The ‘Whistled' Fricative in Xitsonga: Its Articulation and Acoustics

Lee-Kim, Sang Im; Kawahara, Shigeto; Lee, Seunghun J.

doi:10.1159/000362672

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The literature on the acoustic properties of fricatives is extensive and includes work in acoustic phonetics, signal processing, automatic speech recognition and clinical phonetics. Although most early work focused exclusively on English (Gordon et al 2002), more recent studies have examined fricative acoustics in other languages, including German (Hamann andSennema 2005, Kuzla et al 2007), Polish (Nowak 2006, Nawrocki 2008, Portuguese, Italian and German (Jesus andShadle 2002, 2005;Jesus and Jackson 2008;Jesus 2014, 2015), and Xitsonga (Lee-Kim et al 2014). Despite abundant interest in the acoustic properties of fricatives, studies focusing explicitly on classification methods for dimensions such as place of articulation or voicing are more scarce.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives

Spinu

Lilley²

2016

Journal of Phonetics

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In this paper we explore two methods for the classification of fricatives. First, for the coding of the speech, we compared two sets of acoustic measures obtained from a corpus of Romanian fricatives: (a) spectral moments, and (b) cepstral coefficients. Second, we compared two methods of determining the regions of the segments from which the measures would be extracted. In the first method, the phonetic segments were divided into three regions of approximately equal duration. In the second method, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) were used to divide each segment into three regions such that the variances of the measures within each region were minimized. The corpus we analyzed consists of 3,674 plain and palatalized word-final fricatives from four places of articulation, produced by 31 native speakers of Romanian (20 females). We used logistic regression to classify fricatives by place, voicing, palatalization status, and gender. We found that cepstral coefficients reliably outperformed spectral moments in all classification tasks, and that using regions determined by HMM yielded slightly higher correct classification rates than using regions of equal duration.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives

Spinu

Lilley²

2016

Journal of Phonetics

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“… 4 Whistles using the mouth do not engage the vocal cords like standard speech does, including trills and “whistled” sibilant fricatives (which are not in fact truly whistled: Lee-Kim, Kawahara & Lee, 2014). Instead, for whistling the air inside the oral cavity is actively compressed to expel an oral air stream through narrowed rounded lips.…”

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confidence: 99%

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Best

Goldstein

Nam

et al. 2016

Ecological Psychology

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To become language users, infants must embrace the integrality of speech perception and production. That they do so, and quite rapidly, is implied by the native-language attunement they achieve in each domain by 6–12 months. Yet research has most often addressed one or the other domain, rarely how they interrelate. Moreover, mainstream assumptions that perception relies on acoustic patterns whereas production involves motor patterns entail that the infant would have to translate incommensurable information to grasp the perception-production relationship. We posit the more parsimonious view that both domains depend on commensurate articulatory information. Our proposed framework combines principles of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Articulatory Phonology (AP). According to PAM, infants attune to articulatory information in native speech and detect similarities of non-native phones to native articulatory patterns. The AP premise that gestures of the speech organs are the basic elements of phonology offers articulatory similarity metrics, while satisfying the requirement that phonological information be discrete and contrastive: 1) distinct articulatory organs produce vocal tract constrictions; 2) phonological contrasts recruit different articulators, and/or constrictions of a given articulator that differ in degree or location. Various lines of research suggest young children perceive articulatory information, which guides their productions: discrimination of between- versus within-organ contrasts; simulations of attunement to language-specific articulatory distributions; multi-modal speech perception; oral/vocal imitation; perceptual effects of articulator activation or suppression. We conclude that articulatory gesture information serves as the foundation for developmental integrality of speech perception and production. … each blind man felt a part of the animal in his reach, reporting that it was like a wall; a snake; a tree; a fan … “Each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong”(Saxe, 1873, pp. 135–136)

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“…SSANOVA is a statistical method for determining whether significant differences exist between best-fit smoothing splines for two or more sets of data. It has been used in linguistic research to analyze both ultrasound tongue contour data (Davidson, 2006 ; Chen and Lin, 2011 ; De Decker and Nycz, 2012 ; Lee-Kim et al, 2013 , 2014 ) and formant measurements over time (Baker, 2006 ; Nycz and De Decker, 2006 ; Fruehwald, Unpublished Manuscript). Here, the SSANOVA model was generated using the ssanova function of the gss package for R (Gu, 2014 ; R Core Team, 2016 ).…”

Section: Experiments 1: Production Of the Ncvsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Speech Perception Cues Constrain Patterns of Articulatory Variation and Sound Change

Havenhill

Do²

2018

Front. Psychol.

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What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well-documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: (1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and (2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility.

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The ‘Whistled' Fricative in Xitsonga: Its Articulation and Acoustics

Cited by 12 publications

References 29 publications

A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives

A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Visual Speech Perception Cues Constrain Patterns of Articulatory Variation and Sound Change

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