Biomechanically preferred consonant-vowel combinations fail to appear in adult spoken corpora.

Abstract:

:Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front vowels, and velars with back vowels (Davis & MacNeilage, 1994). Plausible biomechanical explanations have been proposed, but it is also possible that infants are mirroring the frequency of the CVs that they hear. As noted, previous assessments of adult language were based on dictionaries; these "type" counts are incommensurate with the babbling measures, which are necessarily "token" counts. We analyzed the tokens in two spoken corpora for English, two for French and one for Mandarin. We found that the adult spoken CV preferences correlated with the type counts for Mandarin and French, not for English. Correlations between the adult spoken corpora and the babbling results had all three possible outcomes: significantly positive (French), uncorrelated (Mandarin), and significantly negative (English). There were no correlations of the dictionary data with the babbling results when we consider all nine combinations of consonants and vowels. The results indicate that spoken frequencies of CV combinations can differ from dictionary (type) counts and that the CV preferences apparent in babbling are biomechanically driven and can ignore the frequencies of CVs in the ambient spoken language.

journal_name

Lang Speech

journal_title

Language and speech

authors

Whalen DH,Giulivi S,Nam H,Levitt AG,Hallé P,Goldstein LM

doi

10.1177/0023830911434123

subject

Has Abstract

pub_date

2012-12-01 00:00:00

pages

503-15

issue

Pt 4

eissn

0023-8309

issn

1756-6053

journal_volume

55

pub_type

杂志文章
  • Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: 'trail-off' conjunctions.

    abstract::The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordin...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830911428858

    authors: Walker G

    更新日期:2012-03-01 00:00:00

  • Durational patterning at syntactic and discourse boundaries in Mandarin spontaneous speech.

    abstract::This study focused on durational cues (i.e., syllable duration, pause duration, and syllable onset intervals (SOIs)) at discourse boundaries in two dialects of Mandarin,Taiwan and Mainland varieties. Speech was elicited by having 18 participants describe events in The Pear Story film. Recorded data were transcribed, l...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830910372492

    authors: Fon J,Johnson K,Chen S

    更新日期:2011-03-01 00:00:00

  • The perception of phonological quantity based on durational cues by native speakers, second-language users and nonspeakers of Finnish.

    abstract::Some languages, such as Finnish, use speech-sound duration as the primary cue for a phonological quantity distinction. For second-language (L2) learners, quantity is often difficult to master if speech-sound duration plays a less important role in the phonology of their native language (L1). By comparing the categoriz...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/00238309050480030401

    authors: Ylinen S,Shestakova A,Alku P,Huotilainen M

    更新日期:2005-01-01 00:00:00

  • Individual Differences in the Adoption of Sound Change.

    abstract::It is still unclear whether an individual's adoption of on-going sound change starts in production or in perception, and what the time course of the adoption of sound change is in adult speakers. These issues are investigated by means of a large-scale (106 participants) laboratory study of an on-going vowel shift in D...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830920959753

    authors: Voeten CC

    更新日期:2020-10-25 00:00:00

  • Dialect effects in vowel perception: the role of temporal information in French.

    abstract::The importance of vowel duration for specifying vowel contrasts differs across languages. In English, for example, a number of vowel pairs are acoustically differentiated by both temporal and spectral information, whereas in standard French temporal information plays a much more minor role. Gottfried and Beddor (1988)...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383099704000304

    authors: Miller JL,Grosjean F

    更新日期:1997-07-01 00:00:00

  • Interaction of native- and second-language vowel system(s) in early and late bilinguals.

    abstract::The objective of this study was to determine how bilinguals' age at the time of language acquisition influenced the organization of their phonetic system(s). The productions of six English and five Korean vowels by English and Korean monolinguals were compared to the productions of the same vowels by early and late Ko...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/00238309050480010101

    authors: Baker W,Trofimovich P

    更新日期:2005-01-01 00:00:00

  • Communicative Success in Spatial Dialogue: The Impact of Functional Features and Dialogue Strategies.

    abstract::This paper addresses the impact of dialogue strategies and functional features of spatial arrangements on communicative success. To examine the sharing of cognition between two minds in order to achieve a joint goal, we collected a corpus of 24 extended German-language dialogues in a referential communication task tha...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830916651097

    authors: Tenbrink T,Andonova E,Schole G,Coventry KR

    更新日期:2017-06-01 00:00:00

  • Toddlers’ Word Recognition in an Unfamiliar Regional Accent: The Role of Local Sentence Context and Prior Accent Exposure.

    abstract::Adults are generally adept at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents. However, studies testing young children’s abilities to cope with accent-related variation in the speech signal have generated mixed results, with some work emphasizing toddlers’ early competence and other work focusing more on their long-l...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830915600471

    authors: van Heugten M,Johnson EK

    更新日期:2016-09-01 00:00:00

  • Crossmodal and incremental perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech.

    abstract::In this article we report on two experiments about the perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech. The article addresses two questions: 1) how do visual cues from a speaker's face to emotion relate to auditory cues, and (2) what is the recognition speed for various facial cues to emotion? Both experiments repo...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830909348993

    authors: Barkhuysen P,Krahmer E,Swerts M

    更新日期:2010-01-01 00:00:00

  • Effects of Valence on Hemispheric Specialization for Emotion Word Processing.

    abstract::The use of emotion in language is a key element of human interactions and a rich area for cognitive research. The present study examined reactions to words of five types: positive emotion (e.g., happiness), negative emotion (e.g., hatred), positive emotion-laden (e.g., blessing), negative emotion-laden (e.g., prison),...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830916686128

    authors: Martin JM,Altarriba J

    更新日期:2017-12-01 00:00:00

  • Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English.

    abstract::Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda co...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/00238309060490020201

    authors: Demuth K,Culbertson J,Alter J

    更新日期:2006-01-01 00:00:00

  • Interspeaker variability in emphatic accent production in French.

    abstract::This research aims (1) to describe the acoustic manifestations of emphatic accent in French by examining similarities and differences between four speakers; and (2) to identify, amongst the acoustic measures, those which determine the perception of emphasis. In experiment 1, four speakers were asked to read twenty-fou...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383099603900402

    authors: Dahan D,Bernard JM

    更新日期:1996-10-01 00:00:00

  • Acoustic parameters in human speaker recognition.

    abstract::Four speaker identification tests were conducted using five female speakers known to the listeners. Starting from acoustic recordings of reiterant "ma" syllables, the perceptual importance of the following three factors was investigated: F0 height, F0 contour, and speech rhythm. For speakers with typically low or high...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383099003300302

    authors: van Dommelen WA

    更新日期:1990-07-01 00:00:00

  • Effects of Age, Sex and Syllable Number on Voice Onset Time: Evidence from Children's Voiceless Aspirated Stops.

    abstract::Voice onset time (VOT) is a temporal acoustic parameter that reflects motor speech coordination skills. This study investigated the patterns of age and sex differences across development of voice onset time in a group of 70 English-speaking children, ranging in age from 4.1 to 18.4 years, and 12 young adults. The effe...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830914522994

    authors: Yu VY,De Nil LF,Pang EW

    更新日期:2015-06-01 00:00:00

  • Auditory and visual cueing of the [+/- rounded] feature of vowels.

    abstract::That lipreading plays a role in phoneme recognition, even when the acoustic signal alone is phonologically unambiguous, has been concluded from experiments in the perception of discrepant combinations of acoustic and visual speech signals. Little is known about the effect of visual information on explicitly phonetic j...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383099203500402

    authors: Lisker L,Rossi M

    更新日期:1992-10-01 00:00:00

  • Early Speech Segmentation in French-learning Infants: Monosyllabic Words versus Embedded Syllables.

    abstract::Lexical acquisition relies on many mechanisms, one of which corresponds to segmentation abilities, that is, the ability to extract word forms from fluent speech. This ability is important since words are rarely produced in isolation even when talking to infants. The present study explored whether young French-learning...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830914551375

    authors: Nishibayashi LL,Goyet L,Nazzi T

    更新日期:2015-09-01 00:00:00

  • Stress in ASL: empirical evidence and linguistic issues.

    abstract::The study of signed languages provides an opportunity to identify those characteristics of language that are universal and to investigate the effect of production modality (signed vs. spoken) on the grammar. Over time, American Sign Language (ASL) has accommodated itself to the production and perception requirements o...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/00238309990420020501

    authors: Wilbur RB

    更新日期:1999-04-01 00:00:00

  • Infants' Processing of Prosodic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Boundary Perception beyond Pause Detection.

    abstract::Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds,...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830917730590

    authors: Holzgrefe-Lang J,Wellmann C,Höhle B,Wartenburger I

    更新日期:2018-03-01 00:00:00

  • Polynomial modeling of child and adult intonation in German spontaneous speech.

    abstract::In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system.Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, ...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830910397495

    authors: de Ruiter LE

    更新日期:2011-06-01 00:00:00

  • Syntactic structure guides prosody in temporarily ambiguous sentences.

    abstract::A pair of speaking and listening studies investigated the prosody of sentences with temporary Object/Clause and Late/Early Closure ambiguities. Speakers reliably produced prosodic cues that allowed listeners to disambiguate Late/Early Closure sentences, but only infrequently produced prosody that disambiguated Object/...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830910372497

    authors: Anderson C,Carlson K

    更新日期:2010-01-01 00:00:00

  • A comparative investigation of coarticulation in fricatives: electropalatographic, electromagnetic, and acoustic data.

    abstract::The principal aim of this investigation was to compare coarticulatory effects at different levels of the speech production system, in order to gain insight into the relations between the different levels. To this end, the relative magnitudes of carryover and anticipatory coarticulation with adjacent vowels were measur...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383099303600307

    authors: Hoole P,Nguyen-Trong N,Hardcastle W

    更新日期:1993-04-01 00:00:00

  • Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings.

    abstract::We examine the use of multiple subphonemic differences distinguishing homophones in production and perception, through a case study focusing on the distinction between two polysemous senses of the English word "sorry" (apology vs. attention-seeking). An analysis of production data from voice actors revealed significan...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830921988975

    authors: Martinuzzi C,Schertz J

    更新日期:2021-01-28 00:00:00

  • Detection of target phonemes in spontaneous and read speech.

    abstract::Although spontaneous speech occurs more frequently in most listeners' experience than read speech, laboratory studies of human speech recognition typically use carefully controlled materials read from a script. The phonological and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous and read speech differ considerably, however, w...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383098803100203

    authors: Mehta G,Cutler A

    更新日期:1988-04-01 00:00:00

  • Vowel production and perception: hyperarticulation without a hyperspace effect.

    abstract::The ability of speakers to exaggerate speech sounds ("hyperarticulation") has led to the theory that the targets themselves must be hyperspace hyperarticulated. Johnson, Flemming, and Wright (1993) found that perceptual "best exemplar" choices for vowels were more speech extreme than listeners' own productions. Our fi...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 临床试验,杂志文章,随机对照试验

    doi:10.1177/00238309040470020301

    authors: Whalen DH,Magen HS,Pouplier M,Kang AM,Iskarous K

    更新日期:2004-01-01 00:00:00

  • Event-related potentials reflecting the processing of phonological constraint violations.

    abstract::How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic lat...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830909336581

    authors: Domahs U,Kehrein W,Knaus J,Wiesel R,Schlesewsky M

    更新日期:2009-01-01 00:00:00

  • Base-language effects on word identification in bilingual speech: evidence from categorical perception experiments.

    abstract::The categorical perception paradigm was used to investigate whether French-English bilinguals categorize a code-switched word as French or English on the basis of its acoustic-phonetic information alone or whether they are influenced by the base-language context in which the word occurs, that is, by the language in wh...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/002383098903200404

    authors: Bürki-Cohen J,Grosjean F,Miller JL

    更新日期:1989-10-01 00:00:00

  • Auditory word serial recall benefits from orthographic dissimilarity.

    abstract::The influence of orthographic knowledge has been consistently observed in dissimilarity speech recognition and metaphonological tasks. The present study provides data suggesting that such influence also pervades other cognitive domains phonological related to language abilities, such as verbal working memory. Using se...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830910371450

    authors: Pattamadilok C,Lafontaine H,Morais J,Kolinsky R

    更新日期:2010-01-01 00:00:00

  • Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: an explanation of n-gram frequency effects based on naive discriminative learning .

    abstract::Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of memory and language, 62, 67-82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about m...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830913484896

    authors: Baayen RH,Hendrix P,Ramscar M

    更新日期:2013-09-01 00:00:00

  • Native and Non-native Perception of Stress in Mapudungun: Assessing Structural Maintenance in the Phonology of an Endangered Language.

    abstract::Today, virtually all speakers of Mapudungun (formerly Araucanian), an endangered language of Chile and Argentina, are bilingual in Spanish. As a result, the firmness of native speaker intuitions-especially regarding perceptually complex issues such as word-stress-has been called into question. Even though native intui...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830916628899

    authors: Molineaux BJ

    更新日期:2017-03-01 00:00:00

  • Perception of American-English Vowels by Early and Late Spanish-English Bilinguals.

    abstract::Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American-English (AE) as a second language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending...

    journal_title:Language and speech

    pub_type: 杂志文章

    doi:10.1177/0023830918806933

    authors: Baigorri M,Campanelli L,Levy ES

    更新日期:2019-12-01 00:00:00