Perception of Allophonic Cues to English Word Boundaries by Polish Learners: Approximant Devoicing in English

• Authors: Arkadiusz Rojczyk , Geoffrey Schwartz , Anna Balas
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The study investigates the perception of devoicing of English /w, r, j, l/ after /p, t, k/ as a word-boundary cue by Polish listeners. Polish does not devoice sonorants following voiceless stops in word-initial positions. As a result, Polish learners are not made sensitive to sonorant devoicing as a segmentation cue. Higher-proficiency and lower-proficiency Polish learners of English participated in the task in which they recognised phrases such as buy train vs. bite rain or pie plot vs. pipe lot. The analysis of accuracy scores revealed that successful segmentation was only above chance level, indicating that sonorant voicing/devoicing cue was largely unattended to in identifying the boundary location. Moreover, higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation. The analysis of reaction times showed an unclear pattern in which higher-proficiency listeners segmented the test phrases faster but not more accurately than lower-proficiency listeners. Finally, #CS sequences were recognised more accurately than C#S sequences, which was taken to suggest that the listeners may have had some limited knowledge that devoiced sonorants appear only in word-initial positions, but they treated voiced sonorants as equal candidates for word-final and word-initial positions.

Keywords

EN

word boundary; devoicing; laryngeal coarticulation; allophonic cues

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 15-29

Dates

published

2016-03-30

Contributors

author

Arkadiusz Rojczyk

• University of Silesia

author

Geoffrey Schwartz

• Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

author

Anna Balas

References

• Ainsworth, W. 1986. Pitch change as a cue to syllabification. Journal of Phonetics 14. 257-264.
• Altenberg, E. P. 2005. The perception of word boundaries in second language. Second Language Research 21(4): 325-358.
• Anderson, S. and R. Port. 1994. Evidence for syllable structure, stress and juncture from segmental durations. Journal of Phonetics 22. 283-315.
• Aslin, R. N., Jenny R. Saffran, and Elissa L. Newport. 1998. Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science 9. 321-324.
• Beckman, M. E. and J. Edwards. 1990. Lengthening and shortening and the nature of prosodic constituency. In J. Kingston and M.. E. Beckman (eds.), Laboratory Phonology I, 152-178. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bissiri, Maria. P., Maria L. Lecumberri, Martin Cooke and Jan Volin. 2011. The role of wordinitial glottal stops in recognizing English words. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011. Florence, Italy.
• Boersma, P. 2001. Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 10. 341-345.
• Bohn, O.-S. 1995. Cross-language speech perception in adults – first language transfer does not tell it all. In W. Strange (ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in crosslanguage research, 275-300. Baltimore: York Press.
• Boucher, Victor J. 1998. A parameter for syllabification for VstopV and relative timing invariance. Journal of Phonetics 16. 299-326.
• Brent, M. R. and T. A. Cartwright. 1996. Distributional regularity and phonotactic constraints are useful for segmentation. Cognition 61. 93-125.
• Byrd, D. and E. Saltzman. 1998. Intergestural dynamics of multiple prosodic boundaries. Journal of Phonetics 26. 173-199.
• Christie, W. M. 1977. Some multiple cues for juncture in English. General Linguistics 17. 212-222.
• Cole, J., H. Kim, H. Choi, and M. Hasegawa-Johnson. 2007. Prosodic effects on acoustic cues to stop voicing and place of articulation. Evidence from Radio News speech. Journal of Phonetics 35. 180-209.
• Cole, R. A., J. Jakimik, and W. E. Cooper. 1980. Segmenting speech into words. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 64. 1323-1332.
• Cutler, A., J. Mehler, D. Norris and J. Segui. 1986. The syllable’s differing role in the segmentation of French and English. Journal of Memory and Language 25(4). 385-400.
• Cutler, A., J. Mehler, D. Norris and J. Segui. 1992. The nonlingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive Psychology 24. 381-410.
• Davidsen-Nielsen, N. 1974. Syllabification in English words with medial sp, st, sk. Journal of Phonetics 2. 15-45.
• Docherty, G. J. 1992. The timing of voicing in British English obstruents. New York: Foris Publications.
• Endress, A. D. and M. D. Hauser. 2010. Word segmentation with universal prosodic cues. Cognitive Psychology 61. 177-199.
• Fougeron, C. and P. Keating. 1997. Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domain. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101. 3728-3740.
• Garellek, M. 2014. Voice quality strengthening and glottalization. Journal of Phonetics 45. 106-113.
• Gow, D. W. and P. C. Gordon. 1995. Lexical and prelexical influences on word segmentation: Evidence from priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21. 344-359.
• Gussman, E. 1992. Resyllabification and delinking. The case of Polish voicing. Linguistic Inquiry 23. 29-56.
• Ito, K. and W. Strange. 2009. Perception of allophonic cues to English word boundaries by Japanese second language learners of English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125(4). 2348-2360.
• Kim, D., J. D. Stephens and M. A. Pitt. 2012. How does context play a part in splitting words apart? Production and perception of word boundaries in casual speech. Journal of Memory and Language 66. 509-529.
• Krakow, R. A. 1993. Nonsegmental influences on velum movement patterns: Syllables, sentences, stress, and speaking rate. In Stephen R. Anderson, Marie. K. Huffman, Rena. A. Krakow and Patricia A. Keating. (eds.), Phonetics and phonology: Nasals, nasalization, and the velum, 87-116. San Diego: Academic Press.
• Lehiste, I. 1960. An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture. Phonetica 5. 1-54.
• Lehiste, I. 1972. The timing of utterances and linguistic boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51. 2018-2024.
• Mattys, S. L., L. White, and J. F. Melhorn. 2005. Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134. 477-500.
• Mehler, J., J. Y. Dommergues, U. Frauenfelder and J. Segui. 1981. The syllable’s role in speech segmentation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20(3). 298-305.
• Nakatani, L. and K. D. Dukes. 1977. Locus of segmental cues for word juncture. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 62. 714-719.
• Nakatani, L., K. D. O’Connor and C. H. Aston. 1981. Prosodic aspects of American English speech rhythm. Phonetica 38. 84-106.
• Norris, D., J. M. McQueen, A. Cutler and S. Butterfield. 1997. The possible word-constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology 34. 191-243.
• Kimbrough, O. D. 1973. The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 54. 1235-1247.
• Quené, H. 1992. Durational cues for word segmentation in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 20. 331-350.
• Ohala, J. J. 1993. Coarticulation and phonology. Language and Speech 36. 155-170.
• Otake, T., G. Hatano, A. Cutler and J. Mehler. 1993. Mora or syllable? Speech segmentation in Japanese. Journal of Memory and Language 32(2). 258-278.
• Pompino-Marschall, B. and M. Żygis. 2010. Glottal marking of vowel-initial words in German. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 52. 1-17.
• Porzuczek, A., A. Rojczyk and J. Arabski. 2013. Praktyczny kurs wymowy angielskiej dla Polaków. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.
• Redford, M. A. and P. Randall. 2005. The role of juncture cues and phonological knowledge in English syllabification judgments. Journal of Phonetics 33. 27-46.
• Rojczyk, A. 2010. Preceding vowel duration as a cue to the consonant voicing contrast: Perception experiments with Polish-English bilinguals. In E. Waniek-Klimczak (ed.), Issues in accents of English: Variability and norm, 341-360. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Schwartz, G. 2013. Vowel hiatus at Polish word boundaries – phonetic realization and phonological implications. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49(4). 557-585.
• Schwartz, G., A. Balas and A. Rojczyk. 2014. External sandhi in L2 segmental phonetics – final (de)voicing in Polish English. Concordia Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 5. 637-649.
• Schwartz, G., A. Rojczyk and A. Balas. 2015. Monitoring English sandhi linking – a study of Polish listeners’ L2 perception. Research in Language 13(1). 61-76.
• Shatzman, K. B., and J. M. McQueen. 2006. Segment duration as a cue to word boundaries in spoken-word recognition. Perception and Psychophysics 68(1). 1-16.
• Shoemaker, E. 2014. The exploitation of subphonemic acoustic detail in L2 speech segmentation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 36(4). 709-731.
• Smith, R. H. and S. Hawkins. 2012. Production and perception of speaker-specific phonetic detail at word boundaries. Journal of Phonetics 40. 213-233.
• Szczepek-Reed, B. 2014. Phonetic practices for action formation: Glottalization versus linking of TCU-initial vowels in German. Journal of Pragmatics 62. 13-29.
• Turk, A. E., and S. Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2000. Word-boundary-related duraton patterns in English. Journal of Phonetics 28. 397-440.
• Turk, A. E., and L. White. 1999. Structural influences on accentual lengthening in American English. Journal of Phonetics 27. 171-206.
• Umeda, N. 1975. Vowel duration in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 58. 434-445.
• Umeda, N. 1978. Occurance of glottal stops in fluent speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 64. 88-94.
• Umeda, N. and C. H. Coker. 1975. Subphonemic detail in American English. In G. Fant and M. A. A. Tatham (eds.), Auditory analysis and perception, 539-564. London: Academic Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/rela-2016-0008