Cross-generational vowel change in American English.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jacewicz E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4134908 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Cross-generational and cross-dialectal variation in vowels among speakers of American English was examined in terms of vowel identification by listeners and vowel classification using pattern recognition. Listeners from Western North Carolina and Southeastern Wisconsin identified 12 vowel categories produced by 120 speakers stratified by age (old adults, young adults, and children), gender, and dialect. The vowels /ɝ, o, ʊ, u/ were well identified by both groups of listeners. The majority of confusions were for the front /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ/, the low back /ɑ, ɔ/ and the monophthongal North Carolina /aɪ/. For selected vowels, generational differences in acoustic vowel characteristics were perceptually salient, suggesting listeners' responsiveness to sound change. Female exemplars and native-dialect variants produced higher identification rates. Linear discriminant analyses which examined dialect and generational classification accuracy showed that sampling the formant pattern at vowel midpoint only is insufficient to separate the vowels. Two sample points near onset and offset provided enough information for successful classification. The models trained on one dialect classified the vowels from the other dialect with much lower accuracy. The results strongly support the importance of dynamic information in accurate classification of cross-generational and cross-dialectal variations.
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Project description:This article provides acoustic measurements data for vowel nasalization which are based on speech recorded from fifteen (8 female and 7 male) native speakers of American English in a laboratory setting. Each individual speaker's production patterns for the vowel nasalization in tautosyllabic CVN and NVC words are documented in terms of three acoustic parameters: the duration of nasal consonant (N-Duration), the duration of vowel (V-Duration) and the difference between the amplitude of the first formant (A1) and the first nasal peak (P0) obtained from the vowel (A1-P0) as an indication of the degree of vowel nasalization. The A1-P0 is measured at three different time points within the vowel -i.e., the near point (25%), midpoint (50%), and distant point (75%), either from the onset (CVN) or the offset (NVC) of the nasal consonant. These measures are taken from the target words in various prosodic prominence and boundary contexts: phonologically focused (PhonFOC) vs. lexically focused (LexFOC) vs. unfocused (NoFOC) conditions; phrase-edge (i.e., phrase-final for CVN and phrase-initial for NVC) vs. phrase-medial conditions. The data also contain a CSV file with each speaker's mean values of the N-Duration, V-Duration, and A1-P0 (z-scored) for each prosodic context along with the information about the speakers' gender. For further discussion of the data, please refer to the full-length article entitled "Prosodically-conditioned fine-tuning of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in English"(Cho et al., 2017).
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Project description:8- and 14-month-old infants' perceptual sensitivity to vowel duration conditioned by post-vocalic consonantal voicing was examined. Half the infants heard CVC stimuli with short vowels, and half heard stimuli with long vowels. In both groups, stimuli with voiced and voiceless final consonants were compared. Older infants showed significant sensitivity to mismatching vowel duration and consonant voicing in the short condition but not the long condition; younger infants were not sensitive to such mismatching in either condition. The results suggest that infants' sensitivity to extrinsic vowel duration begins to develop between 8 and 14 months.
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Project description:Current models of speech perception tend to emphasize either fine-grained acoustic properties or coarse-grained abstract characteristics of speech sounds. We argue for a particular kind of 'sparse' vowel representations and provide new evidence that these representations account for the successful access of the corresponding categories. In an auditory semantic priming experiment, American English listeners made lexical decisions on targets (e.g. load) preceded by semantically related primes (e.g. pack). Changes of the prime vowel that crossed a vowel-category boundary (e.g. peck) were not treated as a tolerable variation, as assessed by a lack of priming, although the phonetic categories of the two different vowels considerably overlap in American English. Compared to the outcome of the same experiment with New Zealand English listeners, where such prime variations were tolerated, our experiment supports the view that phonological representations are important in guiding the mapping process from the acoustic signal to an abstract mental representation. Our findings are discussed with regard to current models of speech perception and recent findings from brain imaging research.
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Project description:In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic generalizations over the words in the lexicon. Tests of these hypotheses have been rare and indirect, usually making use of idealized estimates of phonetic variation. Here we evaluated these hypotheses, using as our test case English and Dutch toddlers' different interpretation of the lexical significance of vowel duration. Analysis of thousands of vowels of one Dutch and three English mothers' speech suggests that children's language-specific differences in interpretation of vowel duration are likely due to detection of lexically specific patterns, rather than bimodality in raw phonetic distributions.
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Project description:A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.
| S-EPMC9326802 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a "foreign accent" in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or "schwas," have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than spectral qualities. Finally, we examined the role of nonstructural variables (e.g. linguistic history measures) in predicting native-like vowel duration. These factors included: Age of L2 learning, amount of L1 use, and self-reported bilingual dominance. Our results suggested that different sociolinguistic factors predicted native-like reduced vowel duration than predicted native-like vowel qualities across multiple phonetic environments.
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Project description:Dutch and English listeners' interpretation of vowel duration changes was examined in a word transcription task. Listeners were presented with spoken words realized with canonical or altered vowel durations. Dutch listeners often misperceived lengthened short vowels and shortened long vowels, identifying them as the short/long counterpart of the target, whereas English listeners more rarely misidentified words with altered vowel duration. Although Dutch and English are similar prosodically and phonologically, listeners' treatment of vowel duration in clear speech is different across the two languages.
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Project description:PurposeThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a curriculum supplement designed to enhance awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE) in African American English- (AAE-) speaking prekindergarten children.MethodChildren in 2 Head Start classrooms participated in the study. The experimental classroom received the Talking and Learning for Kindergarten program (Edwards, Rosin, Gross, & Chen, 2013), which used contrastive analysis to highlight morphological, phonological, and pragmatic differences between MAE and AAE. The control classroom received the Kindness Curriculum (Flook, Goldberg, Pinger, & Davidson, 2014), which was designed to promote mindfulness and emotional self-regulation. The amount of instruction was the same across the 2 programs. Both classrooms participated in pre- and posttest assessments.ResultsChildren in the experimental classroom, but not the control classroom, showed significant improvement in 3 norm-referenced measures of phonological awareness and in an experimental measure that evaluated comprehension of words that are ambiguous in AAE, but unambiguous in MAE, because of morphological and phonological differences between the 2 dialects.ConclusionAlthough more research needs to be done on the efficacy of the Talking and Learning for Kindergarten program, these results suggest that it is possible to enhance AAE-speaking children's awareness of MAE prior to kindergarten entry.
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Project description:In the first years of life, children differ greatly from adults in the temporal organization of their speech gestures in fluent language production. However, dissent remains as to the maturational direction of such organization. The present study sheds new light on this process by tracking the development of anticipatory vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in a cross-sectional investigation of 62 German children (from 3.5 to 7 years of age) and 13 adults. It focuses on gestures of the tongue, a complex organ whose spatiotemporal control is indispensable for speech production. The goal of the study was threefold: 1) investigate whether children as well as adults initiate the articulation for a target vowel in advance of its acoustic onset, 2) test if the identity of the intervocalic consonant matters and finally, 3) describe age-related developments of these lingual coarticulatory patterns. To achieve this goal, ultrasound tongue imaging was used to record lingual movements and quantify changes in coarticulation degree as a function of consonantal context and age. Results from linear mixed effects models indicate that like adults, children initiate vowels' lingual gestures well ahead of their acoustic onset. Second, while the identity of the intervocalic consonant affects the degree of vocalic anticipation in adults, it does not in children at any age. Finally, the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is significantly higher in all cohorts of children than in adults. However, among children, a developmental decrease of vocalic coarticulation is only found for sequences including the alveolar stop /d/ which requires finer spatiotemporal coordination of the tongue's subparts compared to labial and velar stops. Altogether, results suggest greater gestural overlap in child than in adult speech and support the view of a non-uniform and protracted maturation of lingual coarticulation calling for thorough considerations of the articulatory intricacies from which subtle developmental differences may originate.
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