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A Cross-Language Study of Range of Voice Onset Time in the Perception

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A Cross-Language Study of Range of Voice Onset Time in the Perception A cross-languagestudy of range of voice onset time in the perception of initial stop voicing PatriciaA. Keating $6-52L RefearchLaboratory of Electronic•Mas•chusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge. Ma•ach u•etts 02139 Michael J. Miko• Det•rtrnentof $1auicLanguage• Universi(y of Ff•on•in-Milwaukec,Milw•uke• WZ•co•in53201 WilliamF. Ganong,III Departmentof Psychology.•]niversity of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 (Received30 March 1981;accepted for publication8 July 1981) A seriesof experimentswas carded out to comparethe extentof rangeeffects in the phoneticcategorization. of voiceonset time (VOT} by speakersof Polishand of English,two languages which contrast different VOT categories.Results indicate that Polesare moreprone to rangeeffects than are Americans.For acoustic continuawith appr•able numbersof prevoicedstimuli, monolingual Polish speakers' perceptual boundaries fall in the sapt•'tween their productioncategories. For rangesof VOT whichinclude few prevoicedstimuli, theirboundaries are substantially shitSed. Americans show no shif• of thistype, although they do showsome smallshift• It wasdetermined that the muchsmaller shiRs shown by the Americansubjects were not due to expectationsabout the test. Resultsare interpretedin termsof the differentVOT contrastsinvolved: their spacingalong the VOT continuum,and their psychophysical basis. PACS numbers:43.70.Dn, 43.70.Ve INTRODUCTION work on stimulusrange in speechperception (see be- low), but some cautionwas required at that point. All Voice onset time, or VOT, the time between the of this pilot work was done in the United States, with release of a stop occlusion and the onset of glottai vi- native Polish speakers who either spoke some English bration, characterizes the voicing contrast for initial or were exposed to it constantly. We could not dis- stop consonantsin most languages. IAsker and Abram- tinguish effects of bilingualism and language contact son (1964)proposed that languageswhich have stop from effects of perceptual range &er se. In this paper voicing contrasts have chosenamong three VOT cate- we report on a set of experiments conductedin Poland gories. The categoriesare (1) voicinglead (with to resolve this question. We will show that Polish negativeVOT values, also calledprevoicing); (2) coin- listeners are indeed susceptible to quite large range cidentand short-lag VOT (with zero or low positive effects, and that American listeners categorize the VOT values); and (3) long-lagVOT (with highpositive same stimuli with much smaller range effects, if any. VOT values). The perceptionof VOT in English, which contrasts long-lag VOT with short-lag and prevoiced By "rangeeffect" we meana differencein subjects' categories, has been studied intensively. Many lang- performance corresponding to a difference in the range uages, however, contrast lead with lag VOT, and fur- of stimuli presented in, for example, a categorization ther work on the perception of VOT in such languages task. The assumption is that, all things being equal, would be of interest. subjects will prefer to split the range into two equal halves. That is, subjects are assumed to make an im- According to classical phonetics, Polish contrasts plicit comparison of each test item with the set of test prevoiced stops with voiceless unaspirated or slightly items, and to assign it to a response category relative aspirated stops, which corresponds to a contrast of to that set. An alternative to range effects would be voicing lead with short-lag VOT. In some pilot work, "absolute perception," in which perception of a particu- we therefore tested labeling of VOT by native Polish lar stimulus does not depend on the set of items it is listeners residing or visiting in the United States. presentedwith. Absolute perception is typically These subjects produced labeling boundaries like those thoughtto characterize the perception of certain con- which had been found for American listeners. This sonants, such as the voiced and voiceless stops. result was rather disconcerting, because acoustic mea- surement confirmed that the VOT categories of their However, it appears that consonantperception does Polish speechare quite different from those of English. dependon the set of stimuli used in a test. Contrast In an early study (Mikog et at., 1978) we tried to en- effects (Diehi et al., 1978), frequencyeffects (Simon courage a boundary more appropriate to Polish by vary- andStuddeft-Kennedy, 1978), andrange effects (Brady ing the range of VOT stimuli used in L•beling tests. A and Darwin, 1978; Rosen, 1979) have all been found. range that was more representative of the VOT values Of particularrelevance here, Bradyand Darwin (1978) actually used in Polish elicited a boundary more appro- looked at range effects in the perception of VOT. They priate to the Polish production categories than did the used a continuum with a range from +5 to +55 ms VOT Englishlike range of values that had been used before. in 5-ms steps, and a series of five 20-ms subranges, This result was interesting, especially in light of other e.g., 5-25 and 35-55 ms VOT. The small ranges and 1261 J. Acoust.Soc. Arn. 70(5). Nov. 1981 0001-4986/81/111261-11500.80 01981 AcousticalSociety of America 1261 small step sizes maximize the number of stimuli pre- a following word may be either voiced or voiceless. sented near the category boundary. Listeners' respon- Word-final stops before an initial obstruent in a follow- ses for the entire range were compared to those for the ing word are subject to cluster voicing-assimilation: five subranges, and differed significantly. No boundary obstruents in a cluster, whether word-internal or values were computed, but inspection of their figures phrase-internal, must agree in voicing(Mikoõ, 1977). suggests that average differences between ranges vari- Englishalso contrastsa set of stops/bdg/with a set ed from 0 to about 7 ms VOT. Though reliable, such /ptk/, in almostall environments. However, the stops response shifts are small, on the order of typical se- are not phonetically identical to those of Polish, since lective adaptationeffects. • in post-pausalposition the voiced stops.areoften voice- In this type of study, stimulus range is used as an less unaspirated, and the voiceless stops are usually arbitrary experimental variable, as in peychophysical aspirated. studies. Our approach is quite different: VOT range is VOT measurementswere made for a corpus of stop viewedas a propertyof spokenlanguages and the cate- consonantsin each language. In Polish, VOT was mea- gories they use in voicing contrasts. Our interest is sured for 42 disyllabic words containingall phonologi- not so much whether category boundaries can be slight- callylegal sequences of a stopconsonant [bdgptk] fol- ly shifted around experimentally, but whether people lowedby a vowel[ie•a•ou•] in initialposition. For can be induced to show perceptual categories tI•t are each labial stop, all eight C + vowel combinations inappropriate for their langtm.ge. We addressed this occur; for each dental stop, only seven combinations question by comparing categorizations of VOT in Polish occur, and for each velar stop, only six combinations and English, which have different voicing contrasts. occur. (We did not considerthe palatalizedallophones From acoustic measurements of natural speed, an of/t/and/d/, whichoccur before [i], nor didwe con- overall range of VOT values for each language was siderthose other cases of (underlying)/t/and/d/ determined. Test continua correspondingto each lin- whichdo not surface as it] or [d] (cf., Miko.4,1977). guistic range were made, and listeners from each In Polish, stress almost always falls on the penultimate language were then tested on õolh ranges. Thus listen- syllable, so each first syllable of these disyllables was ers always heard two linguistic voicing categories, but stressed. Five monolingualspeakers in Ldd2, Poland, not necessarily their own. recorded a list of these 42 words, ten times each, in a One possible outcome of such an experiment is that local radio station. The VOT of each initial stop was perception would be absolute, i• e., the range of measured from a computer-implemented waveform used would be irrelevant, and listeners would show the display. , sameboundary (consistent with their productiondata) A few tokens were not measured because of omis- on both VOT ranges. This result wouldargue for a sinns, phonetic substitutions, noise, or lack of a clear constant internal standard •nd would agree with the burst. In general these problems are minimal in list: earlier results of Sawusch and Pisoni (1973). Another type readings of absolute-initial stops, but some speak- possible outcome is that listeners perform as expected ers at times tendedto run words in the lists together, only on their own language'srange of VOT, but show making measurement more difficult. In the data re- an anomalous boundary when tested on the unfamiliar ported here, prevoicing was measured only for abs0- range. Sucha range effect would suggestthat phonetic lute-initial (post-pausal)stops. The numberof mea- categories are relative. surementsactually obtained for eachstop was: [b], In this study we compare these predictions with re- 340out of 400;[d], 309out of 350;[g], 259out of 300; suits from experiments on perception in Polish and [p], 378out of 400;it], 338out of 350;and [k], 282 out of 300. English. Before we describe these experiments, how- ever, we describe the VOT categories used in the two The results of this acoustic analysis are summarized languages. in Table I and illustrated in Fig. l(a). The analysis confirms that Polish uses prevoicing for its voiced I. PRELIMINARY TESTS OF ENGLISH AND POLISH stops and short-lag VOT (voiceless unaspirated) for VOICING CATEGORIES its voicelessstops, except that the[k] tokenshave In this section, two methods are used to determine higher VOT's than we might expect. It can be seen the VOT categories of Polish and English: acoustic that the productionsof [k] are also morevariable than measurements of natural speech tokens, and discrimin- ation. In later sections we will relate data On the label- TABLE I.
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