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Contains fulltext : 209333.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 05 augustus 2019

This paper shows that the dictation task, a well- known testing instrument in language education, has untapped potential as a research tool for studying speech perception. We describe how transcriptions can be scored on measures of lexical, orthographic, phonological, and semantic similarity to target phrases to provide comprehensive information about accuracy at different processing levels. The former three measures are automatically extractable, increasing objectivity, and the middle two are gradient, providing finer-grained information than traditionally used. We evaluate the measures in an English dictation task featuring phonetically reduced continuous speech. Whereas the lexical and orthographic measures emphasize listeners’ word identification difficulties, the phonological measure demonstrates that listeners can often still recover phonological features, and the semantic measure captures their ability to get the gist of the utterances. Correlational analyses and a discussion of practical and theoretical considerations show that combining multiple measures improves the dictation task’s utility as a research tool.

Item does not contain fulltext Part of the remarkable efficiency of listening is accommodation to unfamiliar talkers' specific pronunciations by retuning of phonemic intercategory boundaries. Such retuning occurs in second (L2) as well as first language (L1); however, recent research with emigrés revealed successful adaptation in the environmental L2 but, unprecedentedly, not in L1 despite continuing L1 use. A possible explanation involving relative exposure to novel talkers is here tested in heritage language users with Mandarin as family L1 and English as environmental language. In English, exposure to an ambiguous sound in disambiguating word contexts prompted the expected adjustment of phonemic boundaries in subsequent categorisation. However, no adjustment occurred in Mandarin, again despite regular use. Participants reported highly asymmetric interlocutor counts in the two languages. We conclude that successful retuning ability requires regular exposure to novel talkers in the language in question, a criterion not met for the emigrés' or for these heritage users' L1. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (Melbourne, Australia, 5-9 Augustus 2019)

Contains fulltext : 213441.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) We tested whether statistical averageness (SA) at the level of the individual speaker could predict a speaker’s intelligibility. 28 female and 21 male speakers of Dutch were recorded producing 336 sentences, each containing two target nouns. Recordings were compared to those of all other same-sex speakers using dynamic time warping (DTW). For each sentence, the DTW distance constituted a metric of phonetic distance from one speaker to all other speakers. SA comprised the average of these distances. Later, the same participants performed a word recognition task on the target nouns in the same sentences, under three degraded listening conditions. In all three conditions, accuracy increased with SA. This held even when participants listened to their own utterances. These findings suggest that listeners process speech with respect to the statistical properties of the language spoken in their community, rather than using their own speech as a reference. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (Canberra, Australia, 5-9 August, 2019)

Contains fulltext : 208204.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) ICPhS2019, 05 augustus 2019

Item does not contain fulltext This study concerns individual differences in speech imitation ability and the role that lexical representations play in imitation. We examined 1) whether imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar language (L0) is related to imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar non-native accent in the speaker's native language (L1) and 2) whether it is easier or harder to imitate speech when you know the words to be imitated. Fifty-nine native Dutch speakers imitated words with target vowels in Basque (/a/ and /e/) and Greekaccented Dutch (/i/ and /u/). Spectral and durational analyses of the target vowels revealed no relationship between the success of L0 and L1 imitation and no difference in performance between tasks (i.e., L1 imitation was neither aided nor blocked by lexical knowledge about the correct pronunciation). The results suggest instead that the relationship of the vowels to native phonological categories plays a bigger role in imitation. ICPhS 2019, 05 augustus 2019

Item does not contain fulltext Speech input causes listeners to activate multiple candidate words which then compete with one another. These include onset competitors, that share a beginning (bumper, butter), but also, counterintuitively, rhyme competitors, sharing an ending (bumper, jumper). In L1, competition is typically stronger for onset than for rhyme. In L2, onset competition has been attested but rhyme competition has heretofore remained largely unexamined. We assessed L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) word recognition by the same late-bilingual individuals. In each language, eye gaze was recorded as listeners heard sentences and viewed sets of drawings: three unrelated, one depicting an onset or rhyme competitor of a word in the input. Activation patterns revealed substantial onset competition but no significant rhyme competition in either L1 or L2. Rhyme competition may thus be a "luxury" feature of maximally efficient listening, to be abandoned when resources are scarcer, as in listening by late bilinguals, in either language. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (Melbourne, Australia, 5-9 Augustus 2019)

Contains fulltext : 208192.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) ICPhS 2019, 05 augustus 2019

Contains fulltext : 208198.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Previous studies have shown that speakers align their speech to each other at multiple linguistic levels. This study investigates whether alignment is mostly the result of priming from the immediately preceding speech materials, focussing on pitch and articulation rate (AR). Native Dutch speakers completed sentences, first by themselves (pre-test), then in alternation with Confederate 1 (Round 1), with Confederate 2 (Round 2), with Confederate 1 again (Round 3), and lastly by themselves again (post-test). Results indicate that participants aligned to the confederates and that this alignment lasted during the post-test. The confederates' directly preceding sentences were not good predictors for the participants’ pitch and AR. Overall, the results indicate that alignment is more of a global effect than a local priming effect. ICPhS2019, 05 augustus 2019

Contains fulltext : 215182.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English (AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N's nasality and V's orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally. But AusE showed some differences in terms of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect's phonetic grammar. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (Melbourne, Australia, 5-9 Augustus 2019)

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is typically produced with a higher fundamental frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.

Contains fulltext : 207661pre.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access) 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 05 augustus 2019

The purpose of this study is to describe the acoustic changes of the consonants /t/ and /d/ in Dutch speaking individuals before and after total laryngectomy. The speech of seventeen participants was recorded before and after treatment. Eighteen tokens from a read-aloud text were obtained with /t/ or /d/ in initial position. Prevoicing, burst duration and duration of the vowel following the consonant were analyzed. The results show that the acoustic contrast of the /t/ and /d/ in initial position is reduced after treatment. Post-operatively, the presence of prevoicing of /d/ decreases, and burst duration increases. In the post-operative situation, therefore, /d/ becomes more similar to /t/ acoustically.

West-Frisian has a highly frequent suffix -/ən/ in which the schwa is usually deleted. This results in a single nasal which is analysed as ‘syllabic’, at least after obstruents. However, it is unclear what happens if schwa deletion occurs after a stem-final nasal as in hûn-en ‘dog.PL’. We consider several options, including nasal deletion, nasal contraction, and gemination. We compare the duration of an underlyingly single nasal in stem-final position with that of the nasal after schwa deletion in -/nən/ as in hûn ~ hûnen. The results reveal that the nasal in hûnen after schwa deletion is more than twice as long as in hûn and also longer than after schwa deletion in -/tən/. This suggests that the nasal is geminated. We discuss the status of this nasal in light of the fact that gemination has not been reported elsewhere in the phonology of West-Frisian.

We present a neural network model of phonetic and phonological acquisition that can handle two distinct phenomena: category creation and auditory dispersion. Within a single neural network, learning proceeds in two stages. The first stage is distributional learning, during which the model induces phonological features from an auditory input distribution; in the second stage, the model acquires knowledge about the relation between lexical categories and the auditory input distribution. The model can be used bidirectionally: once perceptual learning is complete, the network can also be asked to speak. In the production direction, effortful, perceptually peripheral tokens are avoided. In a chain of iterated learners, in which the output of one generation serves as the input to the next, sound systems emerge that maintain sufficient contrast at a moderate articulatory cost, regardless of the initial distribution.

This study investigates diphthongization in three Swedish varieties that the literature has regarded as different: Lund, Linköping and Stockholm. In all three varieties, the high vowels /iː/, /yː/, /ʉː/ and /uː/ turn out to only marginally glide, if at all, and /eː/ exhibits clear diphthongization of a centralizing nature. For /oː/, a similar centralization is found in Stockholm, but none is found in Linköping, and the reverse is found in Lund. /ɛː/, /øː/ and /ɑː/ do not diphthongize, but /ɛː/ and /øː/ are realized strikingly low in all three varieties, suggesting an alternative transcription as /æː/ and /œː/. An additional finding is that geminate consonants are hardly longer than singleton consonants, so that the fundamental Swedish binary distinction between VCː and VːC syllable types nowadays has to rely on differences in vowel duration, vowel quality, and diphthongization. Diphthongization may thus be an instrument in the maintenance of auditory contrast.

The Bantu language Tumbuka, spoken in Malawi and Zambia, has the vowel phonemes /i, e, a, o, u/ but no phonemic contrast in vowel length. In the present study we measured the duration of vowels before homorganic nasal-obstruent sequences (NC) and compared them to the duration of vowels before single obstruents for four speakers of Tumbuka. With this data, we tested whether there is acoustic support for the existence of a phonological process of pre-NC lengthening, as reported for many other Bantu languages. Our results provide no support for such an interpretation in Tumbuka: pre-NC vowels were only 10 ms longer than pre-obstruent vowels, and though this difference was statistically significant, it is below the just noticeable difference for duration of 25 ms and therefore most likely not perceivable. We conclude that the observed pre-NC lengthening in Tumbuka is a purely co-articulatory, phonetic process.

Italian native speakers often produce short, schwalike vowels at the end of consonant-final loanwords from English. While past studies on these paragogic vowels investigated intra-speaker variation and looked at factors such as stress, voicing or intonation contours, the present study focuses on variation between speakers. We test the hypothesis that the amount of received native English input predicts how often Italians produce paragogic vowels in English loanwords, with less input causing more inserted vowels. L2 input was estimated on the basis of a questionnaire on the active use and passive exposure to English. Twenty-one Italian native speakers with varying levels of English filled out this questionnaire and took part in an irregular-plural elicitation task containing consonant-final loanwords from English. Our results show that Italian speakers with a higher self-reported level of English exposure produce fewer paragogic vowels, thereby confirming our hypothesis.

This study examines Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Finnish /b, d, ɡ/ and /p, t, k/ in initial position. The study aims to investigate whether a contrast is observed between phonological voiced (borrowed)stops versus voiceless (native) stops in initial position, and if so whether it is manifested as a phonetic VOT contrast. The status of /b, d, ɡ/ and especially of the borrowed /b, ɡ/ has been the topic of some debate, but not many empirical studies on the phonetic properties of these phones exist. This exploratory study shows that young speakers with knowledge of English and (Fenno-)Swedish show a tendency of prevoicing /b, d, ɡ/. Prevoicing the /b, d,ɡ/ series could stem from influence from (Fenno-)Swedish or simply from the need to keep /b, d, ɡ/separate from the native voiceless unaspirated /p, t,k/ series.