The phonology of vowel VISC-osity – acoustic evidence and representational implications

Abstract

While vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) is becoming increasingly prominent in phonetic descriptions of varieties of English, there is little data on whether and how formant dynamics may shape the vowel systems of other languages. This paper provides cross-language acoustic comparisons of the degree of VISC in Polish and British English. In one study, British English showed a greater concentration of F1 movement earlier in the time course of vowels than Polish. In a second study, proficient Polish speakers of English showed a greater concentration of F1 movement earlier in the time course of vowels while speaking their L2 English than while speaking their L1 Polish. These findings are in line with a proposal formulated in the Onset Prominence (OP) framework, by which the relative degree of formant dynamics in the two languages is attributable to consonantal or vocalic affiliation of the Vocalic Onset (VO) node of structure. Consonantal VO affiliation in English contributes to a greater degree of VISC concentrated earlier in vowel duration. Further empirical patterns associated with the OP representational settings in the two languages are also discussed, along with implications for other languages.

Beyond the average: embracing speaker individuality in the dynamic modeling of the acoustic-articulatory relationship

“…Measurements of F 1 and F 2 (in Herz) and of tongue movement displacement in x (anteroposterior) and y (superior-inferior) directions (in mm) of four kinematic variables TBx and TBy (relative to tongue blade), and TDx and TDy (relative to tongue dorsum) were extracted at nine equidistant points relative to vowel duration. However, only the five innermost analysis points were preserved for further analysis in an effort to reduce the impact of coarticulation from the neighboring consonants (Schwartz, 2021). Moreover, vowel tokens produced in the context of nasal, rhotic, lateral, and approximant syllable onset and codas were excluded from the analysis, since coarticulatory effects related to these consonants have been shown to affect vowel formants in a complex manner (Labov et al 2006).…”

Australian English Monophthong Change across 50 Years: Static versus Dynamic Measures

“…These findings have led to greater attention to how dynamic and fine-grained temporal and spectral characteristics of vowels can be captured. Researchers have employed a range of techniques for measuring VISC (e.g., Jin and Liu 2013;Williams et al 2015;Elvin et al 2016;Schwartz 2021), including discrete cosine transform (DCT; see e.g., Zahorian and Jagharghi 1993;Watson and Harrington 1999;Harrington et al 2019b), generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs; Winter and Wieling 2016;Sóskuthy 2017;Wieling 2018;Chuang et al 2020), smoothing spline analysis of variance (SS-ANOVA; Docherty et al 2015), and functional principal components analysis (Gubian et al 2019).…”

Perspectives on final laryngeal neutralisation: new evidence from Polish

“…For discussion of other empirical consequences stemming from the status of VO, unrelated to the question of final voice contrasts, seeSchwartz (2016Schwartz ( , 2021.…”