Phonetic reductions and linguistic factors (original) (raw)
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Syllable reduction and articulation rates in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
Journal of Linguistics
This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish. The finding that certain syllable deletion processes take place in Danish but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. This could be a contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.
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 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 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.
Plosive Reduction at the Group Level and in the Individual Speaker
2011
This study presents results of phonetic factors on the reduction of plosives in spontaneously spoken Danish. Using mixed-effect logistic regression with speaker as random effect factor, it is shown that reduction of /d/ is distinct from reduction of /b/ and /g/. Speaker tendency for reduction relative to the group average is shown to be consistent across place of articulation for /b/ and /g/ for the majority of speakers sampled.
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.
As a result of the cooperation in the Intas 915 project, annotated speech corpora have become available in three different languages for both read and spontaneous speech of some 4-5 male and 4-5 female speakers per language (6-10 minutes per speaker). These data have been used to study the effects of redundancy on acoustic vowel reduction, in terms of vowel duration, F 1 -F 2 distance to a virtual target of reduction, spectral center of gravity, and vowel intensity. It was shown that in all three (typologically different) languages vowel redundancy increases acoustic reduction in the same way. The reduction of redundant vowels seems to be a language universal.
Danish phonology and phonetics present Danish children with a great challenge in their early language acquisition due to consonant gradation and schwa reduction, and cross-linguistic studies have shown that Danish children are late in various respects of their language acquisition compared to children acquiring other languages (Bleses et al. 2008; Bleses et al. 2011). We will present a multi method study on reductions, phonological complexity and phonetic variation in Danish children's first words in order to approach this issue. We hypothesize that the order of emergence of early words follows the principle of increasing phonological complexity. We distinguish between the complexity of target words and of the children's pronunciations, and we consider prosodic and phonotactic structure as well as complexity of individual segments. Danish is an interesting test case for such an operationalization because of its opaque syllable structure, which may have an impact on early pho...
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.
Perception of phonetic detail in the identification of highly reduced words
Journal of Phonetics, 2011
There is great phonetic variation of words in context, conditioned by phonetic environment, word type, and speaking style in different communicative situations. Function words and modal particles are particularly susceptible to having their phonetic weight and complexity reduced, especially in casual spontaneous speech. But even if whole strings of segments are no longer delimitable in reduced forms compared with fuller pronunciations of the same lexical items, there will still be articulatory prosodies, superimposed upon the remaining sound material, which retain essential components of the fuller forms, the phonetic essence that characterizes the whole form class of a word. The extreme reduction [ai~ĩ] of the German modal particle eigentlich 'actually' [ai(c)F.(t)(l)i(c -)] is a case in point. The length, palatality and nasality of its gliding movement reflect the polysyllabicity, the central nasal consonant and the final palatal syllable of the fuller forms. It is assumed that this phonetic essence triggers lexical identification in the listener. Therefore two perceptual identification experiments were carried out. They showed the crucial role of the duration of a palatal gliding section in the diphthong [ai~ĩ] to distinguish between eine__ 'one__' and eigentlich'ne__ 'actually a__'. A third test showed further that listeners reacted differently to the palatal glide duration in different reduction environments, which may be related to different functional assessment of reduced forms in situational contexts.