Bernd Pompino-Marschall

Variation in the pronunciation of German ‘‘ein−’’

Pronunciation variation of German ‘‘ein−’’ is examined (unstressed indefinite article ‘‘ein,’’ ‘‘einen,’’ as well as stressed instances of ‘‘ein−,’’ i.e., the numeral or as part of a compound) based on a larger corpus of read and spontaneous speech according to segmental variation (elisions, assimilations, etc.) and acoustic features (segmental durations, extent of formant transitions, etc.). Second, the results of a combined electropalatographical/electromagnetic‐articulographical study are presented. Two male subjects uttered the items ‘‘ein’’ and ‘‘einen’’ embedded in test sentences at normal, slow, and fast speech rate. Electropalatographically tongue palate contacts for the nasal segments (duration, center of gravity of contact area) were analyzed. The EMA measurements of movement from the diphthong to nasal (or from diphthong to nasal to schwa to nasal) were done with a sensor coil mounted 1 cm behind the tip of the tongue and another one mounted on a strip of elastic foil glued to the EPG palate fo...

The perception of German syllabic [n]

Perception of syllabic [n] was studied using different inflectional forms of the German indefinite article, i.e., ‘‘ein’’ (nom. sing. masc.) versus ‘‘einen’’ (acc. sing. masc.). Inspection of a larger corpus of spoken German revealed that the most frequent pronunciation of ‘‘einen’’ is the allegro form with only a lengthened—not literally bisyllabic—[n]. Identification tests were run with manipulated items of a naturally spoken ‘‘einen.’’ The original utterance consisted of a glottalized [a] segment of 68‐, a diphthong of 65‐, and a [n] of 49‐ms duration produced at a fundamental frequency of about 200 Hz by a female speaker. The duration of the diphthong and the nasal were varied in five steps of approximately 10 ms by doubling/cutting pairs of individual pitch periods. A second set of 25 stimuli was produced by cutting the initial glottalized segment. Analyses of variance revealed highly significant effects of nasal duration and glottalization independent of diphthong duration: Longer nasal segments as ...

Articulatory consonant and vowel timing in rhythmically produced syllables

The results of experiments using simultaneous EMG recordings for consonantal (OOS) and vocalic gestures (ABD) in rhythmically produced speech are discussed in connection with an articulatorily based interpretation of the P‐center phenomenon. Three subjects produced sequences of five monosyllabic tokens of the form /Cak/ (with /C/ = /p/, /pf/, /pl/, /pr/, /pfl/) in time to a metronome. In contradiction to the hypothesis of Tuller and Fowler [Percept. Psychophys. 27, 277–283 (1980)], the data in this study suggest that the timing of the articulatory vocalic gesture is not a direct correlate of the P center and, furthermore, not independent of the syllable‐initial consonants. In addition, although the acoustic syllable onset shows the well‐known systematic deviations from isochrony depending on the length of the initial consonant cluster, the articulatory consonantal gesture clearly does not show a parallel systematic shift to earlier onset. These results support the hypothesis that the articulatory timing p...

P centers, C centers, or what else?

Some questions concerning the underlying nature of the so‐called P‐center phenomenon (the acoustic anisochrony of rhythmically regularly produced/perceived sequences of monosyllables) are discussed in the light of recent EMG data from experiments with rhythmically produced /Cak/ syllables (with /C/ = /p/, /pf/, /pl/, /pt/, /pfl/). The differences between /p/ vs /pf/ syllables resemble the timing differences in the microbeam data of Browman and Goldstein [Haskins SR‐93/94, 85–102 (1988)]. Whereas they found a stable timing relation between the “articulatory mean” of the initial consonants (termed C center) and the acoustical offset of the following vowel, in terms of their task dynamic description, however, the phase relations between consonant and vowel gestures should remain the same. This would result in a reduced stiffness of the vowel gesture for the syllables containing consonant clusters. The observations of the present study would also correspond to a reduction of stiffness for the vowel but the nu...

The difference between acoustic and auditory parameter signals as a cue for phonetic segmentation and categorization

Normally, speech recognition systems are based on purely acoustic or on auditorily modeled acoustic speech signals, respectively. The difficulties in segmentation and categorization encountered by those models may partly be overcome by a technique that exploits the difference signal between acoustic and auditory parameters. The difference signal tested here was between the sound‐pressure envelope and the loundness time series. Sound‐pressure level (dB‐scaled) was calculated as the mean value of absolute amplitude within a rectangular widow of 300 sample points (= 15 ms). Loudness was computed every 15 ms according to Paulus and Zwicker [Acustica 27, 253–266 (1972)] by using critical band amplitudes approximated by averaged DFT values (with frequency‐dependent differences in length of the Hanning window; 1500 Hz: 15 ms). For calculation of the difference, signal loudness and sound‐pressure level were normalized to 0 < × < 1 and subtracted from one another.