Marginal Contrast Among Romanian Vowels: Evidence from ASR and Functional Load

Renwick, Margaret E. L.; Vasilescu, Ioana; Dutrey, Camille; Lamel, Lori; Vieru, Bianca

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2016-762

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In Romanian, acoustic analysis of continuous speech has shown that the marginally contrastive /ɨ, ʌ/ distinction is severely diminished, with a phonetic near-merger. The contrast indeed has a very low functional load, and results from automatic speech recognition experiments imply that a merger would have little detrimental impact on word recognition (Renwick, Vasilescu, Dutrey, Lamel, & Vieru, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Phonological Mid Vowel Intuitions in Central Catalan

Renwick

Nadeu²

2018

Lang Speech

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Catalan, like other Romance languages, has two pairs of phonemic mid vowels (/be/ "well" vs. /bɛ/ "lamb"; /os/ "bear" vs. /ɔs/ "bone"). However, these contrasts do not function like others in the language: they are partially phonologically conditioned, and evidence shows that words may be pronounced with different mid vowels by speakers of the same variety or even by the same speaker. Spanish may influence this instability, as first-language Spanish Catalan-Spanish bilinguals struggle to perceive and produce the contrast. This paper investigates the mid vowel contrasts in an Internet survey of vowel height judgments in 220 words by 146 Central Catalan-speaking individuals who also self-reported their language history. Results confirm that certain phonological contexts condition mid vowel height, typically favoring low mid judgments; where phonological conditioning occurs, speakers judge quality with increased consistency and confidence. Many words lacking phonological conditioning environments, however, are variable across speakers. Bilingualism levels and age have an effect: among Catalan-dominant participants, choice of mid vowel is affected by age, while participants with the highest Catalan dominance have greatest confidence in their intuitions. Variably-judged words are also phonetically variable, indicating a word-specific association between strength of phonological representation and realization.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Phonological Mid Vowel Intuitions in Central Catalan

Renwick

Nadeu²

2018

Lang Speech

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“…The ASR system described in Vasilescu et al (2014) and Renwick et al (2016) is used in forced alignment mode in this study. Since the manual transcription is provided a priori, the system only has to select the best matching pronunciation for each word, and the corresponding locations of word and phone boundaries.…”

Section: Forced Speech Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The system was used to conduct linguistic investigations based on forced alignment of manual transcriptions with the audio via a lexicon including pronunciation variants. The system allowed for the quantification of the phonemic contrast of Romanian central vowels [2] and [1], through acoustic analysis and the contextual distribution of variants (Renwick et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying variation in Romanian: deletion of the definite article -l in continuous speech

Vasilescu

Chițoran

Dimulescu-Vieru

et al. 2019

Linguistics Vanguard

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Studies of variation in continuous speech converge towards the conclusion that in everyday speech, words are often produced with reduced variants: some segments are shortened or completely absent. We describe an initiative to automatically exploit spoken corpora, in order to better understand linguistic behavior in spontaneous speech. This study focuses on the reduction of the postposed definite article in Romanian. The Romanian corpora used here cover several speaking styles including both prepared and spontaneous speech, such as broadcast news and debates, elicited dialogues and monologues on suggested topics. Taken together, the data sets contain more than 10 hours of speech produced in a variety of communicative frameworks. The deletion of the definite article -l, i.e. L-dropping in continuous speech, is investigated across speaking styles using pronunciation variants aligned with the speech. The main question addressed in the study is the influence of speaking style on the distribution of L-dropping. We examine the role of the surrounding context in L-dropping and L-retention. The results show that, in prepared speech and broadcast news, deletion is triggered by the context as a consequence of the communicative framework and the nature of the following segment (following vowel-initial words favor L-retention, while consonant-initial words favor L-dropping). In spontaneous speech, L-dropping is more frequent and the context is less important in predicting the occurrence of reduced variants than in other speaking styles.

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“…Two sounds are allophonic if they participate in allophonic alternations conditionedbyaspecificphonemicenvironment,arejudgedtobethesamesoundbynative speakers, and are written with the same grapheme. In addition to work by Hall, other authorshavealsobeguntodefinecontrastusingavarietyofphoneticandusage-based metrics, such as frequency and functional load, see work by Renwick (2014) and Renwick et al (2016). The two most important and often-used criteria in a binary approach are lexical distinction (also called the distinctive function) and predictability of distribution.…”

Section: Criteria For Contrastive Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gradient phonological relationships: Evidence from vowels in French

Stevenson

Zamuner

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The dichotomy of contrastive and allophonic phonological relationships has a long-standing tradition in phonology, but there is growing research that points to phonological relationships that fall between contrastive and allophonic. Measures of lexical distinction (minimal pair counts) and predictability of distribution were applied to Laurentian French vowels to quantify three degrees of contrast between pairs: high, mid, and low contrast. According to traditional definitions, both the high and mid contrast pairs are classified as phonologically contrastive, and low contrast pairs as allophonic. As such, a binary view of contrast (contrastive vs. non-contrastive) predicted that high and mid contrast pairs would pattern together on tasks of speech perception, and low contrast pairs would show a different pattern. The gradient view predicted all vowel pairs would fall along a continuum. Thirty-two speakers of Laurentian French participated in two experiments: an AX task and a similarity rating task. The results did not support a strict binary interpretation of contrast, since the high, mid, and low contrast vowel pairs pattern differently across the experiments. Instead, the results support a gradient view of phonological relationships.

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Marginal Contrast Among Romanian Vowels: Evidence from ASR and Functional Load

Cited by 6 publications

References 14 publications

A Survey of Phonological Mid Vowel Intuitions in Central Catalan

A Survey of Phonological Mid Vowel Intuitions in Central Catalan

Studying variation in Romanian: deletion of the definite article -l in continuous speech

Gradient phonological relationships: Evidence from vowels in French

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