Immediate Integration of Coarticulatory Cues for /s/-Retraction in American English

Abstract

Coarticulatory “noise” has long been presumed to benefit the speaker at the expense of the listener. However, recent work has found that listeners make use of that variation in real time to aid speech processing, immediately integrating coarticulatory cues as soon as they become available. Yet sibilants, sounds notable for their high degree of context-dependent variability, have been presumed to be unavailable for immediate integration, requiring that listeners hold all cues in a buffer until all relevant cues are available. The present study examines the cue integration strategies that listeners employ in the perception of prevocalic and pre-consonantal sibilants. In particular, this study examines the perception of /s/-retraction, an ongoing sound change whereby /s/ is realized approaching /ʃ/ as a result of long distance coarticulation from /r/. The study uses eye tracking in the Visual World Paradigm in order to determine precisely when listeners are able to utilize the spectral cues in sibilants in different phonological environments. Results demonstrate that while in most instances listeners wait until more cues are available before considering the correct candidate, fixation accuracy increases significantly throughout the sibilant interval alone. In the pre-consonantal environment, immediate integration strategies were strengthened when the coarticulatory cues of retraction were stronger and when they were more predictable. These findings provide further evidence that context-dependent variation can be helpful to listeners, even on the most variable of sounds.

Differences in Sibilant Perception between Gender Expansive and Cisgender Individuals

“…We extracted the second [s] from the first sentence and the [ R ] and [i] from the second sentence. Then, the sibilants were digitally mixed together using a modified script in PRAAT used in Phillips, 20 creating a continuum from 0% [ R ] to 100% [ R ] at intervals of 10% (producing 11 sibilants) for each of the three voices. COGs (in Hz) for each step of the continuum for each vocal tract are listed in Table 1.…”

The status of sibilant harmony in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)

“…Time-averaged COG frequencies were measured from the middle 80% of each sibilant using a Praat script (DiCanio 2013) set to a 10 millisecond measurement window. COG was selected as the acoustic variable because it has been measured in previous phonetic studies of Dene sibilants (Gordon et al 2002, McDonough 2003 and sibilant harmony (Berkson 2013), and studies of other languages support its utility as an acoustic correlate for sibilant anteriority (Zellou 2013, Phillips 2020). Significantly higher COG means are expected for the fronter [+anterior] /s/ than for [−anterior] /S/.…”