Volume 70, Issue 3

This paper presents results of a phonetic analysis of instances of lexical selfrepair drawn from a corpus of spontaneous Dutch speech. The analysis addresses questions concerning the phonetic details of prosodic marking in self-repair and its conditioning factors. In particular, it examines the relevance of semantic, temporal and frequency-related factors in modelling f0 and intensity measures and auditory judgements of whether repairs are prosodically marked. It addresses the extent to which observations made in studies using experimentally-elicited speech can be expected to generalise to repairs drawn from uncontrolled spontaneous speech. The results suggest that prosodic marking is rare in spontaneous lexical self-repair, and that semantic, temporal and frequency factors play a limited role only in conditioning speakers' choices for or against prosodic marking, although several weak tendencies can be observed.

De scriptions of lenition have often assumed that connected speech reductions are the phonetic precursors of phonological lenition processes. In this article, production of intervocalic voiced stops during reading in American English is examined to determine whether connected speech reduction processes mirror the stages of lenition that have been posited in the phonological literature. The first result shows that American English speakers never lenite to fricatives or debuccalize to [h] or glottal stop, but rather produce approximants whenever reduction occurs. Second, stress plays an essential role: 51% of stops are produced as approximants when stress is on the preceding syllable (e.g. ‘yoga'), but only 7% of stops weaken when stress is on the following syllable (e.g. ‘lagoon'). Approximant productions are longer and higher in intensity than stop productions when stress precedes the target consonant, but when stress follows the target consonant, the stop cues are enhanced. These acoustic findings suggest that English speakers prioritize the realization of acoustic cues to stress, including the robust production of stop consonants, over pressures to reduce or weaken consonants in intervocalic position.

Lexical tone identification requires a number of secondary cues, when main tonal contours are unavailable. In this article, we examine Mandarin native speakers' ability to identify lexical tones by extracting tonal information from sonorant onset pitch (onset contours) on syllable-initial nasals ranging from 50to 70 ms in duration. In experiments I and II we test speakers' ability to identify lexical tones in a second syllable with and without onset contours in isolation (experiment I) and in a sentential context (experiment II). The results indicate that speakers can identify lexical tones with short distinctive onset contour patterns,they also indicate that misperception of tones 213 and 24 are common. Furthermore, in experiment III, we test whether onset contours in a following syllable can be utilized by listeners in tone identification. We find that onset contours in the following syllable also contribute to the identification of the target lexical tones. The conclusions are twofold: (1) Mandarin lexical tones can be identified with onset contours; (2) tonal domain must be extended to include not just typical cues of tones but also coarticulated tonal patterns.