, it is vital to perform an acoustic analysis of these sounds and examine the most crucial factor that affects their recognition, which is voicing. According to the spectrogram analysis presented in Figure 2, the noise of the voiceless den- tal fricative /θ/ in the word thigh spreads predominantly in the higher frequency range of over 8,000 Hz. In comparison, the noise intensity in the voiceless labio-dental fricative /f/ in the word fie focuses primarily in the range from 3,000 to 4,000 Hz. ...
Similar publications
Over the past three decades, a considerable number of studies have investigated the connection between study abroad and second language acquisition to the exclusion of another emerging language profile, that of heritage language learners who study abroad to enhance their home language skills. The few studies on heritage language learners’ developme...
Languages contact and affect each other at various levels due to some general factors like culture, economy, policies, and the other specific ones like areal convergences and personal relations. One cannot say that there is an isolated, "pure" language that has not been contacted to another language yet. Only the directions, limits and dimensions o...
Classified as an endangered language, the Laz language is spoken in a restricted area by a small number of speakers. The contact between Turkish and Laz is intense and unidirectional in that the latter is only restrained to communication among family members in small speech communities. Contact-induced change, which is an inevitable outcome of Turk...
Mixed languages are a category of contact language, which emerges in bilingual contexts where a common language is already present but drastic social change is underway. In this respect, they do not serve a communicative function, but rather as markers of an in-group identity. Mixed languages combine the vocabulary and grammar of both languages to...
The mutual influence of East-Semitic Akkadian and isolate Sumerian on each other is the first known and documented example of contact-induced language change. Speakers of East-Semitic and Sumerian may have been in contact for over a thousand years, and the contact resulted in similarities on the level of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon....
Citations
... Interdental fricatives have always betrayed the majority of ESL/EFL speakers as they replace them with sounds which are relatively similar and more familiar to them. Many studies have revealed that /θ/ is generally substituted by /t/ while /ð/ is produced as /d/ (Wells, 1986;O'Connor, 1998;Cruttenden, 2008;Hattem, 2009;Hanulíková & Weber, 2010;Yavaş, 2011;Owolabi, 2012;Jekiel, 2012;Firdaws et al. 2020;Brigg, 2021). These studies proved that this substitution is neither a recent phenomenon nor is it specific to a given geographical location because it is even found in English L1 contexts like British English. ...
... TH stopping consists of the substitution of the sound /ð/ and /θ/ by the sounds /d/ and /t/, respectively. It is considered a feature of London English and commonly attributed to the influence of overseas varieties (Wells, 1986;Jekiel, 2012). The confusion between /ð/ and /d/ was said to be traced back to the Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) periods (Lass, 1992, p. 64). ...
... These events include pre-sonorant strengthening, postfricative strengthening and finally, fricative weakening before /Vr/ (Lass, 1992). The relationship between dental fricatives and stops is better explained by Grimm's Law and Verner's Law (See Lass, 1994;Jekiel, 2012). ...
This study investigates the production of /θ/ and /ð/ at initial, medial and final positions by Cameroonian ESL (CamESL) students using the acoustic analysis method. The words theme, something, mouth, them, without and with were put on a list and read by 26 undergraduate CamESL learners from the University of Maroua. Their productions were recorded and analysed using PRAAT version 6.3.11 of 17 July 2023. The analysis revealed that at initial and medial positions, the majority of learners were able to accurately render the sounds while at the final position, both /θ/ and /ð/ were systematically substituted with /f/ and the unreleased stops /t ̚/ and /d ̚ /. It was also discovered that the choice of substituting phonemes depends on the linguistic environment sounds since unreleased stops never occurred at initial and medial word positions, and the normal stops /t/ and /d/ also rarely occurred at the final position. It can be concluded that success and deviation in the production of interdental fricatives by CamESL learners depend on the location of the sound.
... The first, the consonant sound, Voiceless Dental Fricatives /θ/, is mostly replaced with Voiceless Alveolar Stop /t/. That data has a correlation with the previous research conducted by (Jekiel, 2012) who stated that the studies on production, perception, and acquisition of these sounds show that /θ/ and /ð/ are difficult to master both by a native English speaker and for an English as second language speaker, usually realized as /t, d/, /t̪, d̪ /, /f, v/ or /tθ, dð/ across many English dialects. The second one is a Voiced Palatal Fricative /ʒ/ and Voiced Palatal Glide /y/, they replaced it with Voiceless Alveolar Fricative /s/. ...
This study aims to reveal the production of consonant sounds in children aged 6-9 years old whose first language is Indonesian and/or Gorontalo language, as well as to reveal the facts about the consonant sounds that can and cannot be produced by the children. This study applied qualitative method by collecting the data using audio and video recording to record the consonant sounds produced by the participants, and transcribing the sounds using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). The data of this study were taken from School-Age Children from six until nine years old, that consisted of five students from Ronal Hutagalung Learning Center. The data analysis was carried out through the stages of data reduction, data display, and the drawing and verifying conclusion. Furthermore, the classification of NAE Consonant Phonemes by Parker (1986) was used as the main theory in data analysis. The findings show that from five participants, three participants can produce 23 consonant sounds, and two participants can produce 24 consonant sounds. In addition, the results also show that the participants were mostly unable to produce consonants Voiceless Dental Fricative /θ/, Voiced Palatal Fricative /ʒ/, Voiced Palatal Glide /y/, Voiceless Palatal Fricative /ʃ/, and Voiced Dental Fricative /ð/, which means that most of the sounds that they cannot produce are the consonants that do not exist in their first language. The findings of this study are expected to be a reference in teaching English pronunciation to children, as well as overcoming the problems related to the consonant production in children. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengungkap produksi bunyi-bunyi konsonan pada anak usia 6-9 tahun yang bahasa pertamanya adalah bahasa Indonesia dan/atau bahasa Gorontalo, serta mengungkap fakta tentang bunyi konsonan yang dapat dan tidak dapat dihasilkan oleh anak pada usia tersebut. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan pengumpulan data menggunakan rekaman audio dan video untuk merekam bunyi konsonan yang dihasilkan oleh partisipan, dan mentranskripsi bunyi-bunyi tersebut dengan menggunakan IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). Data penelitian ini diambil dari Anak Usia Sekolah dari usia enam sampai sembilan tahun, yang terdiri dari lima siswa dari Ronal Hutagalung Learning Center. Analisis data dilaksanakan melalui tahapan reduksi data, penyajian data, serta penarikan dan verifikasi kesimpulan. Selanjutnya, klasifikasi Fonem Konsonan NAE oleh Parker (1986) digunakan sebagai teori utama dalam analisis data. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa dari lima partisipan, tiga partisipan dapat menghasilkan 23 bunyi konsonan, dan dua partisipan dapat menghasilkan 24 bunyi konsonan. Selain itu, hasil penelitian juga menunjukkan bahwa sebagian besar partisipan tidak dapat memproduksi konsonan Voiceless Dental Fricative /θ/, Voiced Palatal Fricative /ʒ/, Voiced Palatal Glide /y/, Voiceless Palatal Fricative /ʃ/, and Voiced Dental Fricative /ð/, yang berarti bahwa sebagian besar bunyi yang tidak dapat mereka lafalkan adalah konsonan yang tidak ada dalam bahasa pertama mereka. Temuan penelitian ini diharapkan dapat menjadi acuan dalam mengajarkan pronunciation bahasa Inggris pada anak, serta mengatasi permasalahan terkait produksi bunyi-bunyi konsonan pada anak.
... This statement is supported by the fact that there are few minimal pairs involving these sounds in English, and the sounds appear in a mostly predictable distribution (e.g. /D/ occurs word-initially in function words and otherwise mostly word-medially, whereas /T/ occurs mostly word-initially or wordfinally in lexical words), thus demonstrating low functional load (Jekiel 2012). According to Lass (1994: 71-72) the current phonological status of interdental fricatives is similar to the one found in Old English, when /T/ was the only voiceless dental fricative phoneme while [D] was a voiced allophone appearing between voiced sounds. ...
... According to Barber, Beal & Shaw (2009: 45), the stable situation of dental fricatives stems from their being 'well integrated' in the consonant system of English and belonging to a set of fricative pairs (i.e. a familiar pattern that resists change). However, Jekiel (2012) argues that numerous cases of loss of dental fricatives across modern varieties of English suggest that the status of /T/ and /D/ sounds is not stable after all and a possible explanation for these sound changes could be their low functional load. ...
... (McMurray & Jongman 2011: 240) Lastly, our findings help us gain more insight into phonological contrast behavior. Based on (i) multiple unsuccessful attempts to classify front fricatives in both English and Greek employing a variety of acoustic measures and statistical methods, (ii) human listeners' reduced performance in perception studies involving these (English) fricatives (compared to non-front fricatives), (iii) the reports of high inter-and intra-speaker variability in the production of some of these sounds (Narayanan et al. 1995), (iv) the general rarity of interdental fricatives in linguistic inventories (Jekiel 2012), and (v) the loss of dental fricatives in modern varieties of English (ibid.), we might conclude that the contrast between front fricatives, specifically labiodentals and interdentals, is cross-linguistically disfavored because, in one or perhaps multiple ways, it is weak compared to other contrasts. ...
In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front fricatives (McMurray & Jongman, 2011; Maniwa et al., 2009) by taking a closer look at the production of 29 native Greek speakers. Our corpus consists of Greek fricatives from five places of articulation and two voicing values [f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ç, ʝ, x, ɣ] produced in nonce disyllabic words before [a, o, u] in stressed syllables (e.g., [ˈθakos]). We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients, previously successful with obstruent bursts (Bunnell et al., 2004), vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino, 2010), and Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley, 2016). Our method yields the best correct classification rates reported to date for front fricatives: Present study: 88%; English: 66% (Jongman et al., 2000), Greek: 55.1% (Nirgianaki, 2014). The important cues for the successful classification are the vowel following the target fricative and the second region of frication noise. Our study adds to the body of work aimed at identifying techniques for quantifying and categorizing large samples of speech. Obtaining higher classification rates than before takes us one step closer to understanding the properties of “difficult” sounds like the front fricatives.
... Notably, the research cited above (describing the use of rare phonemes in the pharmaceutical industry) do not report the use of phoneme /th/ which too we have discussed in this paper. We argue that both /θ/ and /ð/ are equally rare in world languages (Dubois and Horvath 2004).The World Atlas Of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath 2005) is one of the most complete catalogues of phonological sounds detailed from over 2560 languages of the world (Jekiel 2014) and as per that /th/ sounds occurs in just 43 (7.6%) out of the 566 languages surveyed (Jekiel 2014;Maddieson 2005) and is one of the most uncommon sounds across the world's languages (Jekiel 2014), so its use will result in the same effect as is desired by the use of /x/, /z/ or /q/. In fact, many phonological sounds used by the pharmaceutical industry to bring on the exclusivity and rarity can be described as consonant blends (e.g., /q/ sound as in /kw/ in the word 'squeak' or /ks/ sound in the letter /x/) and are regarded to be very complex in acquisition, production and perception (Jekiel 2014) and are acquired very late in life (see Table 8 below). ...
... Notably, the research cited above (describing the use of rare phonemes in the pharmaceutical industry) do not report the use of phoneme /th/ which too we have discussed in this paper. We argue that both /θ/ and /ð/ are equally rare in world languages (Dubois and Horvath 2004).The World Atlas Of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath 2005) is one of the most complete catalogues of phonological sounds detailed from over 2560 languages of the world (Jekiel 2014) and as per that /th/ sounds occurs in just 43 (7.6%) out of the 566 languages surveyed (Jekiel 2014;Maddieson 2005) and is one of the most uncommon sounds across the world's languages (Jekiel 2014), so its use will result in the same effect as is desired by the use of /x/, /z/ or /q/. In fact, many phonological sounds used by the pharmaceutical industry to bring on the exclusivity and rarity can be described as consonant blends (e.g., /q/ sound as in /kw/ in the word 'squeak' or /ks/ sound in the letter /x/) and are regarded to be very complex in acquisition, production and perception (Jekiel 2014) and are acquired very late in life (see Table 8 below). ...
... Notably, the research cited above (describing the use of rare phonemes in the pharmaceutical industry) do not report the use of phoneme /th/ which too we have discussed in this paper. We argue that both /θ/ and /ð/ are equally rare in world languages (Dubois and Horvath 2004).The World Atlas Of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath 2005) is one of the most complete catalogues of phonological sounds detailed from over 2560 languages of the world (Jekiel 2014) and as per that /th/ sounds occurs in just 43 (7.6%) out of the 566 languages surveyed (Jekiel 2014;Maddieson 2005) and is one of the most uncommon sounds across the world's languages (Jekiel 2014), so its use will result in the same effect as is desired by the use of /x/, /z/ or /q/. In fact, many phonological sounds used by the pharmaceutical industry to bring on the exclusivity and rarity can be described as consonant blends (e.g., /q/ sound as in /kw/ in the word 'squeak' or /ks/ sound in the letter /x/) and are regarded to be very complex in acquisition, production and perception (Jekiel 2014) and are acquired very late in life (see Table 8 below). ...
Research has shown that marketers can enhance consumers’ expectations when a product’s attributes are congruent with its packaging, shape, sensory attributes and sound of the brand name (sound symbolism). In the past decade, a reasonable amount of research has focused on sound symbolic attributes of brand names; however, the literature linking the age of acquisition (AoA) of various phonemes, their usage in brand names and their subsequent perception by consumers is lacking. In the present research, we hypothesized that because humans acquire different phonemes at different ages and consequently some phonemes are used more frequently (vs rarely) in everyday conversations and have more concrete (vs abstract) mental representations than late (vs early)-acquired phonemes, this impacts on the way in which brand names are perceived. Specifically, across three experiments, we demonstrate that brand names created from early-acquired phonemes are more suited to basic brands (i.e., brands which are used in an everyday context), whereas brand names created from late-acquired phonemes are more suited for luxury brands. Our research shows an association between the AoA of phonemes, as captured in brand names, and the brand’s perceived luxurious appeal. We discuss the results in light of the literature on speech sound development and provide practical implications for brand managers and marketers.
The present study investigates the extent to which age of acquisition (AoA), English language proficiency and use influence consonant perception in Singapore English (SgE). Consonantal pairs of interest were presented in a gating paradigm to determine the amount of linguistic information participants required for accurate consonant identification as a measure of perceptual acuity. Only the [th]–[?] and [t]–[?] phonetic contrasts emerged sensitive to differences in AoA of English, with the early AoA group outperforming the late AoA group. Language proficiency and use did not significantly influence consonant perception. The findings are discussed in light of how AoA may interact with the universal difficulty and distributional regularities of speech contrasts to affect speech processing. Future studies should investigate a wider range of SgE speakers and identify distributional regularities of speech sounds to gain a more comprehensive picture of the factors that influence consonant perception in SgE.
This paper examines word-initial engma deletion in Bininj Kunwok. Loss of initial consonants is a well-documented historical process in many Australian languages (Blevins, Juliette. 2001. Where have all the onsets gone? Initial consonant loss in Australian Aboriginal languages. In Jane Simpson, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin & Barry Alpher (eds.), Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages, 481–492. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics), but there has been no systematic analysis of initial consonant loss as a synchronic variable (Fletcher, Janet & Andrew Butcher 2014. Sound patterns of Australian languages. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia, 91–138. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). In the case of Kunwok, word-initial velar nasal deletion (e.g. nganabbarru ∼ anabbarru ‘buffalo’) has been described as having regional distribution and is a prominent feature of speakers from the western and southern peripheries of the dialect chain, but variable in speakers from the central region (Evans, Nicholas. 2003. Bininj Kunwok: A pan-dialectal grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics). This study tests the distribution of the word-initial engma for both linguistic conditioning and sociolinguistic factors, and arrives at three conclusions. First, that preceding environment is a contributing factor. Second, that morphological class is a categorical conditioning factor. And third, that the phenomenon is spreading and there is evidence of language change in progress. This paper also takes into consideration community perspectives, noting that the sound change in progress is accompanied by a change in perceptions.
This paper examines the effect of middle and older age on Michael Caine’s realisation of the English dental fricatives. The results show convergence to prestige forms during middle age. Caine only exhibits TH- fronting during his older years within a familiar social setting (audience and speech styles), while TH- stopping is present in both age groups with a significant increase in his older years. It is proposed that the discrepancy between stopping and fronting exists because the two variants carry different levels of stigma in Caine’s linguistic community.
In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voiceless segments from five distinct places of articulation. Our corpus contains all of the Greek fricatives produced by 29 monolingual speakers, but our focus is on the distinction between the front nonsibilant fricatives [f v θ ð]. For comparison, we also discuss the other places of articulation where relevant. We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients , previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts (Bunnell, Polikoff & McNicholas 2004), English vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010), Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley 2016), and Russian fricatives (Spinu, Kochetov & Lilley 2018). For this study, fricative boundaries were automatically aligned using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and then manually checked. Six Bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (c0–c5) were extracted from 20-millisecond Hann windows. HMMs were used to divide the fricatives and adjacent vowels into three regions of internally minimized variance. A multinomial logistic regression analysis then used the mean cepstral coefficients from each region as predictors for classification by consonant identity. Our method yields highly successful classification rates, exceeding the performance of previous methods. We discuss these results in light of the differences of the phonemic distributions of fricatives between English and Greek.
