Volume 67, Issue 1-2

This work examines the production and perception of the Japanese singleton versus geminate stop contrast in order to investigate properties that distinguish the contrast in the face of variability due to speech rate. The acoustic study found two local relational durations, the ratio of the stop to the preceding mora and the ratio of the stop to the following vowel, to be stable across speaking rates and to accurately classify singleton and geminate productions. However, the subsequent perception study demonstrated an influential role of the preceding mora duration and a marginal role of the following vowel duration on listeners’ categorization. These results demonstrate that Japanese listeners can take advantage of relative duration in the perception of the stop length contrast, and that relative strength of simultaneously available acoustic cues does not necessarily translate into equal perceptual importance.

In the typical speech of any language, voicing onset and offset are effortlessly coordinated with articulation as part of the intrinsic coordination of sound production. In this paper, we argue that voicing-articulatory coordination patterns could be shaped by sensory feedback during early speech learning and these patterns persist in mature syllable productions. Our experimental results show that voicing onset is closely associated with the peak velocity and peak amplitude of jaw and upper lip movements for VC syllables in adults. This robust coordination in the onset position may function to increase the salience of VC syllables and provide a phonetically natural explanation for vowels to undergo phonological lengthening and to avoid phonological reduction in word-initial onset position.

The importance of pitch range variation for intonational meaning and theory is well known; however, whether pitch range is a phonetic dimension which is treated categorically in English remains unclear. To test this possibility, three intonation continua varying in pitch range were constructed which had endpoints with contrastive representations under autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory: H* vs. L+H*, H* with ‘peak delay’ vs. L*+H, and %H L* vs. L*. The prediction derived from AM theory was that the reproduction of continuous pitch range variation should show a discrete pattern reflecting a change in the phonological representation of tonal sequences and in the number of tonal targets across each continuum. Participants’ reproductions of each stimulus set showed continuous variation in pitch range, suggesting that pitch range is a gradient phonetic dimension in English conveying semantic contrast, similar to the formant space for vowels. Moreover, the gradience observed in productions across all parts of the pitch range suggests that contours within each series had the same number of tonal targets. The results support a version of AM theory in which rises and falls are usually comprised of two tonal targets, with strictly monotonic f₀ interpolation between them.

While both human and linguistic factors affect fundamental frequency (F₀) in spoken language, capturing the influence of multiple effects and their interactions presents special challenges, especially when there are strict time constraints on the data-gathering process. A lack of speaker literacy can further impede the collection of identical utterances across multiple speakers. This study employs linear mixed effects analysis to elucidate how various effects and their interactions contribute to the production of F₀ in Luobuzhai, a tonal dialect of the Qiang language. In addition to the effects of speaker sex and tone, F₀ in this language is affected by previous and following tones, sentence type, vowel, position in the phrase, and by numerous combinations of these effects. Under less than ideal data collecting conditions, a single experiment was able to yield an extensive model of F₀ output in an endangered language of the Himalayas.

This paper examines the relationship between phonetic exponents of syntagmatic prosodic structuring and functions in speech communication in English, German, and French. Two strands are distinguished in this substance - function relation: the transmission of semantic structures in propositional, appellative, and expressive meaning, and the facilitation of this transfer from sender to receiver by rhythmic organization. Bundles of several weighted feature values contribute to the signalling of hierarchies of prosodic phrasing to map semantic and rhythmic structures for communicative effect. French and the Germanic languages differ more specifically in the rhythmic strand.