Working Papers in Linguistics: Volume 43 (January 1994)

Permanent URI for this collection

Papers from the Linguistics Laboratory. Edited by Sook-hyang Lee and Sun-Ah Jun


Front Matter
pp. i-vii
Description | Full Text PDF

Initial tones and prominence in Seoul Korean
De Jong, Ken pp. 1-14
Description | Full Text PDF

The domains of laryngeal feature lenition effects in Chonnam Korean
Jun, Sun-Ah pp. 15-29
Description | Full Text PDF

The Timing of Lip Rounding and Tongue Backing for /u/
Lee, Gina M. pp. 30-40
Description | Full Text PDF

Prosody and intrasyllabic timing in French
Fletcher, Janet; Vatikiotis-Bateson, Eric pp. 41-46
Description | Full Text PDF

Lip rounding and vowel formant frequencies in Nantong Chinese
Ao, Benjamin pp. 47-55
Description | Full Text PDF

Comparison of lip rounding in German and English Vowels
Crabtree, Monica; Kurz, Claudia pp. 56-69
Description | Full Text PDF

Labial Position and Acoustics of Korean and English High Vowels
Jun, Sun-Ah pp. 70-84
Description | Full Text PDF

An articulatory study of the features ATR in Akan and emphasis in Arabic
Lee, Sook-hyang pp. 85-96
Description | Full Text PDF

Lip rounding in Amoy and Mandarin high vowels: maximum dispersion, or adequate separation
Pan, Ho-hsien pp. 97-105
Description | Full Text PDF

The duration and perception of English epenthetic and underlying stops
Lee, Sook-hyang pp. 106-116
Description | Full Text PDF

Interference for 'new' versus 'similar' vowels in Korean speakers of English
Jun, Sun-Ah; Cowie, Islay pp. 117-130
Description | Full Text PDF

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
  • Item
    Front Matter (Volume 43, January 1994)
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01)
  • Item
    Initial tones and prominence in Seoul Korean
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) De Jong, Ken
    The present paper reports on an investigation of the informal observation that Seoul Korean nouns have an initial prominence and often have an initial prominence entirely due to an initial intonational prominence, or could other aspects of the signal be involved? Second, are initial tones best considered pitch accents (prominence-lending tones associated with a particular syllable) or are they better seen as phrase tones (markers of the edge of a prosodic group) Two subjects recited various sentences at different rates with different levels of overall emphasis. Word initial syllables are not longer than their medial counterparts; the only durational lengthening found is the consonant initial to the phrase. F0 measurements on initial nouns of various lengths suggests that initial high tones are underlyingly always present, but are obscured in short noun phrases by a following, phrase final tonal prominence. These results suggest that Korean nouns do not have initial stress, but rather occur in prosodic phrases which are marked in part by an initial high tone
  • Item
    The domains of laryngeal feature lenition effects in Chonnam Korean
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Jun, Sun-Ah
    This paper investigates the domain of two aspects of laryngeal features (voicing and voicing onset time) in the Chonnam dialect of Korean. In Korean, voiceless lenis stops, /p, t, k/, sometimes become voiced between voiced segments. Traditionally, this voicing has been discussed as occurring "within a word". Recently, Cho (1989) suggested that lenis stop voicing happens within a phonological phrase. To test this, utterances of various constructions (mostly from Cho 1989) were produced by three Chonnam speakers at three different tempi (slow, normal, fast) with three repetitions. An electroglottograph (EGG) was recorded simultaneously with an audio wave. The results show that word initial lenis stops were almost always voiced within the "accentual phrase" but not within the Phonological Phrase. A second experiment was run for the other laryngeal feature, VOT, to see whether the domain is an accentual phrase as in the case of lenis stop voicing or something else. One, two, or three-syllable words, where a test syllable [pha] was either at a word initial or medial position and phrase initial or medial position, were put in the frame sentence. Sixty four sentences were read with two different accentual phrasings. The result shows that VOT durations of [ph] are significantly different between word initial and medial as well as accentual phrase initial and medial. This suggests that there is a hierarchy of prosodic level in Chonnom Korean: a prosodic word and an accentual phrase.
  • Item
    The Timing of Lip Rounding and Tongue Backing for /u/
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Lee, Gina M.
    A small corpus of X-ray microbeam data was examined to test the predictions made by two well-known views of anticipatory coarticulation: time locking and feature spreading. Lip rounding and tongue backing associated with English /u/ were investigated. The token types were VCnV sequences where V = /i, u/ and C = /s, t/, consonants which are assumed to be neutral with respect to the features under study. The lip and jaw pellets were rotated in such a way that their principal component of movement was in the vertical dimension. In the /iCnu/ tokens there was no evidence for either time locking or feature spreading of the onset of lip rounding. However, other articulatory phenomena are temporally regulated. The timing of both the maximum point of lip rounding and of tongue backing was fixed relative to the acoustic onset of /u/. These results may provide evidence for the idea of fixed targets in speech production.
  • Item
    Prosody and intrasyllabic timing in French
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Fletcher, Janet; Vatikiotis-Bateson, Eric
    Durational variation associated with accentuation and final lengthening is examined in a corpus of articulatory data for French. Both factors are associated with measurable differences in acoustic duration. However two different articulatory strategies are employed to make these contrasts although both result in superficially longer and more displaced gestures.
  • Item
    Lip rounding and vowel formant frequencies in Nantong Chinese
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Ao, Benjamin
    A study of the vowel system of Nantong Chinese, which has as many as seven high vowels, suggests that instead of the traditional two formant model, a three formant model is needed to approximate the Nantong vowel space. Of the three formants used in the model, F3 appears to be the major acoustic cue of lip rounding. It also appears that the "maximum dispersion" hypothesis is not true with regard to the Nantong vowel system.
  • Item
    Comparison of lip rounding in German and English Vowels
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Crabtree, Monica; Kurz, Claudia
    This paper describes an experiment which was designed and conducted to test three hypotheses: first, that German back vowels are more rounded than their English counterparts, second, that the degree or type of lip rounding of a given vowel or set of vowels varies with different consonantal contexts, and third, that German back vowels are more rounded than front rounded vowels. The results of the Analysis of Variance suggests strongly that the first claim is true. No contextual variation was detected. The results also give some indication that the third claim is true.
  • Item
    Labial Position and Acoustics of Korean and English High Vowels
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Jun, Sun-Ah
    This paper examines and contrasts the labial configuration and formant frequencies of Korean and English high vowels. Korean has three high vowels, /i, i, u/, and English has four, /i, I, U, u/. The lip gestures and formant frequencies were compared within each language and across languages to determine whether the idea of maximal dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom (1972)) can account for the distribution of formant frequencies and also be extended to account for the labial configurations. Four male speakers of each language produced each vowel in four different contexts with five repetitions. The production of each word was videotaped and the sound was simultaneously recorded. The lip configurations were assessed using measurements similar to those in Linker (1982) and MANOVA was performed on the measurement data. The formant values were converted to the Bark scale to better represent the perceptual distance. The results of formant frequencies show that the mean F2 values of English back vowels, /u, U/, are significantly higher than that of Korean back vowel, /u/, while the F2 means of /i/'s in both languages are almost the same. The fact that Korean high vowels take more spaces in F2 is contradictory to the prediction of dispersion theory. The same tendency is shown in the result of the labial measurements. That is, Korean /u/ is produced with more rounded and more protruded lips than English /u/, while /i/'s in both languages are produced with the same degree of lip opening even though Korean /i/ used more spread lips. However, if we consider vowels in the same height (similar values of mean F1), we can find the maximal dispersion theory could explain the result since English has only two high vowels, /i, u/, and Korean has three.
  • Item
    An articulatory study of the features ATR in Akan and emphasis in Arabic
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Lee, Sook-hyang
    Akan contrasts two sets of vowels, one in which the tongue root is advanced and the larynx lowered ([+ATR]), and another in which the tongue root is retracted ([-ATR]) (Lindau, 1979). Arabic contrasts two sets of consonants, one in which the pharynx is constricted ([+emphasis]) and another in which it is not ([-emphasis]). Lindau suggests that the two phenomena can be combined as various settings along a single phonetic dimension of pharynx width, with [+ATR] as maximally expanded and [+emphasis] as maximally constricted, and that this dimension can be reduced to the binary phonological feature [±expanded], since no language contrasts more than two settings. This paper tests this hypothesis. Measurements of pharyngeal diameter were taken from X-ray tracings from productions by two Arabic speakers and three Akan speakers, and a multivariate analysis of variance was performed. Although emphasis is primarily a consonant feature in Arabic, it is legitimate to compare vowels in this cross-linguistic study, because as noted by Card (1983), [+emphasis] spreads to vowels and consonants within the same word. The results showed significant interaction between the more and less expanded feature values and the two languages, implying that emphasis in Arabic is controlled by a different mechanism from that used for [±ATR] in Akan.
  • Item
    Lip rounding in Amoy and Mandarin high vowels: maximum dispersion, or adequate separation
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Pan, Ho-hsien
    There are two hypotheses about the relationship between phonological contrasts and phonetic feature scales. Some phoneticians propose that values are chosen so that contrasting phonemes are maximally separated, e.g., Lilijencrants and Lindblom, 1972, while others claim that they need only to be adequately separated, e.g., Maddieson, 1977. This paper tests the competing hypotheses by comparing lip position in Mandarin [i], [y], [u] with that of Amoy [i] and [u]. According to adequate separation, the lip spreadness/roundness of Mandarin will be more extreme than that of Amoy, since there are three high vowels in Mandarin but only two in Amoy. According to the maximum dispersion hypothesis, the degree of roundness should be the same in both languages. Amoy and Mandarin data were collected from three bilingual speakers. The results support the Adequate Separation Theory. This paper also tests Wood's (1986) claim that in a language with two high rounded vowels, /u/ and /y/, /u/ is more rounded than /y/. The result shows that this claim is not necessarily true.
  • Item
    The duration and perception of English epenthetic and underlying stops
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Lee, Sook-hyang
    In American English, an intrusive stop occurs before the fricative in words such as tense and false, making them very much like words with underlying stops, such as tents and faults. Ohala (1975) treats the inserted stop as an artifact of universal physiological or aerodynamic constraints. But this approach can't account for the fact that South African English speakers don't insert the stop between sonorant and fricative clusters (Fourakis and Port, 1986). Another approach posits a language- or dialect-specific phonological rule which inserts a phonological segment (Zwicky, 1972). Fourakis and Port (1986), argue against this approach on the ground that in some pairs the intrusive stop is significantly shorter than the underlying one (although the difference is always very small). This paper presents perception data and duration measurements supporting something like Zwicky's approach. Phrases with intrusive and underlying stops (intense and in tents, respectively) in citation forms produced by three speakers of Mid-Western dialects were presented over earphones in random order for subjects to identify. Identification was very poor, just at chance level. Also, duration measurements of the silence gap between the /n/ and /s/ in these words show no significant difference, contrary to Fourakis and Port's findings. Moreover, token judgments in the perception experiment show very poor correlation with the durations except for one speaker, implying that whatever duration differences there might not be a crucial cue that listeners exploit for labeling the words with epenthetic and underlying stops.
  • Item
    Interference for 'new' versus 'similar' vowels in Korean speakers of English
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 1994-01) Jun, Sun-Ah; Cowie, Islay
    This paper tests Flege's (1987) Speech Learning Model and Bohn and Flege's (in press) hypothesis about the 'deflected' realization rule of a 'similar' L2 vowel. It is shown that Korean-English bilinguals' production of new English vowels, /I, U/, conforms to Flege's prediction. However, their production of similar English vowels, /i, u, U/, conformed to neither Flege's model nor to Bohn and Flege's hypothesis. We especially examined the interference between Korean and English high vowels, /i, I, U, u/, and /U/ based on 8 Korean-English bilinguals with different years of residence in the States, 4 English monolinguals and 3 Korean monolinguals. Formant values of English vowels produced by Korean-English bilinguals with different years of residence in America were compared with those of English monolinguals. For the vowel /i/, Flege's notion of 'similar' L2 vowels needs be redefined to distinguish similar and identical vowels. He may need either some continuous measures or more systematic criteria to categorize whether a phone in L2 is new or similar to phones in L1.