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The contribution of von Kempelen's "Mechanism of Speech" to the 'phonetic sciences' will be analyzed with respect to his theoretical reasoning on speech and speech production on the one hand and on the other in connection with his practical insights during his struggle in constructing a speaking machine. Whereas in his theoretical considerations von Kempelen's view is focussed on the natural functioning of the speech organs – cf. his membraneous glottis model – in constructing his speaking machine he clearly orientates himself towards the auditory result – cf. the bag pipe model for the sound generator used for the speaking machine instead. Concerning vowel production his theoretical description remains questionable, but his practical insight that vowels and speech sounds in general are only perceived correctly in connection with their surrounding sounds – i.e. the discovery of coarticulation – is clearly a milestone in the development of the phonetic sciences: He therefore dispenses with the Kratzenstein tubes, although they might have been based on more thorough acoustic modelling.
Finally, von Kempelen's model of speech production will be discussed in relation to the discussion of the acoustic nature of vowels afterwards [Willis and Wheatstone as well as von Helmholtz and Hermann in the 19th century and Stumpf, Chiba & Kajiyama as well as Fant and Ungeheuer in the 20th century].
The contribution of von Kempelen’s “Mechanism of Speech” to the ‘phonetic sciences‘ will be analyzed with respect to his theoretical reasoning on speech and speech production on the one hand and on the other in connection with his practical insights during his struggle in constructing a speaking machine. Whereas in his theoretical considerations von Kempelen’s view is focussed on the natural functioning of the speech organs – cf. his membraneous glottis model – in constructing his speaking machine he clearly orientates himself towards the auditory result – cf. the bag pipe model for the sound generator used for the speaking machine instead. Concerning vowel production his theoretical description remains questionable, but his practical insight that vowels and speech sounds in general are only perceived correctly in connection with their surrounding sounds – i.e. the discovery of coarticulation – is clearly a milestone in the development of the phonetic sciences: He therefore dispenses with the Kratzenstein tubes, although they might have been based on more thorough acoustic modelling. Finally, von Kempelen’s model of speech production will be discussed in relation to the discussion of the acoustic nature of vowels afterwards [Willis and Wheatstone as well as von Helmholtz and Hermann in the 19th century and Stumpf, Chiba & Kajiyama as well as Fant and Ungeheuer in the 20th century].
Dutch has a three-way contrast in labiodental sounds, which causes problems for native speakers of German in their acquisition of Dutch, since German contrasts only two labiodentals. The present study investigates the perception of the Dutch labiodental fricative system by German L2 learners of Dutch and shows that native Germans with no or little knowledge of the Dutch language categorize the Dutch labiodental voiced fricative and approximant as their native voiced fricative. Advanced learners, however, succeed in acquiring a category for the voiced fricative, illustrating that plasticity in the perception of a second language develops with the amount of exposure to the language.
This paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy.
This paper describes the processing of MRI and CT images needed for developing a 3D linear articulatory model of velum. The 3D surface that defines each organ constitutive of the vocal and nasal tracts is extracted from MRI and CT images recorded on a subject uttering a corpus of artificially sustained French vowels and consonants. First, the 2D contours of the organs have been manually extracted from the corresponding images, expanded into 3D contours, and aligned in a common 3D coordinate system. Then, for each organ, a generic mesh has been chosen and fitted by elastic deformation to each of the 46 3D shapes of the corpus. This has finally resulted in a set of organ surfaces sampled with the same number of 3D vertices for each articulation, which is appropriate for Principal Component Analysis or linear decomposition. The analysis of these data has uncovered two main uncorrelated articulatory degrees of freedom for the velum's movement. The associated parameters are used to control the model. We have in particular investigated the question of a possible correlation between jaw / tongue and velum's movement and have not find more correlation than the one found in the corpus.
This paper addresses remarks made by Flemming (2003) to the effect that his analysis of the interaction between retroflexion and vowel backness is superior to that of Hamann (2003b). While Hamann maintained that retroflex articulations are always back, Flemming adduces phonological as well as phonetic evidence to prove that retroflex consonants can be non-back and even front (i.e. palatalised). The present paper, however, shows that the phonetic evidence fails under closer scrutiny. A closer consideration of the phonological evidence shows, by making a principled distinction between articulatory and perceptual drives, that a reanalysis of Flemming’s data in terms of unviolated retroflex backness is not only possible but also simpler with respect to the number of language-specific stipulations.
Articulatory token-to-token variability not only depends on linguistic aspects like the phoneme inventory of a given language but also on speaker specific morphological and motor constraints. As has been noted previously (Perkell (1997), Mooshammer et al. (2004)), speakers with coronally high "domeshaped" palates exhibit more articulatory variability than speakers with coronally low "flat" palates. One explanation for that is based on perception oriented control by the speaker. The influence of articulatory variation on the cross sectional area and consequently on the acoustics should be greater for flat palates than for domeshaped ones. This should force speakers with flat palates to place their tongue very precisely whereas speakers with domeshaped palates might tolerate a greater variability. A second explanation could be a greater amount of lateral linguo-palatal contact for flat palates holding the tongue in position. In this study both hypotheses were tested.
In order to investigate the influence of the palate shape on the variability of the acoustic output a modelling study was carried out. Parallely, an EPG experiment was conducted in order to investigate the relationship between palate shape, articulatory variability and linguo-palatal contact.
Results from the modelling study suggest that the acoustic variability resulting from a certain amount of articulatory variability is higher for flat palates than for domeshaped ones. Results from the EPG experiment with 20 speakers show that (1.) speakers with a flat palate exhibit a very low articulatory variability whereas speakers with a domeshaped palate vary, (2.) there is less articulatory variability if there is lots of linguo-palatal contact and (3.) there is no relationship between the amount of lateral linguo-palatal contact and palate shape. The results suggest that there is a relationship between token-to-token variability and palate shape, however, it is not that the two parameters correlate, but that speakers with a flat palate always have a low variability because of constraints of the variability range of the acoustic output whereas speakers with a domeshaped palate may choose the degree of variability. Since linguo-palatal contact and variability correlate it is assumed that linguo-palatal contact is a means for reducing the articulatory variability.
Articulatory token-to-token variability not only depends on linguistic aspects like the phoneme inventory of a given language but also on speaker specific morphological and motor constraints. As has been noted previously (Perkell (1997), Mooshammer et al. (2004)) , speakers with coronally high "domeshaped" palates exhibit more articulatory variability than speakers with coronally low "flat" palates. One explanation for that is based on perception oriented control by the speaker. The influence of articulatory variation on the cross sectional area and consequently on the acoustics should be greater for flat palates than for domeshaped ones. This should force speakers with flat palates to place their tongue very precisely whereas speakers with domeshaped palates might tolerate a greater variability. A second explanation could be a greater amount of lateral linguo-palatal contact for flat palates holding the tongue in position. In this study both hypotheses were tested.
The present study shows that though retroflex segments can be considered articulatorily marked, there are perceptual reasons why languages introduce this class into their phoneme inventory. This observation is illustrated with the diachronic developments of retroflexes in Norwegian (North- Germanic), Nyawaygi (Australian) and Minto-Nenana (Athapaskan). The developments in these three languages are modelled in a perceptually oriented phonological theory, since traditional articulatorily-based features cannot deal with such processes.
Syllable cut is said to be a phonologically distinctive feature in some languages where the difference in vowel quantity is accompanied by a difference in vowel quality like in German. There have been several attempts to find the corresponding phonetic correlates for syllable cut, from which the energy measurements of vowels by Spiekermann (2000) proved appropriate for explaining the difference between long, i.e. smoothly, and short, i.e. abruptly cut, vowels: in smoothly cut vowels, a larger number of peaks was counted in the energy contour which were located further back than in abruptly cut segments, and the overall energy was more constant throughout the entire nucleus. On this basis, we intended to compare German as a syllable cut language and Hungarian where the feature was not expected to be relevant. However, the phonetic correlates of syllable cut found in this study do not entirely confirm Spiekermann's results. It seems that the energy features of vowels are more strongly connected to their duration than to their quality.