Phonetic Invariance and the Adaptive Nature of Speech

Lindblom, Björn

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-238050-1.50012-3

Cited by 37 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The Acoustic Invariance Theory (Stevens & Blumstein, 1978;Blumstein & Stevens, 1979), the Quantal Theory of Speech (Stevens, 1972(Stevens, , 1989, and the Adaptive Variability Theory (Lindblom, 1988(Lindblom, , 1990 basically defend the idea that the motor goals are in the auditory perception domain. Thus, in the language of motor control these theories favor extrinsic motor goals.…”

Section: Extrinsic Versus Intrinsic Motor Goals In Speech Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limb versus Speech Motor Control: A Conceptual Review

Britta¹,

Fuchs²,

Perrier³

et al. 2011

Motor Control

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a comparative conceptual review of speech and limb motor control.Speech is essentially cognitive in nature and constrained by the rules of language, while limb movement is often oriented to physical objects. We discuss the issue of intrinsic vs. extrinsic variables underlying the representations of motor goals as well as whether motor goals specify terminal postures or entire trajectories. Timing and coordination is recognized as an area of strong interchange between the two domains. Although coordination among different motor acts within a sequence and co-articulation are central to speech motor control, they have received only limited attention in manipulatory movements. The biomechanics of speech production is characterized by the presence of soft tissue, a variable number of degrees of freedom, and the challenges of high rates of production, while limb movements deal more typically with inertial constraints from manipulated objects. This comparative review thus leads us to identify many strands of thinking that are shared across the two domains, but also points us to issues on which approaches in the two domains differ. We conclude that conceptual interchange between the fields of limb and speech motor control has been useful in the past and promises continued benefit.

show abstract

Section: Extrinsic Versus Intrinsic Motor Goals In Speech Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limb versus Speech Motor Control: A Conceptual Review

Britta¹,

Fuchs²,

Perrier³

et al. 2011

Motor Control

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There is, however, no contradiction between our results and the occurrence of sound change in lexically stressed syllables because we are not proposing an association between word stress and sound change; our model suggests instead that it is a hypoarticulation context brought about by semantic redundancy (of which deaccenting is an example) that can provide the conditions for sound change to occur. These conditions are met in lexically stressed syllables when they are hypoarticulated as they have been shown to be in deaccented words (de Jong 1995;Harrington et al 2000) or perhaps more generally in semantically redundant contexts (Lindblom 1988, Lindblom 1998.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Analogously, speech signals that are low in prominence are processed more slowly, perhaps because listeners can deploy semantic context to a greater extent in such contexts, which are often hypoarticulated (Lindblom 1988). Our suggestion is that this processing advantage in prominent syllables also extends to the listener's compensation for coarticulation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

Harrington

Kleber

Reubold

et al. 2015

Laboratory Phonology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:The study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono-vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic sackt-sagt and sackte-sagte continua, they were shown to compensate for the syllable count differences, but to a lesser extent in a deaccented context. Deaccentuation may therefore provide the conditions for sound change to take place by which /aː/ shortens in polysyllabic words; it may do so because the association between coarticulation and the source that gives rise to it is hidden to a greater extent than in accented contexts.

show abstract

“…Consider, however, that speakers are motivated to insert epenthetic vowels largely by the very perceptual facilitation which we have discovered; that is, they do it for the listener. Vowel epenthesis would join a range of such speech production effects in which communication is facilitated by the speaker taking the listener's interests into account (Cutler, 1987;Lindblom, 1988), and the contradictions raised by an explanation solely in terms of articulatory ease are no longer so significant.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facilitatory Effects of Vowel Epenthesis on Word Processing in Dutch

Donselaar

Kuijpers

Cutler

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We report a series of experiments examining the effects on word processing of insertion of an optional epenthetic vowel in word-final consonant clusters in Dutch. Such epenthesis turns film, for instance, into filəm. In a word-reversal task listeners treated words with and without epenthesis alike, as monosyllables, suggesting that the variant forms both activate the same canonical representation, that of a monosyllabic word without epenthesis. In both lexical decision and word spotting, response times to recognize words were significantly faster when epenthesis was present than when the word was presented in its canonical form without epenthesis. It is argued that addition of the epenthetic vowel makes the liquid consonants constituting the first member of a cluster more perceptible; a final phoneme-detection experiment confirmed that this was the case. These findings show that a transformed variant of a word, although it contacts the lexicon via the representation of the canonical form, can be more easily perceptible than that canonical form. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: word recognition; vowels; epenthesis; Dutch.No one act of spoken-word recognition is exactly like another. Even the same word spoken by the same person to the same listener in the same room may occur in a different context or against different ambient sound. Variability arising from talker differences and environmental conditions has prompted an enormous volume of research in speech perception and has formed one of the principal issues along which models of speech perception and spoken-word recognition divide: whether at some level of processing invariant cues to sounds and words may be abstracted and represented.As if the infinite variability offered by talker and environmental factors were not enough, however, the listener's lot is further complicated by variation as a function of the speech context. The precise form of speech sounds differs as a function of the other sounds that surround them; phonemes are not articulated separately, but are coarticulated with other sounds and vary in accord with the characteristics of their neighbours in the speech signal. This process can alter with speech rate, as well, such that at faster rates of speech coarticulation may result in greater contextual effects or effects which extend across a wider neighborhood; thus it adds another way in which variability complicates spoken-word recognition. And finally, as almost the coup de grace, yet further variation is permitted as a function of certain phonological processes. Thus sounds may assimilate to their phonological context, so that in English, for example, a phrase like hot cakes may be pronounced with either a /t/ or a /k/ at the end of the first syllable.One such form of phonologically determined variation is the epenthesis, or insertion, of isolated sounds where no such sound exists in the underlying form of the word. Epenthesis is a mechanism of historical change in word forms; thus the English word oven, Dutch oven, and German Ofen all have an...

show abstract

Phonetic Invariance and the Adaptive Nature of Speech

Cited by 37 publications

References 41 publications

Limb versus Speech Motor Control: A Conceptual Review

Limb versus Speech Motor Control: A Conceptual Review

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

Facilitatory Effects of Vowel Epenthesis on Word Processing in Dutch

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About