Perception of phonetic detail in the identification of highly reduced words (original) (raw)
Related papers
Phonetic reductions and linguistic factors
2013
In natural communication it is common for speakers to vary between distinct and reduced pronunciations of words or phonemic strings. This paper highlights the some results from a recent large scale study of the occurence of phonetic reductions in Danish spontaneous speech. In this study phonetic reduction is explored by mapping the abstract phonemic representation in a spontaneous speech corpus with the actual phonetic realization on a phone-by-phone basis. By investigating the occurence of distinct vs. reduced realizations of phonemes, it is demonstrated that the propensity for phonetic reduction is closely related to various levels of linguistic description, e.g. the articulatory traits of the individual phonemes, their phonological context, morphological structure, grammatical function and pragmatic factors.
The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants
2015
This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme co-articulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension.
An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants
Journal of Phonetics, 2011
Words are often pronounced very differently in formal speech than in everyday conversations. In conversational speech, they may contain weaker segments, fewer sounds, and even fewer syllables. The English word yesterday, for instance, may be pronounced as [jePai]. This article forms an introduction to the phenomenon of reduced pronunciation variants and to the eight research articles in this issue on the characteristics, production, and comprehension of these variants. We provide a description of the phenomenon, addressing its high frequency of occurrence in casual conversations in various languages, the gradient nature of many reduction processes, and the intelligibility of reduced variants to native listeners. We also describe the relevance of research on reduced variants for linguistic and psychological theories as well as for applications in speech technology and foreign language acquisition. Since reduced variants occur more often in spontaneous than in formal speech, they are hard to study in the laboratory under well controlled conditions. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of possible solutions, including the research methods employed in the articles in this special issue, based on corpora and experiments. This article ends with a short overview of the articles in this issue.
An Acoustic Profile Of Consonant Reduction
1996
Vowel reduction has been studied for years. It is a universal phenomenon that reduces the distinction of vowels in informal speech and unstressed syllables. How consonants behave in situations where vowels are reduced is much less well known. In this paper we compare durational and spectral data (for both intervocalic consonants and vowels) segmented from read speech with otherwise identical segments from spontaneous speech. On a global level, it shows that consonants reduce like vowels when the speaking style becomes informal. On a more detailed level there are differences related to the type of the consonant.
An acoustic description of consonant reduction
Speech Communication, 1999
The acoustic consequences of the articulatory reduction of consonants remain largely unknown. Much more is known about acoustic vowel reduction. Whether the acoustical and perceptual consequences of articulatory consonant reduction are comparable in kind and extent to the consequences of vowel reduction is still an open question. In this study we compare acoustic data for 791 VCV realizations, containing 17 Dutch intervocalic consonants and 13 vowels, extracted from read speech from a single male speaker, to otherwise identical segments isolated from spontaneous speech. Five acoustic correlates of reduction were studied. Acoustic tracers of articulation were based on F 2 slope dierences and locus equations. Speech eort was assessed by measuring duration, spectral balance, and the intervocalic sound energy dierence of consonants. On a global level, it shows that consonants reduce acoustically like vowels on all investigated accounts when the speaking style becomes informal or syllables become unstressed. Methods that are sensitive to speech eort proved to be more reliable indicators of reduction than F 2 based measures. On a more detailed level there are dierences related to the type of consonant. The acoustic results suggest that articulatory reduction will decrease the intelligibility of consonants and vowels in comparable ways.
English Native and Nonnative Speakers’ Perception of English Reduced Word Forms with Reduced Vowels
The Journal of AsiaTEFL
It has been controversial whether phonetic-fine details of the lexical items are encoded and accessed in L1 or L2 speakers' lexicon and how the variants of the reduced word forms are recognized. To address these issues, in this study we carried out the perceptual word recognition experiment, i.e., AB identification test with English native speakers and Korean nonnative English speakers. Two types of synthesized listening stimuli were created from two types of the original word forms by shortening or lengthening the durations of the reduced vowels: words containing the reduced vowels and words without them in the first syllables. First, the results show that a wider variety of tokens of the variants of reduced word forms differing only in the durations of the reduced vowels were recognized with substantially high rates as those with the reduced vowels for English L1 speakers than for Korean L2 English speakers. These findings indicate that phonetic-fine detail information of the reduced word forms with respect to the vowel durations is represented and reconstructed in the lexicon for L1 and L2 speakers' lexicon although their representational robustness varies depending on L1 or L2 status. Furthermore, we show that the degrees of vowel reduction exert the differential effects on the reconstruction or identification of English words according to the word-initial C(V)C types and L1 or L2 status. It also turns out that depending on the presence/absence of the reduced vowels in the words, Korean L2 English speakers are less sensitive or oversensitive to the vowel duration when they recognize the words.
Phonetic reduction can lead to lengthening, and enhancement can lead to shortening
Contextually probable, high-frequency, or easily accessible words tend to be phonetically reduced, a pattern usually attributed to faster lexical access. In principle, word forms that are frequent in their inflectional paradigms should also enjoy faster lexical access, leading again to phonetic reduction. Yet research has found evidence of both reduction and enhancement on paradigmatically probable inflectional affixes. The current corpus study uses pronunciation data from conversationally produced English verbs and nouns to test the predictions of two accounts. In an exemplar account, paradigmatically probable forms seem enhanced because their denser exemplar clouds resist influence from related word forms on the average production target. A second pressure reduces such forms because they are, after all, more easily accessed. Under this account, paradig-matically probable forms should have longer affixes but shorter stems. An alternative account proposes that paradigmatically probable forms are produced in such a way as to enhance not articulation, but contrasts between related word forms. This account predicts lengthening of suffixed forms, and shortening of unsuffixed forms. The results of the corpus study support the second account, suggesting that characterizing pronunciation variation in terms of phonetic reduction and enhancement oversimplifies the relationship between lexical storage, retrieval, and articulation.
Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2007
Ernestus, M. and R. H. Baayen This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words ap- peared to increase lexical competition, either from the word’s stem (Experiment 1) or from the word’s morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slowed down espe- cially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet lis- teners’ needs when they reduce especially high fre- quency words.
Acoustic and articulatory manifestations of vowel reduction in German
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2008
Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during the production of German vowels for combined effects of stress, accent and corrective contrast. In order to identify strategies for vowel reduction independent of speaker-specific vocal-tract anatomies and individual biomechanical properties, an approach similar to the Generalized Procrustes Analysis was applied to formant spaces and lingual vowel target positions. The data basis consists of the German stressed and unstressed full vowels /i… I y… Y e… E E… P… { a… a o… O u… U/ from seven speakers recorded by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA). Speaker normalized articulatory and formant spaces gave evidence for a greater degree of coarticulation with the consonant context for unstressed vowels as compared to stressed vowels. However, only for tense vowels could spatial reduction patterns be attributed to vowel shortening, whereas lax vowels were reduced without shortening. The results are discussed in the light of current theories of vowel reduction, i.e. target undershoot, Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Prominence Alignment.
Phonetic reduction, vowel duration, and prosodic structure
Word frequency, phonological neighborhood density, semantic predictability in context, and discourse mention have all been previously found to cause reduction of vowels. Other researchers have suggested that reduction based on these factors is reflective of a unified process in which "redundant" or "predictable" elements are reduced, and that this reduction is largely mediated by prosody. Using a large read corpus, we show that these four factors show different types of reduction effects, and that there are reduction effects of prosody independent of duration, and vice versa, suggesting the existence of multiple processes underlying reduction.