Timing relations in speech and the identification of voice-onset times: A stable perceptual boundary for voicing categories across speaking rates

Boucher, Victor J.

doi:10.3758/bf03194561

Cited by 40 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In other words, the relational measures of both 'short and long' members of all three vowel series discussed above were affected equally by hyperarticulated clear speech. Similar stability of relational measures across speaking rates was reported by Hirata (2004), Hirata and Whiton (2005), Boucher (2002) and Pickett et al (1999) among others. For instance, Hirata (2004) found that although the Japanese phonemically short and long vowels were affected by speaking rate in a way that increased the duration contrast in absolute measures, the ratios of long-to-short vowels in real words were not affected at normal and slow speaking rate (although they were smaller in fast speech).…”

Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Similar stability of the voicing contrasts across speaking rates when expressed proportionally has been shown by Summerfield (1981), Blumstein (1998) andBoucher (2002). For instance, Boucher (2002), demonstrated that VOT of a stop in the V1C1V2C2 sequence (e.g., a tap) relative to C1V2, as well as to V2C2 and C1V2C2, presents a stable value across speaking rates. This suggests that VOT may be processed relative to units as large as a syllable.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

“…In this study, however, we compare the 'strongest' and 'weakest' prosodic effects, i.e., we collapse stress and word-initial position and compare this with the effect of unstressed, word-medial position on stop consonant production. vii We looked at VOT as a percentage of the stop duration rather than of the syllable duration (as was done by Boucher, 2002) because it was often impossible to measure the duration of the unstressed syllable in the conversational speaking style due to extensive coarticulation with the following word. Furthermore, word-initial syllables all had CV structure while word-medial ones had varying structure (due to the nature of our corpus/task since we used all real words).…”

Section: Closure Duration and Voice Onset Timementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, a number of studies that examined the effect of speaking rate on temporal dimensions of speech, such as VOT, short/long vowel duration and single/geminate stop duration, argue for relational invariance in the production of these contrasts across speaking rates. Although they found that the duration difference is enlarged between the two members of the contrasting pair when expressed in absolute measures, proportional measures exhibited stability across speaking rates (Hirata, 2004, Hirata andWhiton, 2005;Kessinger and Blumstein, 1998;Pind, 1986Pind, , 1995Pind, , 1999Pickett et al, 1999;Boucher, 2002). For instance, Boucher (2002) argued that the ratio of VOT to syllable duration for American English /t/ and /d/ is maintained across speaking rates which suggests that the contrast is not increased when rate is decreased.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Smiljanić

Bradlow

2008

Journal of Phonetics

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In this paper we investigate the effect of clear speech, a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibilityenhancing mode of speech production, on vowel and stop consonant contrasts along the temporal dimension in English and Croatian. Our previous work has shown that, in addition to enhancing the overall acoustic salience of the speech signal through a decrease in speaking rate and expansion of pitch range, clear speech modifications increased the spectral distances between vowel categories in both languages despite the different sizes of their vowel inventories (+10 in English, 5 in Croatian). Here, we examine how clear speech affects the duration of English tense ('long') vs. lax ('short') vowels, English vowels preceding voiced ('long') vs. voiceless ('short') coda stops, Croatian long vs. short vowels and Croatian and English VOT duration for voiced and voiceless stops. Overall, the results showed that the proportional distance between the 'short' and 'long' vowel categories and between the voiced and voiceless stop categories was remarkably stable across the two speaking styles in both languages. These results suggest that, in combination with the spectral enhancement of vowel contrasts, language-specific pronunciation norms along the temporal dimension are maintained in clear and conversational speech.

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Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Section: Closure Duration and Voice Onset Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Smiljanić

Bradlow

2008

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A number of studies that examined the effect of speaking rate on temporal features of speech, such as VOT, short/long vowel duration, and single/geminate stop duration, argue for relational invariance in the production of these contrasts across speaking rates. 1 Although they found that the duration difference is enlarged between the two members of the contrasting pair when expressed in absolute measures, proportional measures exhibited stability across speaking rates for various languages ͑Hirata, 2004; Hirata and Whiton, 2005;Kessinger and Blumstein, 1998;Pickett et al, 1999;Boucher, 2002͒. Some of these studies ͑e.g., Boucher, 2002͒ argue for the perceptual invariance as well as production invariance while others ͑Miller and Volaitis, 1989;Volaitis and Miller, 1992;Nagao and de Jong, 2007͒ show that the perceptual boundaries shift with changes in speaking rate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal organization of English clear and conversational speech

Smiljanić

Bradlow

2008

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study investigated the effect of hyperarticulated, intelligibility-enhancing clear speech on temporal characteristics as reflected in number, durations, and variability of consonant and vowel intervals in sentence-and paragraph-length utterances. The results of sentence-in-noise listening tests showed a consistent clear speech intelligibility gain across the utterances of varying complexity indicating that the talkers successfully maintained clear speech articulatory modifications throughout longer stretches of speech. The acoustic analysis revealed that some temporal restructuring accompanied changes in speaking style. This temporal restructuring was observed in the insertion of consonant and vowel segments that were dropped or coarticulated in conversational speech and in an increase in the number of prosodic phrases for clear speech. Importantly, coefficients of variation ͑variation of consonantal and vocalic intervals normalized for changes in speaking rate͒ for both consonantal and vowel intervals remained stable in the two speaking styles. Overall, these results suggest that increased intelligibility of clear speech may be attributed to prosodic structure enhancement ͑increased phrasing and enhanced segmentability͒ and stable global temporal properties.

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Infant directed speech and the development of speech perception: Enhancing development or an unintended consequence?

McMurray¹,

Kovack-Lesh²,

Goodwin³

et al. 2013

Cognition

136

163

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Infant directed speech (IDS) is a speech register characterized by simpler sentences, a slower rate, and more variable prosody. Recent work has implicated it in more subtle aspects of language development. Kuhl et al. (1997) demonstrated that segmental cues for vowels are affected by IDS in a way that may enhance development: the average locations of the extreme “point” vowels (/a/, /i/ and /u/) are further apart in acoustic space. If infants learn speech categories, in part, from the statistical distributions of such cues, these changes may specifically enhance speech category learning. We revisited this by asking (1) if these findings extend to a new cue (Voice Onset Time, a cue for voicing); (2) whether they extend to the interior vowels which are much harder to learn and/or discriminate; and (3) whether these changes may be an unintended phonetic consequence of factors like speaking rate or prosodic changes associated with IDS. Eighteen caregivers were recorded reading a picture book including minimal pairs for voicing (e.g., beach/peach) and a variety of vowels to either an adult or their infant. Acoustic measurements suggested that VOT was different in IDS, but not in a way that necessarily supports better development, and that these changes are almost entirely due to slower rate of speech of IDS. Measurements of the vowel suggested that in addition to changes in the mean, there was also an increase in variance, and statistical modeling suggests that this may counteract the benefit of any expansion of the vowel space. As a whole this suggests that changes in segmental cues associated with IDS may be an unintended by-product of the slower rate of speech and different prosodic structure, and do not necessarily derive from a motivation to enhance development.

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Timing relations in speech and the identification of voice-onset times: A stable perceptual boundary for voicing categories across speaking rates

Cited by 40 publications

References 43 publications

Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Temporal organization of English clear and conversational speech

Infant directed speech and the development of speech perception: Enhancing development or an unintended consequence?

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