The Nature of Phonetic Gradience across a Dialect Continuum: Evidence from Modern Greek Vowels

Abstract

This study investigates the acoustic properties of vowels in 2 Modern Greek varieties: Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG). Both varieties contain in their phonetic inventories the same 5 vowels. Forty-five female speakers between 19 and 29 years old participated in this study: 20 SMG speakers and 25 CG speakers, born and raised in Athens and Nicosia, respectively. Stimuli consisted of a set of nonsense CVCV and VCV words, each containing 1 of the 5 Greek vowels in stressed and unstressed position. Gaining insights from the controlled experimental design, the study sheds light on the gradient effects of vowel variation in Modern Greek. It shows that (1) stressed vowels are more peripheral than unstressed vowels, (2) SMG unstressed /i a u/ vowels are more raised than the corresponding CG vowels, (3) SMG unstressed vowels are shorter than CG unstressed vowels, and (4) SMG /i·u/ are more rounded than the corresponding CG vowels. Moreover, it shows that variation applies to specific subsystems, as it is the unstressed vowels that vary cross-varietally whereas the stressed vowels display only minor differences. The implications of these findings with respect to vowel raising and vowel reduction are discussed.

Effects of Two Linguistically Proximal Varieties on the Spectral and Coarticulatory Properties of Fricatives: Evidence from Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek

“…F 3 a 0 is overall higher in Athenian Greek than in Cypriot Greek by an estimate of 64 Hz. There were also different effects of the dialect on F 3 a 1 and F 3 a 2 , which suggests that the F 3 contour differs in the two varieties; this finding corroborates earlier studies (e.g., see Themistocleous, 2017b ). An important finding is that the place of articulation of fricatives affects the overall shape of the F 3 contour.…”

“…The recordings of this study were conducted between 2011 and 2012 in Athens, which is the capital city of Greece and in Nicosia, which is the capital city of Cyprus, and it is part of larger program that aims to understand the effects of dialects on the acoustic structure of speech sounds (see also Themistocleous, 2016 , 2017b ).…”

Dialect Classification From a Single Sonorant Sound Using Deep Neural Networks

“…Model comparison: In both classification tasks, we have trained four machine learning models: DNN, SVMs, RFs, and DTs. All models have been employed in speechrelated classification tasks in the past (Graves et al, 2013;Themistocleous, 2017c). Model evaluation: Models were designed and evaluated using two evaluation methods: validation split and group crossvalidation.…”

“…We are also analyzing the coarticulatory effects of sonorants on the adjacent vowel frequencies (for an early study, see Mann, 1980), as these also carry information about sonorants and about speakers' dialect. In fact, in Swedish and in other languages, the lowering of the third formant frequency (F3) of the following vowel is a major cue for the perception of rhotics (Van De Weijer, 1995;Recasens and Espinosa, 2007;Heinrich et al, 2010) (for the role of F3 in Greek, see Themistocleous, 2017c). Since each sonorant exercises different coarticulatory effects on vowel formant frequencies, these effects can be employed to identify the sonorant sound.…”

“…Cypriot Greek is a local variety of Greek spoken in Cyprus; other local varieties of Greek, including Cretan Greek, Pontic Greek, and Tsakonian Greek. Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek are not characterized by vowel raising and reduction, so they are classified as southern varieties, yet acoustically Athenian vowels are more raised than Cypriot Greek vowels (Themistocleous, 2017c). Cypriot Greek and Athenian Greek differ in their pronunciation due to phonetic and phonemic differences (Botinis et al, 2004;Eftychiou, 2010;Themistocleous, 2014Themistocleous, , 2017aThemistocleous et al, 2016), and although Cypriot Greek speakers understand and usually code-switch to Athenian Greek in official settings and in the presence of speakers that are not familiar to the dialect, Athenian…”