Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing, and Neural Activity

Editorial

23 December 2015

Editorial: Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing, and Neural Activity

Ulrike Domahs

Hubert Truckenbrodt

and

Richard Wiese

5,113 views

2 citations

Editors

Ulrike Domahs

University of Marburg

Hubert Truckenbrodt

Leibniz Center for General Linguistics (ZAS)

Richard Wiese

University of Marburg

Impact

Original Research

02 September 2015

Production and perception of contrast: The case of the rise-fall contour in German

Frank Kügler

and

Anja Gollrad

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context.

6,204 views

21 citations

Grand Averages of event-related potentials (ERPs) measured at midline electrodes for words with canonical penultimate stress with Structure 1 (a) and 2 (b) and canonical final stress with Structure 3 (c) and Structure 4 (d). Correct conditions (solid lines) are plotted against the incorrect conditions with antepenultimate stress (dashed lines) and with penultimate/final stress (dotted lines). The light gray bars indicate time-windows for positivity effects evoked by words with incorrect antepenultimate stress and the darker gray bars for positivity effects evoked by words with incorrect penultimate and final stress.

Original Research

21 October 2014

The role of predictability and structure in word stress processing: an ERP study on Cairene Arabic and a cross-linguistic comparison

Ulrike Domahs

, 2 more and

Richard Wiese

5,795 views

10 citations

Psychometric curves of the proportion of /ʃ/-responses for the younger Augsburg group to the stimulus of the mi[s/ʃ]t continuum shown separately for each listener together with the raw values shown as data points.

Original Research

31 July 2014

An analysis of post-vocalic /s-ʃ/ neutralization in Augsburg German: evidence for a gradient sound change

Véronique Bukmaier

, 1 more and

Felicitas Kleber

The study is concerned with a sound change in progress by which a post-vocalic, pre-consonantal /s-ʃ/ contrast in the standard variety of German (SG) in words such as west/wäscht (/vɛst/~/vɛʃt/, west/washes) is influencing the Augsburg German (AG) variety in which they have been hitherto neutralized as /veʃt/. Two of the main issues to be considered are whether the change is necessarily categorical; and the extent to which the change affects both speech production and perception equally. For the production experiment, younger and older AG and SG speakers merged syllables of hypothetical town names to create a blend at the potential neutralization site. These results showed a trend for a progressively greater /s-ʃ/ differentiation in the order older AG, younger AG, and SG speakers. For the perception experiment, forced-choice responses were obtained from the same subjects who had participated in the production experiment to a 16-step /s-ʃ/ continuum that was embedded into two contexts: /mIst-mIʃt/ in which /s-ʃ/ are neutralized in AG and /və'mIsə/-/və'mIʃə/ in which they are not. The results from both experiments are indicative of a sound change in progress such that the neutralization is being undone under the influence of SG, but in such a way that there is a gradual shift between categories. The closer approximation of the groups on perception suggests that the sound change may be more advanced on this modality than in production. Overall, the findings are consistent with the idea that phonological contrasts are experience-based, i.e., a continuous function of the extent to which a subject is exposed to, and makes use of, the distinction and are thus compatible with exemplar models of speech.

8,136 views

13 citations

Percent “no t” responses to the different Øt-items.

Original Research

17 July 2014

Do listeners recover “deleted” final /t/ in German?

Frank Zimmerer

and

Henning Reetz

3,040 views

6 citations

Original Research

24 June 2014

Developing biases

Ruben van de Vijver

and

Dinah Baer-Henney

German nouns may alternate from singular to plural in two different ways. Some singular forms that end in a voiceless obstruent have a plural in which this obstruent is voiced. Another alternation concerns the vowel. Some singular forms with a back vowel have a plural form in which this back vowel is front. For each noun it has to be established individually whether it alternates or not. The voicing alternation is phonetically grounded, but the vowel alternation is not. Knowledge about such alternations involves two things. First, it involves knowledge of which words alternate and which words do not and second, it involves the ability to extend the alternations to novel words. We studied the knowledge of which words alternate and the proportion to which they alternate in two corpus studies. We studied the knowledge of speakers concerning which words alternate and what generalizations can be based upon these words by means of a production study. The production study involved words and nonces. We asked twenty 5 year-olds, twenty 7 year-olds, and ten adults to produce the plural for a given singular word and a plural for a given singular nonce. In the corpus study we found that both alternations occur with the same frequency. In the production of alternations in words we found that participants in all age groups make few mistakes. With respect to the production of alternations in nonce words, we found that the proportion of voicing alternations decreases with age, while the proportion of vowel alternations increases. We explain this change in the ability to generalize the alternations to nonces on the basis of the confidence speakers can have in a generalization. Young children have a small lexicon and they can form relatively unreliable generalizations on lexical distributions. They are, however, proficient users of language and have great phonetic experience. They can more confidently form generalizations on the basis of this experience. Adults have a large lexicon and, as a consequence, they can confidently form generalizations based on their lexicon. In addition, they know that many alternations are not based on phonetic considerations.

5,987 views

35 citations