Sook‐hyang Lee

Variability in the production of quantal vowels revisited

Articulatory and acoustic variability in the production of five American English vowels was examined. The data were movement records for selected fleshpoints on the midsagittal tongue surface, recorded using the x‐ray microbeam. An algorithm for nonlinearly transforming fleshpoint positions to a new Cartesian space in which the x and y axes represent, respectively, the distance of the fleshpoint along the opposing vocal tract wall and the distance perpendicular to the tract wall, is described. The transformation facilitates a test of Quantal Theory in which variability in the two dimensions is compared over many productions of a given vowel type. The data provide some support for the theory. For fleshpoints near ‘‘quantal’’ constriction sites, the primary variability was in the x dimension (constriction location). The y‐dimension values were more tightly constrained, and the formant frequencies were more significantly correlated with the y values than with the x values. The greater variability in constric...

The duration and perception of English epenthetic and underlying stops

In American English, an intrusive stop occurs before the fricative in words such as tense and false, making them very much like words with underlying stops, such as tents and faults. Ohala (1975) treats the inserted stop as an artifact of universal physiological or aerodynamic constraints. But this approach cannot account for the fact that South African English speakers do not insert the stop between sonorant and fricative clusters (Fourakis and Port, 1986). Another approach posits a language‐ or dialect‐specific phonological rule which inserts a phonological segment (Zwicky, 1972). Fourakis and Port (1986) argue against this approach on the grounds that in some pairs the intrusive stop is significantly shorter than the underlying one (although the difference is always very small). This paper presents perception data and duration measurements supporting Zwickys approach. Phrases with intrusive and underlying stops (intense and in tents, respectively) in citation forms produced by three speakers of midwestern dialects were presented over earphones in random order for subjects to identify. Identification was very poor, just at chance level. Also, duration measurements of the silence gap between the /n/ and /s/ in these words show no significant difference, contrary to Fourakis and Ports findings. Moreover, token judgments in the perception experiment show very poor correlation with the durations except for one speaker, implying that whatever duration differences there are might not be a crucial cue that listeners exploit for labeling the words with epenthetic and underlying stops.

Intonational domains of the Seoul dialect of Korean

Pitch tracks were analyzed to determine the prosodic domains needed to described intonation patterns in the Seoul dialect of Korean. Three different domains are observed: the intonation phrase, the accentual phrase, and the phonological word. The intonation phrase consists of one or more accentual phrases, and is cued by the occurrence of a final falling or rising boundary tone configuration. The accentual phrase consists of one or more phonological words and is cued by an F0 peak at the beginning and a low‐high accent on the last syllable. Since the initial peak is not associated with every word‐initial syllable, it belongs to the accentual phrase and is not a correlate of word‐initial lexical stress. Undershoot of the initial peak occurs when the accentual phrase is very short. There is also downstep between each accentual phrase within the intonational phrase; the pitch range is reset at the beginning of a new intonation phrase.

Gestural overlap analysis of lenis stop reduction in Korean.

Korean lenis stops have been reported to become voiced intervocalically (Kagaya, 1974) and are often reduced to sonorants in casual speech with different degrees of reduction depending on the place of articulation (Lee, 1995). Velar lenis stops are more often reduced than the labials and coronals, which makes sense from the point of view of articulatory phonology (Browman and Goldstein, 1990). The oral gesture for a velar stop is on the same vocal tract tier (tongue body tier) as the neighboring vowels, so it should be more affected by overlap and blending with the vowel gestures than the closure gestures for other stops. This study investigates in what vowel environments lenis stop closure shows the most reduction. /VCV/ tokens in carrier sentences were recorded and acoustic analysis was done. The results showed that generally, reducing lenis stop closure is most in the environment of preceding and following low vowels, and least in the environment of high vowels, where the tongue body gestures of neighb...

Jaw height and consonant place

Since the jaw’s vertical displacement is largely due to rotation about the condyle, its contribution to a consonant’s constriction should depend on distance from the condyle. An earlier study of one speaker’s productions of English stops showed higher jaw in labials than in velars, as predicted, but highest jaw in coronals. This study investigates more consonant types produced by three speakers each of Korean, French, and Arabic. In general, the hypothesized dependency was supported. Jaw height was greater in labials than in velars, and greater in velars than in uvulars, but contributed nothing to pharyngeals and laryngeals. However, the problematic results concerning coronals were confirmed; the jaw was highest in coronals, particularly [s] and [∫ ]. Moreover, in Korean the jaw was higher in velars coarticulated with a neighboring central vowel [barred eye] than coarticulated with the fronter [i]. The greater contribution to coronal fricatives may be because the lower incisors must be positioned to impin...

The role of the jaw in consonant articulation.

Various linguistic roles have been hypothesized for the jaw. In Browman and Goldstein’s Articulatory Phonology, it is identified as the common articulator among gestures involving the lower lip, tongue tip, and tongue body, and Goldstein has suggested that this may underly the differentiation in Arabic phonology between oral consonants (labials, dentals, velars) and gutturals (uvulars, pharyngeals, glottals). Keating (1983) proposed that consonants are specified for relatively fixed jaw heights (sibilants higher than stops higher than glides), providing the phonetic basis for sonority sequencing constraints. Macchi (1985) proposed that jaw height during consonants reflects both a passive coarticulation with neighboring vowels, and an active suprasegmental specification (lower in stressed syllables). This paper re‐examines these hypotheses using a corpus contrasting different places of articulation. The hypotheses are supported more or less well, depending on place. For example, Macchi’s hypothesis was bor...

Relating formant variability to vowel constriction features extracted from pellet positions.

Quantal theory claims that sounds which are common in phoneme inventories, such as [i] and [a], are articulated in vocal tract regions where acoustic patterns are relatively insensitive to variation in constriction location. Perkell and Nelson [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 1889–1895 (1985)] tested this claim using a principal components analysis of x‐ray microbeam data. As predicted, tongue pellets showed most positional variation in an axis parallel to the hard palate in [i] and to the pharynx wall in [a]. An earlier replicative study using [i], [a], and three other vowels [Ahalt et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 1871 (1991)] showed that pellet data are more easily interpreted in terms of relative variation in constriction location and degree if they are transformed nonlinearly into a coordinate space where x and y values express location along and distance from the opposing wall of the vocal tract. The present study examined the relationship between formant values and pellet positions in this transformed space...

Evidence from glottal articulation for the analysis of intrusive stops in English

In American English, an intrusive stop occurs before the fricative in words such as tense and false, making them sound like tents and faults, where the stop is specified in the underlying phonological representation. Ohala (1975) treats the inserted stop as a universal phonetic artifact, whereas Zwicky (1972) treats it as the output of a language‐specific phonological rule. However, Ohalas approach cannot explain why South African English speakers do not have intrusive stops, whereas Zwickys cannot explain why the duration of the inserted stop closure is significantly shorter than that of the underlying stop (Fourakis and Port, 1986). Fourakis and Port therefore suggest that intrusive stops are not part of the phonological representation, but are products of language‐specific phonetic rules. Clements (1987), on the other hand, uses autosegmental phonology to give them a different phonological representation from the underlying stops. He argues that in dialects where underlying voiceless stops in the syl...