Neurobiological evidence for voicing underspecification in English

Hestvik, Arild; Durvasula, Karthik

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2015.10.007

Cited by 46 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Multiple tokens of the deviant and standard stimuli provide this within category variation. MMN responses from a high token-variability paradigm can lead to a different pattern of results than found from a paradigm in which only one token of standard and one of a deviant stimulus are used, because the single token paradigm allows for discrimination solely on the basis of acoustic difference (Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016). In addition, increased phonological complexity of stimuli is likely to lead to greater reliance on the phonological level of processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Mandarin Lexical Tone Processing

Shafer

Sussman

2017

Front. Neurosci.

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Language experience enhances discrimination of speech contrasts at a behavioral- perceptual level, as well as at a pre-attentive level, as indexed by event-related potential (ERP) mismatch negativity (MMN) responses. The enhanced sensitivity could be the result of changes in acoustic resolution and/or long-term memory representations of the relevant information in the auditory cortex. To examine these possibilities, we used a short (ca. 600 ms) vs. long (ca. 2,600 ms) interstimulus interval (ISI) in a passive, oddball discrimination task while obtaining ERPs. These ISI differences were used to test whether cross-linguistic differences in processing Mandarin lexical tone are a function of differences in acoustic resolution and/or differences in long-term memory representations. Bisyllabic nonword tokens that differed in lexical tone categories were presented using a passive listening multiple oddball paradigm. Behavioral discrimination and identification data were also collected. The ERP results revealed robust MMNs to both easy and difficult lexical tone differences for both groups at short ISIs. At long ISIs, there was either no change or an enhanced MMN amplitude for the Mandarin group, but reduced MMN amplitude for the English group. In addition, the Mandarin listeners showed a larger late negativity (LN) discriminative response than the English listeners for lexical tone contrasts in the long ISI condition. Mandarin speakers outperformed English speakers in the behavioral tasks, especially under the long ISI conditions with the more similar lexical tone pair. These results suggest that the acoustic correlates of lexical tone are fairly robust and easily discriminated at short ISIs, when the auditory sensory memory trace is strong. At longer ISIs beyond 2.5 s language-specific experience is necessary for robust discrimination.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Mandarin Lexical Tone Processing

Shafer

Sussman

2017

Front. Neurosci.

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“…In this paper, we turn to neurophysiological data, in the form of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) paradigm, that has been argued to reveal at least some aspects of phonological structure (Phillips et al, 2000; Walter and Hacquard, 2004; Kazanina et al, 2006; Scharinger et al, 2010, 2012; Cornell et al, 2011, 2013; Law et al, 2013; Truckenbrodt et al, 2014; de Jonge and Boersma, 2015; Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016; Politzer-Ahles et al, 2016; Schluter et al, 2016) in order to test these different representational approaches. In three MMN experiments, we test English, Arabic, and Russian, three different languages that have a functional two-way voicing distinction at a phonological level, but which rely on different underlying articulatory mechanisms to implement these distinctions during speech production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Vaux (1998) argues that, cross-linguistically, it is the voiceless fricative that is marked, except in languages like Burmese which contrast voiced /z/, voiceless /s/, and voiceless aspirated /s h / fricatives. Recent neurophysiological evidence, however, has been argued to support the laryngeal realism hypothesis (Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Applying Eulitz and Lahiri’s (2004) logic to voicing and the feature marking hypothesis laid out by laryngeal realism, one would expect to observe, in an aspirating language like English, an asymmetry based on an aspiration or [S PREAD G LOTTIS ] feature, as voicing in English is taken to be only a phonetic phenomenon. Indeed, this was recently tested with English stop consonants, where Hestvik and Durvasula (2016) find a larger MMN for the unmarked voiced deviant /d/ than the voiceless one (/t/). By the same token, in a voicing language, the prediction about the MMN asymmetry is the reverse: a larger MMN for the unmarked voiceless deviant (/t/) compared to the marked voiced deviant (/d/), as the voiced segment is marked for [V OICE ] and the voiceless one left unmarked.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We do this with three experiments. In Experiment 1, we use English fricatives to test if the feature marking of these segments is the same as the one in stops (as revealed by the results of Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016) 8 . We test this using an oddball paradigm with the English segments [f] (voiceless) and [v] (voiced) and compare the results to those of Hestvik and Durvasula (2016) for the English stops [t h ] and [].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

et al. 2017

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Many theories of phonology assume that the sound structure of language is made up of distinctive features, but there is considerable debate about how much articulatory detail distinctive features encode in long-term memory. Laryngeal features such as voicing provide a unique window into this question: while many languages have two-way contrasts that can be given a simple binary feature account [±VOICE], the precise articulatory details underlying these contrasts can vary significantly across languages. Here, we investigate a series of two-way voicing contrasts in English, Arabic, and Russian, three languages that implement their voicing contrasts very differently at the articulatory-phonetic level. In three event-related potential experiments contrasting English, Arabic, and Russian fricatives along with Russian stops, we observe a consistent pattern of asymmetric mismatch negativity (MMN) effects that is compatible with an articulatorily abstract and cross-linguistically uniform way of marking two-way voicing contrasts, as opposed to an articulatorily precise and cross-linguistically diverse way of encoding them. Regardless of whether a language is theorized to encode [VOICE] over [SPREAD GLOTTIS], the data is consistent with a universal marking of the [SPREAD GLOTTIS] feature.

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Neurocomputational Properties of Speech Sound Perception and Production

Grimaldi

2023

Neuromethods

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Neurobiological evidence for voicing underspecification in English

Cited by 46 publications

References 53 publications

Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Mandarin Lexical Tone Processing

Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Mandarin Lexical Tone Processing

Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

Neurocomputational Properties of Speech Sound Perception and Production

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