Effects of stress and final-consonant voicing on vowel production: Articulatory and acoustic analyses

Summers, W. Van

doi:10.1121/1.395284

Cited by 136 publications

(123 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

110

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We believe this could be due to the degree of reduction of unstressed syllables. In English there is a greater amount of reduction in duration between stressed and unstressed syllables than in Arabic (see van Summers 1987;Zawaydeh and de Jong, 1999;de Jong and Zawaydeh, 1999). In addition to this, the Arabic and English stress systems differ in how they function in the language.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Arabic Rhythm through a Speech Cycling Task

Zawaydeh¹,

Tajima²,

Kitahara³

2002

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Arabic Rhythm through a Speech Cycling Task

Zawaydeh¹,

Tajima²,

Kitahara³

2002

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Consequently, one might speculate that postvocalic voiced stops are produced with the tongue in a higher position than it is for homorganic voiceless stops. Summers (1987) provides a somewhat indirect test of this hypothesis, in that he found a statistically significant relationship between jaw height at vowel offset and final stop consonant voicing for only 1 of 3 native English subjects. However, failure to find a robust relationsmp between jaw position and F1 offset frequency does not disconfirm the hypothesis that tongue height varies as a function of voicing, because it is possible for speakers to control tongue height and jaw position independently.…”

Section: Fl Offset Frequencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relatively long vocalic segments that terminate with relatively low Fl offset frequencies cue voiced final stop consonants, whereas shorter segments with higher Fl offsets cue voiceless final stop consonants (Raphael, 1972;Summers, 1987Summers, , 1988Walsh & Parker, 1983;Wolf, 1978).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of vocalic cues to consonant voicing and native language background: The influence of experimental design

Crowther

Mann

1994

Perception & Psychophysics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For native speakers of English and several other languages, preceding vocalic duration and F1 offset frequency are two of the cues that convey the stop consonant voicing distinction in word-. final position. For speakers learning English as a second language, there are indications that use of vocalic duration, but not F1 offset frequency, may be hindered by a lack of experience with phonemic (i.e., lexical) vowel length (the "phonemic vowel length account": Crowther & Mann, 1992). In this study, native speakers of Arabic, a language that includes a phonemic vowel length distinction, were tested for their use of vocalic duration and F1 offset in production and perception of the English consonant-vowel-consonant forms pod and pot. The phonemic vowel length hypothesis predicts that Arabic speakers should use vocalic duration extensively in production and perception. On the contrary, Experiment 1 revealed that, consistent with Flege and Port's (1981) findings, they produced only slightly (but significantly) longer vocalic segments in their pod tokens. It further indicated that their productions showed a significant variation in F1 offset as a function of final stop voicing. Perceptual sensitivity to vocalic duration and F1 offset as voicing cues was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 2, we employed a factorial combination of these two cues and a finely spaced vocalic duration continuum. Arabic speakers did not appear to be very sensitive to vocalic duration, but they were about as sensitive as native English speakers to F1 offset frequency. In Experiment 3, we employed a one-dimensional continuum of more widely spaced stimuli that varied only vocalic duration. Arabic speakers showed native-English-like sensitivity to vocalic duration. An explanation based on the perceptual anchor theory of context coding (Braida et al., 1984;Macmillan, 1987;Macmillan, Braida, & Goldberg, 1987) and phoneme perception theory (Schouten & Van Hessen, 1992) is offered to reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptual findings. The explanation does not attribute native-English-like voicing perception to the Arabic subjects. The findings in this study call for a modification of the phonemic vowel length hypothesis.The duration and first formant (Fl) offset frequency of vocalic segments have been widely studied as cues to final stop consonant voicing for native speakers of English. Relatively long vocalic segments that terminate with relatively low Fl offset frequencies cue voiced final stop consonants, whereas shorter segments with higher Fl offsets cue voiceless final stop consonants (Raphael,

show abstract

“…Third, failure to perceive a difference -or more to the point, a failure to demonstrate a perceptual difference -does not mean no systematic difference was produced. To wit, there has been a fair amount of evidence of observable differences in the production of labial stops (Fujimura 1961, Vatikiotis-Bateson & Kelso 1984, Summers 1987. At least one implication of this is: if systematic differences in production can be measured, they should be useful in machine-based recognition of audiovisual speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%