Utterance-initial voiced stops in American English: An ultrasound study

Abstract

In American English, phonologically voiced consonants are often phonetically voiceless in utterance-initial position (Lisker & Abramson, 1964) § Utterance-initial position: 'active voicing' gestures by speakers are needed, the context which is possible to test whether or not a language has stops with pre-voicing (Beckman et al. 2013) § Other than Westbury (1983), there is little articulatory evidence regarding utterance-initial voicing in American English § Westbury (1983): the tongue root is advanced in voiced consonants in utterance-initial positions, but he did not distinguish between phonated and unphonated voiced stops. § One adjustment for initiating or maintaining phonation during the closure: enlarging the supraglottal cavity volume primarily via tongue root advancement. (Westbury 1983, Narayan et al. 1995, Proctor et al. 2009) § The same mechanism that is responsible for phonation during closure also facilitates short positive voice onset time (Cho & Ladefoged, 1999) Research Questions: • What is the phonetic target of utterance-initial voiced stops in English: phonation during closure or short positive VOT? à This study focuses on how the tongue root is employed to reach that phonetic target, comparing phonated voiced stops, unphonated voiced stops, and voiceless stops in utterance-initial position. Hypothesis: • If phonated voiced stops and unphonated stops show o the same tongue root position: speakers have short positive VOT as the phonetic target for both phonated and unphonated stops, but phonation can occur as a by-product of achieving that goal o the different tongue root position: speakers have phonation during closure as the phonetic target for phonated voiced stops

Gridlines approach for dynamic analysis in speech ultrasound data: A multimodal app

“…One of the main techniques in static approaches is the comparison of tongue contours at specific articulatory landmarks (Alwabari, 2019; N. R. Oakley, 2019;Roon & Whalen, 2019). An advantage of this approach is that it allows for the comparison of gestural differences at a specific time of the speech process previously established in the study, for example, differences between vowels (Decker & Nycz, 2012;Mielke et al, 2017), consonants (Ahn, 2015(Ahn, , 2018Recasens & Rodríguez, 2019), or phonological contexts (Davidson, 2006;Diskin et al, 2019). On the other hand, depending on the research questions to be addressed, dynamic approaches can capture time-series characteristics which can be crucial for identifying distinctions between segments that in a static approach may not be observed.…”