Vowel and Nasal Duration as Cues to Voicing in Word-Final Stop Consonants: Spectrographic and Perceptual Studies

Abstract

To determine durational differences between vowel and nasal segments preceding word-final /t/ and /d/, spectrograms were made of adult speakers' productions of minimal pairs of the type /pεent/-/pεnd/. Vowel, nasal, and vowel plus nasal (vocalic nucleus) durations were greater before /d/ than before /t/. Assuming the voiceless context as a base, the increase in nasal duration in the voiced case was proportionately greater than the increase in vowel duration. This outcome suggests that nasal duration is a more powerful cue to the voicing characteristic of the following consonant than is vowel duration. To test this, adult listeners were presented synthetic CVNC utterances in which the nasal and vowel segments were independently varied in duration over a range of 40 msec to 200 msec and were instructed to label the final stop consonant as either voiced /d/ or voiceless /t/. Although changes in both vowel and nasal duration were sufficient to cue both voiced and voiceless judgments, listeners' categorization of final consonants shifted more rapidly as a result of varying nasal rather than vowel duration. Nasal duration, therefore, appears to be a stronger cue than vowel duration for the word-final voiced-voiceless consonant distinction in CVNC utterances.

Linguistic timing factors in combination

“…If there is a resonant like a nasal before the stop, as in bend versus bent, the nasal is lengthened more than the vowel itself for a voiced cluster (Raphael, Dorman, Freeman, and Tobin, 1975;Fourakis, 1979). Several studies (Port and Rotunno, 1979;Weismer, 1979) have found VOT of initial aspirated stops to vary directly with the immediately following voiced vowel duration for changes in phonological features, such as those examined here.…”

The role of temporal and dynamic signal components in the perception of syllable-final stop voicing by children and adults

“…To be completely accurate, the entire voiced portion of a (stressed) syllable is shorter preceding a voiceless obstruent than preceding a voiced obstruent. In addition to the vowel nucleus, the voiced portion may consist of transitions into and out of the vowel nucleus, as well as sonorant consonants (Raphael, Dorman, Freeman, and Tobin, 1975;Raphael, Dorman, and Liberman, 1980). For this reason, the terms vocalic length and vocalic duration will be used in this manuscript instead of vowel length and vowel duration.…”

“…Be that as it may, given that the phenomenon is at least prevalent across languages with syllable-final obstruents we would expect vocalic length to be used by listeners of those languages in perception. And, indeed, numerous reports have shown that vocalic duration influences voicing judgments for syllable-final consonants made by adult speakers of languages with a vocalic-length distinction associated with final consonant voicing Mann, 1992,1994;Denes, 1955;O'Kane, 1978;Raphael, 1972;Raphael et al, 1975;Raphael et al, 1980). Other acoustic properties of syllables ending with voiced or voiceless final stops have also been found to influence adults' voicing judgments (Hogan and Rozsypal, 1980;Summers, 1988;Wardrip-Fruin, 1982), with spectral characteristics associated with the vocal-tract closing gesture apparently being weighted particularly heavily (Hillenbrand, Ingrisano, Smith, and Flege, 1984).…”

More On the Voicing of English Obstruents: Voicing Retention vs. Voicing Loss

“…(2006), Jassem (1983), Ladefoged (1971Ladefoged ( , 1975, Lisker and Abramson (1964), Maddieson (1999), Ohala. (1999, Port and Rottuno (1979), Raphael et al (1975), Roach (1983), Shockey (2003), Szpyra-Kozłowska (2003), Van den Berg (1958), and was based on a large body of recordings of spoken English by 6 native speakers. Yet the results exhibited asymmetrical, if not erratic, behaviour; the details are presented in Table 1 as well as Figures 1 and 2.…”