Prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch (original) (raw)
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Contextual Neutralization of Vowel Length: Evidence from Dutch
Phonetica, 1987
Based on recent experimental studies of word-final devoicing in languages like German and Catalan which show production differences between the neutralized and nonneutralized consonants., it has been claimed that phonological neutralization is'incomplete'. It seems, however, that this claim is quite premature given that most studies have considered only the neutralizing phenomenon of word-final devoicing. In this paper, we examine a qualitatively different neutralizing phenomenonthe neutral tzalion of vowel length in open syllables. We compared the duration of Dutch long vowels which are derived by an open-syllable lenghtening rule to those that are underlyingly long (cf. [da:len] < /dal+en/ vs. [ba:len] < /bal+en/). Our study shows that there is no difference in the duration between these vowels and that, at least, in this instance, contextual neutralization does lead to identical surface realization of distinct phonological segments.
An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and Southern Standard Dutch
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004
A database is presented of measurements of the fundamental frequency, the frequencies of the first three formants, and the duration of the 15 vowels of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands ͑Northern Standard Dutch͒ and in Belgium ͑Southern Standard Dutch͒. The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context ͑i.e., /sVs/͒. Recordings were made for 20 female talkers and 20 male talkers, who were stratified for the factors age, gender, and region. Of the 40 talkers, 20 spoke Northern Standard Dutch and 20 spoke Southern Standard Dutch. The results indicated that the nine monophthongal Dutch vowels /a Ä } i ( Å u y +/ can be separated fairly well given their steady-state characteristics, while the long mid vowels /e o Ö/ and three diphthongal vowels /}( Åu !y/ also require information about their dynamic characteristics. The analysis of the formant values indicated that Northern Standard Dutch and Southern Standard Dutch differ little in the formant frequencies at steady-state for the nine monophthongal vowels. Larger differences between these two language varieties were found for the dynamic specifications of the three long mid vowels, and, to a lesser extent, of the three diphthongal vowels.
A cross-linguistic study of accentual lengthening: Dutch vs. English
Journal of Phonetics, 1999
Close examination of studies concerned with the distribution of accentual lengthening in Dutch and English reveals that the di!erences previously found between these two languages may be the result of di!erent experimental designs. Results of new experiments on Dutch using the same conditions as were used in the English experiments indicate that these two languages are indeed more similar than they were previously thought to be; in both languages, all syllables within an accented word are lengthened to some degree, as compared to a baseline unaccented condition, however a greater amount of lengthening is found on an adjacent syllable to the right of the pitch accented syllable than on an adjacent syllable to the left. Furthermore, the data suggest that only the boundaries of syllables and of (syntactic) words in#uence the distribution of accentual lengthening.
Measuring and Comparing Vowel Qualities in a Dutch Spontaneous SpeechCorpus
2000
Recent studies of spoken Standard Dutch support an ongoing change in the phonetic quality of the diphthong /EI/ (1, 2). How- ever, there is a need for broader analyses and larger data set s. Here, we took Dutch vowel variants of 44 speakers from a spoken Dutch speech corpus, the CGN (3). The vowels were measured and com- pared on
Dutch vowel production by Spanish learners: duration and spectral features
Interspeech 2014, 2014
In this paper we present a study on Dutch vowel production by Spanish learners that was carried out within the framework of our research on Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT). The aim of this study was to obtain detailed information on production of Dutch vowels by Spanish learners, which can be employed to develop effective CAPT programs for this specific target group. We collected speech from learners with varying proficiency levels (A1-B2 of the CEFR), which was transcribed, segmented and acoustically analyzed. We present data on the frequency of pronunciation errors and on detailed analyses of duration and acoustic properties of the vocalic realizations. The results indicate that Spanish learners of Dutch have difficulties in realizing several Dutch vowel contrasts and that they differ from native speakers in the way they employ duration and spectral properties to realize these contrasts. We discuss these results in relation to those of previous studies on Dutch vowel perception by Spanish listeners and relate them to current theories on speech learning.
Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII, 2011
Recent vowel corpora show that there are often clear acoustic differences between vowels produced in different phonetic contexts. We expand on a recent corpus of Northern Standard Dutch (NSD) vowels by including a variety of consonantal contexts. Our results show that there are very clear contextual effects on the spectral and temporal properties of NSD vowels. The most striking effect is the apparent 'fronting' of vowels in alveolar contexts, which has not previously been reported for Dutch. Classification with a supervised learning algorithm reveals some substantial differences between our acoustic measurements and those reported in earlier studies on NSD vowels.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2007
A database is presented of measurements of the fundamental frequency, the frequencies of the first three formants, and the duration of the 15 vowels of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands ͑Northern Standard Dutch͒ and in Belgium ͑Southern Standard Dutch͒. The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context ͑i.e., /sVs/͒. Recordings were made for 20 female talkers and 20 male talkers, who were stratified for the factors age, gender, and region. Of the 40 talkers, 20 spoke Northern Standard Dutch and 20 spoke Southern Standard Dutch. The results indicated that the nine monophthongal Dutch vowels /a Ä } i ( Å u y +/ can be separated fairly well given their steady-state characteristics, while the long mid vowels /e o Ö/ and three diphthongal vowels /}( Åu !y/ also require information about their dynamic characteristics. The analysis of the formant values indicated that Northern Standard Dutch and Southern Standard Dutch differ little in the formant frequencies at steady-state for the nine monophthongal vowels. Larger differences between these two language varieties were found for the dynamic specifications of the three long mid vowels, and, to a lesser extent, of the three diphthongal vowels.