Several UM linguists will be presenting their work at the 158th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Antonio, Oct. 26-30.

Presenters and abstracts listed below

The perceptual time course of coarticulatory nasalization.
Patrice S. Beddor,  Julie E. Boland, Andries Coetzee, Kevin McGowan
Abstract:
Listeners’ moment‐by‐moment processing of anticipatory vowel nasalization and a following nasal consonant was investigated. English‐speaking participants’ eye movements were monitored as they heard instructions to look at one of two pictured objects on a computer screen. Trials included pictured pairs for naturally produced words of the form CVNC‐CVC (e.g., bend‐bed), CVNC‐CVNC (bend‐bent), and CVC‐CVC (bed‐bet). Vowels in CVNC words were coarticulatorily nasalized. Results to date show that, when participants heard a CVNC word (bend), they visually fixated the correct picture earlier when the competing picture was CVC (bed)—that is, when the vowel in the competitor would be expected to be non‐nasal—than when the competitor was another CVNC word (bent). Results also suggest that participants often fixated the target CVNC picture in CVNC‐CVC trials after onset of vowel nasalization but before N onset. However, although vowel nasalization facilitated early selection of CVNC over CVC, a non‐nasalized vowel was not similarly helpful for selecting CVC over CVNC. When participants heard CVC (bed), they did not fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture was CVNC (bend) than when the competitor was CVC (bet). Findings are interpreted in light of production data for English and perceptual theories.

Nasal coarticulation in clear speech
Anthony Brasher
Abstract:
This study tests whether speakers, when trying to speak clearly, employ variable enhancement strategies as a function of phonetic environment. Using aerodynamic and acoustical methods, this study examines the effects of phonemic context and speaking modality and on the spatial and temporal extent of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in English. Target words are English (C)VNCvoiced (e.g., bend) and (C)VNCvoiceless (e.g., bent) words spoken in either clear or citation speech modes. In order to enhance the percept of ／n／ in clear speech, speakers increase the duration of the nasal consonant in CVNCvoiced words but marginally increase, or even decrease, ／n／ duration in CVNCvoiceless words. While highly variable, airflow results suggest little difference on anticipatory nasalization as a function of speech mode. These results argue against models predicting a global reduction in coarticulation in clear speech.

Effects of prosodic structure on the relative timing of articulators in English lateral production.
Susan S. Lin
Abstract:
Previous research has established that American English speakers tend to produce syllable‐final ／l／ with movement of the tongue dorsum preceding movement of the tongue tip. However, the results of these studies differ with respect to the articulator timing in syllable‐initial ／l／, with some claiming synchrony (Browman and Goldstein, 1995) and others claiming asynchrony in the direction opposite that of syllable‐final ／l／ (Gick, 2003). This study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate the relative timing of the tongue tip and dorsum during production of syllable‐initial and syllable‐final ／l／ in multiple prosodic contexts. Prosody has a significant effect on both duration and extent of articulator movement in speech production—onsets of larger prosodic units involve larger and longer movement than onsets of smaller prosodic (Keating, 2006). The explanation that these effects result from speakers’ attempts to render perceptually more clear the segments that initiate phrases and utterances suggests that examining these segments at varying prosodic positions may provide insight into speakers’ knowledge of speech perception. Current preliminary results show that American English speakers may utilize at least two distinct timing relations in initial laterals, supporting a position that speaker knowledge may be variable between speakers.

Aerodynamic modeling for concatenative speech synthesis.
Kevin B. McGowan
Abstract:
Listeners can perceive and use a wide array of fine‐grained phonetic details, including the detailed coarticulatory influences of adjacent sounds, when perceiving speech. Details like anticipatory nasalization can, for example, potentially provide the listener with a rich network of informative cues and are a key to understanding listeners’ ability to disambiguate speech sounds from seemingly ambiguous input. Unfortunately, these coarticulatory cues are generally missing or contradictory in the output of speech synthesis systems. These systems work by concatenating variable‐length sound units chosen from a large database of recorded speech. Units are chosen to minimize two functions: the cost of aligning a particular unit with the desired speech output (target cost) and the cost of adjoining the next sound to the most recently selected unit (join cost). Generally, these costs are calculated using features which can be automatically extracted from the acoustic speech signal. A unit selection database is created, automatically segmented and automatically labeled with nasal and oral airflow feature vectors. These aerodynamic features are used as a proxy for articulatory information in the calculation of join and cost functions. Listeners’ mean opinion scores are obtained on output from this system and a baseline acoustic system for comparison.

Pam Beddor gave two keynote presentations this summer:

(1)   Nasal 2009 International Workshop, co-organized by the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (Université Paul Valéry) and the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Parole (Université de Mons-Hainaut):

Title:  The perceptual time course of nasals and nasalization

Abstract:  Perceptual findings from identification, discrimination, gating, and reaction time studies show that listeners use coarticulatory vowel nasalization as information about a flanking nasal consonant.  In ongoing work being done in our psycholinguistics laboratory (with Julie Boland, Andries Coetzee, and Kevin McGowan), we are studying listeners’ moment-by-moment processing of this information as it unfolds over time.  In this research, English-speaking participants’ eye movements are monitored as they hear instructions to look at one of two pictured objects on a computer screen. Trials include pictured pairs for words of the form CVNC-CVC (e.g., bend-bed), CVNC-CVNC (e.g., bend-bent), and CVC-CVC (e.g., bed-bet).  Preliminary results show that, when participants hear a CVNC word (bend), they visually fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture is CVC (bed) than when the competitor is another CVNC word (bent).  Assuming a 200 ms delay for programming an eye movement (Dahan et al., 2001, Language and Cognitive Processes 16: 507-534), the evidence suggests that participants often fixate the target CVNC picture in CVNC-CVC trials after onset of vowel nasalization but before onset of N.  However, although vowel nasalization facilitates early selection of CVNC over CVC words, a non-nasalized vowel is notsimilarly helpful for selecting CVC over CVNC.  That is, when participants hear a CVC word (bed), they do not fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture is CVNC (bend) than when the competitor is CVC (bet).  These perceptual findings will be interpreted in light of both production data (especially highly variable nasal coarticulation in English) and other perceptual processes (in particular, compensation for coarticulation).

Invited presentation to the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Parole at the Université de Mons-Hainaut, Mons, Belgium.

Title:  The time course of perception of coarticulation

Alan Mishler has received the highly competitive Marshall Sahlins Social Science award from the Honors College. The Marshall Sahlins award is part of the Goldstein Honors prizes, a set of prizes estalished to recognize scholarly excellence and outstanding achievement.

Alan received the prize based on his many academic strengths as well as his service and leadership on campus.

Alan’s thesis, Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience,  is an acoustic and perceptual investigation of domain-initial strengthening in Japanese. The goal of the acoustic study was to determine whether a set of Japanese consonants exhibited domain-initial—in particular, word-initial—strengthening. It did, which led to the perceptual study, whose goal was to assess whether native Japanese speaking listeners could use the acoustic consequences of strengthening to identify word onset. The perceptual study addresses whether strengthening is perceptually useful.

Congratulations, Alan!

Miyeon Ahn’s Qualifying Research Paper, Experimental Investigation of Consonant Cluster Simplification, has been approved by its readers and Miyeon is now advanced to Doctoral Candidacy.

Congratulations, Miyeon!

Abstract: In linguistic phenomena that allow phonological variation,
one variant is often preferred to the others. Traditionally, it has
been argued that the preference depends, amongst other things, on
perceptual knowledge and this argument has led to theories that
incorporate perceptibility in the grammar. The purpose of this study
is to investigate the factors that are involved in phonological
variation. Based on experimental evidence involving consonant cluster
simplification in Korean, I argue that language users consider
information about morphology, frequency and the OCP as well as about
perceptibility and that they apply the integrated information to
consonant cluster resolution.

Edward Flemming, Peter Ladefoged and Sally Thomason.  Phonetic structures of Montana Salish Journal of Phonetics 36:465-491. 2008.

Abstract

Montana Salish is an Interior Salishan language spoken on the Flathead Reservation in Northwest Montana by an estimated population of about 40 speakers. This paper describes the basic phonetic characteristics of the language based on data from five speakers. Montana Salish contains a number of typologically unusual consonant types. Including glottalized sonorants, pre-stopped laterals, and a series of pharyngeals distinguished by secondary articulations of glottalization and/or labialization. The language also allows long sequences of obstruent consonants. These and more familiar phonetic characteristics are described through analysis of acoustic, electroglottographic, and aerodynamic data, and compared with related characteristics in other languages of the world.

Susannah Levi presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Paris.

The poster, co-authored with Stephen Winters and David Pisoni, was entitled, “A cross-language familiar talker advantage. The abstract is available as a downloadable .pdf file.

Susi now takes up her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.

Pam Beddor gave an invited presentation on Perceiving Coarticulatory Variation at the international workshop “La Coarticulation:
Indices, Direction et Représentation”

The workshop was held at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montpellier Dec. 7, 2007

Pam Beddor, Andries Coetzee, and Kevin McGowan have recently returned from NYU where they attended Ultrafest IV. As previously mentioned here, Ultrafest is an annual opportunity for linguists and speech scientists using ultrasound to get together, share work they’re doing with this relatively new tool and discuss common solutions to ultrasound’s unique challenges. We learned a great deal about how ultrasound is used, what its strengths are, and what challenges we can expect to face as we move in this new direction. The department is now researching ultrasound hardware options and will be reviewing demonstration models soon.

Pam and Kevin also had the opportunity to visit the new home of Haskins Laboratories where Pam gave an invited talk on “The phonetics and phonology of nasal gestures” as part of the Haskins Staff Talk series.

During the visit they toured the facilities and were given a hands (and chins)-on introduction to HOCUS (the Haskins Optically-Corrected Ultrasound System) — a bold, multi-year project at Haskins to use optical tracking to allow free and natural head motion during analysis of running speech while still providing the data necessary to orient ultrasound images to the location of the passive articulators in four dimensions.

“Ultrasound systems for research in linguistics range from compact laptop-sized units one can take into the field to finely-tuned installations such as those at Haskins or Maureen Stone’s lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore“, Kevin reported. “This trip will definitely let us take advantage of others’ experiences with ultrasound as we add this tool to our own lab.”

After successfully defending his dissertation in April, Robert Felty started a post-doctoral fellowship at Indiana University in July, under the tutelage of Prof. David Pisoni. The Speech Research Lab at Indiana University has been in operation for over 30 years, and Prof. Pisoni has funded post-docs throughout this time with an NIH training grant. The lab is built in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, with a variety of psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, speech and hearing scientists, and linguists.

Robert is currently working on two projects in the lab:

Discovering neighborhoods through recognition errors

In this collaborative project with Adam Buchwald, we have developed a large (> 1400 words) stimulus list which is designed to be representative of the entire English lexicon in terms of lexical frequency, number of syllables, syllable structure, and initial phoneme. We are presenting these materials in open-set word recognition tasks in order to discover what words are actually being activated in the mental lexicon

A new perceptually robust test of spoken word recognition

In this project with David Pisoni, we are developing a new spoken word recognition test battery to be used in clinical situations, which more accurately represents normal communicative situations, by including sources of variation that we commonly encounter, including speaker specific characteristics such as gender and dialectal variation, as well as a variety of degraded listening situations

You can learn more about Robert’s research from his website.

Pam Beddor, Kevin McGowan and Andries Coetzee are attending Ultravest IV at
NYU this week-end.

Ultrafest is an annual conference on the use of ultrasound technology in speech research. We are thinking of acquiring an ultrasound machine for the Phonetics Lab, and they are going to Ultrafest to learn more about ultrasound, how it works, what it can be used for, etc.

Pam and Kevin will also spend a day at Haskins Labs before Ultrafest.