Intoxication and pitch control in tonal and non-tonal language speakers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1182–1186), 2023
Alcohol intoxication facilitates inhibition of one's first language (L1) ego, which may lead to reduced individual differences among second language (L2) speakers under intoxication. This study examined whether, compared to speaking while sober, speaking while intoxicated would reduce individual differences in the acoustic compactness of vowel categories in sequential bilinguals exemplifying diverse L1-L2 pairs (German-English, Korean-English). Vowel compactness in F1 × F2 space varied by language (German, Korean, English) and by vowel, and was generally lower in intoxicated compared to sober speech, both across languages and throughout a bilingual's language repertoire. Crucially, however, there was still a wide range in compactness under intoxication; furthermore, individuals with more compact vowels while sober also produced more compact vowels while intoxicated, in both L1 and L2. Taken together, these findings show patterned variability of vowel compactness, suggesting that articulatory precision is an individual-difference dimension that persists across speaking conditions and throughout the repertoire.
The Effect of Alcohol on Speech Production
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2013
The present study investigates the effect of acute alcohol consumption on speech in Hungarian subjects. The measures used to reveal these effects were tongue-twisters, which were grouped according to their linguistic features. The number and type of speech errors while uttering the tongue-twisters were compared between intoxicated and sober conditions. The results showed that subjects made more speech errors in alcohol influenced than in sober states in all types of the tongue-twisters except for those using foreign words. Changes in the articulation rate, number of pauses and fundamental frequency were investigated as well. In the intoxicated state, no changes were observed in fundamental frequency and articulation rate, while the number of pauses increased.
The influence of alcohol on L1 vs. L2 pronunciation
ICPhS, 2019
In this study, we investigated the influence of alcohol intake on pronunciation in both a native and a non-native language. At a Dutch music festival, we recorded the speech of 87 participants in Dutch (native language) and English (non-native language) when reading a few sentences in both languages. The recorded audio samples were judged by 108 sober native Dutch speakers in a perception experiment at the same festival. Participants were asked to judge how clear the Dutch pronunciations of a random selection of speakers were and how native-like the English pronunciations were. The results, analysed using generalized additive modelling (which is able to identify non-linear relationships), indicated a small linear negative relationship between alcohol intake and clarity of Dutch speech. For English there was no effect of alcohol intake on the native-likeness of the English pronunciations.
Effects of alcohol on the speech of alcoholics
Journal of speech and hearing research, 1972
Speech disfluency resulting from alcohol intoxication was investigated in an experiment using established measures of nonfluency. Male alcoholic subjects (N --16) read a standardized passage into an audio recorder, once while sober and at two different degrees of intoxication. For each reading, the frequency of occurrence of 13 different operationally defined speech errors was scored. Subjects, when intoxicated, took a longer time to read the standardized passage; had increased interjections of words, phrases, and sounds; increased word omissions; increased word revisions; and increased broken suffixes at higher levels of intoxication (10 oz). Possible uses for a profile of disfluent speech of alcoholics are considered and suggestions for further investigations are discussed.
This article presents preliminary results indicating that speakers have a different pitch range when they speak a foreign language compared to the pitch variation that occurs when they speak their native language. To this end, a learner corpus with French and German speakers was analyzed. Results suggest that speakers indeed produce a smaller pitch range in the respective L2. This is true for both groups of native speakers. A possible explanation for this finding is that speakers are less confident in their productions, therefore, they concentrate more on segments and words and subsequently refrain from realizing pitch range more native-like. For language teaching, the results suggest that learners should be trained extensively on the more pronounced use of pitch in the foreign language.
Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
The effects of ingesting ethanol have been shown to be somewhat variable in humans. To date, there appear to be but few universals. Yet, the question often arises: is it possible to determine if a person is intoxicated by observing them in some manner? A closely related question is: can speech be used for this purpose and, if so, can the degree of intoxication be determined? One of the many issues associated with these questions involves the relationships between a person's paralinguistic characteristics and the presence and level of inebriation. To this end, young, healthy speakers of both sexes were carefully selected and sorted into roughly equal groups of light, moderate, and heavy drinkers. They were asked to produce four types of utterances during a learning phase, when sober and at four strictly controlled levels of intoxication ͑three ascending and one descending͒. The primary motor speech measures employed were speaking fundamental frequency, speech intensity, speaking rate and nonfluencies. Several statistically significant changes were found for increasing intoxication; the primary ones included rises in F0, in task duration and for nonfluencies. Minor gender differences were found but they lacked statistical significance. So did the small differences among the drinking category subgroups and the subject groupings related to levels of perceived intoxication. Finally, although it may be concluded that certain changes in speech suprasegmentals will occur as a function of increasing intoxication, these patterns cannot be viewed as universal since a few subjects ͑about 20%͒ exhibited no ͑or negative͒ changes.
This article presents preliminary results indicating that speakers have a different pitch range when they speak a foreign language compared to the pitch variation that occurs when they speak their native language. To this end, a learner corpus with French and German speakers was analyzed. Results suggest that speakers indeed produce a smaller pitch range in the respective L2. This is true for both groups of native speakers. A possible explanation for this finding is that speakers are less confident in their productions, therefore, they concentrate more on segments and words and subsequently refrain from realizing pitch range more native-like. For language teaching, the results suggest that learners should be trained extensively on the more pronounced use of pitch in the foreign language.
Perceiving the Effects of Ethanol Intoxication on Voice
Journal of Voice, 2009
Many conditions operate to degrade the quality of the human voice. Alcohol intoxication is one of them. In this project, the objectives were to examine the ability of human listeners to accurately estimate both the presence and severity of intoxication from two types of speech samples. A review of available data suggests that, although listeners can often identify individuals who are intoxicated simply by hearing samples of their voice, they are less efficient at accurately determining the severity of this condition. A number of aural-perceptual studies were carried out to test these relationships. Populations of speakers, selected based on rigorous criteria, provided orally read and extemporaneous utterances when sober and at three highly controlled levels of intoxication. Listener groups of university students and professionals attempted to identify both the existence and specific level of intoxication present. It was found that these individuals were proficient in recognizing the presence of, and increases in, intoxication but were less accurate in gauging the specific levels. Several subordinate relationships were also investigated. In this regard, statistically significant differences were not found between male and female listeners or between professionals and lay listeners; however, they were found for different classes of speech. That is, it was shown that text difficulty correlated with severity of effect.
Shifts in fundamental frequency and articulation resulting from intoxication
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1995
nemes but the positions of the phonemes in prime and target were different, no facilitation of target responses was found. In a new series of studies, this result is further examined using new stimuli and a dichotic priming format. Results will be discussed in terms of their implications for the nature of the abstract, segmental representation that underlies word recognition and lexical access. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.] 4aSC9. Are coronals different? The influence of the lexicon on coronal identification.
2006
Intrinsic Pitch differences (perceived pitch differences between high vs. low vowels) were found for Germanic languages. Our previous results gave evidence for a strong cross-linguistic difference when examining non-Germanic languages. We therefore designed a cross-linguistic vowel pitch discrimination experiment to examine the existence of intrinsic pitch in non-Germanic languages in comparison to Germanic languages. The experiment was conducted seperately with two groups of listeners: professional musicians and listeners who did not play an instrument at all. In a pre-experiment we screened the difference limen (dl) for the pitch discrimination of (1) musical stimuli and (2) speech stimuli. The reason was to screen the listeners' ability to successfully manage the following vowel pitch discrimination experiments and to allow listeners to train to identify pitch differences, which facilitates the following experiment.