Deconstructing phonetic transcription: Covert contrast, perceptual bias, and an extraterrestrial view ofVox Humana

Abstract

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast (covert contrast). We present evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naïve listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /θ/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /θ/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities.

Produção e discriminação do contraste de sonoridade das plosivas nos casos de desvio fonológico

“…That fact seems to be confirmed in another theoretical perspective through the covert contrast [15][16][17][18][19] . For the discrimination of voicing contrast, it was observed in this research that only one of the children had a low performance in the SVDT, with a percentage of less than 50% of correct answers.…”

“…A fail in the connection between these two lexicons result in deficits in one or another level 21 . Another study 19 highlights that there is a possible influence of other factors in perceptual performance, including: peculiarities of the language, pre-established cultural concepts, type of perceptual tasks, among others. Then, the auditory information, separately, would not be the only basis of the perceptual judgment of a sound.…”

Estabelecimento Do Contraste Entre as Fricativas Por Crianças Com Transtorno Fonológico: Manipulação De Pistas Acústicas

“…Therefore, speakers of a given language are expected to be aware of which cues are relevant in their language and how to use them correctly, since the same cue might be present in different phonological contrasts (MUNSON et al, 2010).…”

“…Children who are not capable of adapting their production to the target production until they reach the expected age are seen to show the so-called phonological disorder (GRUNWELL, 1981;YAVAS;MATZENAUER-HERNANDORENA;LAMPRECHT, 1992;MOTA, 2001;WERTZNER, 2003;MUNSON et al, 2010).…”

Parâmetros acústicos e articulatórios durante a produção do contraste entre oclusivas alveolares e velares: dados típicos e de desvio fonológico

“…That means, beyond considering evident disturbance of one of the subsystems of language (more specifically in relation to the production of speech sounds), it is given a new view to the understanding of the speech disturbances described by DSM-V (4) . The gradient contrasts, intermediate or covert, are understood as the speech production and as a distinctive knowledge of a certain phonic contrast, not identified through perceptive auditory analysis, but with the help of speech instrumental analysis (5) . Such interpretation is linked to the theoretical bias of the Gestural Phonology (6,7) , the comprehension of articulatory gestures and, consequently, to the adoption of speech instrumental analysis, as the acoustic and articulatory ones.…”