Acoustic variability within and across German, French, and American English vowels: Phonetic context effects

Abstract

Cross-language perception studies report influences of speech style and consonantal context on perceived similarity and discrimination of non-native vowels by inexperienced and experienced listeners. Detailed acoustic comparisons of distributions of vowels produced by native speakers of North German (NG), Parisian French (PF) and New York English (AE) in citation (di)syllables and in sentences (surrounded by labial and alveolar stops) are reported here. Results of within- and cross-language discriminant analyses reveal striking dissimilarities across languages in the spectral/temporal variation of coarticulated vowels. As expected, vocalic duration was most important in differentiating NG vowels; it did not contribute to PF vowel classification. Spectrally, NG long vowels showed little coarticulatory change, but back/low short vowels were fronted/raised in alveolar context. PF vowels showed greater coarticulatory effects overall; back and front rounded vowels were fronted, low and mid-low vowels were raised in both sentence contexts. AE mid to high back vowels were extremely fronted in alveolar contexts, with little change in mid-low and low long vowels. Cross-language discriminant analyses revealed varying patterns of spectral (dis)similarity across speech styles and consonantal contexts that could, in part, account for AE listeners' perception of German and French front rounded vowels, and "similar" mid-high to mid-low vowels.

Production of phonetic and phonological contrast by heritage speakers of Mandarin

“…In other words, they may have simply been drawing upon vowel tokens that were already in their repertoire: particularly fronted versions of English /u/. It has been proposed that due to the fact that American English /u/, which is already relatively front on average, is further fronted in the context of alveolars, the front vowel /y/ may not actually constitute a "new" vowel for English-speaking L2 learners, but instead a "similar" vowel, at least in the context of alveolars (Strange et al, 2007;Levy, 2009;Levy and Law, 2010). Documented perceptual assimilation patterns in which English speakers identify German and French /y/ as closest to English /u/ (e.g.…”

“…The segmental context in which a vowel occurs-in particular, the place of articulation of flanking consonants-has been shown to have a significant, predictable effect on the quality of the vowel. American English /u/, for example, has been shown to be significantly fronted in the context of alveolars (Hillenbrand et al, 2001;Strange et al, 2007). Place of articulation has also been shown to have a predictable effect on VOT (e.g.…”

Spoken-word recognition in foreign-accented speech by L2 listeners

“…However, we had also recorded the speaker " s production of English vowels in the disyllable /hVb=/ (real words were used to aid in pronouncing vowels with ambiguous spelling), and formant values averaged over three tokens indicated that the speaker did not differentiate between English /e/ in hebba (F1 572 Hz, F2 1934 Hz) and /ae/ in habba (F1 586 Hz, F2 1914 Hz). Since /e/, but not /ae/, is an existing phoneme in the Dutch speaker's native repertoire, and the observed formant values better match the citation style values for English /e/ than for /ae/ (see e.g., Ladefoged, 1993;Strange et al, 2007), it is more likely, however, that the Dutch speaker indeed produced a vowel that was closer to /e/ than to /ae/ (and the authors who selected the best tokens of the recordings of course also perceived it like that).…”

Abstraction of phonological representations in adult nonnative speakers

“…The variation in responses between contexts in the discrimination task was not predicted by the PAM-L2, as it posits a level of representation where such detail is not encoded after categorization occurs. The ASP provides a framework in which to investigate not only differences in syllable or word position, as in the current study, but also to examine effects of coarticulation or the context of the overall utterance (e.g., in isolation, in a sentence; Nishi, Strange, AkahaneYamada, Kubo, & Trent-Brown, 2008;Strange et al, 2005;Strange et al, 2007). In the discrimination task, the general greater sensitivity to pharyngeal pairs over uvular pairs by L2 speakers was predicted by the ASP but not by the PAM-L2.…”