Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory

Wagner, Anita; Ernestus, Mirjam; Cutler, Anne

doi:10.1121/1.2335422

Cited by 45 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…A more important reason for the lack of an interaction between listener groups and listening conditions, however, seems that, whereas Dutch listeners made more errors than English listeners did, the differences between those listener groups were not notably larger (and sometimes even smaller) in noise than in quiet (A ppendix). Cutler et al (2008) found similar results, and argue that this can be explained by the finding that English listeners rely more than Dutch listeners do on transitional cues, which do not survive well under noise, for fricative identification (Wagner et al, 2006). Indeed, in general, the identification performance in quiet does not seem to determine which phonemes did and which ones did not show a differential effect of noise for L1 and L2 listeners.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Native and non-native listeners’ perception of English consonants in different types of noise

Broersma

Scharenborg

2010

Speech Communication

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Please be advised that this information was generated on 2018-05-09 and may be subject to change. AbstractThis paper shows that the effect of different types of noise on recognition of different phonemes by native versus non-native listeners is highly variable, even within classes of phonemes with the same m anner or place of articulation. In a phoneme identification experiment, English and D utch listeners heard all 24 English consonants in VCV stimuli in quiet and in three types of noise: competing talker, speech shaped noise, and m odulated speech-shaped noise (all with SNRs of -6 dB). Differential effects of noise type for English and D utch lis teners were found for eight consonants (/p t k g m n q r/) but not for the other 16 consonants. F or those eight consonants, effects were again highly variable: each noise type hindered non-native listeners more than native listeners for some of the target sounds, but none of the noise types did so for all of the target sounds, not even for phonemes with the same m anner or place of articulation. The results imply that the noise types employed will strongly affect the outcomes o f any study of native and non-native speech perception in noise.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Native and non-native listeners’ perception of English consonants in different types of noise

Broersma

Scharenborg

2010

Speech Communication

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“…The result that Japanese listeners rely more on transitional information such as onset F2 frequency may also be explained by the conclusions of Wagner et al (2006). In their study, Wagner et al tested the role of formant transitions in fricative perceptions in five languages: Dutch, German, Spanish, English, and Polish, which differ in their fricative inventories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Language specificity in the perception of voiceless sibilant fricatives in Japanese and English: Implications for cross-language differences in speech-sound development

Munson

Edwards

et al. 2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Both English and Japanese have two voiceless sibilant fricatives, an anterior fricative /s/ contrasting with a more posterior fricative /$/. When children acquire sibilant fricatives, English children typically substitute [s] for /$/, whereas Japanese children typically substitute [$] for /s/. This study examined English-and Japanese-speaking adults' perception of children's productions of voiceless sibilant fricatives to investigate whether the apparent asymmetry in the acquisition of voiceless sibilant fricatives reported previously in the two languages was due in part to how adults perceive children's speech. The results of this study show that adult speakers of English and Japanese weighed acoustic parameters differently when identifying fricatives produced by children and that these differences explain, in part, the apparent cross-language asymmetry in fricative acquisition. This study shows that generalizations about universal and language-specific patterns in speechsound development cannot be determined without considering all sources of variation including speech perception.

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“…Particularly sibilants, i.e. the research subject of the present study, "have very pronounced spectral peaks" [7].…”

Section: Background: the Notion Of "Segmental Intonation"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alternatively (or additionally), it is possible that formant transition residuals of the original sibilant are irrelevant perceptually as long as there is no phonetically closely related neighboring phoneme, i.e. a "spectrally confusable fricative" in the terminology of Wagner et al [7]. Wagner et al found that misleading formant transitions created by fricative cross-splicing in pseudowords did not affect the identification rate of /s/ and /ʃ/ for German listeners, because the two fricatives are too different from each other to be spectrally confusable.…”

Section: Effects Of Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[77][78][79]. It should therefore not be ruled out (despite the experimental evidence of [7]) that the original cutoff sibilant creates, through its traces in the preceding vowel, a bias that pushes or pulls sibilant identification in the created stimuli towards the cut off /s/ or /ʃ/ phoneme. So, in order to properly represent and interpret listeners' responses and separate the effects of the two key independent variables final sibilant and F0 context from those of the two context factors above, the context factors were included in the statistical analysis of the perception data as control variables.…”

Section: Stimulus Number and Independent Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the perception of “segmental intonation”: F0 context effects on sibilant identification in German

Niebuhr

2017

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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In normal modally voiced utterances, voiceless fricatives like [s], [ʃ], [f], and [x] vary such that their aperiodic pitch impressions mirror the pitch level of the adjacent F0 contour. For instance, if the F0 contour creates a high or low pitch context, then the aperiodic pitch impression of the fricative in this context will also be high or low. This contextmatching effect has been termed "segmental intonation". While there is accumulating evidence for segmental intonation in speech production, less is known about if and how segmental intonation is actually integrated in the perception of utterance tunes. This question is addressed here in a perception experiment in which listeners identified target words ending in either [ʃ] or [s]. The two sibilants inherently create low or high aperiodic pitch impressions in listeners due to their characteristically different spectral energy distributions. The sibilants were preceded by high or low F0 contexts in the target words. Results show a clear F0-context effect. The context effect triggered more [ʃ] identifications in high-F0 and/or more [s] identifications in low-F0 contexts. The effect was larger for sibilants that were less clearly identifiable as either /ʃ/ or /s/. The effect represents strong supporting evidence that listeners in fact perceive the segmental intonation of fricatives and integrate its aperiodic pitch with the F0-based pitch when perceiving utterance intonation. Thus, the term "segmental intonation" is perceptually appropriate. Furthermore, the results are discussed with respect to reactiontime measurements and an additional effect of the quality of the adjacent vowel phoneme on sibilant identification.

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Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory

Cited by 45 publications

References 29 publications

Native and non-native listeners’ perception of English consonants in different types of noise

Native and non-native listeners’ perception of English consonants in different types of noise

Language specificity in the perception of voiceless sibilant fricatives in Japanese and English: Implications for cross-language differences in speech-sound development

On the perception of “segmental intonation”: F0 context effects on sibilant identification in German

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