Recent uclaling_wpp items

WPP, No.111: A preliminary model of Singaporean English intonational phonology

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make Singa-porean English (SgE) distinct from other varieties of English. Although the intonation of SgE has been described previously (Deterding 1994; Lim 2004; Ng 2011), no phono-logical model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of SgE intonational phonology within the Autosegmental-Metrical phonology framework (eg. Pierrehum-bert 1980). Three native speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length and stress pattern. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is characterized by a general LH (rising) contour. The L can be attributable to either an L* tone on a lexically-stressed syllable or an L initial boundary tone if the stressed syllable occurs late in the AP. The AP-_nal syllable always has a phonologically...

WPP, No.111: Word-initial glottalization and voice quality strengthening

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Despite abundant research on the distribution of word-initial glottal stops, it is still unclear which factors matter most in predicting where glottal stops occur and why. In this study, logistic mixed-effects regression modeling is used to predict the occurrence of word-initial full glottal stops in an English corpus. The results indicate that prominence and phrasing are overwhelmingly the most important factors in predicting full glottal stop occurrence. Moreover, prominent word-initial vowels that are not preceded by a glottal stop show acoustic correlates of glottal constriction, whereas non-prominent phrase-initial vowels do not. Rather, phrase-initial voicing (even for sonorants) is less regular, but in a manner inconsistent with glottal constriction. These findings are subsequently con_rmed using articulatory measures from electroglottography, and extended to Spanish. Based on the results, a prominence-driven theory of word-initial glottalization is proposed and motivated,...

WPP, No.111: Japanese consecutive devoicing as a phonetic process: the relative contribution of conditioning factors and its speaker variability

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In many dialects of Japanese, high vowels between voiceless consonants are often devoiced. This devoicing phenomenon is generally considered a phonological assimilation process. It is almost obligatory in theTokyodialect, except for some marked environments in which complete devoicing is often blocked. One such case is so called consecutive devoicing, where two or more consecutive vowels are in devoiceable environments. Although several accounts of consecutive devoicing have been proposed (e.g., Kondo, 2005; Yoshida, 2004; Tsuchida, 1997), the nature of its markedness, namely whether it is phonologically or phonetically driven, is still being debated. In order to provide a more comprehensive account of consecutive devoicing in theTokyodialect, the current study investigated the relative contribution of various factors on its occurrence as well as its across-speaker variability. The results revealed that the manner of consonants surrounding the second devoiceable vowel (C2-C3)...

WPP, No.111: Syllabification, Sonority, and Spoken Word Segmentation: Evidence from Word-Spotting

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Since Cutler and Norris (1986), it has been held that the role of the syllable in on-line word segmentation is fundamentally language specific; syllabification-based strategies are said to be available in syllable-timed languages, but unavailable in languages that are stressed-timed. The present study used word-spotting and found listeners in English (a prototypically stress-timed language) to be highly sensitive to sonority patterns. In particular, it was found that listeners more readily parsed sonorant consonants as codas, making vowel-initial target words like “absent” easier to spot in nonsense strings like “jeemabsent” compared to “jeebabsent”. This pattern mirrors both English-speaking listeners’ off-line syllabification preferences, and also the on-line behavior of listeners of syllable-timed languages (e.g., French), suggesting the syllable-based segmentation routine is not language specific.

WPP, No.111: Focus, prosody, and individual differences in “autistic” traits: Evidence from cross-modal semantic priming

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The present study explored listeners’ expectations about how prosodic prominence can be used to disambiguate information structure in English. In particular, the contribution of prenuclear accents to the prosodic disambiguation of the size of the focus constituent (broad VP vs. narrow object focus) in SVO constructions was tested using the cross-modal priming paradigm. In two experiments, listeners were presented with visual targets (e.g., “brunette”) following contrastively related primes (e.g., “blonde”), which were heard as objects in SVO sentences (e.g., “He kissed a blonde.”). In Experiment 1, listeners heard the sentences produced with a single pitch accent on the object, and the focus structure varied from broad VP focus to narrow object focus. No significant differences in priming patterns across conditions were found, supporting theories of Focus Projection (e.g., Selkirk 1995, Gussenhoven 1984), which predict prenuclear accents to be optional. In Experiment 2, the information...

WPP, No.111: Glottal articulations of phonation contrasts and their acoustic and perceptual consequences

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This study explores the properties of one type of phonation contrast - the tense vs. lax phonation contrasts of Yi (Loloish) languages – in terms of their glottal articulations, acoustic correlates, and perceptual salience. To determine the glottal articulations involved in the phonation contrasts, we adopted Functional Data Analysis to analyze entire EGG glottal pulse shapes. This method is found to capture differences in the abruptness of contact, a key property that is not captured by traditional EGG parameter measures. The primary contact patterns for phonation contrasts are very consistent across languages, speakers, and genders, and there is only one underlying articulatory pattern for these tense vs. lax contrasts. Overall, we found consistent correlations among the different kinds of measures, which means that speakers and listeners are able to establish a stable link between articulation, acoustic signals and perception.

WPP, No.111: The Intonation of Tongan

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a model of the intonational system of Tongan, an Austronesian language, taking the autosegmentalmetrical theory as its framework. Tongan has lexical stress which appears on the penultimate syllable of prosodic words and is marked postlexically with one of two bitonal pitch accents—a rise, LH*, or a low tone, L*. Measurements show that the first tone of both pitch accents aligns with the stressed syllable onset, while the second tone aligns with the stressed syllable offset. There is evidence for two tonally marked levels of prosodic phrasing in Tongan, the intonational phrase (IP) and the accentual phrase (AP). The IP is about the size of a full utterance or major phrase and is marked by a final boundary tone and are realized on the IPfinal syllable. Four boundary tones have been observed. The smaller unit, the AP, usually contains one lexical word plus preceding functional elements. Two APfinal tones have been observed, realized on the final syllable of the...

WPP, No.110: Glottal stops before word-initial vowels in American English: distribution and acoustic characteristics

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Despite abundant research on the distribution of glottal stops and glottalization in English and other languages, it is still unclear which factors matter most in predicting where glottal stops occur. In this study, logistic mixed-effects regression modeling is used to predict the occurrence of word-initial full glottal stops vs. no voicing irregularity. The results indicate that prominence and phrasing are overwhelmingly the most important factors in predicting full glottal stop occurrence. Additionally, prominent word-initial vowels that are not preceded by full glottal stop show acoustic correlates of glottal constriction, whereas non-prominent phrase-initial vowels do not. Rather, phrase-initial voicing (even for sonorants) is less regular, but in a manner inconsistent with glottal constriction. Therefore, not all cases of voicing irregularity on wordinitial vowels should be attributed to the presence of a glottal stop gesture.

WPP, No.110: Perception of spectral slopes and tone identification in White Hmong

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates the importance of source spectrum slopes in the perception of phonation by White Hmong listeners. In White Hmong, non-modal phonation (breathy or creaky voice) accompanies certain lexical tones, but its importance in tonal contrasts is unclear. In this study, native listeners participated in two perception tasks, in which they were asked to identify the word they heard. In the _rst task, participants heard natural stimuli with manipulated F0 and duration (phonation unchanged). Results indicate that phonation is important in identifying the breathy tone, but not the creaky tone. Thus, breathiness can be viewed as contrastive in White Hmong. Next, to understand which parts of the source spectrum listeners use to perceive contrastive breathy phonation, source spectrum slopes were manipulated in the second task to create stimuli ranging from modal to breathy sounding, with F0 held constant. Results indicate that changes in H1-H2 (di_erence in amplitude between...

WPP, No.110: Stress correlates and vowel targets in Tongan

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in F0, intensity, duration, F1, and voice quality, but F0 is the best predictor of primary stress. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly cued by a difference in F0. With regards to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowels are higher in the vowel space (have lower F1) when unstressed, with no differences in F2. Moreover, there is no reduction in the overall size of the vowel space. We interpret this pattern as evidence that unstressed vowels in Tongan are not undergoing centralization, nor are they otherwise reduced. Rather, Tongan speakers have separate targets for stressed and unstressed vowels.

WPP, No.110: Registers in tonal contrasts

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This study revisits the issue of tonal registers by exploring the cues used in producing andperceiving the five level tones of Black Miao. Both production and perception experiments show that non-modal phonations are very important cues for tonal contrasts. Two different kinds of non-modal phonations that either enhance pitch contrasts or provide an additional contrastive cue divide tonal levels into several registers. Benefiting from more than one cue, 11, 33 and 55 are well distinguished in the tonal space; by contrast, 22 and 44, only contrasting in pitch, are the most confusable tones. The tonal registers model can explain the different uses of non-modal phonations across languages.

WPP, No. 109: Papers Presented at the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Current members of the UCLA Phonetics Lab were well-represented at the recent ICPhS in Hong Kong. The conference proceedings papers are not reprinted here, but all can be accessed at the authors’ websites provided.

WPP, No. 109: The benefits of vowel laryngealization on the perception of coda stops in English

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It has been previously noted that voiceless coda stops in English may undergo optional glottalization, i.e. they are produced with simultaneous glottal closure. The glottal closure usually produces laryngeal coarticulation on the previous vowel in the form of laryngealization (creaky voice). In this paper, the effects of vowel laryngealization on coda stop perception were investigated. Eighteen native speakers of English participated in a phoneme monitoring task where they were asked to monitor for /t/. The target stimuli were English monosyllabic words ending in a coda /t/, e.g. ‘beat.’ The stimuli differed according to two conditions: whether vowel was either modal or laryngealized, and whether the coda /t/ was either released or unreleased. The results show that presence of laryngealization resulted in faster and more accurate monitoring of /t/ in codas. Further analysis of the filler stimuli suggests that the perceptual advantage of laryngealization is a result of listeners’...

WPP, No. 109: Prosodic Boundaries and the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Group

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this study was to examine the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Group domain. Replicating Carlson et al.'s (2005) perception study, an experiment was conducted aiming to see whether Taiwanese listeners were able to predict the occurrence and strength of upcoming boundaries - Word, Tone Sandhi Group and Utterance. Stimuli were selected from a corpus of spontaneous Swedish speech and Taiwanese read speech, so as to vary in Boundary types (no break vs. weak break vs. strong break), Fragment size (long vs. short), and Filtering (normal vs. low-pass filtered). These fragments were presented to two Taiwanese listeners who were instructed to guess which a prosodic break would follow each fragment. Results revealed that Boundary type is a factor that influenced the judgments when stimuli with all boundary types, fragment sizes and filtering conditions were combined. Taiwanese listeners are able to differentiate strong break vs. weak break vs no break in Swedish and strong break vs....

WPP, No. 109: Production and perception maps of the multidimensional register contrast in Yi

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how contrastive phonation is produced and perceived by native speakers of a language with both tonal and phonation contrasts, Yi. In the production experiment, we measure a wide scope of relevant physiological and acoustic parameters, which show substantial physiological-acoustic coupling: a Contact Quotient (CQ) distinction is the essential property of the phonation contrast, while H1*-H2* and H1*-A1*, which are significantly correlated with CQ, are the best acoustic measures for the phonation contrast. The bandwidth of the first formant (B1) and the Cepstral peak prominence (CPP) are effective acoustic cues too. In addition to the well-established contributions of the vocal folds, this study gives insight into the role of supraglottal settings for the phonation contrast. A consistent F1 difference for the phonation contrast in Yi indicates a shape change in the vocal tract, supporting the multidimensional...

WPP, No. 108: Phonation Contrasts Across Languages

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This study compared the contrastive phonation types of four languages—Gujarati (modal vs. breathy), Hmong (modal vs. breathy vs. creaky), Mazatec (modal vs. breathy vs. creaky), and Yi (tense vs. lax)—on several acoustic measures, within and across languages. For Gujarati, Hmong, and Yi, two electroglottographic (EGG) measures were also compared; a Contact Quotient measure distinguished the within-language phonation types in all three languages. While several acoustic measures distinguished phonation types within each language, only H1*-H2* did so in all four languages. However, when each within-language phonation category was then compared across languages, each category was found to differ from language to language on multiple acoustic measures, e.g. breathy in Hmong is distinct from breathy in Gujarati. This unexpected result suggests that language/speaker differences in voice quality are larger than phonation category differences. This suggestion finds support in a Multi-Dimensional...

WPP, No. 108: Information Structural Expectations in the Perception of Prosodic Prominence

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of previous investigations using context matching (e.g., Gussenhoven 1983) and appropriateness rating tasks (Birch and Clifton 1995, Welby 2003) suggest that English-speaking listeners lack expectations regarding how the size of a focused constituent (broad versus narrow) can be expressed prosodically in certain constructions. In the present study English-speaking listeners were presented with the same SVO sentence (e.g., I bought a motorcycle) presented in either broad or narrow question contexts, and were asked to rate the prominence of the words in those sentences. In general, listeners reported sentence-final objects to be relatively more prominent than preceding verbs in the test sentences when those sentences were presented in narrow-object (What did you buy?) rather than broad-VP (What did you do?) or sentence (What happened?) focus contexts. This effect was found to be stronger in Experiment 2, where the answer was a correction. The findings suggest listeners...

WPP, No. 108: Acoustic correlates of stress and their use in diagnosing syllable fusion in Tongan

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The goals of this study were to determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan, and to use these correlates in diagnosing syllable fusion, an alleged phonological process in the language by which sequences of vowels can fuse into a single syllable. Using recordings of one female native speaker, we found that pitch, duration, and vowel quality appear to be strong cues for primary stress, but intensity and voice quality can differentiate stressed from unstressed tokens for certain vowels. For secondary stress, only F0 was found to differentiate stressed from unstressed vowels, but the effect was smaller than for primary stress. Using these correlates of stress, we found evidence for syllable fusion in Tongan based on pitch and voice quality contours as well as differences in vowel height.

WPP, No. 108: The acoustics of coarticulated non-modal phonation

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of potential breathy-to-creaky phonation contours from a production study of native speakers of English, White Hmong, and Korean. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal phonations. In the English corpus, both the breathiness and creakiness are allophonic. In the Hmong corpus, the breathiness is allophonic but the creakiness is phonemic. In the Korean corpus, the breathiness is arguably phonemic, and the creakiness is allophonic. The contours were analyzed using the three measures of phonation that were found to best differentiate non-modal from modal phonation in these languages: H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio. Results from these measures provide support for the presence of breathy-creaky contours in vowels. The duration and...

WPP, No. 108: Production and Perception of Taiwan Mandarin Syllable Contraction

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is a lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. In this present study, it is shown that syllable contraction is optional with the trough depth distribution as the evidence. Trough depth is also employed as the measure for gradience. In the perception experiment, listeners were asked to do a forced-choice identification task and the accuracy was generally high. The results from the production experiment not only verifies that syllable contraction is optional and gradient, but also show that durations and F0 range are the acoustic cues that contribute to the distinction between the fullycontracted tokens and the lexical tokens.

WPP, No. 108: Perception of pitch location within a speaker’s own range: fundamental frequency, voice quality and speaker sex

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

How are listeners able to identify whether the pitch of a brief isolated sample of an unknown voice is high or low in the overall pitch range of that speaker? Does the speaker’s voice quality convey crucial information about pitch level? Results and statistical models of two experiments that provide answers to these questions are presented. First, listeners rated the pitch levels of samples taken over the full pitch ranges of male and female speakers. The absolute f0 of the samples was by far the most important determinant of listeners’ ratings, but with some effect of the sex of the speaker. Acoustic measures of voice quality had only a very small effect on these ratings. This result suggests that listeners have expectations about f0s for average speakers of each sex, and judge voice samples against such expectations. Second, listeners judged speaker sex for the same speech samples. Again, absolute f0 was the most determinant of listeners’ judgments, but now voice quality...

WPP, No. 108: Bole Intonation

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Bole is a Chadic language spoken in Yobe and Gombe States in northeastern Nigeria. The Bole tone system has two contrasting level tones, high (H) and low (L), which may be combined on heavy syllables to produce phonetic rising and falling tones. The prosody of intonation refers to lexical tones and the overall function of the utterance. Bole does not have lexical or phrasal stress, and intonation does not play a pragmatic role typical of stress languages, such as pitch raising to signal focus. The paper discusses intonation patterns of several phrasal types: declarative statements, yes/no questions of two types, WHquestions, vocatives, pleas, and lists. Certain interactions of intonation with tone apply to most of these phrase types: downdrift (esp. of H following L) across a phrase, phrase final tone lowering (extra lowering of phrase final L and plateauing of phrase final H after L), and boosting of H in the first HL sequence of a phrase. Special phrase final pitch phenomena...

WPP, No. 108: The acoustic consequences of phonation and tone interactions in Jalapa Mazatec

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz (Jalapa) Mazatec is unusual in possessing a three-way phonation contrast and three-way level tone contrast independent of phonation. This study investigates the acoustics of how phonation and tone interact in this language, and how such interactions are maintained across variables like speaker sex, vowel timecourse, and presence of aspiration in the onset. Using a large number of words from the recordings of Mazatec made by Paul Kirk and Peter Ladefoged in the 1980s and 1990s, the results of our acoustic and statistical analysis support the claim that spectral measures like H1-H2 and mid-range spectral measures like H1-A2 best distinguish each phonation type, though other measures like Cespstral Peak Prominence are important as well. This is true regardless of tone and speaker sex. The phonation contrasts are strongest in the first third of the vowel and then weaken towards the end. Although tones remain distinct from one another in terms of F0 throughout...

WPP, No. 108: Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

To determine if the speaking fundamental frequency (F0) profiles of English and Mandarin differ, a variety of voice samples from male and female speakers were compared. Two methods of pitchtracking were also compared. Differences in the F0 data from the two methods were small, except that the lowest creaky F0 values were better detected manually. The F0 profiles of English vs. Mandarin speakers were sometimes found to differ, but these differences depended on the particular speech samples being compared. Most notably, the physiological F0 ranges of the speakers, determined from tone sweeps, did not differ between the two languages, indicating that the English and Mandarin speakers’ voices are comparable. Their use of voice pitch in single-word utterances was, however, quite different, with the Mandarin speakers having higher maximums and means, and larger ranges, even when only the Mandarin high falling tone was compared with English. In contrast, for a prose passage, the two...

WPP, No. 107: Acoustic Study of Georgian Stop Consonants

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates the acoustic properties of ejective, voiced and voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian, a Caucasian language, and seeks to answer two questions: (1) which acoustic features discriminate the three stop manners and (2) do Georgian stops undergo initial strengthening, and if so, is it syntagmatic or paradigmatic strengthening? Five female speakers were recorded reading words embedded into carrier phrases and stories. Acoustic measures include closure duration, voicing during the closure, voicing lag, relative burst intensity, spectral moment of bursts, phonation (H1-H2) and f0. Of these, voicing lag, voicing during the closure, mean burst frequency, H1-H2 and f0 could all be used to discriminate stop manner, but stop manners did not differ in closure duration or relative burst intensity. Georgian stops did show initial strengthening and showed only syntagmatic enhancement, not paradigmatic enhancement. Stops showed longer closure durations, longer voicing...

WPP, No. 107: Dispersion in the Vowel System of Pima

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This is a report of a pilot study of the phonetic variation of vowels due to stress and syllable type in Pima, a dialect of O’odham. O’odham, along with several other Uto-Aztecan languages, has a five vowel system which appears unevenly distributed in two ways: its only front vowel is high, and it includes three high-back or high-mid vowels. This arrangement of canonical vowels appears not to reflect the influence of a drive for maximal dispersion of canonical vowels, something which has been argued to account for the frequency and type of vowel inventories cross-linguistically. Several properties of the allophonic variation observed in Pima, however, can be explained by appealing to just such a drive to maximize acoustic distinctness. Factors besides maximal distinctness must also be involved in controlling this distribution, however, as evidenced by the relative stability of this vowel system among Uto-Aztecan languages.

WPP, No. 107: Shooting Through the Nose in Karekare: A Study of Nasally Released Stops in a Chadic Language

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

WPP, No. 107: Shooting Through the Nose in Karekare: A Study of Nasally Released Stops in a Chadic Language

Phonetic Theory and Cross-Linguistic Variation in Vowel Articulation

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Phonetic Theory and Cross-Linguistic Variation in Vowel Articulation

WPP, No. 102: Dissection of the Speech Production Mechanism

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

WPP, No. 102: Dissection of the Speech Production Mechanism

WPP, No. 105: Phonological Development of Korean: A Case Study