Effect of vowel quality on perception of post–vocalic nasal consonants in noise

Zee, Eric

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30925-8

Cited by 29 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Coarticulatory cues from the preceding vowels have been found to strongly affect the perception of place of articulation of postvocalic nasals [19]. According to Zee [18] and Chen et al [20], the high front vowel /i/ resulted in more misidentification of coda nasals than mid vowel /ə/ and low vowel /a/. Given its potential effects in perceiving the coda nasal, vowel type is taken into consideration in the current study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Previous studies of L2 speech led us to posit that Wuxi speakers may perceive and produce both nasals in Mandarin as the alveolar /n/ of their L1 Wu dialect. The production of closed syllables with nasal endings involves a process of coarticulation with preceding vowels [18]. Coarticulatory cues from the preceding vowels have been found to strongly affect the perception of place of articulation of postvocalic nasals [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wuxi Speakers’ Production and Perception of Coda Nasals in Mandarin

Wang¹,

Cui²,

Chen³

2018

Interspeech 2018

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Wuxi natives speak a dialect of Wu, which has only one coda nasal /n/ but allows allophones depending on the pre-nasal vowel [1], whereas in Mandarin, there are two coda nasalsalveolar /n/ and velar /ŋ/. Two perception experiments were conducted to investigate Wuxi speakers' perception and production of coda nasals in their second language (L2) Mandarin. First, two groups of Wuxi native speakers, age around 20 and 50, produced monosyllabic words with nasal coda in Mandarin and their production was used as the stimuli for native Mandarin speakers to identify. Second, the same Wuxi speakers participated in an identification task to judge the place of articulation of the nasal coda in monosyllabic words in standard Mandarin. The results of the first experiment indicate that young Wuxi speakers' Mandarin production was identified with higher accuracy by native Mandarin speakers than older Wuxi speakers', suggesting the young speakers produced more nativelike Mandarin than the older speakers. The results of the second experiment reveal that young Wuxi speakers identified coda nasals in Mandarin more accurately than older Wuxi speakers did, suggesting Wuxi speakers' production of Mandarin coda nasals is associated with their perception.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wuxi Speakers’ Production and Perception of Coda Nasals in Mandarin

Wang¹,

Cui²,

Chen³

2018

Interspeech 2018

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“…More specifically, nasal consonants are thought to be relatively vulnerable to sound change because of their low perceptual salience (Chen, 1973;Zee, 1981;Zee, 1985). Place contrasts in nasal consonants are more difficult to distinguish than in oral stops in both onset (Narayan, 2008) and coda position (Kawahara & Garvey, 2014), and are subject to positional neutralization more frequently than similar oral segments in the world's languages (Ohala, 1990;Steriade, 1994;Lombardi, 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nasal coda neutralization in Shanghai Mandarin: Articulatory and perceptual evidence

Faytak

Liu

Sundara

2020

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Shanghai Mandarin is reported to neutralize /n/ and /ŋ/ after non-low vowels, a change also reported for other varieties of Chinese. However, the place of articulation of the resulting nasal is unclear. We used production and perception experiments to determine the contexts which condition neutralization and the place of articulation of the resulting nasal. Analysis of ultrasound data using a dimensionality reduction technique revealed that neutralization in production was dependent on the height of the preceding vowel: The highest vowel /i/ conditioned a consistent, non-structure-preserving neutralization to a fronted velar or palatal nasal; the mid vowel /ə/ conditioned an inconsistent, structure-preserving neutralization to [n]; and no neutralization occurred after the low vowel /a/. In contrast, Standard Mandarin controls produced the contrast in all vowel contexts. A follow-up perception experiment confirmed that, consistent with complete neutralization, Shanghai Mandarin listeners failed to distinguish alveolar and velar nasals following /i/. More surprisingly, so did Standard Mandarin listeners, suggesting a near merger of the nasal codas following /i/ in Standard Mandarin. Our results provide support for a role for substantive factors in neutralization-driven sound changes.

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“…A number of studies have looked into the perceptual cues of /n/ and /ŋ/ when combined with different vowels in the context of VC syllables. For instance, Zee showed the effect of the vowel quality on the identification of the post-vocalic nasal consonants (i.e., /n/, /ŋ/), /n/ and /ŋ/ were best identified after the vowel /a/ among the five vowels [4]. Malé cot reported that the formant transitions between vowels and nasal consonants were important cues for place identification between /n/ and /ŋ/ [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With respect to Mandarin, a series of studies have investigated the perceptual cues of /n/ and /ŋ/ in VC syllables. For instance, some perceptual studies showed clear evidence for effects of vowel qualities on identification of /n/ and /ŋ/, more specifically, the more similar the phonetic values (i.e., formants) of the vowels were, the less distinctive that the two nasal codas were [8,9], which was comparable to the result of [4]. Nasal Finals in Mandarin were divided into three parts: vowel nucleus, nasalized vowel and nasal coda [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactions between Vowels and Nasal Codas in Mandarin Speakers’ Perception of Nasal Finals

et al. 2018

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Previous studies have shown vowels' effect on the perception of nasal codas from the perspectives of acoustics and phonetics with evidence from Mandarin. While few studies investigated the processing interactions between vowels and nasal codas during the perceptual processing of nasal Finals. Using a speeded classification paradigm which requires participants to attend to one dimension selectively and to ignore other dimensions, we aimed to explore the processing interactions between vowels and nasal codas in the process of nasal Finals' perception. Results of the speeded classification experiment showed that there was a mutual and symmetrical pattern of interference effect between vowel and nasal coda dimensions. More specifically, participants were affected by irrelevant variation of the nasal coda dimension when they were attending to the vowel dimension and affected by irrelevant variation of the vowel dimension when they were attending to the nasal coda dimension. The extent of such mutual interference effect was equal. Results were discussed in terms of phonemic differences in acoustic properties and relative discriminability between vowels and nasal codas. The present study may be helpful to second language learners of Mandarin during their course of acquiring nasal Finals.

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Effect of vowel quality on perception of post–vocalic nasal consonants in noise

Cited by 29 publications

References 11 publications

Wuxi Speakers’ Production and Perception of Coda Nasals in Mandarin

Wuxi Speakers’ Production and Perception of Coda Nasals in Mandarin

Nasal coda neutralization in Shanghai Mandarin: Articulatory and perceptual evidence

Interactions between Vowels and Nasal Codas in Mandarin Speakers’ Perception of Nasal Finals

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