Phil J. HowsonLeibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Phil J. Howson
Ph. D.
About
53
Publications
9,668
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Introduction
My primary research interests are (1) phonetics-phonology interface, (2) phonological representation, (3) articulatory phonology, (4) phonetics, (5) Slavic languages. I use a wide variety of research methods in my research, including articulatory, acoustic, and perception studies. I am most familiar with ultrasound, but have experience with EMA, acoustic measures, EPG, and EGG.
Additional affiliations
March 2023 - present
Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung
Position
- PostDoc Position
September 2020 - August 2021
July 2018 - July 2020
Education
September 2013 - November 2018
University of Toronto
Field of study
- Linguistics
Publications
Publications (53)
The Czech language has two trills produced with the anterior tongue, represented in the Czech orthography as /r/ and /ř/. The phonetic characterization of the latter trill, currently transcribed in the IPA as [], has been especially controversial. The present study uses ultrasound, electroglottography (EGG) and acoustic evidence to examine these tr...
The Czech trill-fricative, /r̝/, is typologically rare among the world's languages. The present study used electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to examine the cross-sectional morphology during the production of the trill-fricative /r̝/ compared to the plain trill /r/ and sibilant fricatives /ʃ, ʒ, s, z/. Data collected from 5 native speakers of Cze...
Purpose
Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /ɹ/ in child and adult speech.
Method
In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve 8-year-old, and 11 college-aged speakers...
Lateral vocalization is a cross-linguistically common phenomenon where a lateral is realized as a glide, such as [w, j], or a vowel [u, i]. In this paper, we focus on the articulatory triggers that could cause lateral vocalization. We examined Brazilian Portuguese, a language known for the process of lateral vocalization in coda position. We examin...
Plain language summary
Second language acquisition requires that language learners acquire a novel set of speech segments. For young Sorbians who learn Lower Sorbian as a second language, they must acquire two novel sibilant fricative segments (high frequency noisy segments like /s/). Both of these segments are perceptually similar to the German si...
Polish language has an uncommon three-way sibilant contrast /s, ʂ, ɕ/. For learners of Polish who have an L1 system that has two-way sibilant contrast (e.g., /s, ʃ/), this means that they must learn two segments (i.e., /ʂ, ɕ/) that are acoustically and perceptually similar to one L1 segment. In this study, we examined 5 A-level and 5 C-level L2 lea...
Fricatives require precise gestural control to produce a narrow constriction in the vocal tract. This generates turbulent airflow that gives fricatives their distinctive acoustic properties. This study investigated the articulation of the lingual fricatives /s, ʃ, x/ of Upper Sorbian, which is an endangered language spoken in eastern Germany. We us...
This poster examines the production and perception of L2 learners of the three-way sibilant contrast in Polish. The findings indicate that learners utilize L1 articulatory patterns to facilitate the learning of novel segments and that perceptually similar segments in L1 and L2 become linked over time with a shared representation.
Liquids, comprised of rhotics and laterals, are complex segments that pattern together across languages with respect to phonological and phonotactic behavior. However, there has been little if any unifying phonetic properties. This sets apart the liquids from other classes where there are clear phonetic correlates. Some researchers have suggested t...
Lower Sorbian is a moribund language spoken in Eastern Germany that features a three-way sibilant contrast, /s, ʂ, ɕ/. The vast majority of L1 speakers are above eighty years of age and virtually no young Sorbians learn Lower Sorbian as their first language. There are language revitalization programs in place, but this means that virtually all Lowe...
This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length and four contrastive tones. In our acoustic study, we find that the primary correlate of stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné is duration, whereas intensity plays a secondary but statistical...
The present study investigated “the” reduction in phrase-medial Verb- the-Noun sequences elicited from 5-year-old children and young adults (18–22 yr). Several measures of reduction were calculated based on acoustic measurement of these sequences. Analyses on the measures indicated that the determiner vowel was reduced in both child and adult speec...
Purpose
As a class, fricatives are more “resistant” to consonant–vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /θ, s, ʃ/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech sounds.
Method
Ten 5-year-old children, seven 8-year-old children, and nin...
No PDF available
ABSTRACT
Motor plans are complex and consist not only of constriction location and degree, but also gestural timing. For children to acquire adult-like speech, they need to acquire complex timing relationships that can result in delayed acquisition. To examine this phenomenon, we examined long-distance timing patterns for English l...
Czech has a sibilant inventory that contrasts at three places of articulation: Alveolar, a pre-post-alveolar, and palato-alveolar. The specific aim of this study is to examine the perception of the typologically rare Czech sibilant inventory and to determine whether acoustic-perceptual characteristics play a role in the maintenance of the Czech tri...
A perceiver’s ability to accurately predict target sounds in a forward-gated AV speech task indexes the strength and scope of anticipatory coarticulation in adult speech (Redford et al., JASA, 144, 2447–2461, 2018). This suggests a perception-based method for studying coarticulation in populations who may poorly tolerate the more invasive or restri...
Upper Sorbian, an endangered West Slavic language spoken in Germany, is unusual among Slavic languages in having a uvular rhotic /R/. This paper focuses on the gestural configuration and coarticulatory resistance of the uvular rhotic and explores the relation between the articulation and acoustics of this sound. Ultrasound tongue imaging data were...
This paper presents a method for adding additional statistical comparisons to multidimensional scaling (MDS). The object of study in our work is perceptual distances between speech sound categories. Typically, MDS solutions do not receive inferential statistical treatment and their visualizations present average results across numerous participants...
An examination of 7 fricatives in the perceptual space of English and Malayalam listeners. The aim is to see if phonological subgroups of fricatives group together in the perceptual space and support the notion that natural classes are dictated - at least in part - by perceptual characteristics.
We use a novel AV-gated speech perception method to map long-distance anticipatory coarticulatory patterns for English liquids in three age groups: 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, adults. We find a difference in the degree of anticipatory coarticulation between the English rhotic and lateral and a difference in anticipatory coarticulation strategies by a...
Finding phonetic correlates of rhotics as a natural class has been elusive, leading to the suggestion that any class-based relationship between different rhotic categories is purely phonological in nature. This paper examines native English speakers’ perception of three different non-native rhotics (i.e., /r ɻ ʀ/) compared to non-native sounds from...
No PDF available
ABSTRACT
The late acquisition of liquids is well documented and attributed to the simultaneous anterior and posterior lingual constrictions required. But adult-like segmental production also entails the acquisition of coarticulatory patterns. Liquids are interesting in this regard because they have exceptionally strong effects on t...
No PDF available
ABSTRACT
The internal representation of linguistic information has been the subject of much debate. Recent work has shown that brain activation in response to different categories of segments, such as obstruents or approximants, triggers different neural networks. This work examines the perception of English and Malayalam native sp...
Although liquids are mastered late, English-speaking children are said to have fully acquired these segments by age 8. The aim of this study was to test whether liquid coarticulation was also adult-like by this age. 8-year-old productions of /əLa/ and /əLu/ sequences were compared to 5-year-old and adult productions of these sequences. SSANOVA anal...
This study examines the effects of determiner reduction and coarticulation on the perceived naturalness of resynthesized shock-the-geek (V-the- N) sequences. The determiner, equally spaced between monosyllabic V and N, was manipulated in 3 experiments along a 7-step continuum: (1) duration varied from 0.25x the original duration to 4x this duration...
This study examines the effects of determiner reduction and coarticulation on the perceived naturalness of resynthesized shock-the-geek (V-the-N) sequences. The determiner, equally spaced between monosyllabic V and N, was manipulated in 3 experiments along a 7-step continuum: (1) duration varied from 0.25x the original duration to 4x this duration;...
Although liquids are mastered late, English-speaking children are said to have fully acquired these segments by age 8. The aim of this study was to test whether liquid coarticulation was also adult-like by this age. 8-year-old productions of /əLa/ and /əLu/ sequences were compared to 5-year-old and adult productions of these sequences. SSANOVA anal...
There is phonological evidence that rhotics form a natural class of sounds (Walsh-Dickey, 1997). However, the articulatory and acoustic properties that are common across all rhotics have been difficult to identify (Lindau, 1985; Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996), creating a disconnect between phonetics and phonology. This thesis argues that the natural...
The perception of liquids in Mandarin and Hindi.
Rhotics and laterals are often described as being separated by F3; however, recent work has described lower F2 as a distinguishing quality of rhotics. The current work examines the perception of liquids (rhotics and laterals) by Mandarin and Hindi listeners. Participants completed a forced-choice identification task on a set of 30 stimuli, manipula...
Two of the major problems with rhotics are: (1) rhotics, unlike most other classes, are highly resistant to secondary palatalization, and (2) acoustic cues for rhotics as a class have been elusive. This study examines the acoustics of Upper and Lower Sorbian rhotics. Dynamic measures of the F1-F3 and F2-F1 were recorded and compared using SSANOVAs....
Sorbian is a West Slavic language spoken in eastern Germany, in Saxony and Brandenburg near the borders of Poland and the Czech Republic, and is recognized as an endangered language by UNESCO (Moseley 2012). It is commonly referred to as Sorbian in English, but has historically been referred to as both Wendish and Lusatian. The Sorbian speech area...
Upper Sorbian has been influenced tremendously by German, causing it to adopting the uvular rhotic. The current study examines the uvular rhotic and its palatalized counterpart in three vocalic environments (word initial, intervocalic, and word final) with the vowels /a, e, o, i/ using ultrasound. The preliminary results indicate a striking differe...
Malayalam has a typologically rare set of three rhotic consonants—an alveolar trill, an alveolar tap, and a retroflex/postalveolar approximant. The first one is described as velarized, while the other two are somewhat palatalized. Previous acoustic work by Punnoose et al. [Phonetica 70, 274-297 (2013)] has established that the contrast can be diffe...
Though palatalized rhotics are cross-linguistically rare (Hall & Hamann, 2010), Japanese rhotic taps can be palatalized. The rarity of palatalized rhotics has been associated with the observation that rhotics require tongue dorsum backing, while palatalization requires tongue dorsum fronting (Kavitskaya et al., 2009), implicating a possible conflic...
Though palatalized rhotics are cross-linguistically rare (Hall & Hamann, 2010), Japanese rhotic taps can be palatalized. The rarity of palatalized rhotics has been associated with the observation that rhotics require tongue dorsum backing, while palatalization requires tongue dorsum fronting (Kavitskaya et al., 2009), implicating a possible conflic...
This study is an acoustic examination of laterals in Lower Sorbian, an endangered language spoken in eastern Germany. Acoustic data for two dialects of Lower Sorbian (one with the dark lateral and one which underwent the sound change to /w/; both have a clear lateral, /l/) was collected and analyzed using a SSANOVA to examine temporal characteristi...
The current paper presents an acoustic study of Lower Sorbian. Four native speakers of Lower Sorbian participated in this study. Center of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis and slope measures were taken to measure the fricatives' spectral qualities. Vocalic transitions were also taken to gather finer grained information about the sibi...
The production of trills requires precise articulatory and aerodynamic settings, which appear to be hardly compatible with secondary palatalization – the raising and fronting of the tongue body. Yet, the precise reasons for this incompatibility are still poorly understood, largely given the paucity of articulatory work on trills. Moreover, previous...
This paper used ultrasound technology to examine the plain and palatalized taps in Japanese. Six participants of Japanese produced nonsense words containing /ɾ/ and /ɾ j /. The mid-sagittal contours were compared in three intervocalic contexts: a_a, o_o, u_u. The results showed that /ɾ/ had a great deal of variability around the tongue dorsum. This...
This paper examines the liquid segments in Czech (/r/ and /l/) using articulography. The mid-sagittal and parasagittal contours of the liquids were compared. 5 speakers of Czech produced nonsense words in three environments: word-initial, intervocalic, and word-final position. The results indicated that /l/ is articulated further forward in the mou...
This paper used ultrasound technology to examine the plain and palatalized taps in Japanese. Six participants of Japanese produced nonsense words containing /ɾ/ and /ɾ j /. The mid-sagittal contours were compared in three intervocalic contexts: a_a, o_o, u_u. The results showed that /ɾ/ had a great deal of variability around the tongue dorsum. This...
Previous studies have suggested that there is a difference between the Czech trills /r̝/ and /r/ with respect to the airflow required to produce each trill. This study examines this question using an airflow meter. Five speakers of Czech produced /r̝/ and /r/ in the real words řád “order,” pařát “talon,” tvař “face,” rád “like,” paráda “great,” and...
It has been previously suggested that fricative production is marked by a longer glottal opening as compared to sonorous segments. The present study uses electroglottography (EGG) and acoustic measurements to test this hypothesis by examining the activity of the vocal cords during the articulation of fricative and sonorant segments of English and S...
This paper examines the alveolar and post-alveolar fricatives in Czech using articulography. The placement of sensors along both the mid-sagittal plane and the coronal plane allowed for data collection of both the mid-sagittal contour and the cross-sectional morphology of the alveolar and post-alveolar fricatives. Six native speakers of Czech read...
Previous studies have indicated a difference between voiced and voiceless pairs of consonants with respect pre-constriction vocal tract volume. This article utilizes electropalatography (EPG) to examine the anterior and posterior groove width of palatalized and non-palatalized fricative pairs in Russians in order to observe different degrees of pre...
Previous studies have found that the degree of tongue grooving during production of fricatives correlates with their place of articulation. Czech has a cross-linguistically rare alveolar trill-fricative <ř>, which would be expected to pattern with alveolar fricatives in terms of the tongue grooving. The current study employs electromagnetic articul...
Previous studies comparing the articulation of the contrasting Czech trills /ř/ and /r/ have described /ř/ as being produced with the laminal portion of the tongue at a more anterior location with a narrower channel [Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World’s Languages Blackwell, Oxford (1996)] and using a tighter constriction than /r/ [Dan...
The article utilizes electroglottography (EGG) to test for a difference in laryngeal setting as the potential source of acoustic distinction inexplicable by tongue height. Due to the spectrographic evidence which shows that becomes more fricated towards the end of the sound, particularly in word-initial and word-final positions. EGG waveforms were...