Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation

Balise, Raymond R.; Diehl, Randy L.

doi:10.1159/000261962

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This difficulty in determining the defining acoustic properties has been mirrored at the perceptual level. Among fricatives, /f/ and /T/ and /v/ and /D/ are most easily confused (e.g., Balise and Diehl, 1994;Jongman and Wang, submitted). Given the reported difficulty in recognition of these fricatives, Miller and Nicely (1955) hypothesized that the distinction between /f/ and /T/ and /v/ and /D/ may be based on non-acoustic information:…”

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confidence: 99%

Contributions of Semantic and Facial Information to Perception of Nonsibilant Fricatives

Jongman

Wang

Kim

2003

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Most studies have been unable to identify reliable acoustic cues for the recognition of the English nonsibilant fricatives /f, v, θ, ð/. The present study was designed to test the extent to which the perception of these fricatives by normal-hearing adults is based on other sources of information, namely, linguistic context and visual information. In Experiment 1, target words beginning with /f/, /θ/, /s/, or /∫/ were preceded by either a semantically congruous or incongruous precursor sentence. Results showed an effect of linguistic context on the perception of the distinction between /f/ and /θ/ and on the acoustically more robust distinction between /s/ and /∫/. In Experiment 2, participants identified syllables consisting of the fricatives /f, v, θ, ð/ paired with the vowels /i, a, u/. Three conditions were contrasted: Stimuli were presented with (a) both auditory and visual information, (b) auditory information alone, or (c) visual information alone. When errors in terms of voicing were ignored in all 3 conditions, results indicated that perception of these fricatives is as good with visual information alone as with both auditory and visual information combined, and better than for auditory information alone. These findings suggest that accurate perception of nonsibilant fricatives derives from a combination of acoustic, linguistic, and visual information.

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confidence: 99%

Contributions of Semantic and Facial Information to Perception of Nonsibilant Fricatives

Jongman

Wang

Kim

2003

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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“…This would mean that the aperiodic pitch impressions of voiceless fricatives either remain approximately constant for each fricative and speaker or that they vary randomly across different contexts, particularly those contexts of intonation and tone. This is quite an assumption given that (a) about 25% of the speech signal in, for example, English everyday conversation is voiceless, that (b) almost half of this percentage is due to voiceless fricatives [22], and that (c) languages have more voiceless fricatives than voiceless stops (according to the UPSID database, [23]). …”

Section: Background: the Notion Of "Segmental Intonation"mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the perception of “segmental intonation”: F0 context effects on sibilant identification in German

Niebuhr

2017

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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In normal modally voiced utterances, voiceless fricatives like [s], [ʃ], [f], and [x] vary such that their aperiodic pitch impressions mirror the pitch level of the adjacent F0 contour. For instance, if the F0 contour creates a high or low pitch context, then the aperiodic pitch impression of the fricative in this context will also be high or low. This contextmatching effect has been termed "segmental intonation". While there is accumulating evidence for segmental intonation in speech production, less is known about if and how segmental intonation is actually integrated in the perception of utterance tunes. This question is addressed here in a perception experiment in which listeners identified target words ending in either [ʃ] or [s]. The two sibilants inherently create low or high aperiodic pitch impressions in listeners due to their characteristically different spectral energy distributions. The sibilants were preceded by high or low F0 contexts in the target words. Results show a clear F0-context effect. The context effect triggered more [ʃ] identifications in high-F0 and/or more [s] identifications in low-F0 contexts. The effect was larger for sibilants that were less clearly identifiable as either /ʃ/ or /s/. The effect represents strong supporting evidence that listeners in fact perceive the segmental intonation of fricatives and integrate its aperiodic pitch with the F0-based pitch when perceiving utterance intonation. Thus, the term "segmental intonation" is perceptually appropriate. Furthermore, the results are discussed with respect to reactiontime measurements and an additional effect of the quality of the adjacent vowel phoneme on sibilant identification.

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“…Balise and Diehl (1994) measured the RMS amplitude of frication noise in English sibilants and nonsibilants and found that voicing effectively reduces the frication noise of sibilants so that they become less distinguishable from their nonsibilant counterparts. Perceptual experiments also verified this by showing that voiced fricatives are more difficult to identify than voiceless ones, and the impact is more severe on the perception of sibilants than nonsibilants (Balise and Diehl 1994;Miller and Nicely 1955;Singh and Black 1966;Wang and Bilger 1973).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the dialectal variations of voiced sibilant /dz/ in Taiwan Min young speakers

Chuang

Fon

2017

lingua. sin.

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This study examined the realization of /dz/ in three dialects of Taiwan Min among young speakers based on a paragraph-reading task. Results showed there were five robust realization categories of /dz/, including the commonly reported dental sibilants, velar obstruents, and liquids and the rarely mentioned dental nonsibilants and retroflexes. Liquids and retroflexes were more likely to occur before a rounded segment, while dental sibilants, dental nonsibilants, and velar obstruents were more likely to occur before an unrounded segment. For the latter environment, there was also a correlation between structural complexity and realization of dental sibilants, velar obstruents, and liquids. The three dialects examined demonstrated different attitudes towards the realization of /dz/. 泉 Chôan was the most receptive to the new sounds of liquids, dental nonsibilants, and retroflexes, while Mix was the most conservative in preserving the old forms of dental sibilants and velar obstruents. 漳 Chiang was somewhere in between. It maintained a robust dental sibilant category like Mix yet welcomed new variants of dental nonsibilants and retroflexes like Chôan. Talkers were consistent in their /dz/ realization choices and intra-talker variability was low. This study thus demonstrated that talkers' realization of a variable sound is a complex product of linguistic structure, speakers' background, and idiosyncratic preference. . Among the 304 languages with voiced sibilants, 206 have sibilant fricatives while 202 have sibilant affricates. Although the two databases do not include the same set of languages, and might have even adopted different criteria for phoneme decisions, the distributions are fairly similar, i.e., voiced sibilants are far less likely to occur than voiceless ones, and voiced sibilant fricatives and voiced sibilant affricates are equally likely to appear.

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Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation

Cited by 21 publications

References 8 publications

Contributions of Semantic and Facial Information to Perception of Nonsibilant Fricatives

Contributions of Semantic and Facial Information to Perception of Nonsibilant Fricatives

On the perception of “segmental intonation”: F0 context effects on sibilant identification in German

On the dialectal variations of voiced sibilant /dz/ in Taiwan Min young speakers

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