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Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice

  • Eleanor Chodroff ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Colin Wilson
Published/Copyright: September 13, 2018
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 4 Issue s2

Abstract

The present study investigates patterns of covariation among acoustic properties of stop consonants in a large multi-talker corpus of American English connected speech. Relations among talker means for different stops on the same dimension (between-category covariation) were considerably stronger than those for different dimensions of the same stop (within-category covariation). The existence of between-category covariation supports a uniformity principle that restricts the mapping from phonological features to phonetic targets in the sound system of each speaker. This principle was formalized with factor analysis, in which observed covariation derives from a lower-dimensional space of talker variation. Knowledge of between-category phonetic covariation could facilitate perceptual adaptation to novel talkers by providing a rational basis for generalizing idiosyncratic properties to several sounds on the basis of limited exposure.

Keywords: stop consonants; talker variability; phonetic covariation; factor analysis; predictability

Appendix

The analyses in Section 2 involved correlations of talker means; however, many previous studies have also examined correlations across individual tokens (e.g. Dmitrieva et al. 2015; Kirby and Ladd 2015, Kirby and Ladd 2016; Clayards 2018). For comparison with these studies, token-by-token correlations between phonetic cues were calculated for each stop category within and across talkers. Only stop consonants with non-outlier values for both cues were retained for these correlations. There were 71,852 stops for the COG-VOT analysis, 57,737 stops for the COG-f0 analysis, and 74,916 stops for the VOT-f0 analysis. The first correlation analysis, reported in Table A1, was conducted across all tokens (see also Dmitrieva et al. 2015; Clayards 2018). These correlations largely resembled the correlations of talker means in magnitude (especially between COG and VOT for [b], [d], and [g]); while many of these correlations reached significance, they were nevertheless quite weak. In the second analysis, correlations were limited to talkers with more than 20 tokens per stop category. The median number of talkers excluded from each analysis was four and the maximum was 55 talkers (between COG and f0 for [th]). Table A2 presents the median token-by-token correlation for each of the cue pairs and stop consonants, as well as the range across talkers. Consistent with findings in Kirby and Ladd (2016) for French and Italian intervocalic stops, the magnitude and direction of the by-speaker correlations varied substantially across talkers. Together, these findings indicate that, while there may exist weak relationships across talker means, the token-by-token relationships within talker-specific productions are highly variable.

Table A1:

Token-by-token correlations for each cue pair and stop category aggregated over all talkers.

COG-VOTCOG-f0 (female)COG-f0 (male)VOT-f0 (female)VOT-f0 (male)
ph0.18*−0.010.09*−0.05*−0.02
b0.34*0.00−0.05*−0.03−0.01
th0.09*0.07*0.12*−0.11*−0.06*
d0.57*−0.11*−0.06*−0.06*−0.01
kh0.17*0.10*0.09*−0.15*−0.13*
g0.52*0.03−0.01−0.030.01

  1. An asterisk reflects p < 0.001.

Table A2:

For each stop category and cue pair separately, the median talker-specific token-by-token correlation (left column) and range of talker-specific token-by-token correlations (right column).

COG-VOTCOG-f0VOT-f0
MedianRangeMedianRangeMedianRange
ph0.17−0.41 to 0.620.09−0.41 to 0.44−0.04−0.47 to 0.54
b0.33−0.14 to 0.77−0.01−0.53 to 0.640.00−0.37 to 0.41
th0.06−0.46 to 0.590.10−0.34 to 0.51−0.16−0.59 to 0.41
d0.54−0.18 to 0.75−0.06−0.50 to 0.45−0.03−0.35 to 0.42
kh0.16−0.31 to 0.570.10−0.34 to 0.52−0.20−0.61 to 0.39
g0.54−0.04 to 0.790.01−0.51 to 0.390.00−0.38 to 0.33

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0047).

Received: 2017-10-15
Accepted: 2018-07-05
Published Online: 2018-09-13

©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
  2. Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
  3. Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
  4. Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
  5. Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
  6. The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
  7. Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
  8. Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
  9. Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
  10. Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
  11. Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
  12. Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
  13. Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
  14. The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0047
Keywords for this article
stop consonants; talker variability; phonetic covariation; factor analysis; predictability

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
  2. Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
  3. Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
  4. Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
  5. Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
  6. The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
  7. Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
  8. Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
  9. Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
  10. Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
  11. Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
  12. Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
  13. Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
  14. The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
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