The singleton-geminate distinction can be rate dependent: Evidence from Maltese

Abstract

Many languages distinguish short and long consonants, or singletons and geminates. The primary acoustic correlate of this distinction is the duration of the consonants. Given that the absolute duration of speech sounds varies with speech rate, the question rises to what extent the category boundary between singletons and geminates is sensitive to the overall speech rate (i.e., rate normalization). Next to rate normalization, there are two other possible explanations how singletons and geminates might be distinguished. First, it has been suggested that despite variation in absolute duration, the two categories remain distinct; that is, even in fast speech, geminates seldom take on durations that would be typical of singletons at slow speech rates. Second, it has been suggested that, with higher speech rate, both the duration of consonants and vowels shrink, so that the duration ratio of consonant and adjacent vowel is a rate independent cue for the singleton-geminate distinction. Using production and perception data from Maltese, we show that, first, the singleton-geminate distinction is endangered by speech-rate variation and, second, consequently undergoes speech-rate normalization.

Contextual speech rate influences morphosyntactic prediction and integration

“…Bosker, 2017aBosker, , 2017bBosker, Reinisch, & Sjerps, 2017;Kaufeld et al, in press;Maslowski, Meyer, & Bosker, 2018, 2019a. Similar findings have been reported for other (duration-cued) segmental distinctions, such as /b-p/ (Gordon, 1988), /b-w/ (Miller & Baer, 1983;Wade & Holt, 2005), /p-p#p/ (Pickett & Decker, 1960), and singletongeminate (Mitterer, 2018). In fact, reduced highly coarticulated linguistic units can even be missed entirely by listeners when presented in slow contexts.…”

Not just a function of function words: Distal speech rate influences perception of prosodically weak syllables

“…Historically, distal rate effects on phoneme-level perception, e.g., for consonants like /g/ vs. /k/ differing in voice-onset time, have been recognized to be fairly fragile, with generally small effects on phonetic boundary shifts (Kidd, 1989;Summerfield, 1981;Wade & Holt, 2005). Recent studies have generalized knowledge of distal rate effects on speech perception by considering a wider array of phoneme-level perceptual ambiguities, both ambiguities in type of phoneme, e.g., / / versus / :/ in Dutch (Bosker, 2017), and number of phonemes, e.g., Canadian oats versus Canadian notes (Heffner et al, 2017;Reinisch, Jesse, & McQueen, 2011;Reinisch & Sjerps, 2013), and singleton/geminate contrasts (Mitterer, 2018) and have demonstrated effect sizes more comparable to those seen the Bdisappearing word^cases. While variability in study designs obviously raises caveats to any generalizations across these studiesincluding in the type of dependent measure used (e.g., temporal boundary shifts vs. proportion of responses indicating an extra unit)it tentatively appears to be the case that distal rate effects on phoneme-level perceptual ambiguities (vowel-length contrasts, phoneme count, singleton/geminate) may be less robust than distal rate effects on syllable-level perceptual ambiguities (leisure or time, I align vs.…”

The Role of Segmental Information in Syntactic Processing Through the Syntax–Prosody Interface

“…For example, given that a lexical boundary is aligned with a prosodic word boundary, which is partly expressed in duration (being suprasegmental extending over more than a single segment), duration also co-determines which words we are hearing (Salverda et al, 2003). Thus, perceiving the prosodic structure of a sentence in terms of its duration (Morrill et al, 2015) or pitch contour (Morrill et al, 2014) can influence listeners' spoken word recognition; and it may also heavily influence the decision on whether a segment is a singleton or a geminate (Mitterer, 2018b).…”