Volume 38, Issue 4

Although the aims of contrastive phonology are clear, there are a number of problems connected with the model of description and with the ontological status of phonological accounts of contrastive similarities or differences. This paper illustrates these problems with the oppositions between the series of /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/ in the contrastive phonology of French versus German. On the basis of a number of perceptual experiments and results from articulation training, a new contrastive description of these sound phenomena is presented, which arrives at a phonological evaluation through a phonetic analysis of performance, rather than predicting performance from the usual phonological categories.

Lateral cineradiograms, taken at a rate of 100 frames per second, were used to investigate tongue apex movements associated with alveolar consonants produced by five American English speakers. Consistent with previous research concerning bilabial stops, the results indicated a tendency for faster apical movements toward voiceless stops than toward voiced stops. On the other hand, tongue speeds during voiced alveolar stops and alveolar taps did not appear to differ significantly. Any tendency for faster speeds to be associated with tap movements appeared to be due to corresponding greater distances moved by the tongue tip. Finally, the amount of stress on vowels preceding or following [d] was not found to be an independent factor for determining tongue tip speeds toward the consonant. Once again, any speed differences seemed predictable on the basis of distance.

The role of laryngeal adjustments for phonetic variations of voicing in Japanese-vowel devoicing and intervocalic /h/ voicing – was investigated using laryngeal electromyography (EMG) and fiberoptic endoscopy. The results indicated that the vowel devoicing was accompanied by EMG activity patterns of the posterior cricoarytenoid and interarytenoid different from those for fully voiced vowels, causing the glottis to be wide open. In this respect, it may be concluded that vowel devoicing mainly reflects a kind of free variation at a higher level than the EMG signals. In contrast, the voicing of /h/ occurred while the glottis remained as wide as it did for voiceless /h/ or /s/ with comparable EMG patterns of those muscles, despite the presence of vocal fold vibrations. Therefore, it may be that this latter phenomenon is chiefly dependent on some other condition at the level of the glottis.

Listeners were asked to identify 295-ms synthetic CVs (45-ms transitions + 250-ms steady states) in the presence of monotically or dichotically competing isolated second-formant ‘bleats’ from CVs. Bleat duration was varied, by cutting back the steady-state portions, from 295-ms total to a transition alone (45 ms). This temporal variation in the bleats was chosen to focus on the extent to which ‘nonphonetic’ structural characteristics of signals determine the presence and amount of interference. Dichotic identification varied as a continuous, monotonic function of bleat duration, with greatest interference observed with the largest steady-state value and least interference for no steady state (i.e., transition alone). In contrast, monotic identification was relatively poor and constant across duration values. These results, together with an analysis of errors, lead to the conclusion that monotic interference does not depend on signals’ steady-state durations; consistent with other peripheral masking studies, monotic results seem, instead, dependent upon which segments of two signals are simultaneous and whether these temporally overlapping parts have energy in similar frequency ranges. In contrast, dichotic interference does depend on steady-state duration. This suggests dichotic interference is a form of ‘central masking’ which occurs because of the disruption of processes concerned with specifying the overall time-by-frequency characteristics of signals, independent of their interpretation as phonetic events.