The Phonetic Basis for Syllable Division

Malmberg, Bertil

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9582.1955.tb00521.x

Cited by 30 publications

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“…If other evidence of this nature can be found it may yet be possible to establish the syllable as a linguistic unit with definite physical attrib utes. See also Malmberg [1955].…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Intrinsic Variations in the Speech Signal

Mohr¹

1971

Phonetica

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“…If other evidence of this nature can be found it may yet be possible to establish the syllable as a linguistic unit with definite physical attrib utes. See also Malmberg [1955].…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Intrinsic Variations in the Speech Signal

Mohr¹

1971

Phonetica

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“…Malmberg (1955) reported long ago that listeners grouped the consonant of VC-V stimuli with the final vowel when the closure ?uration was made very short; however, he did not mention any mterference effect. Perhaps the absence of interference wasjlue to his particular synthetic stimuli which had identical initial and final vowels, or to his use of sophisticated listeners.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual integration and differentiation of spectral cues for intervocalic stop consonants

Repp

1978

Perception & Psychophysics

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The place of articulation of intervocalic stop consonants is conveyed by temporally distributed spectral information, viz, the formant transitions preceding and following the silent closure interval (Ve and ev transitions). Experiment 1 shows that more than 200 msec of silent closure is needed to hear ve and ev formant transitions as separate phonemic events (geminate stops). As closure duration is reduced, these cues are integrated into a single phonemic percept, and the ve transitions become increasingly redundant (Experiments 2 and 3). ve and CV transitions conveying different places of articulation, on the other hand, are heard as separate phonemes at closure durations as short as 100 msec. If closure duration is further reduced, a single stop is heard whose place of articulation corresponds to the CV transitions (Experiment 3). Even in the absence of ev transitions, VC transitions carry little perceptual weight at very short closure durations (Experiment 4). Despite their apparent redundancy, however, the VC transitions exert a positive bias on the perception of CV transitions at very short closure durations. At closure durations beyond 100 msec, on the other hand, ve and CV transitions interact contrastively in perception and tend to be heard as different phonemes (Experiments 5 and 6). The results of these experiments suggest two different processes of temporal integration in phonetic perception, one taking place at a precategoricallevel, the other combining identical phoneme categories within a certain time span.An intervocalic stop consonant-for example, the Idl in /adez---is produced by rapidly constricting the vocal tract at a point appropriate for the place of articulation of the consonant (e.g., by bringing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge), thereby interrupting the airflow from the lungs for a very brief period, and then releasing the constriction and rapidly returning the vocal tract to a more open configuration. The acoustic consequences of such an articulatory act are schematically illustrated in Figure 1. This stylized spectrogram of /ads/ begins with a steady-state formant pattern specifying the vowel lal and ends with a different steady state specifying the vowel I£!. The silent interval in the center represents the closure of the vocal tract. (In real utterances, the closure interval may be filled with low-amplitude periodicity when the stop consonant is voiced, but silence may be substituted in synthetic utterances without any significant perceptual consequences.) On each side of the closure period, the This research was supported by NICHD Grant HDOI994 to the Haskins Laboratories. Preliminary reports of these data appeared in Repp (Notes 5-7), where also more detailed discussions of some side issues may be found. I thank Alvin Liberman, Quentin Summerfield, and David Isenberg for helpful comments on an earlier draft.formants change rapidly towards the pattern characteristic of the point of occlusion. The transitions from the initial vocalic portion into the closure will be ...

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“…This generally reliable acoustic correlate of release of stops, at least, is termed "burst," sometimes accompanied by aspiration in voiceless and "breathy voiced" (voiced aspirated) stops. Malmberg (1955) showed that the differing inflections of the first and second formants of "explosive" (syllableinitial) and "implosive" (syllable-final) stops are reliably "perceived as a difference in syllabic division" (1955: 85-86). The burst of initial fricatives and sonorant consonants is more gradual (Lieberman and Blumstein 1988: 190-193 The notion of consonant release shared by Saussure, Smalley, and Abercrombie, however, we may define as "phonologically significant release under pressure" such that the release or dearticulation of the consonant is perceptibly and reliably different from release without the pressure.…”

Section: The Phonetic Feature Of Consonant Releasementioning

confidence: 99%

Consonant release and the syllable

Hudson¹

1995

Ling

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Syllable-boundary phenomena, particularly the "{C, #}" rule environment, are the most frequently mentioned evidence for the phonological role of the syllable. Consonant release provides an effective characterization of the syllable boundary and an increase in explanatory power over the unrefined notion "syllable (boundary)/' Although it remains in need of full articulatory rather than acoustic definition, consonant release yields phonetic burst, a perturbedpostconsonantal air stream that clarifies voicing and place of articulation contrasts. Nonrelease naturally leads to neutralization and/or "weakening." Thus for example Quebec French stop nasalization is of unreleased rather than syllable-final stops, and German devoicing is of unreleased rather than syllable-final obstruents. Consonant release is a necessary feature of complete allophonic phonetic specification of languages and is perhaps contrastive in some. Other aspects of syllable phonology are better understood in terms of consonant release, such as the maximal onset principle, which maximizes released, acoustically marked consonants, and the sonority cycle, which perhaps reflects degrees of releasability based upon degrees of openness.Many phonological phenomena that appear to rely on recognition of the syllable may be better understood to rely on the phonetically grounded phonological feature of consonant release. Section 1 of this paper presents some phonological rules that have often been considered to offer the best evidence for the syllable. Section 2 discusses the phonetic phenomenon of consonant release, and section 3 presents some roles for the feature of nonrelease in phonology, arguing that the feature is more explanatory than the notion "syllable" in these roles. Section 4 shows how, in the rules presented in section 1, reference to the syllable may be replaced by reference to the feature termed [unreleased] ([unr]). Finally, section 5 briefly discusses what understanding of the syllable results with the replacement of the syllable boundary by values of the feature [unr].

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The Phonetic Basis for Syllable Division

Cited by 30 publications

References 0 publications

Intrinsic Variations in the Speech Signal

Intrinsic Variations in the Speech Signal

Perceptual integration and differentiation of spectral cues for intervocalic stop consonants

Consonant release and the syllable

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