Volume 64, Issue 2-3

Some Khmu’ dialects have phonologically distinctive voice registers.Auditory observations have claimed a stable distinction between clear voice andhigh pitch for Register 1 and breathy voice and low pitch for Register 2 in theKhmu’ Rawk dialect of northern Thailand. Word pairs distinguished only by registerwere recorded by 25 native speakers. Acoustic analysis yielded F0 and overallamplitude contours, frequencies of F1 and F2 in quasi-steady states of the vowels,relative intensities of higher harmonics to that of the first harmonic, and voweldurations. When circumstances caused early attention to perception testing, thewords of only 8 speakers had been analyzed for properties other than amplitudeand F0. Since the only significant factor that had emerged by then was F0 contour,the synthetic stimuli were made with just a series of seven contours. The labelingby 32 native speakers yielded two categories, demonstrating the sufficiency of F0as an acoustic cue. The completed acoustic analysis showed a significant effect ofone of the harmonic ratios for the women only, suggesting a conservative bias.The language has been shifting toward tonality and may have reached it.

Bilabial stops often show a lowering of the tongue in symmetrical VCVsequences. The causes of this phenomenon, sometimes called the ‘trough effect’,are unknown. However, it could have important implications for the study of timevaryingaspects of speech events. Ultrasound is a non-invasive technique that hasallowed us to image the shape of the tongue in real time and measure the actualtongue displacement that occurs in the C of a VCV sequence. Five repetitions ofsymmetrical V<inf>1</inf>CV<inf>2</inf> sequences with the bilabial stops /b, p/ were obtained from 10British English speakers. Results showed not only differences in the direction anddegree of the tongue displacement but also differences in the tongue contour configurationbetween subjects. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of ultrasoundas a technique in phonetic research, making possible the analysis of tonguesurface movement for large amounts of data from multiple subjects.

This study addressed whether acoustic variability and category overlap innon-native speech contribute to difficulty in its recognition, and more generallywhether the benefits of exposure to acoustic variability during categorizationtraining are stable across differences in category confusability. Three experimentsconsidered a set of Spanish-accented English productions. The set was seen topose learning and recognition difficulty (experiment 1) and was more variable andconfusable than a parallel set of native productions (experiment 2). A trainingstudy (experiment 3) probed the relative contributions of category central tendencyand variability to difficulty in vowel identification using derived inventoriesin which these dimensions were manipulated based on the results of experiments1 and 2. Training and test difficulty related straightforwardly to category confusabilitybut not to location in the vowel space. Benefits of high-variability exposurealso varied across vowel categories, and seemed to be diminished for highly confusablevowels. Overall, variability was implicated in perception and learning difficultyin ways that warrant further investigation.

This paper deals with the influence of ambient speech on individual speechproductions. A methodological framework is defined to gather the experimentaldata necessary to feed computer models simulating self-organisation in phonologicalsystems. Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 was run onFrench native speakers from two regiolects of Belgium: two from Liège and twofrom Brussels. When exposed to the way of speaking of the other regiolect vialoudspeakers, the speakers of one regiolect produced vowels that were significantlydifferent from their typical realisations, and significantly closer to the wayof speaking specific of the other regiolect. Experiment 2 achieved a replication ofthe results for 8 Mons speakers hearing a Liège speaker. A significant part of theimitative effect remained up to 10 min after the end of the exposure to the otherregiolect productions. As a whole, the results suggest that: (i) imitation occursautomatically and unintentionally, (ii) the modified realisations leave a memorytrace, in which case the mechanism may be better defined as ‘mimesis’ than as‘imitation’. The potential effects of multiple imitative speech interactions on soundchange are discussed in this paper, as well as the implications for a general theoryof phonetic implementation and phonetic representation.

Based on the phonology of the Kiel Intonation Model (KIM), a tripartite oppositionof German intonation is investigated: early, medial, and late peaks. Theseintonation categories, which can be projected onto H + L*, H*, and L* + H in theAM framework, are described in the KIM as rising-falling F<inf>0</inf> peak patterns differentiatedby their synchronization with the accented-vowel onset. Perception experimentswere carried out, showing that the function-based identification of the peakcategories is not only influenced by peak synchronization, but also by peak shapeand height. While the complete spectrum of findings is not covered by the currentphonological modelling, the findings corroborate the existence of all three categoriesin German intonation and support the idea that the timing of the peakmovements with regard to the accented vowel is important for their perceptualdifferentiation.