Best practices in measuring vowel merger

Nycz, Jennifer; Hall‐Lew, Lauren

doi:10.1121/1.4831400

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Many methods have been proposed to examine overlap in the study of vowel splits and mergers; see Nycz & Hall-Lew (2013) for discussion of Euclidean distance, mixed model regression, spectral overlap, and the Pillai-Bartlett trace. Following Nycz (2013), the 'mixed model regression' technique was used in the present study: for each vowel pair analysed, and for each speaker, a mixed-effects regression analysis was undertaken in the R environment using the Rbrul text-based interface (Johnson 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic transfer in language contact: Evidence for equivalence classification in the mid-vowels of Occitan–French bilinguals

Mooney¹

2017

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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This article examines first to second language (L1-to-L2) phonetic transfer in the speech of ten Occitan–French bilinguals, focusing on the mid-vowels in each of their languages. Investigating transfer in a situation of long-term societal language contact aims to shed light on the emergence of regional French phonological features from contact with Occitan. Using a sociophonetic methodology, the concept of equivalence classification (Flege 1988) is investigated, that is, that L2 words will be (initially) decomposed into familiar L2 sound categories, causing L1 and L2 sounds to resemble each other phonetically. The consequences of language contact are modelled statistically using an original corpus of over 1200 vowel tokens. The findings show that equivalence classification may not lead to equated sounds coming to resemble each other phonetically, suggesting necessary revisions to the speech learning model (SLM) hypothesis, and the need to consider the influence of sociolinguistic factors in situations of long-term language contact is emphasised.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic transfer in language contact: Evidence for equivalence classification in the mid-vowels of Occitan–French bilinguals

Mooney¹

2017

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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“…A Pillai score of 1 indicates a complete separation of vowel categories, while a score of 0 indicates complete overlap. This metric has been proposed in sociophonetics as a more powerful alternative to acoustic distances (Nycz and Hall-Lew, 2013) for measuring vowel mergers and splits (Hay, Warren and Drager, 2006;Hall-Lew, 2010), and has recently been proposed as a metric of L2 pronunciation by Mairano et al (2019). Our assumption is that speakers who have developed phonological categories for front rounded vowels show less overlap with competing phonemes (IT3) than learners who have not developed such phonological categories (IT22), as shown in Figure 1 and Table 2.…”

Section: Fluency Metrics (Ar Sr Np)mentioning

confidence: 99%

What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Mairano¹,

Santiago²

2020

French Language Studies

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Measures of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary size have been shown to correlate with language proficiency in reading, writing and listening skills, and vocabulary tests are sometimes used for placement purposes. However, the relation between learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking skills has been less thoroughly investigated, and even less so in terms of pronunciation. In this article, we compare vocabulary and pronunciation measures for 25 Italian instructed learners of L2 French. We measure their receptive (Dialang score) and productive (vocd-D, MTLD) vocabulary size, and calculate the following pronunciation indices: acoustic distance and overlap of realizations for selected L2 French vowel pairs, ratings of nasality for ratings of foreign-accentedness, fluency metrics. We find that vocabulary measures show low to medium correlations with fluency metrics and ratings of foreign-accentedness, but not with vowel metrics. We then turn our attention to the impact of research methods on the study of vocabulary and pronunciation. More specifically, we discuss the possibility that these results are due to pitfalls in vocabulary and pronunciation indices, such as the failure of Dialang to take into account the effect of L1-L2 cognates, and the lack of measures for evaluating consonants, intonation and perception skills.

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“…Note that for all speakers, the Pillai score is >0.75, which is close to the maximum score of 1.00, indicating that these vowels are relatively distinct for all speakers. While Pillai scores are not necessarily comparable across studies, Nycz and Hall-Lew ( 2014 ) find Pillai scores of < 0.25 for speakers of Canadian and Scottish English, for whom /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are merged. Hay et al ( 2006 ) find that speakers of New Zealand English differ greatly in the degree of overlap for the vowels /iə/ ( near ) and /eə/ ( square ): the speaker with the least distinct vowels in their sample received a Pillai score of 0.0009, while the speaker with highest degree of contrast received a score of 0.969.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Production Of the Ncvsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This method returns a score ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates that the two distributions are identical and where 1 indicates no overlap at all. It was first used in sociophonetic research by Hay et al ( 2006 ), and has since been applied in the literature by Hall-Lew ( 2010 ) and compared to other methods of measuring vowel distance by Nycz and Hall-Lew ( 2014 ). In this case, the Pillai score was used to measure the difference between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ in F1, F2, and F3, while taking into account the preceding and following consonantal environments.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Production Of the Ncvsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Speech Perception Cues Constrain Patterns of Articulatory Variation and Sound Change

Havenhill

Do²

2018

Front. Psychol.

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What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well-documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: (1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and (2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility.

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Best practices in measuring vowel merger

Cited by 25 publications

References 23 publications

Phonetic transfer in language contact: Evidence for equivalence classification in the mid-vowels of Occitan–French bilinguals

Phonetic transfer in language contact: Evidence for equivalence classification in the mid-vowels of Occitan–French bilinguals

What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Visual Speech Perception Cues Constrain Patterns of Articulatory Variation and Sound Change

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