Search Results (22)

Background/Objectives: Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often display heightened sensitivity to simple auditory stimuli, but have difficulty discriminating and integrating multiple phonological features (segmental: consonants and vowels; suprasegmental: lexical tones) at the syllable level, which negatively impacts their communication. This study aims to investigate the neural basis of segmental, suprasegmental and combinatorial speech processing challenges in Mandarin-speaking children with ASD compared with typically developing (TD) peers. Methods: Thirty children with ASD and thirty TD peers will complete a multi-feature oddball paradigm to elicit auditory ERP during passive listening. Stimuli include syllables with single (e.g., vowel only), dual (e.g., vowel + tone), and triple (consonant + vowel + tone) phonological deviations. Neural responses will be analyzed using temporal principal component analysis (t-PCA) to isolate overlapping ERP components (early/late MMN), and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to assess group differences in neural representational structure across feature conditions. Expected Outcomes: We adopt a dual-framework approach to hypothesis generation. First, from a theory-driven perspective, we integrate three complementary models, Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF), Weak Central Coherence (WCC), and the Neural Complexity Hypothesis (NCH), to account for auditory processing in ASD. Specifically, we hypothesize that ASD children will show enhanced or intact neural discriminatory responses to isolated segmental deviations (e.g., vowel), but attenuated or delayed responses to suprasegmental (e.g., tone) and multi-feature deviants, with the most severe disruptions occurring in complex, multi-feature conditions. Second, from an empirically grounded, data-driven perspective, we derive our central hypothesis directly from the mismatch negativity (MMN) literature, which suggests reduced MMN amplitudes (with the exception of vowel deviants) and prolonged latencies accompanied by a diminished left-hemisphere advantage across all speech feature types in ASD, with the most pronounced effects in complex, multi-feature conditions. Significance: By testing alternative hypotheses and predictions, this exploratory study will clarify the extent to which speech processing differences in ASD reflect cognitive biases (local vs. global, per EPF/WCC/NCH) versus speech-specific neurophysiological disruptions. Findings will advance our understanding of the sensory and integrative mechanisms underlying communication difficulties in ASD, particularly in tonal language contexts, and may inform the development of linguistically tailored interventions. Full article

This study proposes a novel approach to measuring phonetic distances among six Hailu Hakka vowels ([i, e, ɨ, a, u, o]) by applying Euclidean distance-based calculations from both articulatory and acoustic perspectives. By analyzing articulatory feature values and acoustic formant structures, vowel distances are systematically represented through linear vector arrangements. These measurements address ongoing debates regarding the central positioning of [ɨ], specifically whether it aligns more closely with front or back vowels and whether [a] or [ɑ] more accurately represents vowel articulation. This study also reassesses the validity of prior acoustic findings on Hailu Hakka vowels and evaluates the correspondence between articulatory normalization and acoustic formant-based models. Through the integration of articulatory and acoustic data, this research advances a replicable and theoretically grounded method for quantitative vowel analysis. The results not only refine phonetic classification within a Euclidean framework but also help resolve transcription inconsistencies in phonetic distance matrices. This study contributes to the growing field of quantitative phonetics by offering a systematic, multidimensional model applicable to both theoretical and experimental investigations of Taiwan Hailu Hakka. Full article

For heritage speakers (HSs), expectations of influence from the community’s dominant language are pervasive. An alternative account for heritage language variability is that HSs are demonstrating sociolinguistic competence: HSs may either initiate or carry forward a pattern of variation from the homeland variety. We illustrate the importance of this consideration, querying whether /u/-fronting in Heritage Korean is best interpreted as influence from Toronto English, where /u/-fronting also occurs, or a continuation of an ongoing vowel shift in Homeland (Seoul) Korean that also involves /ɨ/-fronting and /o/-fronting. How can patterns of social embedding untangle this question that is central to better understanding sociolinguistic competence in HSs? For Korean vowels produced in sociolinguistic interviews by Heritage (8 adult immigrants, 8 adult children of immigrants) and 10 Homeland adults, F1 and F2 were measured (13,232 tokens of /o/, 6810 tokens of /u/, and 20,637 tokens of /ɨ/), normalized and subjected to linear regression. Models predict effects of gender, age, orientation toward Korean language and culture, the speaker’s average F2 for the other shifting vowels, and duration. These models highlight HS’s sociolinguistic competence: Heritage speakers share linguistic and social patterns with Homeland Korean speakers that are absent in English. Additionally, heritage speakers lack the effects of factors attested in the English change. Full article

This study investigates the unstressed reduction process of Galician. In particular, we wondered about: (1) the specific mechanisms involved, (2) whether there are different degrees of reduction, depending on the word-stress position, or whether reduction applies categorically to all unstressed vowels, (3) whether it depends on the duration, and (4) whether it is a mechanical process. In order to answer those questions, an experimental acoustic study with semi-spontaneous speech from six young Galician-native women was conducted. The results were analyzed by applying individual linear mixed-effects models for each vowel. The results show that two different mechanisms are involved in the reduction process, namely raising and centralization, and conclude that, in Galician, this process does not depend on the duration of the segment, and, thus, it is controlled by the grammar of the language. Full article

The main purpose of this study is to test a method for the analysis of phonetic variation in natural speech. The method takes into account the continuous nature of the speech flow and allows for the investigation of the systematic variation phenomena that occur in the speech net of the cross-word coarticulation phenomena that are expected in connected speech. We will describe some of the most frequent phonetic variation patterns that may be observed in the speech chain seen as a sequence of syllables, in relation to internal syllabic structure and lexical stress. The present study concerns speech data from the Italian section of the NOCANDO corpus. The data consist of about 1000 syllables extracted from monological speech from different speakers. In two different analysis layers, we attempted to align the “phonological” expected form and observed realisation. The results of this attempt led to the definition of syllabic deletion, substitution, or insertion when the alignment fails. The proposed method provides insight into the phonetic variation processes that can systematically occur in natural speech with relation to specific linguistic structures; in particular, unstressed syllables are most likely to undergo variation phenomena, and systematic differences concern the syllabic position of the segmental change, in that the presence of lexical stress prevents vowel deletion or centralization, but allows for onset changes (such as consonant cluster simplification or lenition). Full article

The present study is concerned with some aspects of the production of [ɨ] and [ə] in Romanian, i.e., their position within the vowel space, degree of acoustic variability and acoustic duration. To this end, acoustic data were collected for the Romanian stressed vowels [i e a o u ɨ ə] produced by six speakers in controlled consonantal context conditions and real and nonsense words. The formant frequency data reveal that [ɨ] and [ə] do not overlap along the F1 dimension, which may be ascribed to the need to set in contrast the two central vowels phonologically. Moreover, [ɨ] is clearly more variable in F2, and thus in vowel fronting, than schwa. Regarding segmental duration, [ɨ] is as short as high vowels and shorter than schwa, whose duration is comparable to that of mid vowels. The phonetic characteristics for stressed schwa in Romanian are in contrast with those for the same vowel in other world’s languages, in which it is highly variable and shorter than all or most peripheral vowels. This behaviour may be attributed to the existence of two central vowels, while suggesting that [ə] has a well-defined articulatory target in the Romanian language. Full article

Italian has a length contrast in its series of voiced and voiceless obstruents while also presenting phonetic differences across regional varieties. Northern varieties of the language, including Veneto Italian (VI), are described as maintaining the voicing contrast but, in some cases, not the length contrast. In central and southern varieties, the opposite trend may occur. For instance, Roman Italian (RI) is reported to optionally pre-voice intervocalic voiceless singleton obstruents whilst also maintaining the length contrast for this consonant class. This study looks at the acoustic realization of selected obstruents in VI and RI and investigates (a) prevoicing patterns and (b) the effects and interactions of regional variety, gemination, and (phonological and phonetic) voicing on consonant (C) and preceding-vowel (V) durations, as well as the ratio between the two (C/V), with a focus on that particular measure. An acoustic phonetic analysis is conducted on 3703 tokens from six speakers from each variety, producing eight repetitions of 40 real CV́C(C)V and CVC(C)V́CV words embedded in carrier sentences, with /p, pp, t, tt, k, kk, b, bb, d, dd, ɡ, ɡɡ, f, ff, v, vv, t∫, tt∫, dʒ, ddʒ/ as the target intervocalic consonants. The results show that both VI and RI speakers produce geminates, yielding high C/V ratios in both varieties, although there are cross-regional differences in the realization of singletons. On the one hand, RI speakers tend to pre-voice voiceless singletons and produce overall shorter C durations and lower C/V ratios for these consonants. On the other hand, VI speakers produce longer C durations and higher C/V ratios for all voiceless singletons, triggering some overlap between the C length categories, which results in partial degemination through singleton lengthening, although only for voiceless obstruents. The implications of a trading relationship between phonetic voicing and duration of obstruents in Italian gemination are discussed. Full article

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. During and after COVID-19, audiovestibular symptoms and impairments have been reported. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on the peripheral and central auditory systems of children and adolescents following the acute COVID-19 phase based on behavioral, electroacoustic, and electrophysiological audiological assessments. Methods: This is a primary, prospective, observational, and cross-sectional study of 23 children aged 8 to 15 years who acquired confirmed COVID-19 and who, before infection, had not had any auditory complaints or school complications. The results were compared with pre-pandemic data collected from a similar group of 23 children who had normal peripheral and central hearing and good school performance. Each participant answered a questionnaire about child development, school, and health history and underwent tests including pure-tone audiometry and high-frequency audiometry, imitanciometry, transient evoked otoacoustic emissions, and distortion product otoacoustic emissions. They also received tests of Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potentials, Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potentials, Dichotic Digits Test, Sentence Identification Test, Dichotic Consonant–Vowel Test, Frequency Pattern Test, and Gaps-In-Noise Test. Results: Significant differences were observed between the groups, with the study group showing worse thresholds compared to the control group at both standard audiometric frequencies and at higher frequencies, although both groups were still within normal limits (p ≤ 0.05). In addition, the study group had a higher prevalence of absent responses, as identified by otoacoustic emissions and acoustic reflexes. In terms of central auditory performance, the study group showed ABRs with significantly longer latencies of waves I, III, and V compared to the control group. The study group also performed less well on the Dichotic Digits and Pediatric Speech Identification tests. Conclusions: COVID-19 appears to alter the auditory system, both peripherally at the level of the outer hair cells and more centrally. Full article

This study presents an acoustic analysis of vowel realisations in contexts where, in Australian English, a historical contrast between unstressed /ɪ/ and /ə/ has largely diminished in favour of a central schwa-like variant. The study is motivated by indications that there is greater complexity in this area of vowel variation than has been conventionally set out in the existing literature, and our goal is to shed new light by studying a dataset of conversational speech produced by 40 young speakers from Perth, WA. In doing so, we also offer some critical thoughts on the use of Wells’ lexical sets as a framework for analysis in work of this kind, in particular with reference to the treatment of items in unstressed position, and of grammatical (or function) words. The acoustic analysis focused on the realisation in F1/F2 space of a range of /ɪ/ and /ə/ variants in both accented and unaccented syllables (thus a broader approach than a focus on stressed kit vowels). For the purposes of comparison, we also analysed tokens of the fleece and happy-tensing lexical sets. Grammatical and non-grammatical words were analysed independently in order to understand the extent to which a high-frequency grammatical word such as it might contribute to the overall pattern of vowel alternation. Our findings are largely consistent with the small amount of previous work that has been carried out in this area, pointing to a continuum of realisations across a range of accented and unaccented contexts. The data suggest that the reduced historical /ɪ/ vowel encountered in unaccented syllables cannot be straightforwardly analysed as a merger with /ə/. We also highlight the way in which the grammatical word it participates in this alternation. Full article

In this study, we report on results of a preliminary acoustic–phonetic analysis of the Hidatsa vowel system. We conducted acoustic measurements of Hidatsa vowels in terms of averaged temporal and spectral properties of these phones. Our durational analysis provides strong evidence that Hidatsa has a ten-vowel system with phonemically long and short vowels, in addition to two diphthongs. Our spectral measurements consisted of averages and time-evolution dynamic properties of the first three formants (F1, F2 and F3) at 30 equally spaced time points along the central portion of each vowel. The centers and distributions of the F1 and F2 formants, as well as their time-averaged trajectories, provide strong evidence for separate vowel qualities for both the short and long vowels. These measurements also show that all Hidatsa vowels have some degree of time-dependent spectral change, with the back vowels generally displaying a longer time-evolution track. Lastly, our results also indicate that in Hidatsa mid-short vowels do not appear with the same frequency as the other vowels, and that the short [é] has no unstressed counterpart. Full article

While variation in the southern Peninsular Spanish affricate /tʃ/ has been considered in the context of deaffrication to [ʃ], this study examines an emergent variant [ts] in the context of sociolinguistic identity and style in political speech. Based on a corpus of public speech from Madrid and Andalusia, Spain, this study examines the phonetic and sociolinguistic characteristics of the affricate, finding variation in the quality of the frication portion of the segment through an analysis of segment duration (ms), the center of gravity (Hz), and a categorical identification of realization type. The results suggest that both linguistic variables, like phonetic environment, stress, lexical frequency, and following vowel formant height, as well as extralinguistic variables, like speaker city, gender, political affiliation, and speech context, condition use. Based on these findings, it appears that production of the alveolar affricate [ts] is an incipient sociolinguistic marker in the process of acquiring social meaning. It is particularly associated with female speech and prestige norms that transcend regional identification. This alveolar variant serves as an additional sociolinguistic resource accessible for identity development among politicians and offers insight into ongoing change in the affricate inventory of southern and northern-central Peninsular Spanish. Full article

Speech samples can provide valuable information regarding speaker characteristics, including their social backgrounds. Accent variations with speaker backgrounds reflect corresponding acoustic features of speech, and these acoustic variations can be analyzed to assist in tracking down criminals from speech samples available as forensic evidence. Speech accent identification has recently received significant consideration in the speech forensics research community. However, most works have utilized long-term temporal modelling of acoustic features for accent classification and disregarded the stationary acoustic characteristics of particular phoneme articulations. This paper analyzes short-term acoustic features extracted from a central time window of English vowel speech segments for accent discrimination. Various feature computation techniques have been compared for the accent classification task. It has been found that using spectral features as an input gives better performance than using cepstral features, with the lower filters contributing more significantly to the classification task. Moreover, detailed analysis has been presented for time window durations and frequency bin resolution to compute short-term spectral features concerning accent discrimination. Using longer time durations generally requires higher frequency resolution to optimize classification performance. These results are significant, as they show the benefits of using spectral features for speaker profiling despite the popularity of cepstral features for other speech-related tasks. Full article

The southeastern United States has experienced rapid growth in the Hispanic population in recent decades, giving rise to a newly forming bilingual community. The present study builds on previous work by the authors via expansion of a “variable swarm”: the analysis of multiple linguistic variables simultaneously for the same set of speakers, with the goal of understanding patterns of accommodation and change within the community. The initial study included four linguistic variables (prosodic rhythm, bilingual discourse markers, the realization of /bdg/ and vowel space), and the present study adds an additional four variables (bilingual filled pauses, subject pronoun realization, code switching, and the labiodental realization of orthographic <v>) for 23 speakers of Mexican and Central American origin across two sociolinguistic generations (G1 vs. G2). Results for individual speakers show a pattern of adoption of some features by speakers of both generations (such as English-influenced prosodic rhythm and phonological filled pauses), while other, possibly more salient forms directly integrated from English (English discourse markers and code switching) exhibit later, highly variable rates of adoption, suggesting that speakers may consciously manipulate these variables as part of a process of active identity construction. Likewise, G1 speakers show fewer correlations among linguistic variables than G2 speakers, and patterns reveal that some bilingual forms are incorporated in tandem due to shared phonological traits or discourse functions. The innovative swarm analysis further contributes to the advancement of techniques employed in sociolinguistic research by serving as a bridge between traditional first- and second-wave studies that focus on a single variable, and third-wave studies that focus more on variation at the individual level. Full article

This study describes the segmental and suprasegmental phonology of Adur Niesu, a Loloish (or Ngwi) language spoken mainly in Liangshan, Sichuan, southwest China. Phonemically, there are 41 consonants, 10 monophthongs and 1 diphthong in Adur Niesu. All Adur syllables are open. Its segmental changes mainly happen to the vowels, featuring high vowel fricativization, vowel lowering, vowel centralization, vowel assimilation and vowel fusion. It is common for Adur Niesu syllables to be reduced in continuous speech, with floating tones left. There are three main types of syllable reduction: complete reduction including the segment and tone, partial reduction with a floating tone left, and partial reduction with the initial consonant left. Adur Niesu employs tones as an important means for lexical contrast, namely, high-level tone 55, mid-level tone 33, and low-falling tone 21. There is also a sandhi tone 44. There are two types of tonal alternation: tone sandhi and tone change. Tone sandhi occurs at both word and phrasal levels, and is conditioned by the phonetic environment, while tone change occurs due to the morphosyntactic environment. Finally, some seeming tonal alternation is the result of a floating tone after syllable reduction. Full article

Xiang (hsn) remains a poorly understood grouping within Sinitic, with no satisfactory conclusions on how to demarcate its boundaries or define its subgroupings. One general observation is that there is a rough typological split between the Northeast and Southwest related to contact from northern- and southern-type Sinitic varieties, respectively, which can be supported with phonological, lexical, and syntactic evidence. It is predicted here that an additional source of evidence can be found in the phonetic features of hesitation markers (HMs; ‘fillers’, ‘speech disfluencies’, etc.), which tend towards the central area of the vowel space (approaching [ə], [ɤ], [e], etc.) but still conform to the phonologies of the languages in which they occur. This study introduces a novel three-way division of Xiang in terms of phonemic central vowels found in open syllables (either [ə/ɤ], [e/ɛ], or both) which is then evaluated against the vocalic quality found in HMs to determine whether they can be used as evidence for Xiang internal typology. Data are gathered from 47 speakers representing 16 Xiang localities, distributed across Hunan province, recorded performing the Pear Stories paradigm, with 304 hesitation markers extracted. Features reported on include vowel quality (F1-F2), tonal contour (F0), and duration (ms). It is found that Xiang HMs demonstrate four distinct vowel qualities, but that their distribution does not neatly fit established taxonomic schemes; however, the evidence does support the transitional status of Xiang varieties as a site of mixture of northern and southern Sinitic features. Full article