A Cross-Language Study of Laryngeal-Oral Coordination Across Varying Prosodic and Syllable-Structure Conditions

Abstract

(a) The representation of French voiceless plosives requires an active specification for glottal spreading just as in German. (b) Static features are not well suited to capturing cross-language differences in voicing typology and changes in voicing specification over time.

Exploring the source of short-term variations in respiratory data

“…The effects are not restricted to specific conditions, but are more extreme in loud speech and in words under focus. This is in line with literature on prosodic strengthening and in particular on laryngeal kinematics, where a larger glottal opening has been reported for strong prosodic conditions than in weak ones (Fuchs et al, 2004;Hoole and Bombien, 2017).…”

“…Prosodic variation is of interest given that prosody can be manifested in articulatory changes at a segmental level. For German speakers, a larger glottal opening for voiceless stops has been observed in the production of loud in comparison to normal speech (Fuchs et al, 2004) and for focused in comparison to an unfocused position (Hoole and Bombien, 2017). It is not known, however, whether such prosodic effects on consonantal characteristics are reflected in respiratory patterns.…”

Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

“…Furthermore, these results are also somewhat incompatible with traditional single-feature models (e.g., Chomsky and Halle, 1968) where [+V OICE ] is taken as the marked value. However, the observed results are compatible with binary or privative feature models if one posits that voicelessness—e.g., [-V OICE ] or [S PREAD G LOTTIS ]—is the fully specified or marked feature (e.g., Vaux, 1998; Wetzels and Mascaró, 2001; Bennet and Rose, unpublished).…”

“…Other theorists have suggested the need for [V OICE ] as a binary feature and for [-V OICE ] (i.e., voiceless unaspirated segments) to be phonologically active. Wetzels and Mascaró (2001) suggest that the facts of Ya:thê (Macro-Jê) argue the need for the voiceless unaspirated stops to have an active feature as both /t/ and /t h / condition devoicing of a previous voiced obstruent. Similarly, Bennett and Rose (unpublished) show that the Thetogovela dialect of Moro (Kordofanian; Niger-Congo) contrasts pre-voiced stops with short-lag stops yet shows [-V OICE ] to be the key feature explaining dissimilation.…”

“…Here, we largely ignore this debate as it is somewhat orthogonal to our research question. Whether the phonological system of a language needs to refer to both the positive and negative values of a feature is at the heart of this debate, and we note that there is some recent literature suggesting a need for a reference to both labels of a binary feature, for e.g., that [-V OICE ] is necessary to represent phonological processes in some languages (Wetzels and Mascaró, 2001; Bennet and Rose, unpublished). More relevant for our purposes is the notion of markedness, that one of the two options (i.e., [+V OICE ] vs. [-V OICE ] or [V OICE ] vs. [ ]) is marked (i.e., specified with a feature) while the other is unmarked (i.e., left featurally unspecified).…”