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 1,081 records · Page 60Linked to original sources
PubMed1989

Perceived strength and identity of foreign accent in Swedish.

We report three listening experiments focussing on the phonetic correlates of perceived foreignness and perceived strength of foreign accent in Swedish. In the first experiment, it is shown that accentedness can be reliably measured on the basis of a relatively short speech sample and that a statistical count of deviating pronunciations correlates significantly with subjective judgements of accentedness by linguistically naive listeners. The second experiment shows a significant correlation between number of deviant features and perceived accent strength and a significant correlation between judgements of degree of deviation and foreignness. Some features are associated with impressions of stronger accents than others, and some with perception of 'Finnish' accent. The third experiment establishes which combinations of deviant phonetic characteristics most strongly tend to give the impression of Finnish accent.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

The nature and origins of ambient language influence on infant vocal production and early words.

Phonological structure may be seen as emerging in ontogeny from the combined effects of performance constraints rooted in the neuromotor and perceptual systems, individual lexical development and the influence of the particular ambient language. We review here the nature and origins of the earliest ambient language influences. Global effects within the first year of life include both (1) loss of early appearing phonetic gestures not supported by the ambient language and (2) positive effects, reflecting infant attention to prosody and to cues available in the visual as well as the auditory modality. In the course of early lexical development more specific effects become manifest as individual children pursue less common phonetic paths to which the ambient language provides 'sufficient exposure'.

Child Language↗
PubMed1994

Conventional, biological and environmental factors in speech communication: a modulation theory.

Speech signals contain various types of information that can be grouped under the headings phonetic, affective, personal and transmittal. Listeners are capable of distinguishing these. Previous theories of speech perception have not considered this fully. They have mainly been concerned with problems relating exclusively to phonetic quality. The theory presented in this paper considers speech signals as the result of allowing conventional gestures to modulate a carrier signal that has the personal characteristics of the speaker, which implies that in general the conventional information can only be retrieved by demodulation.

Communication↗
PubMed1995

Native speakers of Spanish show rate-dependent processing of English stop consonants.

English monolinguals and native Spanish speakers of English used a 9-point scale to rate syllable-initial stops for goodness as realizations of the English /p/ category. Voice onset time (VOT) was varied in a set of short-duration ('fast-rate') consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli, and in a set of longer-duration ('slow-rate') CV stimuli. The VOT values ranged from values typical for English /b/ to values which exceeded those typical for English /p/. Results for the native English (NE) subjects replicated those obtained previously using the same two continua. Goodness ratings systematically increased, then decreased as VOT values extended beyond the range typical for English /p/. The NE subjects gave their highest ratings to stimuli with VOT values of about 50 ms. For stops with longer VOT values, their ratings were higher for stimuli in the slow-rate than fast-rate continuum. The native Spanish (NS) subjects were assigned to two subgroups based on degree of foreign accent in their pronunciation of English sentences. Both proficient and nonproficient NS subjects gave their highest ratings to stimuli with much the same VOT values as the NE subjects, even though /p/ is realized with short-lag VOT in Spanish. The nonproficient, but not the proficient NS subjects showed significantly smaller rate effects on goodness ratings than did the NE subjects. However, the subjects in both NS groups gave significantly higher ratings to stimuli with short-lag VOT values than did the NE subjects. The results are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that adult learners of a second language may establish new perceptual phonetic categories for phonetic segments not found in the native language.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

A probable case of clicks influencing the sound patterns of some European languages.

In the history of various European languages (Latin, Spanish, English, Swedish, and various dialects of French) there are instances of the cluster mn appearing as mpn. There are philological controversies as to whether this 'epenthetic' p was actually pronounced or was just a learned hypercorrect spelling. I offer here a novel phonetic scenario supporting the claim that the p was pronounced and arose in a phonetically natural way: I posit that in the mn cluster there was temporal overlap of the m and n closures. The simultaneous labial and apical closure would create a pocket of air between them which, when the labial closure was released, would undergo a momentary rarefaction of pressure and thus be released with a click-like burst. Listeners would be likely to interpret this stop burst auditorily as a pulmonic [p] and this would be the basis of their own pronunciations.

Europe↗
PubMed2000

Cerebral specialization for speech and non-speech stimuli in infants.

Early cerebral specialization and lateralization for auditory processing in 4-month-old infants was studied by recording high-density evoked potentials to acoustical and phonetic changes in a series of repeated stimuli (either tones or syllables). Mismatch responses to these stimuli exhibit a distinct topography suggesting that different neural networks within the temporal lobe are involved in the perception and representation of the different features of an auditory stimulus. These data confirm that specialized modules are present within the auditory cortex very early in development. However, both for syllables and continuous tones, higher voltages were recorded over the left hemisphere than over the right with no significant interaction of hemisphere by type of stimuli. This suggests that there is no greater left hemisphere involvement in phonetic processing than in acoustic processing during the first months of life.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2002

Development of speech perception and production in children with cochlear implants.

The purpose of the present study was twofold: 1) to compare the hierarchy of perceived and produced significant speech pattern contrasts in children with cochlear implants, and 2) to compare this hierarchy to developmental data of children with normal hearing. The subjects included 35 prelingual hearing-impaired children with multichannel cochlear implants. The test materials were the Hebrew Speech Pattern Contrast (HeSPAC) test and the Hebrew Picture Speech Pattern Contrast (HePiSPAC) test for older and younger children, respectively. The results show that 1) auditory speech perception performance of children with cochlear implants reaches an asymptote at 76% (after correction for guessing) between 4 and 6 years of implant use; 2) all implant users perceived vowel place extremely well immediately after implantation; 3) most implanted children perceived initial voicing at chance level until 2 to 3 years after implantation, after which scores improved by 60% to 70% with implant use; 4) the hierarchy of phonetic-feature production paralleled that of perception: vowels first, voicing last, and manner and place of articulation in between; and 5) the hierarchy in speech pattern contrast perception and production was similar between the implanted and the normal-hearing children, with the exception of the vowels (possibly because of the interaction between the specific information provided by the implant device and the acoustics of the Hebrew language). The data reported here contribute to our current knowledge about the development of phonological contrasts in children who were deprived of sound in the first few years of their lives and then developed phonetic representations via cochlear implants. The data also provide additional insight into the interrelated skills of speech perception and production.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1990

Phonological awareness tasks as predictors of decoding ability: beyond segmentation.

The performance of 38 male third- and fourth-grade reading disabled/poor decoders and above-average readers/good decoders was compared on a series of six measures of phonological awareness, including tasks that required the ability to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes. Performance on these tasks was also correlated with phonetic decoding of pseudowords. Significant but varying intercorrelations were obtained among tasks in both groups. For the poor decoders, deletion was the most highly correlated with the other tasks. However, all good decoders performed at ceiling level on this task. For the poor decoders, deletion was significantly correlated with phonetic decoding (r = .74 and r = .78 for timed and untimed decoding measures, respectively). While all good decoders had good phonological awareness, not all those with good phonological awareness were good decoders. The results suggest that tasks that require blending and manipulation of phonemes, in addition to segmentation, may predict decoding ability best.

Awareness↗
PubMed2004

Perception of Mandarin lexical tones when F0 information is neutralized.

In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore spoken word recognition how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, tone languages supposedly critical portions of the tonal pattern were neutralized with signal processing techniques, yet identification of the tonal pattern remained quite good. In Experiment 2, even more drastic removal of tonal information was tested, using stimuli whispered by Mandarin speakers, or signal processed to remove the pitch cues. Again, performance was surprisingly good, showing that listeners can use secondary cues when the primary cue is unavailable. Moreover, a comparison of tone perception of naturally whispered monosyllables and the signal processed ones suggests that Mandarin speakers promote the utility of secondary cues when they know that the primary cue will be unavailable. The flexible use of cues to tone in Mandarin is similar to the flexibility that has been found in the production and perception of cues to phonetic identity in Western languages.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Measures of native and non-native rhythm in a quantity language.

The traditional phonetic classification of language rhythm as stress-timed or syllable-timed is attributed to Pike. Recently, two different proposals have been offered for describing the rhythmic structure of languages from acoustic-phonetic measurements. Ramus has suggested a metric based on the proportion of vocalic intervals and the variability (SD) of consonantal intervals. Grabe has proposed Pairwise Variability Indices (nPVI, rPVI) calculated from the differences in vocalic and consonantal durations between successive syllables. We have calculated both the Ramus and Grabe metrics for Latvian, traditionally considered a syllable rhythm language, and for Latvian as spoken by Russian learners. Native speakers and proficient learners were very similar whereas low-proficiency learners showed high variability on some properties. The metrics did not provide an unambiguous classification of Latvian.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Alignment of "phrase accent" lows in dutch falling rising questions: theoretical and methodological implications.

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form Do you live in [place name]? produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of these turning points is affected by the location of a postaccentual secondary stressed syllable if one is present. This is consistent with the findings and analyses of Grice, Ladd, & Arvaniti, 2000 (Phonology 17, 143-185), suggesting that the low turning points are the phonetic reflex of a "phrase accent." In the second part of this study, we measured the low turning points in falling-rising questions produced in a task-oriented dialog setting and found that their alignment is affected in the same way as in the read speech data. This suggests that read speech experiments are a valid means of investigating the phonetic details of intonation contours.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The dynamic nature of speech perception.

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge phonetic to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In categorization that study, Dutch listeners made lexical decisions to spoken stimuli, including words with an ambiguous fricative (between [f] and [s]), in either [f]- or speech [s]-biased lexical contexts. In a subsequent categorization test, the former perception group of listeners identified more sounds on an [epsilonf]-[epsilons] continuum as [f] than the latter group. In the present experiment, listeners received the same exposure and test stimuli, but did not make lexical decisions to the exposure items. Instead, they counted them. Categorization results were indistinguishable from those obtained earlier. These adjustments in fricative perception therefore do not depend on explicit judgments during exposure. This learning effect thus reflects automatic retuning of the interpretation of acoustic-phonetic information.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The interaction of coarticulation and prosody in sound change.

Ohala (1974, 1981a) has proposed that sound changes can originate in hearers' misinterpretations of synchronic phonetic patterns. This paper applies this idea to sound changes that are conditioned by the prosodic environment, such as the voicing of voiceless fricatives in unstressed syllables in Proto-Germanic. Browman and Goldstein's (1989, 1990) "gestural score" suggests a representation of synchronic patterns in which extreme overlap between gestures of neighboring phoneme segments in casual speech can produce the appearance of a feature change or a segment deletion. Many of the sound changes that are conditioned by prosodic environment can be viewed as a diachronic reinterpretation of just such synchronic fast-speech processes. For example, vowel reduction in unstressed syllables can be viewed as a reinterpretation of undershoot that occurs when the vowel is overlapped to a great extent by the oral gestures for neighboring consonants. Phonetic data are reviewed that support analogous accounts of stop spirantization, voiceless obstruent voicing, and even the insertion of an intrusive stop in clusters such as /ns/ in some prosodic environments.

Female↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Coordination and coarticulation in speech production.

In this article, we consider the concepts of coordination and coarticulation in speech production in the context of a task-dynamic model. Coordination reflects the transient establishment of constrained relationships among articulators that jointly produce linguistically significant actions of the vocal tract--that is phonetic gestures--in a flexible, context-sensitive manner. We ascribe the need for these constraints in part to the requirement of coarticulatory overlap in speech production. Coarticulation reflects temporally staggered activation of coordinative constraints for different phonetic gestures. We suggest that the anticipatory coarticulatory field for a gesture is more limited than look-ahead models have suggested, consistent with the idea that anticipatory coarticulation is the onset of activation of coordinative constraints for a forthcoming gesture. Finally, we ascribe much of the context-sensitivity in the anticipatory or carryover fields of a gesture (variation due to "coarticulation resistance") to low-level (below the speech plan) interactions among the coordinative constraints for temporally overlapping gestures.

Female↗
PubMed2004

Speech outcome following treatment in cross-linguistic cleft palate studies: methodological implications.

OBJECTIVE: In cross-linguistic studies of cleft palate speech outcome following treatment, treatment is the independent variable, speech outcome is the dependent variable, and the speakers' language background is a background variable, like sex, age, and cleft type, which must be eliminated. This article focuses on language as a background variable and how it should be treated. The methodological problems are illustrated through a presentation of two cross-linguistic speech outcome studies. CONCLUSION: When speakers of different language background are included in cleft palate studies of speech outcome following treatment, speech outcome data should be based on speech units that are phonetically identical across languages. This affects the make-up of the speech material used in the study. In practice, the requirement of phonetically identical speech units may not be totally met, and detailed information regarding the interaction between the cleft condition and speech sound production is still required to fully understand how the validity of data is affected if this requirement is not met.

Cleft Palate↗
PubMed1999

Perception of middorsum palatal stops from the speech of three children with repaired cleft palate.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine listeners' perception of the middorsum palatal stop, a compensatory articulation used by individuals with repaired cleft palates. DESIGN: This study tested whether listeners could discriminate middorsum palatal stops from matched alveolar (/t/) and velar (/k/) stops using a two-button "change/no-change" procedure. It also explored how listeners identified the palatal stop by rating each sound on a scale of one to eight. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty listeners, 10 untrained and 10 trained in general phonetics (graduate students in speech-language pathology), participated in discrimination and identification tasks during a 1-hour session in the Speech Perception Laboratory at the University of Buffalo. MEASURES: Discrimination was measured using d-prime, a score based on listeners' hits, correct rejections, misses, and false alarms to the changes/no changes in the stimuli. Identification was measured by the mean rating score for each class of stops. RESULTS: Listeners discriminated middorsum palatal stops from alveolar and velar stops, but their ratings for the middorsum palatal stops did not differ from those for the regular stop consonants. The two groups differing in phonetic training did not perform differently. CONCLUSIONS: Listeners can discriminate middorsum palatal stops from other stop articulations, but they did not identify them differently from alveolar and velar stop consonants. The results suggest that considerable training listening to middorsum palatal stops is necessary for listeners to be able to reliably identify them.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

[PARCOR analysis in experimental plate wearer's sound and its application to evaluation of plate formation].

The study demonstrates the relationship between palatal formation and human utterance by PARCOR analysis. PARCOR (partial autocorrelation) coefficient 'k' in speech wave was derived from the conception of linear prediction of human speech production by ltakura. Linguistic opposition was also adapted for the evaluation of plate forms and postions. Investigations were conducted to six adult men as the subjects who wore the experimental plates divided by four steps. PARCOR coefficients of the plate wearer's sounds were shifted as the plate area increase, and linguistic oppositions were individually proposed. Conclusions were represented as follows; Phonetic opposition of /p/X/m/ and /d/X/m/ (in 'stop' to 'nasal' opposition) were influenced by the width of the plates. Opposition of /t/x/s/ (in 'stop' to 'fricative' opposition) was significantly influenced by the frontal positions in oral cavity. Phonetic oppositions were also influenced from vowel environments to the consonants. As the plate areas were increased in order of full plate, 1/2 plate and 1/4 plate, the evidency of the oppositions were decreased.

Denture, Complete, Upper↗
PubMed2005

Comparison of spectrographic records of two syllables pronounced from scripts in hiragana and romaji by students with different familiarity with English.

The same syllables /mu/ and /ra/ written in Japanese hiragana and romaji given on a standard speeded naming task elicited phonetically or acoustically different responses in a syllabic hiragana condition and a romaji condition. The participants were two groups of Japanese college students (ns = 15 and 16) with different familiarity with English as a second language. The results suggested that the phonetic reality of syllables represented in these scripts can differ, depending on the interaction between the kind of script and speakers' orthographic familiarity.

Adolescent↗