Byung-jin Lim

Phase transitions in a repetitive speech task as gestural recomposition

Tuller and Kelso (JSHR, 1991) show the relative timing of peak glottal opening and oral closure in repetitive /ip/ production differs between /ip/ and /pi/ productions. Also, as repetition rate increases, the timing in /ip/ merges with that in /pi/. The authors interpret this to indicate two stable regions in glottal‐to‐oral phasing, one for codas and one for onsets. The current paper examines a similar corpus of glottal transillumination traces of repeated syllables, which includes both labial and lingual stops. Preliminary examination of peak glottal timing with respect to acoustic landmarks indicating closure shows the same pattern of timing differences at slow rates and neutralization at fast rates. However, peaks in the transillumination traces often do not indicate glottal abduction for the consonant, but rather indicate a relatively open glottis for vocalic voicing, happening in the context of glottal stoppage at the onset of the vowel. In addition, coronal codas exhibit cycle‐to‐cycle variation from glottalized to abducted voiceless forms. Thus while rate does induce stepwise changes in glottal activity, phasing, in the sense of relative timing, does not account for many of the rate effects. Rather, rate appears to be inducing a recomposition of the gestures which comprise the speech.

The Perception of Syllable Affiliation of Singleton Stops in Repetitive Speech

Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were extracted from a previous study of repeated stop + vowel and vowel + stop syllables (de Jong, 2001a, 2001b). Forced-choice identification tasks show that slow repetitions are clearly distinguished. As speakers increase rate, they reach a point after which listeners disagree as to the affiliation of the stop. This pattern is found for voiced and voiceless consonants using different stimulus extraction techniques. Acoustic models of the identifications indicate that the sudden shift in syllabification occurs with the loss of an acoustic hiatus between successive syllables. Acoustic models of the fast rate identifications indicate various other qualities, such as consonant voicing, affect the probability that the consonants will be perceived as onsets. These results indicate a model of syllabic affiliation where specific juncture-marking aspects of the signal dominate parsing, and in their absence other differences provide additional, weaker cues to syllabic affiliation.

Tonal alignment in Seoul Korean

Bruce found that a local F0 peak is aligned very precisely in time with the segmental material in Swedish [Swedish word accents in sentence perspective (1977)]. Alternatively, it is possible that such F0 peaks may function as edge markers, and hence not necessarily be aligned with any particular aspect of the word‐internal structure. This study investigates how an initial high tone is aligned in time with the segmental material in Standard Korean. Recordings of two speakers of Seoul Korean producing three‐syllable words with various syllable structure combinations in two prosodic conditions were digitized and analyzed. One speaker shows no apparent pattern of alignment with the segmental material; peaks are simply reached at a fixed duration from the beginning of the utterance regardless of the structure of the word. Another speaker, however, shows that initial high tones fall into two distinct groups, ones aligned with initial syllables and ones aligned with second syllables. This syllable association is...

Lexical and phonotactic effects on the perception of rate induced resyllabification

Stetson (1951) noted that, when repeated, singleton coda consonants (VC) appear to modulate into onset consonants (CV) as the rate of repetition increases. de Jong et al. (2001) found that naEe listeners robustly perceive such resyllabifications with labial consonants, and in a later study, that such perceptions broadly corresponded to changes in glottal timing. In the current study, stimuli included labial, coronal, and velar stops, creating mixtures of real words (such as ‘‘eat’’), and nonwords (such as ‘‘ead’’). A comparison of the perception of real and nonreal words reveals no robust effect of lexical status. In addition, vowels in the corpus were either tense or lax, so that the CV combination is phonotactically illegal in half of the corpus. The perception of resyllabification also does occur with these lax vowels, though only for voiced coronal and labial stops. Other stops did not exhibit resyllabification. Analyses of glottal and acoustic recordings are currently underway. [Work supported by NIDCD and NSF.]

Cross‐language perception of rate induced resyllabification

This paper investigates the degree to which speakers of languages with different syllabic inventories are similar in their perceptions of syllabic affiliation. Stetson (1951) noted that repeated coda (VC) structures become perceived as onset (CV) structures as repetition rates increase. Stimuli were extracted from a repetitive production experiment in which English talkers produced voiced and voiceless labial stop onsets and codas at tempi controlled by a rate varying metronome. Native English, Japanese, and Korean listeners were asked to label the repeated syllable with one of four choices: ‘‘bee,’’ ‘‘pea,’’ ‘‘eeb,’’ ‘‘eep.’’ All three language groups showed perceptual shifts from VC to CV as the speech rate increased. However, Japanese listeners are biased toward identifying VC productions as CVs, and very rarely identified CV productions as VCs. These results indicate a very consistent cross‐language perception of syllabic affiliation, regardless of a language’s syllabic inventory, although the languag...

Effects of native language and speech rate on perceptual and decisional processing of voicing and syllable affiliation in stops

Previous work shows that variation in speech rate influences the perception of voicing distinctions (/b/-/p/) and syllable affiliation (“pea”-“eep”), and it is well-documented that native language influences how listeners perceive phonological distinctions. We analyze the influences of speech rate and native language in the perception of voicing and syllable affiliation by applying a model of perception and response selection to data from Japanese, English, and Korean listeners who identified the voicing and the syllable affiliation of (English) stops produced at slow, moderate, and fast rates. The fitted model indicates that for all three native language groups, perceptual salience decreases substantially as speech rate increases for both voicing and syllable affiliation. Even at slow rates, however, the salience of voicing is lower for coda than for onset stops. In addition, as rate increases, all three groups exhibit an increasing bias toward “onset” responses, with a bias toward “voiced” responses for...

Perception of English resyllabification by monolingual Japanese listeners

Previous results (Nagao et al., 2001) show that non‐native listeners exhibit remarkably similar patterns of perceptual resyllabification with English listeners, suggesting that perceptual resyllabification is not a language specific phenomenon. The same listeners tended to identify voiced English tokens as voiceless, in keeping with Japanese voicing categories. In order to determine the degree to which the non‐native perceptual resyllabification was due to extensive exposure to English, monolingual Japanese listeners, 8 from an older and 12 from a younger generation, participated in the same experiment. Monolinguals showed perceptual resyllabification of the same tokens as do English listeners’, consistent with the previous results. Also consistent with previous results, especially older listeners’ responses were more affected by Japanese voicing categories. In addition, older listeners were more likely than English listeners to identify tokens as CV’s, while younger listeners were less likely to. The res...

Effects of syllable structure and syllable boundary on segment duration in Seoul Korean

The present study reports results of an investigation into Korean durational patterns with respect to syllable structure and syllable boundary. The main questions raised in this study were (1) whether different preceding syllable structures contribute to the durational patterns of the following segmental durations: closure duration, voice onset timing (VOT), and vowel duration; and, if so, (2) how they are realized, especially over syllable boundaries determined by Korean orthography. Thirty‐six two‐syllable nonsense words varying in syllable structure were analyzed. For the durational pattern of internal elements of syllables over syllable boundary, the initial consonants of the second syllable were differentiated into lax, tensed, and aspirated stops. Results indicate that initial consonant duration showed no significant difference regardless of syllable structure. Initial vowel duration, however, reflected temporal compensation depending on the syllable structure. In addition, the effect of preceding s...