bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cross-linguistic variation in language similarity classification.
Authors: Walter MaryAnn
Published: October 2013

This study aims at identifying factors that make language sound structures seem more or less similar to English, and how those similarity judgments change according to the listener’s native language. Listeners from four different native language groups (English, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Turkish) sorted a group of 17 genetically and geographically diverse languages in terms of their sound-based distance from English. Placements of individual languages were analyzed, as well as groupings of similarly ranked languages and correlations among overall ranking structures of the different groups. Bilingual listeners exhibit more variability in their rankings than monolingual English speakers, rank their own language as less similar to English than other groups do, and rank languages of neighboring groups the least similar to it of all. Ranking correlations between language groups are significant, varying somewhat in magnitude depending on geographical proximity and typological/genetic relatedness of the listener group languages. This reflects the presence of consistent groupings within ranking structures for all language groups, which depend on sound-based factors such as the presence of perceptually salient speech sounds. These results enable predictions about relative intelligibility among international English users, native and non-native. [Work supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.]
Confusion direction differences in second language production and perception.
Authors: Hao Yen-Chen , de Jong Kenneth
Published: October 2013

This study examines differences between confusions found in productions and perceptions of learners of English. Twenty Korean EFL learners engaged in three tasks involving obstruents placed in different prosodic positions: (a) identification of native English productions, (b) reading from orthographic prompts, and (c) mimicry of native English productions. Recordings of reading and mimicry were presented to 50 native English listeners for identification. This paper compares patterns of errors found for 10 intervocalic obstruents before and after a stress, since previous studies showed that Korean does not exhibit stress-induced differences in consonant allophones. Similarity estimates using Luce’s similarity choice model were regressed across the two intervocalic positions. We found robust correlations despite allophonic differences in English, suggesting a component of L1 transfer in all three tasks. Examining bias parameters, however, revealed systematic differences in the direction of the resulting errors, which is task-dependent. Identification and mimicry tended to underestimate allophonic shifts due to stress, and so to create more voiceless to voiced errors in poststress environments. Reading productions exhibited error directions in exactly the opposite directions, suggesting Korean learners produced the stress but not the corresponding allophonic variations. These patterns indicate very different error outcomes in production and perception.
The role of linguistic experience in lexical recognition.
Authors: Weber Andrea
Published: October 2013

Lexical recognition is typically slower in L2 than in L1. Part of the difficulty comes from a not precise enough processing of L2 phonemes. Consequently, L2 listeners fail to eliminate candidate words that L1 listeners can exclude from competing for recognition. For instance, the inability to distinguish /r/ from /l/ in rocket and locker makes for Japanese listeners both words possible candidates when hearing their onset (e.g., Cutler, Weber, and Otake, 2006). The L2 disadvantage can, however, be dispelled: For L2 listeners, but not L1 listeners, L2 speech from a non-native talker with the same language background is known to be as intelligible as L2 speech from a native talker (e.g., Bent and Bradlow, 2003). A reason for this may be that L2 listeners have ample experience with segmental deviations that are characteristic for their own accent. On this account, only phonemic deviations that are typical for the listeners’ own accent will cause spurious lexical activation in L2 listening (e.g., English magic pronounced as megic for Dutch listeners). In this talk, I will present evidence from cross-modal priming studies with a variety of L2 listener groups, showing how the processing of phonemic deviations is accent-specific but withstands fine phonetic differences.
Designing the foreign language learning environment: From basic research towards product development.
Authors: Akahane-Yamada Reiko
Published: October 2013

In order to examine the acquisition of English by native speakers of Japanese, a series of training studies were conducted under various environments, that is, in the laboratory, at schools, or in virtual spaces over the Internet, and learners of various ages participated. The results demonstrated that web-based training methods using computers can improve even adult learners’ ability to perceive and produce L2, and that the acquisition of phonological categories plays an important role in the language learning. Based on these results, an L2 training system, dubbed ATR CALL BRIX, was developed by putting emphasis on speech learning. The system is a collection of training tools for speech perception, production, and comprehension. Each component focuses on the acoustic-phonetic, prosodic, lexical, or semantic decoding level of spoken language. Speech analysis and pronunciation evaluation tools are also provided. The target users vary from children to adults and from beginners to advanced learners. The content is designed with Learning Object concept and each component is adjustable on the learner characteristics and curricula. The system is already in the market. It is suggested that the cross-language and L2 acquisition studies are readily applicable to designing actual foreign language learning environment. [Work supported by JSPS.]
Electrophysiological indices of vowel discrimination in late bilinguals.
Authors: Tessel Carol A. , Hestvik Arild , Girbau Dolors , Schwartz Richard G. , Shafer Valerie L.
Published: October 2013

The purposes of the current study are: (1) To investigate discrimination of a vowel contrast not found in Spanish by late learners of English with Spanish as a first language; (2) to assess whether the use of natural consonant-vowel-consonant stimuli and multiple exemplars will show the same pattern of results as found in studies using synthetic stimuli; and (3) examine whether better speech perception as examined by the event-related potential, mismatch negativity (MMN) correlates with greater language usage as measured by a language background questionnaire. The results indicate that late-bilinguals are slower at discriminating the vowel contrast than the English monolinguals, as indexed by MMN. Monolingual English listeners showed significant MMN from 200 to 300 ms, whereas for late learners of English, the MMN was significant 50 ms later between 250 and 300 ms. Both groups showed excellent behavioral discrimination of the vowel contrast. Results also suggest that vowel category reshaping is less flexible in adult learners of a second language. The results will be discussed in relation to language usage.
Allophonic alternations influence non-native perception of stress.
Authors: Shea Christine E. , Curtin Suzanne
Published: October 2013

We examined the identification of stressed syllables by adult L2 Spanish learners to see if it is influenced by an allophonic alternation driven by word position and stress. We utilized the Spanish voiced stop-approximant alternation, where stops occur in word onsets and stressed-syllable onsets. If L2 learners track the distribution of this alternation, they should link stops to stressed syllables in word onset position and approximants to unstressed, word medial position. Low- and Intermediate-level L1 English/L2 Spanish learners, Native Spanish and monolingual English speakers listened to a series of CVCV nonce words and determined which syllable they perceived as stressed. In Experiment 1, we crossed onset allophone and vowel stress. In Experiment 2, we alternated the onset allophone and held the vowel steady. Our results show that less experienced groups were more likely to perceive stressed vowels and approximant onset syllables as stressed. This suggests that learning the interplay between allophonic distributions and their conditioning factors is possible with experience. L2 learners track distributions in the input and this, in turn, influences their perception of other properties in the language, in this case, syllable stress. Native language distributions and target language proficiency play a role in this process.
Perceptual confusions of American English vowels and consonants in Arabic-English bilinguals.
Authors: Shafiro Valeriy , Kharkhurin Anatoliy , Levy Erika
Published: October 2013

This study investigated the perception of American English (AE) vowels and consonants by proficient adult Arabic-English bilinguals studying in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The native language of all participants was Arabic, and their average age of English acquisition was 6 years. In a closed set format, 29 participants were asked to identify 12 AE vowels presented in /hVd/ context and 20 AE consonants in three vocalic contexts: /ɑCɑ/, /iCi/, and /uCu/. Overall vowel identification was 70% correct. The three least-accurately identified vowels were /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /æ/, which were 17%, 38%, and 54% correct, respectively. Most confusions were found among low and back vowels. Overall, perception of consonants was more than 90% correct in all three vocalic contexts. The most errors on consonants were found for /Ð/, i.e., 63% and 46% correct in /ɑCɑ/ and /iCi/ contexts, respectively. In both contexts, /Ð/ was most frequently confused with /v/. However, identification of /Ð/ in /uCu/ context was far more accurate; i.e., 97% correct. These results suggest a phonetic context effect on the cross-language perception of consonants.
Experience with foreign accent influences non-native (L2) word recognition: The case of th-substitutions.
Authors: Hanulikova Adriana , Weber Andrea
Published: October 2013

Effects of mispronunciations on word recognition are often explained in terms of perceptual similarity: the less similar mispronunciations are to target words, the more lexical activation is disturbed. Using th-mispronunciations that occur in foreign-accented English, this study investigated whether, irrespective of perceptual similarity, experience with mispronunciations influences word recognition. While Dutch speakers of English frequently substitute voiceless th with /t/ (e.g., /tεft/ for theft), German speakers prefer /s/ (e.g., /sεft/); the perceptually close /f/ occurs infrequently in both groups. Four eye-tracking experiments examined whether familiar substitutions cause stronger lexical activation than less familiar ones. German and Dutch participants listened to sentences spoken with a German or Dutch accent (e.g., “Now you will hear /tεft/”), while they were looking at a display with four printed words (e.g., theft, left, kiss, mask). The time course of lexical activation was measured as a function of amount of looks to printed th-words after hearing mispronounced words with a /t/, /s/, or /f/ substitute. Irrespective of the heard accent, th-words were fixated more often when hearing /t/ for Dutch listeners but /s/ for German listeners, while /f/ never outperformed the accent-specific dominant substitute. The results suggest an influence of accent-specific experience on L2 word recognition.
Vowel quantity and quality perception in Finnish and Estonian speakers.
Authors: Werner Stefan , Meister Einar
Published: October 2013

Vowel quality perception in quantity languages might be expected to be unrelated to duration of the vowels since duration is used to realize phonemic duration oppositions. Our studies, both earlier reported ones and our latest project, indicate, though, that vowel-intrinsic duration changes have a consistent effect on vowel identification in Estonian and Finnish speakers. Our latest experimental setup for investigating perceptional effects of microduration consists of two blocks, first a set of tests to identify the subject’s formant-based categorial boundaries between vowel pairs on the close-open axis, then the accordingly selected listening tests presenting formant-wise ambiguous vowel exemplars produced with varying durations. Results from ten Estonian and ten Finnish speakers will be presented. In addition, the phenomenon observed will be compared with formant structure and duration perception in languages where these parameters co-vary (e.g., English) and thus an influence of sub-phonemic durational changes on vowel perception would seem much likelier.
Assessing the contribution of second language experience and age of learning in Catalan/Spanish bilinguals’ perrception and production of English sounds.
Authors: Fullana Natalia , MacKay Ian R. A.
Published: October 2013

Previous research in immersion settings has shown that an early age of onset of second language (L2) learning, together with long-term exposure to the L2, are determinant factors for perceiving and producing L2 sounds accurately [e.g., Flege, MacKay, & Meador (1999)]. However, research in formal learning contexts has resulted in negative evidence for an early age of learning advantage [e.g., Garcia-Lecumberri & Gallardo (2003)] or in divergent experience effects (Cebrian, 2003, 2006). This study aimed to further examine the contribution of the factors of age of onset of L2 learning (AOL) and experience in a foreign language learning environment. Catalan/Spanish bilinguals studying English at university, with AOLs of 4 to 14 years and a minimum of 7 years of formal instruction, performed an AXB discrimination task, a picture narrative, and a delayed sentence repetition task. Results revealed that Catalan/Spanish bilinguals with somewhat longer exposure to English and an earlier AOL tended to discern English sounds at higher correct rates. By contrast, a great degree of variability was found across the bilinguals' extemporaneous and prompted production of English segments. Findings are discussed in terms of current models of L2 speech acquisition and their application to formal learning settings. [Work supported by postdoctoral fellowship from the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia and the FECYT (Spain).]
Implicit learning of non-native speech stimuli.
Authors: Vlahou Eleni L. , Protopapas Athanassios , Seitz Aaron
Published: October 2013

Previous studies have induced robust adult learning of non-native natural speech stimuli using explicit instructions and feedback. Here, Greek adults were exposed to non-native Hindi phonemes for six sessions in which they were unaware of the phoneme distinctions and the phonemes had no relevance to their main task. Stimuli were natural recordings of CV syllables (a retroflex or dental unvoiced stop followed by [a]) from a Hindi speaker. On each trial, participants heard two identical dental sounds and two retroflex sounds differing in intensity by an adaptively varied amount between 0.5–3 dB. The explicit task was to identify which pair differed in intensity, while the implicit learning goal was the phonetic contrast. After training, participants were tested on explicit phonetic identification and discrimination of trained and untrained stimuli spoken by the same and a novel speaker. The trained group outperformed an untrained group who were administered the same tests. Our results are compatible with a perceptual learning model where task-irrelevant stimuli (Hindi sounds) are learned due to a systematic pairing with task targets (intensity difference). Learning did not extend to the novel speaker, in agreement with previous studies showing that variability in training is crucial for generalization.
Phonetic cue-weighting in the acquisition of a second language: Evidence from Greek speakers of English.
Authors: Giannakopoulou Anastasia , Uther Maria , Ylinen Sari
Published: October 2013

The most difficult speech-sound contrasts for foreign-language learners are often the ones that have multiple phonetic cues, especially if the cues are weighted differently in the foreign and native languages. Greek speakers of English were studied to determine on what basis they are making discrimination and identification between English vowels. The use of spectral and duration cues of English vowel minimal pairs (e.g., “beat” versus “bit”) in Greek speakers were studies using perception and discrimination tasks. There were two forms of perceptual, minimal pair identification tasks. One used natural stimuli and the other used matched vowel duration words to “force” the use of spectral cues. Performance was impaired for Greek speakers across both perceptual identification tasks compared to native speakers. But performance was the worst for Greek speakers for the matched duration condition. Interestingly, an AB-X discrimination task with the same stimuli did not hamper the performance of the Greeks compared to the English in the same way. Pilot data from Greek children also showed similar patterns of performance across conditions to the Greek adults, but with a somewhat reduced ceiling. These results are discussed in terms of the strategies used to acquire new languages.
Phonetic accommodation in conversations between native and non-native speakers.
Authors: Kim Midam
Published: October 2013

We explored phonetic accommodation during native speaker interactions (four native English pairs and four native Korean pairs) and native–non-native interactions (four native–non-native pairs, all speaking English). Speakers engaged in a collaborative picture description task that lasted approximately 20 min. Utterances from relatively early and late in the task were subsequently presented to native English listeners (or Korean listeners, for the Korean-language dialogues), who were asked to carry out XAB similarity judgments, where X=one talker’s utterance and A/B=early and late utterances from the partner. Phonetic accommodation is indexed by how frequently listeners select the “late” utterance as sounding more similar to the target utterance. An independent group of native English speakers rated the nonnative utterances for degree of accentedness. Phonetic convergence was observed for native-native conversations (English or Korean), and this was stronger when speakers shared the same or similar dialects. In native–non-native conversations, none of the native speakers converged towards a nonnative partner, while non-native speakers showed different patterns depending on their proficiency, with greatest convergence for moderately accented nonnatives. The results suggest that phonetic accommodation can occur cross-linguistically, and that it may be constrained both by speakers’ dialect and by their language proficiency.
Speeded discrimination of American English vowel contrasts by Spanish-speaking late second-language (L2) learners.
Authors: Rosas Jason , Barias Arsenia , Gilichinskaya Yana D. , Strange Winifred
Published: October 2013

This study is the third in a series exploring discrimination of American English (AE) vowel contrasts by late L2-learners of English whose native languages have small vowel inventories (Japanese, Russian, Spanish). On a speeded ABX task, adult Spanish-speaking listeners discriminated multiple AE vowel contrasts including adjacent height pairs that differed in both spectral and duration parameters, front/back pairs (differing only in spectral characteristics, and four nonadjacent control pairs). It was hypothesized that Spanish listeners, who do not distinguish native vowels based on duration, would have difficulties with both types of experimental contrasts, relative to control pairs. Additionally, mean reaction time (RT) difference scores (relative to mean RTs for control pairs) for Spanish listeners were expected to be slower than for AE controls. Preliminary findings confirm these predictions. Differences in relative difficulty of experimental pairs compared with earlier data for Japanese and Russian L2-learners showed L1-specific patterns of performance that were related to L1/L2 perceptual similarity patterns. Spanish subjects also completed the Versant Test, an English language proficiency examination conducted by phone. A correlational analysis of discrimination accuracy and speed with Versant Test fluency and pronunciation measures will be presented. [Work supported by NSF.]
Spoken word recognition in quiet and noise by native and non-native listeners: Effects of age of immersion and vocabulary size.
Authors: Doty Astrid Z. , Rogers Catherine L. , Bryant Judith B.
Published: October 2013

In spoken word recognition, high-frequency words with few and less frequently occurring minimal-pair “neighbors” (lexically easy words) are recognized more accurately than low-frequency words with many and more frequently occurring neighbors (lexically hard words). [Bradlow and Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am.,106, 2074–2085 (1999)] found a larger “easy-hard” word effect for non-native than native speakers of English. The present study extends this work by specifically comparing word recognition by non-native listeners with either earlier (age 10 or earlier) or later (age 14 or later) ages of immersion in an English-speaking environment to that of native English speakers. Listeners heard six lists of 24 words, each composed of 12 lexically easy and 12 lexically hard target words in an open-set word-identification task. Word lists were presented in quiet and in moderate background noise. A substantially larger easy-hard word effect was obtained only for the later learners, but a measure of oral vocabulary size was significantly correlated with performance for the non-native listener groups only. Thus, the increased easy-hard effect for non-native listeners appears to be better explained as an effect of phonetic proficiency and/or the effect of vocabulary size on the structure of lexical neighborhoods than as an effect of language competition.
Perception of phonemic and allophonic contrasts in English- and Spanish-learning infants.
Authors: Meredith Morgan , Maye Jessica
Published: October 2013

Infants from monolingual English- and Spanish-speaking homes were compared in their perception of two phonetic contrasts that differ in their phonemic status in the two languages. The contrast [d]-[Ð] is phonemic in English but allophonic in Spanish; while the contrast [d]-flap is phonemic in Spanish but allophonic in English. Infants ranged from 6 to 16 months of age. Each infant was tested on discrimination of both contrasts. For half of the infants the stimuli were produced by a Spanish speaker, while for the other half of the infants the stimuli were produced by an English speaker. Data collection from Spanish-learning infants is still in progress. However, preliminary results indicate that infants in the youngest age group (6–8 months) are able to discriminate the [d]-flap contrast regardless of infant language background, while the [d]-[Ð] contrast is discriminated poorly at this age in both language groups. English-learning infants lose sensitivity to the allophonic [d]-flap contrast with age, and it is not until 14–16 months that discrimination of the phonemic [d]-[Ð] contrast improves in these infants. Spanish-learning infants are expected to remain proficient at discriminating the phonemic [d]-flap as they age and to remain poor at discriminating the allophonic [d]-[Ð] contrast. [Work supported by NIH1R03HD048538 to JM.]
Native language experience influences the perceived similarity of second language vowel categories.
Authors: Farmer Thomas A. , Liu Ran , Mehta Neha S. , Zevin Jason D.
Published: October 2013

Most studies of L2 speech perception seek to characterize—at least implicitly—how the similarity among L2 speech sound categories is shaped by L1 experience. Intercategory similarity for native language speakers is rarely considered, however. Here, we derive two indices of graded intercategory similarity for a front vowel series (pin, pen, and pan): One from an off-line perceptual similarity judgment task and a second from online measures of arm-movement trajectories in a word recognition task. Both tasks revealed graded effects of intercategory similarity, but the similarity spaces differed between language groups. Both groups perceived /ae/ and /E/ to be most similar, but the native Italian speakers perceived /I/ to be equally similar to /E/ and /ae/, whereas English speakers perceived the /I/ and /E/ to be more similar than /I/ and /ae/. The Italian speakers’ performance in both tasks suggests a similarity space that is dominated by dimensions that are contrastive for /I/ with respect to the other vowels. This may reflect a compensatory strategy for L2 vowel perception that may derive from experience with the distributional properties of their native vowels.
The impact of native inventory versus native contrast on vowel discrimination.
Authors: Ettlinger Marc , Johnson Keith
Published: October 2013

Theories of speech perception differ as to whether experience with sounds or with sound contrasts is more important when discriminating novel sounds. To explore this question, 21 American English, 16 Turkish, and 16 French speakers were tested on their ability to discriminate high front vowels in German (/i/∼/y/∼/Y/∼/I/). The crucial difference between the participant languages is that English only uses the tense-lax contrast (/i/∼/I/), while Turkish and French only use the rounding contrast (/i/∼/y/). If contrast is crucial, then English speakers should be better at discriminating /y/∼/Y/, whereas if the inventory is crucial, then they should be better at discriminating /I/∼/Y/. The results of a fixed discrimination task show that there is no significant effect of language and that the tense-lax contrast (/i/∼/I/; /y/∼/Y/) is universally more easily discriminated than the rounding contrast (/i/∼/y/; /I/∼/Y/). The results of a rating task do reflect an influence of language, however with English-listeners rating /I/∼/Y/ as more distinct and French and Turkish speakers rating /y/∼/Y/ as more distinct. So, because English has /I/, but no rounding contrast, what matters in the perception of new sounds is not experience with contrasts, but rather experience with particular sounds.
Informational masking in first- and second-language speech recognition.
Authors: Van Engen Kristin J.
Published: October 2013

Human speech recognition in noisy conditions is modulated by cognitive factors such as language background. For example, noise is more detrimental to non-native listeners than native listeners (e.g., van Wijngaarden et al., 2002), and when noise is a speech signal, native-language noise is more detrimental than foreign-language noise for listeners attending to native-language speech targets (e.g., Van Engen and Bradlow, 2007). It is not clear, however, whether this increased interference is primarily due to the native status of the noise or to the greater similarity between target and noise. To address this issue, English speech recognition in the presence of English and Mandarin babble was assessed for monolingual English listeners and L2 English listeners whose L1 is Mandarin. Results showed that intelligibility for both groups was lower in English versus Mandarin babble; that is, L2 listeners experienced more difficulty in same-language noise versus native-language noise. However, monolingual English listeners showed a greater release from masking in Mandarin noise than did L1 Mandarin listeners. The informational masking imposed on speech targets by interfering speech noise, therefore, is dependent both on the linguistic and/or acoustic similarity between the noise and the target and on the listeners’ experience with the languages involved.
Discrimination of four English vowel contrasts by Catalan learners varying in language experience.
Authors: Fabra Lucrecia Rallo
Published: October 2013

PAM-L2 (Best and Tyler, 2007) hypothesizes that discrimination of L2 sounds can be predicted from the perceptual relatedness of L2 categories to L1 categories. Catalan EFL learners encounter serious difficulties to discriminate some English vowel contrasts, partly because Catalan has a smaller vowel inventory than American English. This study presents data from a perceptual discrimination test in which three groups of EFL learners varying in experience with English were asked to discriminate a series of potentially difficult English vowel pairs. The discrimination task consisted in picking the odd item out of three stimuli which were heard one after the other at 1.3-s intervals. The target vowel stimuli occurred in CVC syllables produced by six native English talkers. Four vowel contrasts were tested: //opena-/invv/, //eh-/aelig/, /i-/smallI/, and /u-/smallU/. As predicted by PAM-L2, “category-goodness” contrasts /i-/smallI/ and /u-/smallU/ were fairly well discriminated, the “single-category” contrast /opena-/invv/ was poorly discriminated. The “uncategorized” contrast //eh-/aelig/ failed to meet PAM-L2 predictions, learners failed to distinguish these two vowels although the contrast was predicted as relatively easy to discriminate. Language experience did not have a significant effect on ease of discrimination. These results suggest that PAM-L2 assimilation patterns can also be extended to EFL learning.
Effects of linguistic and musical experience on non-native perception of Thai vowel duration.
Authors: Cooper Angela , Wang Yue
Published: October 2013

Previous research has suggested a relationship between musical experience and L2 proficiency. The present study investigated the influence of musical experience on non-native perception of speaking-rate varied Thai phonemic vowel length distinctions. Given that musicians are trained to discern temporal distinctions in music, we hypothesized that their musical experience would enhance their ability to perceive non-native vowel length distinctions as well as their sensitivity to temporal changes as a function of speaking rate. Naive native English listeners of Thai, with and without musical training, as well as native Thai listeners, were presented with minimal pairs of monosyllabic Thai words differing in vowel length at three speaking rates in an identification task and a discrimination task. For identification, participants were asked to identify whether a word contained a long or short vowel. For discrimination, participants heard three successive words and were asked to indicate whether the second word had the same vowel length as the first or last word. The results show significant group differences in identification and discrimination accuracy within and across speaking rates, suggesting that listeners’ perception of phonetic categorical versus temporal acoustic variations differs as a function of linguistic and musical experience.
The perception of Norwegian word tones by second language speakers.
Authors: van Dommelen Wim A. , Husby Olaf
Published: October 2013

The present study is concerned with the perception of Norwegian word tones by second language speakers. The phonological system of Norwegian involves two different tones that are used to distinguish a relatively large number of word pairs. Earlier studies have shown that native speakers of Norwegian are able to identify the word tones almost error-free. The aim of the present study was to investigate word tone perception by speakers of a tonal language (Mandarin Chinese) and a non-tonal language (German). These two groups as well as a control group of native listeners identified manipulated stimuli with tonal contours varying between tone 1 and tone 2. It appeared that the L2 users had less sharp transitions than the natives, the Chinese subjects performing somewhat better than the Germans. In addition, native speakers categorized tokens of tone 1 and tone 2 words produced by the L2 speakers and indicated on a five-point scale how sure they were in their judgment. In an acoustical analysis the fundamental frequency contours of the L2 test words were analyzed and subsequently used for comparison with native categorization results. The implications of the found correlations between production and perception are discussed.
Cross-language differences in the uptake of place of articulation.
Authors: Wagner Anita E.
Published: October 2013

There are cross-language differences in the use of coarticulatory cues for fricative identification. Listeners with spectrally similar fricatives in their native phoneme inventories rely more on the information in the surrounding vowels than listeners with spectrally distinct fricatives. The present study examined whether such cross-language differences result in differences in the temporal uptake of information specifying fricatives. In a gating study native listeners of Dutch and Italian, both languages with spectrally distinct fricatives were compared with Spanish and Polish listeners. The Spanish fricative inventory contains the spectrally similar labiodental and dental fricatives. The Polish fricative repertoire contains postdental, alveolar, and alveolopalatal fricatives. The questions addressed were whether the presence of spectrally similar fricatives leads to: (1) reliance on cues, which are secondary for listeners with distinct fricatives; (2) an uptake of information specifying place of articulation in particular for fricatives; (3) an uptake of information from coarticulatory cues preceding or following the consonant. Listeners identified fricative and stop targets in gated CV and VC syllables. The results show that listeners optimize their uptake of information to the demands of their native phoneme inventories and rely on more sources of information only for distinctions between several similar places of articulation.
Language background influences the emergence of voice onset time production and perception.
Authors: MacLeod Andrea A. N. , Rvachew Susan , Polka Linda
Published: October 2013

This study investigates the production and perception of voice onset time (VOT) among preschool children who acquired English and French simultaneously compared to monolingual peers of these two languages. Children participated in this study at the age of 18 months and returned at 24 months for a second session. During each session the children took part in a visual habituation procedure to evaluate discrimination of VOT using edited natural /b/+ vowel and /p/ + vowel syllables in a task format developed by Houston et al. (2007) to assess individual performance. In this task, three VOT values (produced by several talkers) were presented to the children: one within adult norms of the language for voiced bilabial consonants; one within the adult norms of the language for voiceless bilabial consonants; and one between the means for the voiced and voiceless consonants. The children also participated in a structured play session, and their spontaneous productions of word initial stops were acoustically analyzed to measure VOT. Preliminary analysis indicates that accuracy in discriminating VOT precedes production of voicing contrasts for all groups, and monolinguals appear to have developed adultlike perception and production of voicing at a younger age than their bilingual peers.
Stop-like modification of dental fricatives in Indian English: A preliminary study to perceptual experiments.
Authors: Chu Chi D. , Chen Nancy F.
Published: October 2013

Stop-like modification of dental fricatives occurs in both American English and foreign accents of English (Zhao, Ph.D. thesis, 2007). This study examines stop-like word-initial /Ð/ in Indian English to determine its frequency and compare it with American English. Acoustic analysis on unscripted telephone recordings of 40 Indian English speakers showed that of 161 total word-initial /Ð/ instances, 61% were stop-like. The modification occurred most frequently in utterance-initial contexts, after stops, and after fricatives, and least after vowels and liquids. The variable occurrence of the modification across many contexts suggests that it may result from physiological conditions rather than from a phonological rule. If the modification is physiologically conditioned, differences in modification frequency between dialects may indicate dialectal differences in articulation. For example, comparison with American English showed that stop-like /Ð/ was more common in Indian English across all contexts, particularly after fricatives, consistent with the tendency of Indian English to substitute bilabial stops for labiodental fricatives (e.g., /f/ and /v/), which provides a context more conducive to stop-like /Ð/. Further investigation of varying cross-dialectal frequencies of stop-like modification could uncover additional dialectal differences in articulation and determine how such articulatory differences might affect cross-dialect perception.
Baseline sound monitoring plan for Grant-Kohrs Ranch national historic site.
Authors: Maher Robert C.
Published: October 2013

Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site (GRKO), located just north of Deer Lodge, Montana, is a working cattle ranch commemorating the heritage of cowboys and stock growers in the history of the American West during the 19th and 20th centuries. The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) maintains the site according to its charter as a working ranch, with all the sights, sounds, and sensations associated with ranching. The cultural soundscape of the working ranch is considered essential to visitor enjoyment and understanding. Several anticipated changes in the neighboring community of Deer Lodge may affect the visitor experience at GRKO, including anticipated expansion of the local airport, increasing interstate highway traffic, and proposals to establish a rifle shooting range nearby. Because GRKO currently has no data characterizing the natural and cultural sounds of the park, this project was commissioned to monitor and evaluate the natural, cultural, and community sounds that comprise the ambient acoustic environment of the historic site over the period of one calendar year. The baseline acoustical data are analyzed and documented in a format suitable for management purposes by the NPS (the sponsor of this study), and by the NPS Natural Sounds Program Office.
Sound production and localization in loricariid catfishes.
Authors: Smith Michael E. , Stewart Patrick C. , Webb Amanda L. , Rogers Brian D.
Published: October 2013

Catfishes of the family Loricariidae have bilobed swim bladders that are adjacent to their ears. We hypothesize that this anatomical design assists these fishes in sound localization and/or sound production. Loricariid catfishes produce short, broadband clicks via pectoral spine stridulation. To test whether these clicks can be localized, we used classical conditioning to train groups of 50 Otocinclus affinis to come to a conspecific sound on one side of a 200-L aquarium. Four types of experiments were performed—naive, trained, test-1, and test-2. During trained trials, food and a conspecific sound stimulus were presented simultaneously, while only the sound stimulus was presented during naïve (untrained) trials. During the test-1 and test-2 trials, only the conspecific sound stimulus or a 500-Hz sound stimulus, respectively, was presented. O. affinis were attracted to the conspecific sound post-training, with 60–80% of the fish remaining on the speaker side of the tank during the stimulus. In summary, O. affinis are able to localize a conspecific sound source. Future experiments have been designed to examine the acuity of this sound localization using four speakers in a circular tank, and the effects of swim bladder deflation on the sound localization ability of O. affinis.
Sand acoustics: The effective density fluid model, Pierce/Carey expressions, and inferences for porous media modeling.
Authors: Williams Kevin
Published: October 2013

Recently, Pierce and Carey [JASA-EL 124, EL308–EL312 (2008)], presented a low-frequency analysis of sound propagation in sand/silty sediments. Here, equivalent expressions are presented using a low frequency expansion of an unconsolidated version of Biot porous medium theory (i.e., the effective density fluid model (EDFM)). The resulting expression for attenuation allows identfication of the nondimensional parameter in the Pierce/Carey result in terms of physical parameters. One of the important aspects of the Pierce/Carey derivation is that they show how to account for the inertial effects due to the relative grain/fluid density. The agreement between the Pierce/Carrey and EDFM low-frequency attenuation expressions motivates further frequency and relative grain/fluid density analyses of attenuation and sound speed. The general inference of these analyses is that any model that ignores inertial effects due to differences in grain and fluid density is missing a key piece of physics that makes it incomplete. Wood’s equation is one such model and since the Buckingham model uses Wood’s equation, it is another example. The point being that the use of the mass density to handle inertia in a porous medium is a low-frequency approximation. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]
Vowel inherent spectral change in forensic voice comparison.
Authors: Morrison Geoffrey Stewart
Published: October 2013

Two-parameter models of vowel inherent spectral change, such as dual-target or target-plus-slope models, have been found to be adequate for vowel-phoneme identification. More sophisticated curve-fitting models do not appear to outperform such two-parameter models. This suggests that if only simple cues such as initial and final formant values are necessary for signaling phoneme identity, then speakers may have considerable freedom in the path taken between the initial and final formant values. If the constraints on formant trajectories are relatively lax with respect to vowel-phoneme identity, then with respect to speaker identity there may be considerable information contained in the details of formant trajectories. Differences in physiology and idiosyncracies in the use of motor commands may mean that different individuals consistently produce different formant trajectories between the beginning and end of the same vowel phoneme. If within-speaker variance is substantially smaller than between-speaker variance, then formant trajectories may be exploited for forensic voice comparison. This paper reviews a number of forensic-voice-comparison studies (including studies conducted using the likelihood-ratio framework) which have extracted information relevant to speaker identity from formant trajectories. For the purposes of forensic voice comparison, models using parametric curves are found to outperform simple two-parameter models.
Were we or are we? Perception of reduced function words in spontaneous conversations.
Authors: Warner Natasha , Brenner Dan , Woods Anna , Tucker Bejamin V. , Ernestus Mirjam
Published: October 2013

Spontaneous, reduced pronunciations diverge greatly from citation forms. The quality of a single segment can change, e.g., /b/ in “about” surfacing as an approximant. But sounds, syllables, and entire words can also be deleted (e.g., “do you have time?” as [djutEm] with no acoustic trace of “have”). This work investigates the perception of reduced function words such as “he was” or “we were.” Twenty-two young American English speakers’ spontaneous conversations with close acquaintances were recorded. From these, we selected utterances containing items such as “he’s/he was, we’re/we were, got him/got them.” When hearing an entire utterance, native listeners may clearly perceive “we were,” but on hearing just the “we were” portion, they perceive an unambiguous “we’re.” The portion of the signal presented to listeners is manipulated to determine the contributions of local acoustic cues, speech rate and coarticulation, semantic and syntactic information, and overall bias toward present vs past tense. An auditory and a written task are also compared to separate the contribution of intonation from that of syntax/semantics. These results begin to elucidate the interplay of information sources listeners draw upon when parsing spontaneous speech. Future work will compare to non-native listeners’ perceptions.
PAMGUARD: Semiautomated, open source software for real-time acoustic detection and localization of cetaceans.
Authors: Gillespie Douglas , Mellinger David K. , Gordon Jonathan , McLaren David , Redmond Paul , McHugh Ronald , Trinder Philip , Deng Xiao-Yan , Thode Aaron
Published: October 2013

PAMGUARD is open-source, platform-independent software to address the needs of developers and users of Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) systems. For the PAM operator—marine mammal biologist, manager, or mitigator—PAMGUARD provides a flexible and easy-to-use suite of detection, localization, data management, and display modules. These provide a standard interface across different platforms with the flexibility to allow multiple detectors to be added, removed, and configured according to the species of interest and the hardware configuration on a particular project. For developers of PAM systems, an Application Programming Interface (API) has been developed which contains standard classes for the efficient handling of many types of data, interfaces to acquisition hardware and to databases, and a GUI framework for data display. PAMGUARD replicates and exceeds the capabilities of earlier real time monitoring programs such as the IFAW Logger Suite and Ishmael. Ongoing developments include improved real-time location and automated species classification. [PAMGUARD funded by the OGP E&P Sound and Marine Life project.]
Investigation of damping materials for heavy-weight floor impact sounds in concrete structures.
Authors: Jeon Jin Yong , Yoo Seung Yup
Published: October 2013

Multi-layers of surface materials were investigated for the isolation of floor impact sounds in concrete structures. Both resilient and viscoelastic damping materials were tested according to the modified method of ANSI S2.22 for calculating elastic modulus and loss factor. The dynamic characteristics of the concrete structures subjected to heavy-weight floor impacts were modeled by the compressional damping theory, using sandwiched beams. Results show that the viscoelastic damping materials are more effective than the resilient materials. In field measurements, the insertion loss of the heavy-weight impact sounds, which was mainly affected by the modal characteristics at low frequencies, was higher in floor structures with the damping materials.
Precise sound velocity measurements on solids and liquids at high pressure and high temperature with direct length measurement.
Authors: Li Baosheng
Published: October 2013

Sound velocity measurements at pressure and/or temperature provide important information in the material’s structural behavior and physical properties under extreme conditions. With the application of synchrotron X-radiation sources, new developments have emerged to facilitate the study properties and structures of crystalline and amorphous materials. In the last decade, we have developed a unique technique for measuring sound velocity in a cubic type multianvil apparatus installed at X-17B2, National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) of Brookhaven National Lab, which allows us to conduct precise velocity measurements on crystalline and noncrystalline materials at various pressure and temperature conditions by conducting simultaneous X-radiation and ultrasonic interferometry measurements. In this paper, sound velocities at high temperatures for some ceramics and metals are measured to study the behavior and property change of these materials undergoing compression/expansion as well as phase transition and structural instabilities. This technique opens new opportunities for the study of materials that are of interest to many disciplines, such as earth science, materials science, and condensed matter physics.