Formant Transition Duration and Amplitude Rise Time as Cues to the Stop/Glide Distinction
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Abstract:
There is some disagreement in the literature about the relative contribution of formant transition duration and amplitude rise time in signalling the contrast between stops and glides. In this study, listeners identified sets of /ba/ and /wa/ stimuli in which transition duration and rise time varied orthogonally. Both variables affected labelling performance in the expected direction (i.e. the proportion of /b/ responses increased with shorter transition durations and shorter rise times). However, transition duration served as the primary cue to the stop/glide distinction, whereas rise time played a secondary, contrast-enhancing role. A qualitatively similar pattern of results was obtained when listeners made abrupt-onset/gradual-onset judgements of single sine-wave stimuli that modelled the rise times, frequency trajectories, and durations of the first formant in the /ba/-/wa/ stimuli. The similarities between the speech and non-speech conditions suggest that significant auditory commonalities underlie performance in the two cases.Keywords:
Sine wave
Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Time shifting
Rise time
The developmental use of vowel duration, final transition and voicing during closure as cues to voicing in final stop consonants were investigated, using 10 three-year-old, 10 six-year-old and 10 adult subjects. The stimuli were alterations of eight stop-vowel-stop words. The presentation of each stimulus item was response contingent. The resulting data supported the ability of adults and children to use both temporal and spectral cues to acoustic/ phonetic distinctions. However, three-year olds relied more on temporal cues, six-year olds relied more on spectral cues, while adults used both spectral and temporal cues in judging the voicing feature of final stop consonants.
Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Stimulus (psychology)
Distinctive feature
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Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Feature (linguistics)
Distinctive feature
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Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
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Voice-onset time
Place of articulation
Stop consonant
Articulation (sociology)
Manner of articulation
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ABSTRACT Voice onset time (VOT) characteristics of stops in initial clusters in American English words produced by children and adults were studied. Words were spoken in isolation and in sentence context by eleven three-and four-year-old children, and by a male and female adult. Spectrograms were made and VOT duration measurements taken. Three experienced listeners transcribed the isolated words and sentences. Analyses showed that overall timing characteristics were similar for children and adults. Speakers differed in their [±voice] boundary and there was no absolute time distinction between [±voice] stops; [+voice] stops showed less variability than [−voice]. VOT generally increased from labial to dental to velar clusters, and was shorter in sentence context and longer in clusters than in singletons. Children's VOT averages were generally, but not significantly, longer than adults' in all contexts, and coarticulation constraints affected the accuracy with which children produced the stop and liquid portion of a particular cluster.
Voice-onset time
Coarticulation
Stop consonant
Consonant cluster
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Talkers differ greatly in the acoustic realization of speech sounds, a source of signal variation that must be overcome by human and machine listeners. The present study examined talker variability in voice onset time (VOT) across the six word-initial stop consonant categories (/ptkbdg/) of American English. Employing a large corpus of productions from more than 100 speakers, we replicated previous findings of significant variation in overall and stop-specific VOT means. However, we also identified several statistical generalizations within and across phonetic patterns of individual talkers. Speaking rate accounted for a large portion of VOT variance, with talkers differing considerably in the strength of this relationship. Stop category means showed high pairwise correlations, particularly among /ptk/. Additionally, stop-specific means and variances were highly correlated. The structured variation present in VOT could be exploited by both listeners and automatic recognition systems to facilitate robust perceptual adaptation from limited exposure to novel talkers.
Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Realization (probability)
Variation (astronomy)
American English
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Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Time lag
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Realization (probability)
Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Variation (astronomy)
American English
Predictability
Connected speech
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There is voluminous evidence that homorganic stop consonants are distinguishable on the basis of voice onset time relative to their supraglottal articulation. For initial stops a convenient acoustic reference point is the onset of the release burst, and VOT has been defined as the interval between this point and onset of glottal signal. VOT boundary values between voiced and voiceless initial stops of English have been established by spectrographic measurements of naturally produced isolated words and by perception testing of synthesized CV syllables. The close match between the two kinds of boundary values suggests that fairly natural values were chosen for the invariant features of the synthetic speech patterns tested. It is known, however, that certain of these affect voicing perception. New data from synthesis experiments show that VOT boundaries shift with changes in transition duration, and that it is the first formant and not higher ones which are responsible.
Voice-onset time
Stop consonant
Place of articulation
Manner of articulation
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