The Influence of Consonant Environment upon the Secondary Acoustical Characteristics of Vowels

Abstract

DESIGN OF HIGH FREQUENCY ANECHOIC TANKS 105 for use in the megacycle region can be simply constructed with a tan rho-c rubber liner. At a frequency of 3.35 megacycles a -}-inch thick liner provides results which are close to optimum, yielding a reflection coefficient of about--30 db up to an angle of incidence of about 60 ø . Above 60 ø the liner is highly ineffective. Theoretically, one would desire that the real part of the dilatational velocity in the rubber be slightly higher than that in water. In addition, there is an optimum dilatational attenuation coefficient which is frequency dependent. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe author wishes to thank Dr. W. C. Wineland for his many helpful suggestions, and Mr. R. H. Yee for his • -40 -50 Fro. 10. Experimental reflection coefficient for an aluminum backed rho-c rubber sheet of indicated thickness at a frequency of 3.35 megacycles/sec and beam width of 3 ø. assistance in carrying out the calculations and experiments.The consonant environments of vowels were varied by forming non meaningful stimulus syllables consisting of 72 combinations of six vowels and 12 consonants. The syllables were spoken by subjects, and the duration, fundamental frequency, and relative power of the vowels were measured. All three factors varied significantly in response to changes of the consonant environment. The variations were systematically related to the attributes of the consonants, the most powerful attribute being the presence or absence of vocal fold vibration, followed by manner of articulation and place of articulation, in that order. MONG the acoustical investigations of vowels,experiments employing wave analysis have naturally been most numerous, while studies of the secondary characteristics--duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity--have been relatively few. Especially has this been true of variation in these secondary characteristics which may be systematically related to the widely varying consonantal environments of vowels in words.Fairbanks, House, and Stevens, • reporting the results of an experiment on the relative intensities of vowels, concluded that, "When the same vowel is spoken in different isolated words, its intensity sometimes varies significantly from word to word, and it seems probable that such variations are, in part at least, effects of differing consonantal environments." In that investigation the words spoken by the subjects were monosyllables in which vowels were preceded and followed by consonant elements. All consonants were voiceless and varied unsystematically among stopplosives, fricatives, and affricates, produced in bilabial, labio-dental, lingua-dental, and velar positions. Since • Fairbanks, House, and Stevens, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 22, 457 (1950).voicing was held constant and since only 10 words were used for each vowel, such variations were implicitly restricted. The finding that significant variation in intensity obtained even under these conditions was of unusual interest. A few previous studies have shown variation in duration also. Heffner an...

What the reader’s eye tells the mind’s ear: Silent reading activates inner speech

“…Port (1981) found that, in monosyllabic English words, vowels followed by voiceless consonants were 34% shorter than the same vowels followed by voiced consonants. Similarly, House and Fairbanks (1953) reported that vowels followed by voiceless consonants averaged 165 msec, while vowels followed by voiced consonants averaged 255 msec. In general, the dynamic range of vowel duration varies from 40 to 235 msec (Umeda, 1975).…”

Towards Understanding Text Factors in Oral Reading

“…Thus it has been long known that different segments have different intrinsic durations which account for a lot of variation in segmental durations (Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Klatt, 1976;van Santen, 1992): for example, high vowels tend to be shorter than low vowels. At the syllable level, in many languages vowels tend to be shorter when followed by a voiceless consonant than when followed by a voiced consonant (House and Fairbanks, 1953;Crystal and House, 1988) while consonants within a consonant cluster tend to be shorter than single consonants (Klatt, 1976).…”

The evolution of auditory dispersion in bidirectional constraint grammars

“…The relation between the phonological and the phonetic form is evaluated by cue constraints (CUE), and the phonetic form on its own is evaluated by articulatory constraints (*ART). As an example of a cue constraint, consider the fact that the duration of a vowel is a major cue to the voicing of a following obstruent in English, both in perception (Denes 1955, Raphael 1972) and in production (Heffner 1937, House & Fairbanks 1953, Luce & Charles-Luce 1985, but at most a weak cue in some other languages, both in perception (Morrison 2002, Broersma 2005 6 and in production (Keating 1979(Keating , 1985. Hence, the cue constraint *[long vowel duration] /obs,Avoice/ is ranked high in English but low elsewhere.…”