Infant perception of VOT and closure duration contrasts Publication date: November 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77 Author(s): Muna Schönhuber, Nathalie Czeke, Anja Gampe, Janet Grijzenhout Abstract Previous research suggests that infant perception of phonetic contrasts undergoes a reorganisation during the first year of life with universal sound discrimination from birth that adapts to the native phoneme contrasts around 12 months of age. This paper focuses on two closely related languages that crucially differ in the realisation of stop contrasts: (Standard High) German and Swiss German. The first employs a VOT contrast for tense/lax stops, the latter uses a length contrast to distinguish singletons and geminates. In a habituation paradigm, German and Swiss infants aged 7, 11 and 15 months were tested on their ability to discriminate (a) VOT contrasts and (b) closure duration contrasts for labial stops. Results show that German infants discriminated the VOT contrast at all ages. Swiss German infants discriminated the VOT contrast at 11 months only. At 7 months, neither German nor Swiss German children discriminated the closure duration contrast, whereas both groups were able to perceive the contrast at 11 and 15 months of age. Our findings contribute to clarifying the so far inconsistent picture of infant perception of length contrasts. We discuss the findings critically with regard to the different dimensions of VOT and closure duration.

Learning a new sound pair in a second language: Italian learners and German glottal consonants Publication date: November 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 77 Author(s): Nikola Anna Eger, Holger Mitterer, Eva Reinisch Abstract The present study investigated Italian learners’ production and perception of German /h/ and /Ɂ/ – two sounds that lack obvious linguistic counterparts in Italian. Critically, of these sounds only /h/ is explicitly known to learners from instruction and orthography. We therefore asked whether this awareness would lead to better acquisition of /h/ than /Ɂ/, and whether any differences would depend on the explicitness of the task. In production, learners of a medium proficiency level performed accurately in about 70% of the cases, with errors including sound deletions and substitutions. In spoken word recognition, two other learner groups of the same proficiency were hindered by sound deletions, but not by substitutions, although they were able to differentiate the sounds in an explicit goodness rating task. Overall, acquisition of /Ɂ/ was similar to /h/, despite lack of awareness for this sound. The results suggest that learners have established one combined “glottal category” to which both sounds map in speech processing, while they may be better implemented in production.

Publisher Note Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s):

Exploiting the speech-gesture link to capture fine-grained prosodic prominence impressions and listening strategies Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s): Petra Wagner, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Barbara Samlowski Abstract In this paper, we explore the possibility to gather perceptual impressions of prosodic prominence by exploiting the strong prosody-gesture link, i.e., by having listeners transform a perceptual impression into a motor movement, namely drumming, for two domains of prominence: word-level and syllable-level. A feasibility study reveals that such a procedure is indeed easily and speedily mastered by naïve listeners, but more difficult for word-level prominences. We furthermore examine whether “drummed” annotations are comparable to those gathered with more established annotation protocols based on cumulative naïve impressions and fine-grained expert ratings. These comparisons reveal high correspondences across all prominence annotation protocols, thus corroborating the general usefulness of the gestural approach. The analyses also reveal that all annotation protocols are strongly driven by structural linguistic considerations. We then use Random Forest Models to investigate the relative impact of signal and structural cues to prominence annotations. We find that expert ratings of prosodic prominence are guided comparatively more by structural concerns than those of naïve annotators, that word-level annotations are influenced more by structural linguistic cues than syllable-level ones, and that “drummed” annotations are driven least by structural cues. Lastly, we isolate two main listener strategies among our group of “drummers”, namely those integrating structural and signal cues to prominence, and those being guided predominantly by signal cues.

Stress, pitch accent, and beyond: Intonation in Maltese questions Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s): Martine Grice, Alexandra Vella, Anna Bruggeman Abstract Maltese question word interrogatives are shown to have an alternation in the association of postlexical tones with the question word. Tones associate with the left edge of the question word in direct questions, and with the lexically stressed syllable in indirect questions and when quoted. This alternation holds regardless of the metrical structure of the word. Maltese is thus the first language with lexical stress to be described as having a pragmatically conditioned alternation between fully-fledged pitch accents and pitch events without association to stress.

Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s): Georgia Zellou, Delphine Dahan Abstract While the fact that phonetic information is evaluated in a non-discrete, probabilistic fashion is well established, there is less consensus regarding how long such encoding is maintained. Here, we examined whether people maintain in memory the amount of vowel nasality present in a word when processing a subsequent word that holds a semantic dependency with the first one. Vowel nasality in English is an acoustic correlate of the oral vs. nasal status of an adjacent consonant, and sometimes it is the only distinguishing phonetic feature (e.g., bet vs. bent). In Experiment 1, we show that people can perceive differences in nasality between two vowels above and beyond differences in the categorization of those vowels. In Experiment 2, we tracked listeners’ eye-movements as they heard a sentence that mentioned one of four displayed images (e.g., ‘money’) following a prime word (e.g., ‘bet’) that held a semantic relationship with the target word. Recognition of the target was found to be modulated by the degree of nasality in the first word’s vowel: Slightly greater uncertainty regarding the oral status of the post-vocalic consonant in the first word translated into a weaker semantic cue for the identification of the second word. Thus, listeners appear to maintain in memory the degree of vowel nasality they perceived on the first word and bring this information to bear onto the interpretation of a subsequent, semantically-dependent word. Probabilistic cue integration across words that hold semantic coherence, we argue, contributes to achieving robust language comprehension despite the inherent ambiguity of the speech signal.

Does infant speech perception predict later vocabulary development in bilingual infants? Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s): Leher Singh Abstract One of the most significant transitions reported in infant psychological development is perceptual narrowing whereby infants orient towards their native language. In monolingual infants, the progress made by infants in perceptual narrowing positively predicts later vocabulary size. The relationship between infant speech perception and later language development has not been thus far reported in bilingual populations. The present study investigated infant speech perception in relation to later vocabulary development in a prospective longitudinal study of bilingual infants over the first three years of life. Our study revealed three primary findings. First, unlike monolingual infants, bilingual infants demonstrated a positive correlation between native and non-native phonetic discrimination. Second, native speech perception at 10–11 months predicted single-language (English) vocabulary at 2 years, but not second language (Mandarin), nor total conceptual vocabulary. Third, infants with a native language orientation relative to a non-native orientation in phonetic discrimination at 10–11 months tended towards higher English vocabulary scores at 3 years of age. When placed in the context of prior research with monolingual infants, results with bilingual infants point to distinct relationships between native and non-native speech perception in infancy, but to a similar continuity between infant speech discrimination and later vocabulary growth.

Prosodic encoding in Mandarin spontaneous speech: Evidence for clause-based advanced planning in language production Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s): Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen, Shu-Chuan Tseng Abstract This study reports the cross-boundary f0 shifting of prosodic units (PU) in Mandarin conversational speech by analyzing the PU-initial and PU-final f0 heights as a function of its semantic structure. Initial and final f0 heights were defined as the f0 values extracted at the energy max of the first and the last syllable of the PU. The semantic structure of the PU was defined based on its co-extensiveness with a semantic unit in discourse (DU), i.e., a proposition, often encoded by a clause. Our analysis shows significant relationships between the cross-boundary f0 heights and the PU-DU co-extensiveness. PU-DU left alignment introduces a significant up-shifting effect on both initial and final f0 heights. This pitch resetting is effective across the whole PU, suggesting speakers’ sensitivity to the initiation of propositions in production. On the other hand, PU-DU right alignment introduces a down-shifting effect on both f0 heights. The regressive f0-lowering observed in the PU-initial f0 heights (anticipatory effect based on the PU-terminal semantics) and the progressive f0-raising of the PU-final f0 heights (carried-over effect based on the PU-initial semantics) both shed light on the psycholinguistic importance of the proposition and support its central role in advanced planning in spontaneous speech production.

Editorial Board Publication date: September 2019 Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 76 Author(s):