Phonetic and phonological vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese

The present study examines the phonetic and phonological status of vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese. In order to compare the effects of duration and metrical structure, we tested the influence of duration on the realization of /a/ in five prosodic positions: word-initial pretonic, word-medial pretonic, tonic, word-medial posttonic, and word-final posttonic. The results revealed that, while both phonetic duration and prosodic position had effects on F1 values for /a/, the categorical effect of prosodic position was much stronger and more reliable. In particular, F1 values for /a/ were best predicted by a two-way distinction between posttonic and non-posttonic syllable positions. Correlations between a vowel’s duration and its F1 frequency were statistically significant but generally weak in all positions. We argue that these findings suggest that vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese primarily reflects phonological patterning rather than phonetic undershoot, although there was also evidence for some amount of undershoot. Brazilian Portuguese can therefore be said to have a mixed system of phonological and phonetic reduction. The present study discusses the results in the context of Brazilian Portuguese metrical organization, sound change, and the relation between phonetics and phonology.

Corpus Phonetics for Under-Documented Languages: A Vowel Harmony Example

Corpus phonetics is enabling the comprehensive analysis of large digital speech collections. In this paper, we develop a corpus phonetics workflow that is flexible enough to be easily applied to under-documented languages. To test the capabilities of this workflow we choose a challenging vowel reduction and vowel harmony problem. In Kera (Chadic) it has been shown (Pearce, 2012), that not only is phonetic reduction linked to the phonetic duration of the vowel, but also that reduction is blocked in vowel harmony domains. We are able to replicate previously published experiments by Pearce that were originally completed using manual measurements. We expect that our corpus phonetics workflow will be of value to phonologists working on other languages.

A phonetic study of length and duration in Kyrgyz vowels

This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are found to consistently exhibit opposite durational effects. Specifically, high vowels in word-edge syllables are longer than high vowels in medial syllables, while non-high vowels in word-edge syllables are shorter than non-high vowels in medial syllables. This suggests either a phenomenon of durational neutralisation at word edges or the exaggeration of durational differences word-medially, and is not taken as a case of word-edge strengthening. Proposals for how to select from between these hypotheses in future work are discussed.

Duration as a Phonetic Cue in Native and Non‑Native American English

This vowel study looks at the intricate relationship between spectral characteristics and vowel duration in the context of American English vowels, both from a native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) perspective. The non-native speaker cohort is homogeneous in the sense that all speakers have Serbian as their mother tongue, but have been long-time residents of the US. The phonetic context investigated in this study is /bVt/, where V is one of the American English monophthongs /i ɪ u ʊ ε æ ʌ ɔ ɑ/. The results of the acoustic analysis show that the NNS vowels are generally longer than the NS vowels. Furthermore, NNSs neutralise the vowel quality of two tense and lax pairs of vowels, /i ɪ/ and /u ʊ/, and rely more heavily on the phonetic duration when prononuncing them.

Durational cues to stress, final lengthening, and the perception of rhythm

Binary stress languages have a well-known asymmetry between their tolerance of initial versus final lapse; the former being extremely rare and the latter being quite common. Lunden (to appear) proposes that final lengthening plays a role in this asymmetry, as the additional inherent phonetic duration of the final syllable can contribute to the continuation of a perceived rhythm, even in the absence of actual final stress. She notes this effect of final lengthening should only be available in languages that use duration as a cue to stress. However, some languages are described as having different cues to primary and secondary stress, and it is not clear which is more important for this perceptual effect. The results of four new studies show that final lengthening contributes to the perceptual rhythm of the word even when only one level of stress is cued with duration.

The Phonetics of Emphatic Vowel Lengthening in English

While many languages show lexical contrasts based on duration in vowels and consonants, such lexical durational contrasts are usually limited to binary distinctions (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). Within the phonetically-driven phonology approach (Hayes and Steraide 2004), one explanation for this fact is that, in the spirit of Dispersion Theory (Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972, Lindblom 1986), listeners have difficulty perceiving contrasts that are above binary. An alternative articulation-based explanation is that this preference is due to difficulties in producing such fine distinctions.This paper reports two experiments—which support the first, perception-difficulty theory—based on a non-lexical use of phonetic duration: lengthening to express pragmatic emphasis (e.g. Thank you sooooo much). Experiment 1 shows that some English speakers can produce beyond-binary durational distinctions, and Experiment 2 shows English speakers do not perceive these distinctions. These findings support the view that perception is behind the preference for binary lexical duration contrasts, while eliminating the articulation-based explanation

Time and again

There is growing evidence that multiword information affects processing. In this paper, we look at the effect of word and multiword frequency on the phonetic duration of words in spontaneous speech to (a) extend previous findings and (b) ask whether the relation between word and multiword information changes across the frequency continuum. If highly frequent sequences are stored holistically, then the effect of word frequency should disappear. If alternatively, increased sequence usage causes a change in the prominence of word and multiword information, we should see reduced effects of word frequency, and increased effects of sequence frequency for high frequency sequences. We first extend previous findings by showing that trigram frequency affects single word duration, even when controlling for word predictability. We then show that the effect of trigram frequency increases while the effect of word frequency decreases — but does not disappear — for highly frequent sequences. The findings provide further support for the effect of multiword information on processing and document the growing prominence of multiword information with repeated usage.

Durational properties of emphatically lengthened consonants in Japanese

Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means ‘frame’ and [katta] with a long [tt] means ‘bought’. This sort of contrast is usually limited to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse languages. The other use of phonetic duration is to express pragmatic emphasis. Speakers of some languages can use lengthening to express emphasis, as in the English exampleThank you sooooooo much. This lengthening can employ multiple degrees of duration, beyond the more standard binary contrast. This second use of duration has been understudied, and this paper attempts to fill that gap. To that end, this paper reports the first experimental documentation of the consonant lengthening pattern in Japanese, which expresses pragmatic emphasis. The results show that at least some speakers show six levels of durational distinctions, while other speakers show less clear-cut distinctions among different levels of emphatically lengthened consonants. Nevertheless, all but one speaker showed a linear correlation between duration and level of emphasis.