Perception of consonant length: voiceless stops in Turkish and Bengali

Hankamer, Jorge; Lahiri, Aditi; Koreman, Jacques

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30445-0

Cited by 55 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The measures were made using waveform and spectrographic displays generated by PRAAT acoustic analysis software (version 4.4.30; Boersma and Weenink, 2006). The segmentation procedures described below followed those described by prior studies (Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Klatt, 1976;Lahiri and Hankamer, 1988;Hankamer et al, 1989;Ham, 2001) and applied to the measurement of Japanese stop sounds by Idemaru and Guion (2008) and Idemaru and Guion-Anderson (2010).…”

Section: Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in cue weights are stable across time: The case of Japanese stop lengths

Idemaru

Holt

Seltman

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, and listeners give differential weighting to dimensions in phonetic categorization. The informativeness (predictive strength) of dimensions for categorization is considered an important factor in determining perceptual weighting. However, it is unknown how the perceptual system weighs acoustic dimensions with similar informativeness. This study investigates perceptual weighting of two acoustic dimensions with similar informativeness, exploiting the absolute and relative durations that are nearly equivalent in signaling Japanese singleton and geminate stop categories. In the perception experiments, listeners showed strong individual differences in their perceptual weighting of absolute and relative durations. Furthermore, these individual patterns were stable over repeated testing across as long as 2 months and were resistant to perturbation through short-term manipulation of speech input. Listeners own speech productions were not predictive of how they weighted relative and absolute duration. Despite the theoretical advantage of relative (as opposed to absolute) duration cues across contexts, relative cues are not utilized by all listeners. Moreover, examination of individual differences in cue weighting is a useful tool in exposing the complex relationship between perceptual cue weighting and language regularities.

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Section: Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in cue weights are stable across time: The case of Japanese stop lengths

Idemaru

Holt

Seltman

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…Perception of quantity is also affected by factors other than the duration of the segment in question, as shown by many previous studies (e.g. [13] for Bengali, [9,10] for Finnish). Preceding vowel duration has been reported to affect geminate perception in several languages [14], in ways matching their production patterns, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 67%

Perception of geminates in Finnish and Polish

O’Dell¹,

Malisz²

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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Finnish and Polish subjects judged four series of two-syllable stimuli varying in intervocalic consonant duration as short (singleton) or long (geminate). The four series differed in the durations of the flanking vowels. As predicted, perception shifted toward geminates for Finnish subjects when V1 was lengthened, especially when V2 was also shortened, to match normal Finnish production. The shift also occurred for Finnish subjects when V1:V2 ratio was kept constant. Any effect of lengthened stimuli on perceived tempo, expected to produce a geminate boundary shift in the opposite direction, was smaller than the V1-effect. We also hypothesised that Polish subjects would show a similar pattern in perception, given that, like Finnish, Polish has slightly longer vowels before geminates. Polish listeners did present a clear sensitivity to flanking vowel durations but the observed shifts in geminate boundaries for the four stimulus series were almost exactly reversed compared to the Finnish subjects.

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“…One reason to use Tashlhiyt as the target language (other than the fact that French listeners are unlikely to have been exposed to Tashlhiyt) is that singleton-geminate contrasts in this language are almost exclusively marked by duration differences (Ridouane, 2007 ), which are directly relevant to quantity distinctions. Although the primary acoustic cue to gemination is always duration (Lahiri and Hankamer, 1988 ; Hankamer et al, 1989 ; Ridouane, 2010 ), there are some languages in which other phonetic or prosodic cues participate in the distinction between geminate and single consonants: for example, accentual cues in Pattani Malay (Abramson, 1986 ), VOT differences in Cypriot Greek (Armosti, 2009 ), following vowel quality differences in Japanese (Kawahara, 2006 ). Because we address here the issue of the perception of nonnative consonant duration quantity contrasts, a target language such as Tashlhiyt, for which the possible confounds with other dimensions than duration are minimized, is highly desirable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners

2016

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In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts such as bi-bbi or sir-ssir. That is, French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final voiceless stops than to either voiced murmur or frication duration of fully voiced stops or voiceless fricatives in word-initial position. We propose, tentatively, that native speakers of French, a language in which gemination is usually not considered to be phonemic, have not acquired quantity contrasts but yet exhibit a presumably universal sensitivity to rhythm, whereby listeners are able to perceive and compare the relative temporal distance between beats given by successive salient phonetic events such as a sequence of vowel nuclei.

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Perception of consonant length: voiceless stops in Turkish and Bengali

Cited by 55 publications

References 8 publications

Individual differences in cue weights are stable across time: The case of Japanese stop lengths

Individual differences in cue weights are stable across time: The case of Japanese stop lengths

Perception of geminates in Finnish and Polish

Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners

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