The perception of nasalized vowels in American English: An investigation of online use of vowel nasalization in lexical access. J McDonough, H. Lehnert-LeHoullier & N. Bardhan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nasal Coarticulation in Lexical Perception: The Role of Neighborhood-conditioned Variation
2011
Nasal coarticulation has been shown to vary systematically in words depending on the number of phonological neighbors: words with many neighbors are produced with a greater degree of vowel nasality than words with fewer phonological neighbors [9]. This study examines the effect of this systematic low-level variation on lexical perception. The degree of nasality in natural real and nonsense words from high and low density neighborhoods was manipulated to neutralize the neighborhood-conditioned differences, and these original and manipulated stimuli were presented to subjects in a lexical decision task and a forced choice preference task. The findings of this study suggest that, for high neighborhood density words at least, listeners are indeed sensitive to this systematic low-level phonetic variation and that it has an influence on lexical perception.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1999
The conditions under which listeners do and do not compensate for coarticulatory vowel nasalization were examined through a series of experiments of listeners' perception of naturally produced American English oral and nasal vowels spliced into three contexts: oral ͑C-C͒, nasal ͑N-N͒, and isolation. Two perceptual paradigms, a rating task in which listeners judged the relative nasality of stimulus pairs and a 4IAX discrimination task in which listeners judged vowel similarity, were used with two listener groups, native English speakers and native Thai speakers. Thai and English speakers were chosen because their languages differ in the temporal extent of anticipatory vowel nasalization. Listeners' responses were highly context dependent. For both perceptual paradigms and both language groups, listeners were less accurate at judging vowels in nasal than in non-nasal ͑oral or isolation͒ contexts; nasal vowels in nasal contexts were the most difficult to judge. Response patterns were generally consistent with the hypothesis that, given an appropriate and detectable nasal consonant context, listeners compensate for contextual vowel nasalization and attribute the acoustic effects of the nasal context to their coarticulatory source. However, the results also indicated that listeners do not hear nasal vowels in nasal contexts as oral; listeners retained some sensitivity to vowel nasalization in all contexts, indicating partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization. Moreover, there were small but systematic differences between the native Thai-and native English-speaking groups. These differences are as expected if perceptual compensation is partial and the extent of compensation is linked to patterns of coarticulatory nasalization in the listeners' native language.
Phonology, 2002
Without doubt, the most significant development in phonology over the past decade has been the ascendance of constraint-based formalisms over ordered rules. Constraints have provided us with a much richer and more nuanced conception of markedness-the answer to the question why sound x is more natural than sound y in context z. In recent markedness discussions, listeneroriented notions such as salience, contrast, similarity and cue have figured prominently. These terms derive from the speech-perception literature, whose goals and methods are often tangential to phonology. In the belief that the moment had arrived for linguists and speech scientists to reconnect with one another, Hume and Johnson organised a satellite meeting of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in August 1999 in the San Francisco Bay Area that brought together leading phonologists and phoneticians to discuss how research in the speech laboratory can illuminate sound patterns in language. 1 The volume under review contains ten papers from the conference, plus a foreword by Björn Lindblom. It presents a healthy diversity of opinion on the nature and the extent of the grounding of phonology in speech perception. The reader gets a good sense of the kinds of experiments that can be brought to bear on these questions and the difficulties in interpreting their results. Space limitations preclude discussion of each chapter in this review. All are well worth reading. The paper by Patrice Speeter Beddor, Rena Arens Krakow & Stephanie Lindemann, ' Patterns of perceptual compensation and their phonological consequences', is an instructive example of how the study of speech perception in the laboratory can elucidate the phonology of nasal vowels. Previous literature showed that listeners readily compensate for nasal coarticulation. For example, Kawasaki (1986) found that American English subjects detect nasality in the vowel of a NṼ N syllable when the coda nasal is attenuated. Building on these results, Beddor et al. designed an experiment to show that such perceptual compensation (attributing a property of one segment to an adjacent one) is more gradient. Stimuli were constructed by excising and cross-splicing oral and nasal vowels from words like bode [bod] and moan [mõn]. American Englishspeaking subjects were presented with two pairs of stimuli and asked to judge which pair is ' more different '. In a control trial of [bod]-[bõd] vs. [bod]-[bod] (and [mon]-[mõn] vs. [mõn]-[mõn]) subjects were highly accurate in detecting nasal vs. oral vowels in contexts not susceptible to coarticulatory compensation. The test trials gauged listeners' ability to discriminate the V vs. Ṽ contrast in different consonantal contexts. Performance was quite good (80-90 %) in oral 1 The volume appears exactly 50 years after the most famous and influential collaboration between phonologists and phoneticians : Jakobson et al. (1951).
Compensatory articulation in American English nasalized vowels
Journal of Phonetics, 2011
In acoustic studies of vowel nasalization, it is sometimes assumed that the primary articulatory difference between an oral vowel and a nasal vowel is the coupling of the nasal cavity to the rest of the vocal tract. Acoustic modulations observed in nasal vowels are customarily attributed to the presence of additional poles affiliated with the naso-pharyngeal tract and zeros affiliated with the nasal cavity. We test the hypothesis that oral configuration may also change during nasalized vowels, either enhancing or compensating for the acoustic modulations associated with nasality. We analyze tongue position, nasal airflow, and acoustic data to determine whether American English /i/ and /a/ manifest different oral configurations when they are nasalized, i.e. when they are followed by nasal consonants. We find that tongue position is higher during nasalized [ĩ] than it is during oral [i] but do not find any effect for nasalized [ã]. We argue that speakers of American English raise the tongue body during nasalized [ĩ] in order to counteract the perceived F1-raising (centralization) associated with high vowel nasalization.
HOW PHONOLOGICAL CONTEXT AFFECTS COMPREHENSION: THE CASE OF ASSIMILATED NASALS AND STOPS
Four forced-choice identification tasks examined the recognition of words containing sounds that have undergone the process of nasal place assimilation ('phone box': /n/→[m]) or stop place assimilation ('cat box': /t/→[p]). Identification scores and response times were measured for words ending in unassimilated or assimilated coronal consonants, which were either presented in isolation or within a carrier sentence that provided the triggering phonological context for place assimilation (i.e., where the word-final coronal consonant is followed by a word-initial labial sound). Identification scores showed that the presence of the context had a positive influence on listeners' correct identification of the assimilated forms. Furthermore, this effect was comparable across nasal and stop consonants. However, response time measures showed that phonological context speeded the recognition of assimilated nasals but not assimilated stops. This finding is consistent with the idea that compensation for assimilation involves distinct processing mechanisms for nasals versus stop consonants.
Perception and Production of English Vowels by American Males and Females
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2015
The aims of this study are to explore the link between the perception and production of vowel sounds and to make a minor contribution to the debate about the hyperspace effect. The sample of 18 American English speakers (male and female) identified ideal American English vowels from sets of synthetic vowels, and the same participants produced those vowels in a clear speaking style. The formant values of the produced vowels were measured and compared with those of perceived vowels on the vowel space. The results show that a vast majority of the perceived vowel spaces of the male and female groups were not significantly different, whereas the produced vowel spaces of the two groups were significantly different. Additionally, in the male group, the perceived vowel space was larger than the produced vowel space, whereas the opposite phenomenon was observed in the equivalent vowel space of the female group. The perception of vowels in this study, therefore, appears to reference a speaker who is not necessarily the same as the listener. Thus, the hyperspace effect based on a simple comparison between perceived and produced vowel spaces should be reconsidered.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013
English vowels may be difficult to discriminate for many learners of English (L2 learners). Research in L2 speech perception has shown that the use of visual cues improves speech perception, at least for visually-salient contrasts. This study investigated the use of visual cues in the perception of English vowels by L2 Advanced learners (Spanish native speakers) and English native speakers (ENS). 37 L2 learners and 20 ENS were given a vowel test that presented real CVC words in audio (A), audiovisual (AV) and video-alone (V) mode. The A and AV conditions were presented in noise (-10 dB SNR) to ENS and in quiet to L2 learners. For ENS, identification rates were significantly higher in AV than in A condition, suggesting there were visual cues to vowel identity. For L2 learners, A scores were significantly lower than for ENS, and AV scores did not differ significantly from results in A mode. This suggests low sensitivity to visual cues to vowel identification, though L2 learners achieved better than chance scores when forced to attend to visual information in the V mode. These results support previous findings of relatively poor sensitivity to visual cues to phoneme identity in L2 learners.
Coarticulatory influences on the perceived height of nasal vowels
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1988
Certain of the complex spectral effects of vowel nasalization bear a resemblance to the effects of modifying the tongue or jaw position with which the vowel is produced. Perceptual evidence suggests that listener misperceptions of nasal vowel height arise as a result of this resemblance. Whereas previous studies examined isolated nasal vowels, this research focused on the role of phonetic context in shaping listeners' judgments of nasal vowel height. Identification data obtained from native American English speakers indicated that nasal coupling does not necessarily lead to listener misperceptions of vowel quality when the vowel's nasality is coarticulatory in nature. The perceived height of contextually nasalized vowels (in a [ bVnd] environment) did not differ from that of oral vowels (in a [bVd] environment) produced with the same tongue-jaw configuration. In contrast, corresponding noncontextually nasalized vowels (in a [bVd] environment) were perceived as lower in quality than vowels in the other two conditions. Presumably the listeners' lack of experience with distinctive vowel nasalization prompted them to resolve the spectral effects of noncontextual nasalization in terms of tongue or jaw height, rather than velic height. The implications of these findings with respect to sound changes affecting nasal vowel height are also discussed.