Influence of syllable-coda voicing on the acoustic properties of syllable-onset /l/ in English

Abstract

Properties of syllable onset /l/ that depend on the voicing of the syllable coda were measured for four speakers, representing different non-rhotic British English accents that differ in their phonetic realisation of onset /l/ and in their system of phonological contrast involving onset /l/ and /r/. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless codas for all four speakers, and darker for two of them as measured by lower F 2 frequency, and for these two and one other as measured by spectral centre of gravity (COG). There were no coda-dependent differences in f 0 in the /l/, and F 1 frequency differed only for the fourth speaker. The vowel was also longer for all four speakers when the coda was voiced (as expected), while F 1 was lower and F 2 normally higher. One speaker provided data with fricative or affricate onsets: fricated segments were longer before voiced codas, but no coda-dependent COG differences were found. At least when the onset includes /l/, phonological voicing of the coda seems to be reflected in complex acoustic-phonetic properties distributed across the whole syllable, some properties being localised, others not. We describe these properties as variations in a bright~sombre dimension. In most accents, when the coda is voiceless, the syllable is relatively bright: small proportions of periodic energy which is relatively high-frequency at the syllable edges, and a high proportion of silence or aperiodic energy. When the coda is voiced, the syllable is relatively sombre: a high proportion of periodic energy which is relatively low-frequency at the syllable edges, and relatively small amounts of silence and aperiodic energy. Other accents use other combinations, dependent on the phonetic and phonological properties of liquids in the particular accent. The association of onset darkness and coda voicing does not seem to be ascribable to anticipatory coarticulation of features essential to voicing itself; this observation provides support for nonsegmental models of speech perception in which fine phonetic detail is mapped directly to linguistic structure without reference to phoneme-sized segments.

An acoustic study on non-local anticipatory effects of Italian length contrast

“…For instance, there are well-known phenomena such as vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (e.g., € Ohman, 1966), labialization (e.g., Benguerel and Cowan, 1974), and nasalization (Moll and Daniloff, 1971), but also less well understood durational and spectral adjustments caused by non-adjacent voicing contrasts (e.g., Hawkins and Nguyen, 2004). Note that these studies mostly show non-local adjustments in supralaryngeal articulation, while the gemination account predicts adjustments in the temporal/rhythmic domain.…”

Perception of coda voicing from properties of the onset and nucleus of led and let

“…Other properties, illustrated in Fig. 1, are described in [6]. The impressionistic quality was good.…”

Influence of English r-resonances on intelligibility of speech in noise for native English and German listeners

“…In a word-segmentation task, Ito and Strange (2009) found that native Japanese speakers living in the USA took 9-10 years to learn to discriminate harder English phonological contrasts. Only four of our Germans had lived in an Englishspeaking country for anything approaching 9 years (108 months), and for three of them this its relationship with onset /l/ in the phonological system, as briefly discussed by Hawkins and Nguyen (2004), and in detail by Carter (1999Carter ( , 2002Carter ( , 2003, Kelly and Local (1986;1989) and Coleman (2003).…”

“…Other properties of sounds do of course spread over several segments, the best-known example being lip rounding (Benguerel & Cowan, 1974), and others being coda voicing (Coleman, 2003;Hawkins & Nguyen, 2004) and the feature…”