The Perception of Quantity in Icelandic

Pind, Jörgen

doi:10.1159/000261765

Cited by 22 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…In general, the percentage of geminate responses rises from close to 0% for short constriction durations to close to 100% for long constriction durations, confirming that constriction duration is an important perceptual cue for consonant length identification (Garnes 1976, Pind 1986, Hankamer, Lahiri & Koreman 1989, Esposito & Di Benedetto 1999.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 83%

The consonant length contrast in Persian: Production and perception

Hansen¹,

Myers²

2016

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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Across languages, there is a tendency to avoid length contrasts in the most vowel-like consonant classes, such as glides or laryngeals. Such gaps could arise from the difficulty of determining where the boundary between vowel and consonant lies when the transition between them is gradual. This claim is tested in Persian (Farsi), which has length contrasts in all classes of consonants, including glides and laryngeals. Persian geminates were compared to singletons in three different speaking rates and seven different consonant classes. Geminates were found to have longer constriction intervals than singletons, and this length effect interacted with both speaking rate and manner of articulation. In one of two perception experiments, Persian speakers identified consonants as geminate or singleton in stimuli in which the constriction duration was systematically varied. The perceptual boundary between geminates and singletons was most sharply defined for obstruents and least so for laryngeals, as reflected by the breadth of the changeover region in the identification curve. In the other perception experiment, subjects identified the length class of glides differing in constriction duration and formant transition duration. Longer formant transitions led to more geminate responses and to a broader changeover interval.Persian (Farsi) has a contrast in consonant length, as illustrated by the minimal pair baenɑ 'building' -baennɑ 'builder'. This contrast extends to all the consonant classes in the language, listed in Table 1 (Samareh 1977(Samareh , 1985Mahootian 1997;Majidi & Ternes 1999;Deyhime 2000;Bijankhan & Nourbakhsh 2009;Hansen 2004Hansen , 2012. Samareh (1977) does not include geminate [ʒʒ] or [ɢɢ] in his inventory of Persian clusters, and we know of no instances of these geminates in Persian words. Yet we find that Persian speakers freely produce them in reading nonsense words with the relevant consonants marked with the length mark. This suggests that these are accidental gaps, and that these two consonants are not systematically avoided.With that caveat, the consonants in Table 1 all occur as singletons or as geminates, where the geminate differs from the corresponding singleton in having a longer constriction interval. The geminate has the same feature specification as the corresponding singleton, but

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 83%

The consonant length contrast in Persian: Production and perception

Hansen¹,

Myers²

2016

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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“…At first glance, these results would seem to show some kind of rate adjustment in speech perception. Rate dependent effects are by no means limited to durational variation in the relevant syllables, though these effects tend to be larger than those connected with extrinsic factors such as precursor sentences (Pind, 1986;Summerfield, 1981).…”

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confidence: 96%

“…This line of division also holds for the study of rate-dependent processing, in which a number ofinvestigators have attempted to locate higher-order invariants which would preserve "the essential acoustical qualities of phonetic identity '" despite variations in rate of articulation" (Summerfield, 1981), and thus eliminate the need for a process of normalization (Pind, 1986;Port & Dalby, 1982;Summerfield, 1981).…”

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confidence: 98%

“…Pind (1986, in press) has argued for the role of durational ratios in Icelandic in the perception both of quantity (a contrast involving the durations of vowels and consonants) and of preas piration (the phoneme [h] inserted between a vowel and closure). The study ofquantity (Pind, 1986) showed that the ratio of the perceived-vowel boundary to the duration of the whole-syllable rhyme, V/(V+C), was highly resistant to transformations of rate and came close to the ideal ofan invariant cue.' It was not absolutely invariant, since extrinsic manipulations (e.g., of precursor rate) did cause small shifts in the phoneme boundaries.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…But in those cases, the boundaries stayed close to invariance when expressed in terms of their ratio to the rhyme duration. On the basis of these results, Pind (1986;see also Summerfield, 1981) hypothesized that two mechanisms were involved in rate normalization of quantity-namely, (1) a perception of the intrinsic durational ratios, the defining characteristic of the speech cue; and (2) an extrinsic type of normalization involving, perhaps, an adjustment to a perceptual "clock." The latter effect shows up as minor perturbations in the perceptual ratios defined by the former mechanism.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Speaking rate, voice-onset time, and quantity: The search for higher-order invariants for two Icelandic speech cues

Pind

1995

Perception & Psychophysics

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The temporal structure of speech has been shown to be highly variable. Speaking rate, stress, and other factors influence the duration of individual speech sounds. The highly elastic nature of speech would seem to pose a problem for the listener, especially with respect to the perception of temporal speech cues such as voice-onset time (VOT) and quantity: How does the listener disentangle those temporal changes whicqh are linguistically significant from those which are extrinsic to the linguistic message? This paper reports data on the behavior of two Icelandic speech cues at different speaking rates. The results show that manipulations of rate have the effect of slightly blurring the distinction between unaspirated and aspirated stops. Despite great changes in the absolute durations of vowels and consonants, the two categories of syllables-V:C and VC:-are nonetheless kept totally distinct. In two perceptual experiments, it is shown that while the ratio of vowel to rhyme duration is the primary cue to quantity and remains invariant at different rates, no such ratio can be defmed for VOT. These results imply that quantity is the only one of these two speech cues that is selfnormalizing for rate. Models of rate-dependent speech processing need to address this difference. 291Many speech cues are primarily temporal in nature, being defined either by the temporal relationships between acoustic events or by the duration of individual segments (Lehiste, 1970;Lisker, 1974). A noticeable feature of normal speech is the highly variable utterance rate. The fact that listeners do not appear to be overly bothered by such speaking-rate variations poses a challenge for perceptual theory, not least concerning the perception of temporal speech cues. How is the listener able to disentangle those temporal aspects which properly are extrinsic to the phonemic message (i.e., changes of tempo) from those which define the relevant phonemic contrasts, given that both are carried simultaneously in the speech stream?Numerous studies have shown convincingly that ratedependent speech processing does in fact occur and is found to affect numerous speech cues. Miller and Liberman (1979) found that with a longer overall duration of the syllable, listeners required longer formant transition durations to hear /wa/ than to hear /ba/. Summerfield (1981) found that the longer the following vowel, the longer the voice-onset times (VOTs) that were needed

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Constancy and normalization in the perception of Voice Offset Time as a cue for preaspiration

Pind

1995

Acta Psychologica

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The Perception of Quantity in Icelandic

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

The consonant length contrast in Persian: Production and perception

The consonant length contrast in Persian: Production and perception

Speaking rate, voice-onset time, and quantity: The search for higher-order invariants for two Icelandic speech cues

Constancy and normalization in the perception of Voice Offset Time as a cue for preaspiration

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