Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Rajka Smiljanic; Ann R. Bradlow

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2007.02.002

Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

Rajka Smiljanic^*, Ann R. Bradlow

^*Corresponding author for this work

Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

75 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effect of clear speech, a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production, on vowel and stop consonant contrasts along the temporal dimension in English and Croatian. Our previous work has shown that, in addition to enhancing the overall acoustic salience of the speech signal through a decrease in speaking rate and expansion of pitch range, clear speech modifications increased the spectral distances between vowel categories in both languages despite the different sizes of their vowel inventories (+10 in English, five in Croatian). Here, we examine how clear speech affects the duration of English tense (long) vs. lax (short) vowels, English vowels preceding voiced (long) vs. voiceless (short) coda stops, Croatian long vs. short vowels and Croatian and English voice onset time (VOT) duration for voiced and voiceless stops. Overall, the results showed that the proportional distance between the 'short' and 'long' vowel categories and between the voiced and voiceless stop categories was remarkably stable across the two speaking styles in both languages. These results suggest that, in combination with the spectral enhancement of vowel contrasts, language-specific pronunciation norms along the temporal dimension are maintained in clear and conversational speech.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	91-113
Number of pages	23
Journal	Journal of Phonetics
Volume	36
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2007.02.002
State	Published - Jan 2008

Funding

We are grateful to Irena Zovko for help in recruiting Croatian subjects, and to Ken Konopka for assistance in data collection. We thank Robert Daland for help with Praat scripts. We also thank Gerry Docherty and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions concerning the research reported here. This research was supported by Grant No. NIH-R01-DC005794 from NIH-NIDCD and by The Hugh Knowles Center at Northwestern University.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Speech and Hearing

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10.1016/j.wocn.2007.02.002

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title = "Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian",

abstract = "In this paper, we investigate the effect of clear speech, a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production, on vowel and stop consonant contrasts along the temporal dimension in English and Croatian. Our previous work has shown that, in addition to enhancing the overall acoustic salience of the speech signal through a decrease in speaking rate and expansion of pitch range, clear speech modifications increased the spectral distances between vowel categories in both languages despite the different sizes of their vowel inventories (+10 in English, five in Croatian). Here, we examine how clear speech affects the duration of English tense (long) vs. lax (short) vowels, English vowels preceding voiced (long) vs. voiceless (short) coda stops, Croatian long vs. short vowels and Croatian and English voice onset time (VOT) duration for voiced and voiceless stops. Overall, the results showed that the proportional distance between the 'short' and 'long' vowel categories and between the voiced and voiceless stop categories was remarkably stable across the two speaking styles in both languages. These results suggest that, in combination with the spectral enhancement of vowel contrasts, language-specific pronunciation norms along the temporal dimension are maintained in clear and conversational speech.",

author = "Rajka Smiljanic and Bradlow, {Ann R.}",

note = "Funding Information: We are grateful to Irena Zovko for help in recruiting Croatian subjects, and to Ken Konopka for assistance in data collection. We thank Robert Daland for help with Praat scripts. We also thank Gerry Docherty and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions concerning the research reported here. This research was supported by Grant No. NIH-R01-DC005794 from NIH-NIDCD and by The Hugh Knowles Center at Northwestern University. ",

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N2 - In this paper, we investigate the effect of clear speech, a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production, on vowel and stop consonant contrasts along the temporal dimension in English and Croatian. Our previous work has shown that, in addition to enhancing the overall acoustic salience of the speech signal through a decrease in speaking rate and expansion of pitch range, clear speech modifications increased the spectral distances between vowel categories in both languages despite the different sizes of their vowel inventories (+10 in English, five in Croatian). Here, we examine how clear speech affects the duration of English tense (long) vs. lax (short) vowels, English vowels preceding voiced (long) vs. voiceless (short) coda stops, Croatian long vs. short vowels and Croatian and English voice onset time (VOT) duration for voiced and voiceless stops. Overall, the results showed that the proportional distance between the 'short' and 'long' vowel categories and between the voiced and voiceless stop categories was remarkably stable across the two speaking styles in both languages. These results suggest that, in combination with the spectral enhancement of vowel contrasts, language-specific pronunciation norms along the temporal dimension are maintained in clear and conversational speech.

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Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

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