Olle Engstrand

Does babbling sound native? Listener responses to vocalizations produced by Swedish and American 12- and 18-month-olds.

Previous studies of infants’ babbling have reported contradictory results as to the extent and timing of discernible phonetic influences of the ambient language. In the present experiment, five experienced phoneticians were asked to listen for ambient language effects on vocalizations produced by American and Swedish 12- and 18-month-olds (with 8 children in each language and age group), and to motivate their decisions in terms of word or phonetic cue perception. Group results indicated that listeners did not perceive effects of ambient language on pure babbles for either of the two age groups, whereas a clear effect appeared in both age groups given a more liberal definition of babbling. This is taken to suggest that results of ambient language listening tests may depend crucially on judgments of vocalizations’ word status. As compared to the group trends, listener responses to individual children’s vocalizations did not indicate that a majority of either 12- or 18-monthers were sufficiently native-sounding to be reliably identified on the basis of ambient language. A closer analysis of listeners’ use of phonetic cues indicated that one single phonetic property, the grave tonal word accent, was discerned by most listeners in vocalizations produced by the Swedish 18-monthers; this property was also discerned by one listener in vocalizations produced by Swedish 12-monthers. This result is consistent with the generally held belief in the primacy of tonal features in phonetic acquisition, and with experimental evidence indicating that Swedish mothers tend to enhance word accent contours in baby talk. In the final section of the paper, the results are discussed with a view to reconcile competing theories of babbling development, notably the ‘babbling drift’ and the ‘independence’ hypotheses.

Phonetic Interpretation of the Word Accent Contrast in Swedish

This paper reports an experimental phonetic study of the acute and grave word accents in Central Standard Swedish. The hypothesis was that the fall in fundamental frequency (F₀) observed on the

Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion

Audio recordings of lively conversational speech produced by 3 Swedish, 4 Finnish and 3 Estonian speakers were analyzed for durational correlates of quantity distinctions. The data suggest that durati

Phonetic Interpretation of the Word Accent Contrast in Swedish: Evidence from Spontaneous Speech

Fundamental frequency (F₀) correlates of the Swedish tonal word accents, ‘grave’ and ‘acute’, were studied in spontaneous speech produced by 3 male speakers of Central Standard Swedish. The grave accent was invariably marked by an F₀ fall on the primary stress syllable, while the corresponding F₀ contour in acute words seemed to be predictable from sentence-level intonation. The latter observation, which could not be tested on the basis of spontaneous speech data, was confirmed in a companion paper in which a controlled speech material was analysed. In combination, the two papers corroborate the view that an F₀ fall is a positive phonetic feature of the grave accent, while the acute accent constitutes the unmarked member of the contrast. They also illustrate the methodological advantage of using complementary spontaneous and controlled speech materials.

Preaspiration and the Voicing Contrast in Lule Sami

This experiment investigates the role of voice offset time (the durational aspect of preaspiration), closure duration and voice onset time as phonetic carriers of the voiced-voiceless contrast in Lule

Systematicity of phonetic variation in natural discourse

Abstract Phonetic variation in natural speech is more extensive and its systematicity less transparent than in experimentally elicited speech. This paper raises the question to what extent phonetic structure in natural speech can be observed and explained. In the light of some recent data, it is argued that this can indeed be done with a fair amount of success.

Durational Patterns of Lule Sami Phonology

Four experiments have been conducted to explore durational patterns underlying various aspects of Lule Sami phonology. Experiment 1 (1 subject) demonstrates clear-cut durational correlates of the elab

Simplification of phonotactic structures in unscripted Swedish

Informal listening suggests that unscripted Swedish shows a tendency to produce alternating contoid and vocoid articulations which relate to more complex consonant and vowel structures at the phonological level. To test this hypothesis, two unscripted monologues and, for comparison, a careful text reading were analyzed. The speech material was segmented using criteria based on the so-called sonority hierarchy. The results largely corroborated the hypothesis in showing that contoid-vocoid units appeared considerably more frequently in unscripted speech than suggested by conventional phonotactic analysis, and that some reduction effects appeared more frequently in the unscripted than in the read speech. The possibility that this reflects an underlying articulatory organization of spontaneous speech in terms of typologically basic CV units is discussed.

The phonetic profile of Swedish

Abstract This chapter is “typological” in two senses: Whereas the first section considers some of the sounds and sound patterns of Swedish from a universal-typological point of view, the second section discusses the considerable phonetic variability observed across the various dialects of the language. It is argued that, with some exceptions, Swedish is typologically fairly mainstream. Exceptions concern particularly the inventory of non-back rounded vowels, voiceless fricatives and partly prosody. The Swedish dialects are found to contain several distinct consonant and vowel types that are not encountered in Standard varieties. It is also found that the intonational structure of the Swedish dialects is fairly complex and diversified. The third section concludes the chapter with some informal observations of possible sound changes in progress.

Investigating the ‘‘trough:’’ Vowel dynamics and aerodynamics

Articulatory coordination in vowel–consonant–vowel utterances (V=/i a/, C=/p b/) was studied in 5 Swedish, 3 English, 2 German, and 3 French speakers. Electropalatographic records showed that the amount of transconsonantal V‐to‐V coarticulation was greater in German and French than in Swedish and English. For the symmetrical utterances /ipi/ and /ibi/, the EPG patterns displayed a marked ‘‘trough’’ (a temporary reduction of tongue height) associated with the stop closure in the Swedish and English, but not in the German and French speakers; the Swedish and English trough patterns were, however, differently timed. These observations are consistent with dynamic vowel features characteristic of the respective languages. In a second experiment, using a wider voice onset time range, three Swedish speakers produced words containing CV syllables (C=/p b t d k g/, V=/i o/ a ■ u/). VOT was controlled in terms of voicing, stress, word length, and position in the word. Formant data showed that the amount of F2 locus...