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Voicing Assimilations by French Speakers of German in Stop-Fricative Sequences
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In this paper we present selected results from a study of the voicing profiles of consonants in five languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, German, Hindi, Mexican Spanish, and Italian. We will focus here on the voicing properties of stop closures in these languages. The voicing profile is defined as the frame-by-frame voicing status of a speech sound in continuous speech. We propose statistical models that predict the probability of voicing from phone identity, neighbouring phones, and positional and prosodic factors. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper investigates the voicing properties of stops by means of voicing profiles: the frame-by-frame voicing probability through- out the duration of stop closures. The voicing profiles reveal the dynamics of voicing status changes and thereby facilitate further investigations of contextual effects on voicing. The motivation of this study originally comes from appli- cations in speech technologies, such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, and automatic speech segmentation. Some applica- tions in these domains are sensitive to the discrepancies between the assumed (often phonological) specification of a speech sound and its acoustic realization. The phonological specification of voic- ing, represented as a binary distinction of (+voice) or (-voice) over the domain of the entire speech sound (2) is a particularly trou- blesome feature when it comes to feature-to-data matching, when the state of vocal cord vibration is subject to the delicate balance of many factors (16, 10, 1, 15, 11, 9). Such discrepancies are of course well-known, and have been a major motivation driving the research of voice onset time (VOT) (8, 7) in search of a better cri- terion than the distinctive feature to differentiate the stop series in a given language. The VOT research has been successfully applied cross-linguistically (4, 6, 14, 12, 3). As more information becomes available in addition to VOT, such as the voicing trajectory along the entire stop closure duration, we expect a better understanding of the factors affecting voicing contrasts, and improvement in speech related applications. This is the starting point of the current paper. We will compare the voicing profiles of the stop closures in five languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, German, Hindi, Mexican Spanish, and Italian, and discuss the effects of aspiration, preceding phone context and following phone context, and prosodic factors where available. The study is part of a larger project that investigates the voicing profiles of consonants in a cross-linguistic framework (see also (13)).
This study investigates the phonetic realisations of voicing contrast in alveolar and postalveolar fricatives production in different word positions in order to understand the temporal and spatial production strategies used in the control of voicing and frication, and to provide a frame of reference for speech therapy despite the inter-speaker variation. Seven native speakers of German, originally coming from various regions, participated in the experiment. Acoustic signals were recorded onto DAT, and tongue palate contact patterns were recorded by means of electropalatography (EPG). The temporal parameters were measured using the acoustic signals and the spatial parameters were measured based on the EPG data. The corpus included real words with /s, z, S, Z/ occurring at word initial, medial and final positions. Temporal results showed that differences in the overall frication duration for voicing contrast occur at almost all positions (with longer duration for voiceless phonemes). However, voicing during the frication interval was a less reliable discriminator, particularly for Southern German speakers and at word final position. We found a positive correlation between the relative voicing duration and the amount of tongue palate contact for subjects who produced voicing. Especially for the postalveolars, voicing also coincides with more front articulation. Results are discussed with respect to laryngeal-oral co-ordination and aerodynamics.
For listeners to recognize words, they must map temporally distributed phonetic feature cues onto higher order phonological representations. Three experiments are reported that were performed to examine what information listeners extract from assimilated segments (e.g., place-assimilated tokens of cone that resemble comb) and how they interpret it. Experiment 1 employed form priming to demonstrate that listeners activate the underlying form of CONE, but not of its neighbor (COMB). Experiment 2 employed phoneme monitoring to show that the same assimilated tokens facilitate the perception of postassimilation context. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that listeners recover both the underlying place of the modified item and information about the subsequent item from the same modified segment. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1, using different postassimilation contexts to demonstrate that context effects do not reflect familiarity with a given assimilation process. The results are discussed in the context of general auditory grouping mechanisms.
Models of speech perception attribute a different role to contextual information in the processing of assimilated speech. This study concerned perceptual processing of regressive voice assimilation in French. This phonological variation is asymmetric in that assimilation is partial for voiced stops and nearly complete for voiceless stops. Two auditory-visual cross-modal form priming experiments were used to examine perceptual compensation for assimilation in French words with voiceless versus voiced stop offsets. The results show that, for the former segments, assimilating context enhances underlying form recovery, whereas it does not for the latter. These results suggest that two sources of information -- contextual information and bottom-up information from the assimilated forms themselves -- are complementary and both come into play during the processing of fully or partially assimilated word forms.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, August, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 343-365).
Numerous studies have indicated that prosodic phrase boundaries may be marked by a variety of acoustic phenomena including segmental lengthening. It has not been established, however, whether this lengthening is restricted to the immediate vicinity of the boundary, or if it extends over some larger region. In this study, segmental lengthening in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries is examined and found to be restricted to the rhyme of the syllable preceding the boundary. By using a normalized measure of segmental lengthening, and by compensating for differences in speaking rate, it is also shown that at least four distinct types of boundaries can be distinguished on the basis of this lengthening.
The present study examines whether, and to what degree, regressive voicing assimilation of Spanish /s/ (as in rasgo /rasgo/ [ˈraz.ɣ̞ o]) occurs in the speech of advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish. Acoustic analyses of L2 productions of /s/ in the voicing context (preceding a voiced consonant) and in the non-voicing context (preceding a voiceless consonant) elicited from a contextualized picture-description task revealed a contextual voicing effect in the speech of only a limited number of the advanced L2 speakers. The low occurrence of the assimilation process even amongst the advanced learners may be attributed in part to the variable nature of voicing in the input and to the complexity of the process (i.e. subject to different stylistic, linguistic, and social factors). The study also provides a phonetic description of the variants of L2 Spanish /s/ and finds that when voicing does occur, it is phonetically similar to native Spanish voicing in terms of the phonetic contexts in which voicing occurs, patterns of durational differences of /s/ according to voicing, and the variable nature of its occurrence.
In this book, Richard Wiese provides the most complete and up-to-date description presently available of the phonology of German. Starting with a presentation of phonemes and their features, the author then describes in detail syllables, higher prosodic units, phonological conditions of word formation, patterns of redundancy for features, phonological rules, and rules of stress for words and phrases, giving particular emphasis to the interaction of morphology and phonology. He focuses on the present-day standard language, but includes occasional discussion of other variants and registers.
The study is informed by recent models in phonological theory, and for phonologists and morphologists it provides both a rich source of material and a critical discussion of current problems and their solutions. It also serves as an introduction to the sound system of German for the non-specialist reader.
Phonological rules introduce variation in word forms that listeners have to compensate for. We previously showed (Darcy 2002; Darcy et al., to appear) that compensation for phonological variation in perception is driven by language- specific mechanisms. In particular, English speakers compensate more for place assimilation than for voicing assimilation, whereas the reverse holds for French speakers. English indeed has a rule of place assimilation, whereas French has a rule of voicing assimilation. In the present study, we explore the patterns of compensation for assimilation in English learners of French and in French learners of English. We use the same design and stimuli as Darcy (2006), Darcy et al. (to appear); in this design, listeners are engaged in a word detection task on sentences containing occurrences of both place assimilation and voicing assimilation. We test British English and American English learners of French as well as French learners of American English on both their native language (L1) and their second language (L2). The results show that beginners interpret their L2 in exactly the same way as their L1: they apply the native compensation pattern to both languages. Advanced learners, by contrast, succeed in compensating for the non-native assimilation rule in their L2, while keeping the native compensation pattern for L1; as little or no interference from L2 on L1 is observed for these learners, we conclude that two separate systems of compensation for phonological processes can co-exist.
Acoustic analysis of 10 pairs of German words produced by 10 native speakers revealed that the distributions of acoustic parameters for underlying voiced and voiceless stops are significantly different, despite considerable overlap between the 2 categories. Also, in a listening test, 10 German listeners were able to distinguish the voiced and voiceless pairs with about 60% accuracy. Several mechanisms for such a semicontrast are considered, including the possibility that it is an experimental artifact. It is concluded that although this is not an artifact, it probably serves no communicative function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The study investigated L1 orthographic impact on cognitive processing involved in L2 reading. In a cross-linguistic experiment with four orthographically diverse groups (Arabic, English, Japanese, and Spanish), the effects of two types of phonological encoding interference (phonological similarity and unpronounceability) on short-term memory recall performance in English were compared. Data demonstrate that (a) STM recall performance of all four groups was seriously impaired when phonological encoding interference was present, (b) the two types of interference had differential effects on STM performance between phonographic (Arabic, English, and Spanish) and morphographic (Japanese) readers, and (c) phonological coding strategies used in L1 and L2 are consistent. These results seem to indicate, first, that a phonological code is dominantly used in the STM encoding process regardless of the language background: second, that different phonological coding strategies are used among subjects with contrasting orthographic backgrounds; and, third, that strategies used in L1 processing are transferred to L2 processing. Hence, the findings of the study suggest that there is a strong relationship between orthography and cognition.
This study addressed prosodic effects on the duration of and amount of glottal vibration in German word-initial fricatives /f, v, z/ in assimilatory and non-assimilatory devoicing contexts. Fricatives following /ə/ (non-assimilation context) were longer and were produced with less glottal vibration after higher prosodic boundaries, reflecting domain-initial prosodic strengthening. After /t/ (assimilation context), lenis fricatives (/v, z/) were produced with less glottal vibration than after /ə/, due to assimilatory devoicing. This devoicing was especially strong across lower prosodic boundaries, showing the influence of prosodic structure on sandhi processes. Reduction in glottal vibration made lenis fricatives more fortis-like (/f, s/). Importantly, fricative duration, another major cue to the fortis-lenis distinction, was affected by initial lengthening, but not by assimilation. Hence, at smaller boundaries, fricatives were more devoiced (more fortis-like), but also shorter (more lenis-like). As a consequence, the fortis and lenis fricatives remained acoustically distinct in all prosodic and segmental contexts. Overall, /z/ was devoiced to a greater extent than /v/. Since /z/ does not have a fortis counterpart in word-initial position, these findings suggest that phonotactic restrictions constrain phonetic processes. The present study illuminates a complex interaction of prosody, sandhi processes, and phonotactics, yielding systematic phonetic cues to prosodic structure and phonological distinctions.
German obstruent sequences by French L2 leaners
- A Bonneau
A. Bonneau, 'German obstruent sequences by French L2
leaners', Melbourne, 2019.