Vowel reduction across tasks for male speakers of American English

Abstract

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-I/, /A-ˆ/, /u-U/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectral acoustic features were examined, including vowel duration, vowel-to-word duration ratio, formant frequency, and dynamic spectral characteristics. Results revealed that the tenseÀlax vowel difference was generally enhanced in clear relative to plain speech, but clear-speech modifications for tense and lax vowels showed a trade-off in the use of temporal and spectral cues. While plain-to-clear vowel lengthening was greater for tense than lax vowels, clear-speech modifications in spectral change were larger for lax than tense vowels. Moreover, peripheral tense vowels showed more consistent clear-speech modifications in the temporal than spectral domain. Presumably, artic-ulatory constraints limit the spectral variation of these extreme vowels, so clear-speech modifications resort to temporal features and reserve the primary spectral features for tensity contrasts. These findings suggest that clear-speech and tensity interactions involve compensatory modifications in different acoustic domains.

Variation in /u/ fronting in the American Midwest

“…That is, larger gender differences in vowel space expansion were observed in low-density words than in high-density words, and regional dialect variants representing changes-in-progress were more advanced in low-density words than in high-density words, in high-predictability words than in low-predictability words, in second mention words than in first mention words, and in plain laboratory speech directed toward an imagined friend or family member than in clear laboratory speech directed toward an imagined hearing-impaired or non-native listener. These patterns of increased use of stable forms, which have social indexical value, and of more advanced forms in a change-in-progress parallel the findings for phonetic reduction, in which more reduced forms are observed in low-density words than in highdensity words (Munson and Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2010;Wright, 2004), in high-predictability words than in lowpredictability words (Aylett and Turk, 2004;Bell et al, 2009), in second mention words than in first mention words (Baker and Bradlow, 2009;Fowler and Housum, 1987), and in plain laboratory speech than in clear laboratory speech (Ferguson and Kewley-Port, 2007;Kuo and Weismer, 2016;Picheny et al, 1986;Smiljanic and Bradlow, 2005). Thus, across a range of contexts that are known to elicit phonetic reduction, individual talkers have been shown to produce a parallel increase in their degree of social indexing, including more advanced forms of changes-in-progress.…”

Criteria for creating new standard reading passages for the assessment of speech and voice: A Delphi consensus study

“…Separate studies may be necessary to identify the most important criteria that apply to the specificities of these languages. Furthermore, this set is not adapted for specific research aims, for which particular criteria might be needed (see for example, (Kuo & Weismer, 2016;Van Zundert et al, 1998)).…”

“…However, although a plethora of texts exist in different languages, none of them seem to really meet the expectations and needs of clinicians and researchers for routine speech and voice assessment. Some were created for a specific purpose, such as the Zoo Passage in English (Fletcher, 1972) for the assessment of velopharyngeal closure, or the texts by Kuo and Weismer (Kuo & Weismer, 2016) for the assessment of vowel reduction. For most of the others, little information is available about how they were created.…”

Assessment of adult speech disorders: current situation and needs in French-speaking clinical practice

“…Indeed, a plethora of reading passages exists in various languages, some of which have been created for a specific aim (e.g. the Zoo Passage in English [69], which includes only oral consonants and allows for the assessment of the velopharyngeal closure, or the reading passages by Kuo and Weismer [70], specifically created for the assessment of vowel reduction). However, none of these texts seem to really meet the clinicians and researchers needs for common speech and voice assessments.…”