Production and perception of velar stop (de)voicing in European Portuguese and Italian

Abstract

Speech production and speech perception studies were conducted to compare (de)voicing in the Romance languages European Portuguese (EP) and Italian. For the speech production part, velar stops in two positions and four vowel contexts were recorded. The voicing status for 10 consecutive landmarks during stop closure was computed. Results showed that during the complete stop closure voicing was always maintained for Italian, and that for EP, there was strong devoicing for all vowel contexts and positions. Both language and vowel context had a significant effect on voicing during stop closure. The duration values and voicing patterns from the production study were then used as input factors to a follow-up perceptual experiment to test the effects of vowel duration, stop duration and voicing maintenance on voicing perception by EP and Italian listeners. Perceptual stimuli (VCV) were generated using biomechanical modelling so that they would include physically realistic transitions between phonemes. The consonants were velar stops, with no burst or noise included in the signal. A strong language dependency of the three factors on listeners' voicing distinction was found, with high sensitivity for all three cues for EP listeners and low sensitivity for Italian listeners. For EP stimuli with high voicing maintenance during stop closure, this cue was very strong and overrode the other two acoustic cues. However, for stimuli with low voicing maintenance (i.e. highly devoiced stimuli), the acoustic cues vowel duration and stop duration take over. Even in the absence of both voicing maintenance during stop closure and a burst, the acoustic cues vowel duration and stop duration guaranteed stable voicing distinction in EP. Italian listeners were insensitive to all three acoustic cues examined in this study, with stable voiced responses throughout all of the varying fully crossed factors. None of the examined acoustic cues appeared to be used by Italian listeners to obtain a robust voicing distinction, thus pointing to the use of other acoustic cues or combination of other cues to guarantee stable voicing distinction in this language.

Stop and Fricative Devoicing in European Portuguese, Italian and German

“…Apparently EP fits neither into the aspirated–unaspirated type of languages such as German or English, nor into the strictly voiced–voiceless type of languages such as Italian or Slavic languages. In the following, we present different possibilities for the EP voicing distinction, all from a perceptual point of view; however, follow-up perceptual experiments have to be conducted (see results for EP and Italian presented by Pape and Jesus (2014)) to verify the speculations.…”

“…Thus, the following questions could be raised, especially when seen in the light of cross-linguistic perceptual research: what are the cues that the perceptual system chooses to form a robust voicing distinction, and how is weighting among the available cues mediated? For vowel perception, it has been shown that the human perceptual system is not only able to perform certain weighting techniques between cues (i.e., to apply cue-trading ) in order to achieve a robust perceptual outcome, but, in addition, this weighting differs across different dialects and languages (Escudero, Benders, & Lipski, 2009; Morrison, 2005; Pape & Jesus, 2014). For the perception of obstruent voicing, this cue weighting is assumed to be highly language-dependent: while some languages merely rely on the strong cues like VOT, other languages may rely on voicing maintenance, closure duration or vowel duration instead.…”

A comparison of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Romanian fricatives

“…Our fricative corpus was originally collected by the first author of this study for her dissertation research, which addresses the topic of secondary palatalization more generally (Spinu 2010). Due to the focus on secondary palatalization and the characteristics of its distribution in Romanian, there are important differences between our stimuli and those used in the majority of previous studies, such as the VC syllabic structure, as compared to CV (with exceptions such as Jesus and Shadle 2002, Pape and Jesus 2014, and Maniwa et al 2009, who also examined fricatives in a VCV context) and the inclusion of plain and palatalized fricative pairs, allowing us to compare these two types of segments directly. This is particularly noteworthy because, to our knowledge, no large-scale studies have attempted the classification of plain versus palatalized segments based on their acoustic properties.…”

Phonological contrasts and gradient effects in ongoing lenition in the Spanish of Gran Canaria

“…This is justified by evidence from perception. For instance, Pape & Jesus (2014) demonstrate that a perceptual voicing threshold can be found as early as at the 20–25% mark of stop duration, and that listeners can reliably differentiate between voiced and voiceless intervocalic stops in which voicing is maintained for more than 50% of the duration of the sound. Similar results were found for other languages (Snoeren et al 2008, Mercier 2019).…”