Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “PHONETICS”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 973 records · Page 54Linked to original sources
PubMed1976

Processing interaction between two dimensions of nonphonetic auditory signals.

In 1974 Wood proposed a hybrid serial-parallel model to account for the within-stimulus interactions between the acoustic cue of "pitch" and the phonetic cure of "place." Three of the five experiments in this paper replicate the Wood findings with analogous, clearly nonphonetic stimuli and thus refute Wood's implicit assumption of the involvement of any uniquely phonetic processes as factors in his results. The experiments in this paper demonstrate that the patterns of interaction found by Wood are independent of the experience of the subjects, the order of cue presentation, and whether the cues are presented simultaneously or sequentially. We conclude that the given patterns of interaction are general characteristics of the auditory system. These characteristics probably are not related to backward or forward "recognition" masking but may be a function of several other general factors.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1998

Processing of illegal consonant clusters: a case of perceptual assimilation?

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates--which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant /l/--as being dental stops. However, as information for the /l/ became available in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the initial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme monitoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line during speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. These results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the native phonological system.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The role of phonological codes in integrating information across saccadic eye movements in Chinese character identification.

Prior research has generally assumed either that phonological codes do not contribute to Chinese character identification or that they do so only through a look-up process at the character level. In 3 experiments, a homophone seen parafoveally aided the identification of a target character that was fixated following an eye movement to the preview location. Moreover, high-frequency phonetically regular characters were named faster than high-frequency, phonetically irregular characters. Thus, both lexical and sublexical phonological codes of Chinese characters are involved early in the process of character identification. Orthographic information from the preview was also used in character identification, as orthographically similar previews facilitated target identification as well. The evidence for the extraction of semantic information from parafoveal previews was mixed, as synonym previews facilitated in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Use of parafoveally visible characters during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Chinese readers' use of parafoveal character previews was examined. In Experiment 1, the preview of target characters consisted of targets or of graphemically similar, homophonic, or dissimilar characters. Each preview was replaced with the corresponding target when the eyes reached the target location. Oculomotor measures revealed preview benefits for targets, for graphemically similar characters, and for homophonic characters. Experiment 2 showed that parafoveal preview of graphemically similar characters yielded benefits primarily when they shared the phonetic radical with their targets. The phonological relationship between previewed radicals and subsequently viewed targets was ineffective. Chinese character processing thus involves the initial use of orthographic information from the phonetic radical and the activation of the character's phonological form.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1980

Information in speech: observations on the perception of [s]-stop clusters.

A series of experiments is reported that investigated the pattern of acoustic information specifying place and manner of stop consonants in medial position after [s]. In both production and perception, information for stop place includes the spectrum of the fricative at offset, the duration of the silent closure interval, the spectral relationship between the frequency of the stop release burst and the following periodically excited formants, and the spectral and temporal characteristics of the first formant transition. Similarly, the information for stop manner includes the duration of silent closure, the frequency of the first formant at the release, the magnitude of the first formant transition, and the proximity of the second and third formants at release. A relationship was shown to exist in perception between the spectral characteristics of the first formant and the duration of the silent closure required to hear a stop. This appears to reciprocate the covariation of these parameters in production across different places of articulation and different vocalic contexts. The existence of perceptual sensitivity to a wide range of the acoustic consequences of production questions the efficacy of accounts of speech perception in terms of the fractionation of the signal into elemental acoustic cues, which are then integrated to yield a phonetic percept. It is argued that it is inappropriate to ascribe a psychological status to cues whose only reality is their operational role as physical parameters whose manipulation can change the phenotic interpretation of a signal. It is suggested that the metric of the information for phonetic perception cannot be that of the cues; rather, a metric should be sought in which acoustic and articulatory dynamics are isomorphic.

Humans↗
PubMed1983

Converging sources of evidence on spoken and perceived rhythms of speech: cyclic production of vowels in monosyllabic stress feet.

The article reviews the literature from psychology, phonetics, and phonology bearing on production and perception of syllable timing in speech. A review of the psychological and phonetics literature suggests that production of vowels and consonants are interleaved in syllable sequences in such a way that vowel production is continuous or nearly so. Based on that literature, a hypothesis is developed concerning the perception of syllable timing assuming that vowel production is continuous. The hypothesis is that perceived syllable timing corresponds to the times sequencing of the vowels as produced and not to the timing either of vowel onsets as conventionally measured or of syllable-initial consonants. Three experiments support the hypothesis. One shows that information present during the portion of an acoustic signal in which a syllable-initial consonant predominates is used by listeners to identify the vowel. Compatibly, this information for the vowel contributes to the vowel's perceived duration. Finally, a measure of the perceived timing of a syllable correlates significantly with the time required to identify syllable-medial vowels but not with time to identify the syllable-initial consonants. Further support for the proposed mode of vowel-consonant production and perception is derived from the literature on phonology. Language-specific phonological conventions can be identified that may reflect exaggerations and conventionalizations of the articulatory tendency for vowels to be produced continuously in speech.

Humans↗
PubMed1994

On the perceptual organization of speech.

A general account of auditory perceptual organization has developed in the past 2 decades. It relies on primitive devices akin to the Gestalt principles of organization to assign sensory elements to probable groupings and invokes secondary schematic processes to confirm or to repair the possible organization. Although this conceptualization is intended to apply universally, the variety and arrangement of acoustic constituents of speech violate Gestalt principles at numerous junctures, cohering perceptually, nonetheless. The authors report 3 experiments on organization in phonetic perception, using sine wave synthesis to evade the Gestalt rules and the schematic processes alike. These findings falsify a general auditory account, showing that phonetic perceptual organization is achieved by specific sensitivity to the acoustic modulations characteristic of speech signals.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Levels of perceptual representation and process in lexical access: words, phonemes, and features.

Three experiments and a simulation study investigate competing featural and phonemic views of the representation of the speech input in access to the mental lexicon. Auditory lexical decision and gating tasks show that the processing consequences of subcategorical mismatches (conflicts between phonetic cues to speech segment identity) depend on the lexical status of the conflicting cues, such that conflicts that only involve nonwords do not disrupt performance. A further study, using a phonetic-decision task with the same stimuli, found the same pattern. A simulation study shows that the interactive activation model TRACE, with top-down feedback to a prelexical phonemic level, does not model these effects successfully. The authors argue instead for a direct access featural model, based on a distributed computational substrate, where featural information is mapped directly onto lexical representations.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Alveolar bias in the final consonant deletion patterns of African American children.

PURPOSE: The variable deletion of word-final consonants is a well-known feature of African American English (AAE). This study aimed to show whether African American children exhibit an alveolar bias in their deletion of final voiceless stops as has been observed for their production of final nasals. METHOD: The data were extracted from more than 5000 spontaneous utterances in the speech samples of 7 African American children at 32 to 36 months of age. RESULTS: The final alveolar voiceless stop /-t/ was deleted significantly more often in word-final position than were /-p/ and /-k/ in both singleton and clustered contexts. The deletion of /-t/ in final clusters preceding other consonants at word boundaries contributed significantly to this bias. No significant differences were observed among the stops in their relative frequencies of deletion when a vowel sound followed or when the final stop was prepausal at word boundaries. CONCLUSION: African American children's deletion of final consonants is patterned even at an early age. It varies with whether the voiceless stop consonant is an alveolar sound or not and with the type of phonetic context in which the alveolar stop is embedded. This alveolar stop bias was attributed to phonetic and grammatic constraints on articulating final /-t/ relative to final /-p/ and /-k/. CLINICAL IMPLICATION: All final consonant deletion patterns should not be regarded as typical of African American children when assessing their speech even as early as age 3;0 (years;months).

Black or African American↗
PubMed2004

Variability in /s/ production in children and adults: evidence from dynamic measures of spectral mean.

Previous research has found developmental decreases in temporal variability in speech. Relatively less work has examined spectral variability, and, in particular, variability in consonant spectra. This article examined variability in productions of the consonant /s/ by adults and by 3 groups of children, with mean ages of 3;11 (years;months), 5;04, and 8;04. Specifically, it measured the influence of age, phonetic context, and syllabic context on variability. Spectral variability was estimated by measuring dynamic spectral characteristics of multiple productions of /s/ in sV, spV, and swV sequences, where the vowel was either /a/ or /u/. Mean duration, variability in duration, and coarticulation were also measured. Children were found to produce /s/ with greater temporal and spectral variability than adults. Duration and coarticulation were comparable across the 4 age groups. Spectral variability was greater in swV contexts than in sV or spV sequences. The lack of consistent effects of phonetic context on spectral variability suggests that the developmental differences were related to subtle variability in place of articulation for /s/ in the children's productions.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Forced-choice analysis of segmental production by Chinese-accented English speakers.

This study describes the development of a minimal-pairs word list targeting phoneme contrasts that pose difficulty for Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language. The target phoneme inventory was compiled from analysis of phonetic transcriptions of about 800 mono- and polysyllabic English words with examples of all the vowels, diphthongs, and syllable onsets and codas of the language. The Mandarin-specific minimal-pairs list derived from the phonetic transcription analyses contains 190 items. Tape recordings were made of 8 Mandarin speakers reading a randomized version of target items from the minimal-pairs list and a set of 20 sentences. Listeners who were native American English speakers judged the words in a forced-choice task and wrote down what they understood of the sentences. Correlations between listener responses on the forced-choice task and the sentence intelligibility scores showed differences in the strength of the relationship with sentence intelligibility across categories of minimal-pairs contrasts. Multiple regression analysis found listener responses on the minimal-pairs task to account for approximately 76% of the variance in speakers' sentence intelligibility scores, showing that performance on the minimal pairs of the probe list does predict connected speech intelligibility. Analyses of individual contrasts indicate target phonemes most often misperceived by native listeners.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

An investigation of speech perception in children with specific language impairment on a continuum of formant transition duration.

Fifteen children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and 15 typically developing (TD) children were tested for identification performance on 2 synthetic speech continua varying in formant transition durations (FTDs). One continuum varied from /ba/ to /wa/, and the other varied from /da/ to /ja/. Various d'-related measures from signal detection theory were used to compare category boundaries and indirectly derive sensitivity to phonetic changes in category tokens along each continuum. The SLI group showed less consistent identification performance along the /ba/-/wa/ series relative to the TD group, as well as reduced sensitivity to phonetic changes along the continuum. On the /da/-/ja/ series, the SLI group revealed less consistent identification performance on the short FTD end but similar identification levels to the TD group at the long FTD end. The overall results support the contention that children with SLI reveal a deficiency in the processing of speech sounds at the level of segmental identity.

Child↗
PubMed2005

A phonemic implicational feature hierarchy of phonological contrasts for English-speaking children.

Contrastive feature hierarchies have been developed and used for some time in depicting typical phonological development and in guiding therapy decisions. Previous descriptions of feature use have been based on independent analyses and usually phonetic inventories. However, recent trends in phonology include a relational analysis of phonemic inventories (D. Ingram & K. D. Ingram, 2001). The current investigation was a relational analysis of the phonemic inventories of 40 typically developing 2-year-old American-English-speaking children. Consonant inventories were derived from spontaneous speech samples using the Logical International Phonetics Programs computer software (D. K. Oller & R. E. Delgado, 1999). Cluster analysis was used to determine the grouping of contrastive features. Four levels emerged. Level I included [consonant], [sonorant], and [coronal], Level II included [voice], Level III included [anterior], [continuant], and [nasal], and Level IV included [lateral] and [strident]. Results suggested that the resulting 4-level phonemic feature hierarchy might be used to classify the phonological systems of children with phonological disorders.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed1976

Distinctive features in speech pathology: phonology or phonemics?

Distinctive feature is not a unique concept within linguistic theory. It has two distinct bases: phonemic theory and generative theory. Phonemic theory assumes a direct correspondence between distinctive features (the elements of phonemes) and the speech signal. Although this assumption can be shown to be incorrect, it seems to be the one most widely held in speech science. Generative theory, on the other hand, assumes no such direct relation and consequently can account for certain linguistic phenomena that phonemic theory cannot. This theory then seems to be preferable to phonemic theory for a featural analysis of misarticulation. However, there is a problem. Chomsky and Halle's system (generative theory) as it stands does not deal with the link between what it conceives to be the lowest level of linguistic structure (the phonetic matrix) and speech production. Therefore, Chomsky and Halle's distinctive features cannot be applied fruitfully to all instances of misarticulation. The discrepancy that exists between phonological structure and the speech signal must be accounted for in a theory of speech production. This can be accomplished by recognizing a production matrix below the phonetic matrix, where segments are described in terms of production features. The crucial point is that no one-to-one relationship necessarily exists between distinctive features and production features.

Humans↗
PubMed1985

Rule invention in the acquisition of morphology by a language-impaired child.

This paper presents a case study of a language-impaired child who invented a unique morphophonologic rule for signaling the distinction between English singular and plural nouns. Conventional linguistic-phonetic analysis indicated that the child was producing the distinction suprasegmentally rather than segmentally. Acoustic-phonetic analysis of matched singular-plural noun pairs was performed in order to determine quantitatively which suprasegmental acoustic cues he used to signal the distinction. Results of a multivariate analysis of variance revealed that singular and plural productions were significantly different from one another on various fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity parameters. This example of a child's linguistic creativity is offered as further evidence in support of a model of language acquisition that emphasizes the cognitive aspects underlying linguistic regularities in child language. Clinical implications are also discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1990

Speech analyses of four children with repaired cleft palates.

Four males with surgically repaired cleft palates, between 3 years 2 months and 3 years 11 months of age, served as subjects. Speech samples were collected and subjected to a number of analyses, including phonetic inventories and analysis of phonological processes. Frequency counts of error types, including gross or compensatory substitutions, were also tallied. The results revealed that the subjects were similar to one another with respect to their phonetic inventories. They differed considerably, however, in the frequency and types of phonological processes used. Those differences may be attributed to variations in language skills. The data strongly suggest that not all of the articulatory problems among the children can be explained solely on the basis of present or past structural deficits.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1977

Nonindependence of feature processing in initial consonants.

Mutual dependence in the processing of manner and place of articulation was investigated in two experiments. The first study assessed the location of the voiced-voiceless boundary as a function of place of articulation, and the second investigated the location of the labial-alveolar boundary as a function of manner class. In both experiments, the location of the phonetic boundary systematically varied as a function of the nontarget feature value. These results indicate that the processing of phonetic feature information occurs in parallel, with decisions about one feature influencing the particular value assigned to another feature.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1982

Associations between phonology and syntax in speech-delayed children.

Interactions between phonology and syntax are inspected in continuous speech samples from 30 speech-delayed children. Two types of interactions are examined: The co-occurrence of speech and language delay and the effects of phonological reduction on the realization of phonetically complex morphophonemes. Four possible patterns of association between the phonological and syntactic systems are outlined, and subjects are assigned to these patterns based on their phonological and syntactic performance. Results indicate that two-thirds of the subjects display evidence of overall syntactic delay, whereas half show some limitation in the use of phonetically complex morphophonemes, their performance in that area being below the level of their syntactic production. Implications of these findings for a theory of speech delay and for management programming are discussed.

Age Factors↗