Language and Speech

The relationship between syntactic and prosodic cues to sentence boundaries was examined as a function of language dominance. Groups of English-dominant and Hebrew-dominant subjects were timed on their responses to tones at the ends of complete and incomplete sentences in both languages, and they identified each utterance as either “finished” or “unfinished”. The truncated sentences were lexically and syntactilly well-formed, through prosodically incomplete. Reaction time was also measured in a second experiment, in which explicit attention was not called to intonation. The results indicated that listeners perceive acoustic cues to sentence boundaries, though the tendency to reprocess these cues in terms of syntax increases at less attention is directed to prosodic features. In experiment II, both the subjects who were aware of the unfinished intonation and those who reported noticing unusual about the sentences responsed significantly more slowly to incomplete utterances. These findings indicate that post-sentence identification tasks may fail to detect that objective acoustic information is in fact initially perceived. The two dominance groups responded similarly to the same stimuli in Experiment I, producing no errors in identifying unfinished sentences in English and the largest number of incorrect responses on unfinished in Hebrew. These results provide support for perceptual effects of differences in segmental lenthening between English and Hebrew uncovered in an earlier study.

Alveolar, labial, fricative, and stop features were not readily accessible to adult subjects in a concept-formation task that involved learning a linguistic suffixing rule, even though the alveolar stop category triggers an alternate form of the English past tense suffix. However, the place/manner dissimilation principle was accessed toward the end of the testing session, suggesting that subjects encountered it as an articulatory constraint, as a result of pronouncing stimuli throughout the experiment. Speakers may process the past tense and plural suffixing rules in terms of articulatory constraints (i.e., possible and impossible pronunciation sequences), rather than in terms of segment or feature categories.

The relationship between cognitive stage and three types of linguistic markers used to convey speaker uncertainty was assessed. Cognitive stage was assessed on the basis of explanations given by 56 subjects on two Piagetian probability tasks. These cognitive interviews also provided context-appropriate verbal data on the production of uncertainty markers, classified referentially as (a) frequency, (b) psychological, and (c) ambiguous. Production of frequency markers was not related to cognitive stage. However, both concrete and formal operational subjects produced more ambiguous markers than preoperational subjects, and formal operational subjects produced more psychological uncertainty markers than concrete and preoperational subjects. The results are discussed in terms of Piaget's hypothesized relationship between language and thought.

In four subjects, the correlations between dysfluencies in spontaneous speech and head movements, monitored by polarized-light goniometry, were studied in order to establish accurately their relative timing and the interaction between their linguistic and physical properties. Speech dysfluencies were categorized according to grammatical and physical properties, while head movements were classed as previously according to kinematic properties. Distinct head movement occurred after most dysfluencies, especially in association with large increases in loudness, showing significant correlations between movement classes and dysfluency categories. For instance, wide, linear movements ("postural shifts" or PS) tended to occur after "grammatical" pauses (between clauses or sentences); narrow, rapid movements (RM) tended to occur after dysfluencies inside grammatical boundaries, especially after short pauses. Findings were interpreted as consistent with previous speculations, assigning head movement a role in speech production, especially in dissipating energy and helping to co-ordinate movements of the articulators.

A two-dimensional, speech dynamic analysis of natural speech identifies linking (liaison) as a prominent class of phenomena at the phonetic syllabic level. Consonant Attraction, the specific feature under experimental observation, is highly prevalent in casual English speech both in terms of absolute frequency and in a ratio of potential to actualized link points. A statistically significant difference between native and nonnative speech can be noted for this fluency phenomenon. It points to the role this and related processes can potentially play in a taxonomy of the oral language and suggests the use of this feature as one of the parameters of fluent speech, valuable particularly in second-language proficiency assessment. There are strong indicators that the degree of alteration due to this and similar processes of absorption in phonated speech has significant repercussions on canonical shape in English.

Bever (1970) has proposed a number of strategies which can be applied during comprehension. According to one of these strategies, noun—verb—noun sequences are assumed to correspond to "actor—action—object." Using a sentence classification task, Experiment 1 provides evidence that such a strategy is indeed employed by adults. The results of Experiment 1, in conjunction with the data from a lexical decision task using the same materials (Experiment 2), also provide evidence that even weak semantic relations can produce substantial lexical priming effects during comprehension.

The developmental use of vowel duration, final transition and voicing during closure as cues to voicing in final stop consonants were investigated, using 10 three-year-old, 10 six-year-old and 10 adult subjects. The stimuli were alterations of eight stop-vowel-stop words. The presentation of each stimulus item was response contingent. The resulting data supported the ability of adults and children to use both temporal and spectral cues to acoustic/ phonetic distinctions. However, three-year olds relied more on temporal cues, six-year olds relied more on spectral cues, while adults used both spectral and temporal cues in judging the voicing feature of final stop consonants.

The study explores the differences in peak intraoral air pressure in voiceless unaspirated bilabial stop consonant [p] in a CV syllable in which V is produced with different tones. Native speakers of four Chinese languages that have different tonal systems participated in the investigation. The results show that there is a positive correlation between the peak intraoral air pressure in [p] and the onset F_o value of the tone that occurs on the following vocalic element. The results are discussed in terms of possible physiological explanations, such as the use of a higher subglottal pressure to produce a higher fundamental frequency.

Aspiration as a phonetic property of the English stop categories is usually said to be non-distinctive on the ground that its occurrence can be accounted for by context-sensitive rules. The word-pair pin -spin is often cited by way of example. The word-initial voiceless stop is aspirated; the post-/s/ voiceless stop is not. But the presence of aspiration is "predicted" only for some voiceless stops - namely those that are "spelled" phonologically /p/ and are either word-initial or in a position where the next vowel is stressed and in the same word. Initial stops that are spelled /b/, as in bin, may also be voiceless, so that a rule which predicts aspiration from the voicelessness of an initial stop will not work, since bin is never aspirated. Thus the knowledge on which the prediction is based is not the voicelessness of the stop, or indeed on any other ascertainable phonetic property. We know that in some words voiceless initial stops can be freely replaced by voiced stops without semantic effect, and that those voiceless stops are never aspirated, while in other words there are initial voiceless stops that are regularly aspirated, and cannot be freely replaced by voiced stops. In other words, we know whether a voiceless stop is to be aspirated or not if we know how it is spelled phonologically.