It is a well-known overt feature of the Northern Jutlandic variety of Danish that /t/ is pronounced with short voice onset time and no affrication. This is not limited to Northern Jutland, but... Show moreIt is a well-known overt feature of the Northern Jutlandic variety of Danish that /t/ is pronounced with short voice onset time and no affrication. This is not limited to Northern Jutland, but shows up across the peninsula. This paper expands on this research, using a large corpus to show that complex geographical patterns of variation in voice onset time is found in all fortis stops, but not in lenis stops. Modeling the data using generalized additive mixed modeling both allows us to explore these geographical patterns in detail, as well as test a number of hypotheses about how a number of environmental and social factors affect voice onset time. Show less
The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike... Show moreThe existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered. Show less
In forensisch zaakonderzoek komt steeds vaker spraakmateriaal in verschillende talen voor. Dit roept de vraag op of er taalonafhankelijke spreker-specifieke kenmerken zijn. De bilabiale nasaal /m/... Show moreIn forensisch zaakonderzoek komt steeds vaker spraakmateriaal in verschillende talen voor. Dit roept de vraag op of er taalonafhankelijke spreker-specifieke kenmerken zijn. De bilabiale nasaal /m/ is één van de meest spreker-specifieke segmenten, wat wordt toegeschreven aan de rigiditeit van de neusholte [1]. Tegelijkertijd is de mondholte ook betrokken bij de productie en heeft de tong daarbij geen vaste positie [2]. Hierdoor is er ruimte voor binnen-sprekervariatie, die mogelijk taalafhankelijk is. Wij onderzochten in hoeverre de realisatie van /m/ verschilt tussen de eerste (L1) en tweede taal (L2) van meertalige sprekers.Er zijn monologen gebruikt van 53 vrouwelijke sprekers uit D-LUCEA [3], in hun L1 Nederlands en L2 Engels. De sprekers waren eerstejaarsstudenten van University College Utrecht en hadden een bovengemiddelde beheersing van het Engels. De nasalen werden gesegmenteerd in Praat en geanalyseerd op verschillende akoestische kenmerken.De resultaten laten zien dat de verschillen tussen de realisaties in de L1 en L2 minimaal zijn. Alleen de tweede nasale formant (N2) liet een taalverschil zien: hoger in de L2 dan in de L1. Sprekers verschilden in de mate waarin ze deze verschuiving vertoonden en voor sommigen was het resultaat in tegengestelde richting.Hoewel de gevonden L1−L2 verschillen in de uitspraak van de /m/ klein zijn, lijkt de bilabiale nasaal niet geheel taalonafhankelijk. De N2 wordt gerelateerd aan de mond- en neusholte [4], wat duidt op een aanpassing in de productie. Rekening houdend met deze aanpassing zou de /m/ bruikbaar kunnen zijn in meertalige sprekervergelijkingen. Vervolgstappen zijn om dit te onderzoeken met sprekerclassificatie. Show less
The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure... Show moreThe present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi automatic way In the first stage, a program provides suggestions for the phonetician to decide the lexical tonal variants for the recordings of each word, based on the result of a functional k-means partitioning algorithm and tonal information from an available pronunciation dictionary of a related Chinese dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. The second stage iterates a functional version of k-means partitioning with silhouette-based criteria to abstract an optimal number of tonal patterns from the whole corpus, which also allows the phoneticians to adjust the results of the automatic procedure in a controlled way and so redo partitioning for a subset of clusters.The procedure yielded eleven disyllabic tonal patterns for Jinan Mandarin, representing the tonal system used by contemporary Jinan Mandarin speakers from a wide range of age groups. The procedure used in this paper is different from previous linguistic descriptions which were based on more elderly speakers' pronunciations . This method incorporates phoneticians' linguistic knowledge and preliminary linguistic resources into the procedure of partitioning. It can improve the efficiency and objectivity in the investigation of lexical tonal pattern categories when building pronunciation dictionaries for underresourced languages. Show less
