Volume 76, Issue 6

Arrernte is a language with a relatively large consonant inventory, and a relatively small vowel inventory. In this study, electropalatography is used to examine lingual consonant production according to lexical stress, in the context of the two most common vowels in the language, the central vowels /a/ and /ə/. The consonants examined are /t̪ n̪ l̪ t n l ʈ ɳ ɭ ɻ c ɲ ʎ j k ŋ w/. Data are for two female speakers and are taken from a large database of read texts. Results show very little articulatory variation in consonant production depending on the contexts examined. Although consonants before a stressed vowel have greater duration than consonants before an unstressed vowel, there is no consistent difference in tongue-palate contact patterns between the two prosodic contexts. The main exception to this pattern is the retroflex stop, nasal and lateral, which show a more posterior contact before an unstressed vowel: it is suggested that this is because the preceding stressed vowel contains the primary cues to retroflex place of articulation.

This paper presents three experiments exploring the perception and production of accents in song. In a perception experiment, participants listened to passages sung and spoken by native and non-native speakers of English. The participants did better at identifying native speakers when listening to the spoken passages. Accents were also judged as more native-like in song than in speech. In addition, two production experiments compared the acoustic characteristics (pitch, duration, F1 and F2) of sung and spoken vowels, produced by native and non-native speakers of English. Both native and non-native speakers changed the pitch and duration of their vowels when singing; the vowel quality was not consistently shifted. Together, the results indicate that the melody imposed by the song impacts the suprasegmental properties of pronunciation whereas the segmental properties remain largely intact. Based on these results, we conclude that a main reason why accents are more difficult to detect in song than in speech is that the rhythm and melody imposed by the song mask intonational cues to accent.

We examined gestural coordination in C1C2 (C1 stop, C2 lateral or tap) word initial clusters using articulatory (electromagnetic articulometry) and acoustic data from six speakers of Standard Peninsular Spanish. We report on patterns of voice onset time (VOT), gestural plateau duration of C1, C2, and their overlap. For VOT, as expected, place of articulation is a major factor, with velars exhibiting longer VOTs than labials. Regarding C1 plateau duration, voice and place effects were found such that voiced consonants are significantly shorter than voiceless consonants, and velars show longer duration than labials. For C2 plateau duration, lateral duration was found to vary as a function of onset complexity (C vs. CC). As for overlap, unlike in French, where articulatory data for clusters have also been examined, clusters where both C1 and C2 are voiced show more overlap than where voicing differs. Further, overlap was affected by the C2 such that clusters where C2 is a tap show less overlap than clusters where C2 is a lateral. We discuss these results in the context of work aiming to uncover phonetic (e.g., articulatory or perceptual) and phonological forces (e.g., syllabic organization) on timing.