Learning [Voice]

University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Fall 2010 Learning [Voice] Joshua Ian Tauberer University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the First and Second Language Acquisition Commons Recommended Citation Tauberer, Joshua Ian, "Learning [Voice]" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 288. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/288 Please see my home page, http://razor.occams.info, for the data files and scripts that make this reproducible research. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/288 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Learning [Voice] Abstract The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation's focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two English-learning infants aged 1;1--3;5. While preceding vowel duration has been studied before in infants, the other correlates of post-vocalic voicing investigated here --- preceding F1, consonant duration, and closure voicing intensity --- had not been measured before in infant speech. The study makes empirical contributions regarding the development of the production of [voice] in infants, not just from a surface- level perspective but also with implications for the phonetics-phonology interface in the adult and developing linguistic systems. Additionally, several methodological contributions will be made in the use of large sized corpora and data modeling techniques. The study revealed that even in infants, F1 at the midpoint of a vowel preceding a voiced consonant was lower by roughly 50 Hz compared to a vowel before a voiceless consonant, which is in line with the effect found in adults. But while the effect has been considered most likely to be a physiological and nonlinguistic phenomenon in adults, it actually appeared to be correlated in the wrong direction with other aspects of [voice] here, casting doubt on a physiological explanation. Some of the consonant pairs had statistically significant differences in duration and closure voicing. Additionally, a preceding vowel duration difference was found and as well a preliminary indication of a developmental trend that suggests the preceding vowel duration difference is being learned. The phonetics of adult speech is also considered. Results are presented from a dialectal corpus study of North American English and a lab speech experiment which clarifies the relationship between preceding vowel duration and flapping and the elationshipr between [voice] and F1 in preceding vowels. Fluent adult speech is also described and machine learning algorithms are applied to learning the [voice] distinction using multidimensional acoustic input plus some lexical knowledge. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Linguistics First Advisor Jiahong Yuan Second Advisor Mark Liberman Third Advisor Daniel Swingley Keywords acoustic phonetics, language acquisition, phonological features, voice Subject Categories First and Second Language Acquisition Comments Please see my home page, http://razor.occams.info, for the data files and scripts that make this reproducible research. This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/288 LEARNING [VOICE] Joshua Ian Tauberer A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Jiahong Yuan Gene Buckley Assistant Professor, Department of Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics Linguistics Supervisor of Dissertation Graduate Group Chair Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor of Daniel Swingley, Associate Professor, Phonetics, Department of Linguistics Department of Psychology Committee Member Committee Member — ‘Tricky Linguistics’, A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989) — Hugh: So let’s talk instead about flexibility of language, uh, linguistic elasticity if you like. Stephen: Yes, I think that I said earlier that I said that our language English— Hugh: As spoken by us. Stephen: As we speak it, yes, certainly. —defines it. We are defined by our language, if you will. Hugh: (to the audience) Hello, we’re talking about language. Stephen: Perhaps I can illustrate my point. Let me at least try. Here’s a question. Hugh: What is it? Stephen: Ah. Well my question is this: Is our language, English, capable, is English capable of sustaining demagoguery? Hugh: Demagoguery? Stephen: Demagoguery. Hugh: And by demagoguery you mean ... ? Stephen: By demagoguery I mean demagoguery. Hugh: I thought so. ... Stephen: There’s language, and there’s speech. There’s chess, and there’s a game of chess. Mark the difference for me, mark it please ... Imagine a piano keyboard. Eighty-eight keys, only 88, and yet, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards in Dorset alone. Our language, Tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, thrillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that no one has ever said it before in the history of human communication: ii Acknowledgements A dissertation is not just a degree or the culmination of years of effort. If you look close enough you will probably see rings for the many seasons that have come and gone, representing the deeply emotional states it went through — I went through — with among other things a confusing and protracted transformation in self-image from student to professional. Let me start at the beginning. I sincerely thank my advisor, Professor Jiahong Yuan, for his direction and encouragement. Stumbling out of syntax and into phonetics in my third year, things could have taken a more terrible turn, but Jiahong brings everyone quickly up to speed to the latest in acoustic and corpus phonetics. I also thank the remainder of my committee, Professors Mark Liberman, whose insights never cease to amaze, and Daniel Swingley, for valuable feedback. I’d also like to thank Professor Gene Buckley for serving on my proposal committee and Professors Tony Kroch, Charles Yang, and Maribel Romero for their unique ways they influenced my thinking and keeping me in the game. And I’d like to thank Amy Forsyth, our department’s administrative coordinator. The last six+ years would not have been the same without my cohort, Laia Mayol, Lucas Cham- pollion, Keelan Evanini, Jonathan Gress-Wright, and Jean-François Mondon. I have fond memories of studying in the GSC and burgers at New Deck, at least until New Deck got old. Oh and I especially note — and once again apologize for — the incident referred to in Mayol (2009, acknowledg- ments). I greatly enjoyed collaborating with Keelan on Tauberer and Evanini (2009), a portion of which made its way into this thesis. The p.lab and its many furniture arrangements would not have been the same without my friends and classmates Giang Nguyen (who suggested my thesis have something to do with babies), Laurel MacKenzie (“gellatto”), Yanyan Sui (tennis and soup), Aviad Eilam (trips to New York and gossip I soon forgot), Stefanie Brody (C3PO’s trills), Tanja Scheffler (many years of XTAG meetings and PWPL), and Michael Friesner (my first year buddy). I wish my memories of Penn were not inextricably linked with some very painful years which I would just as soon forget. Without my friends, especially Andrew Clausen (who, while I’m here, I also thank for help with maximum likelihood estimation), David Robinson, Aliza Wasserman, and again Laia, Laurel, and Yanyan, I could not have made it through life, let alone the dissertation. I couldn’t overstate how important you all have been to me. (I also thank the TV show ‘House’.) Much of the data used here was derived from existing corpora. The largest and most important was the Providence corpus, by Demuth, Culbertson, and Alter — thank you for making it available — and I thank the parents and children involved in the corpus as well. I also thank the two LibriVox readers whose works I used in Chapter 7 and the participants in the study in Section 5.2. Finally I thank my family, most of all my parents Gale and Peter. No parents could be more encouraging, supportive, and interested, and best of all always ready for a game of scrabble. And really finally, I thank the remainder of my family for their page-counting support, especially my Bubby and late Zayde, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins (hugs). iii ABSTRACT LEARNING [VOICE] Joshua Ian Tauberer Supervisor: Jiahong Yuan The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation’s focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two English- learning infants aged 1;1–3;5. While preceding vowel duration has been studied before in infants, the other correlates of post-vocalic voicing investigated here — preceding F1, consonant duration, and closure voicing intensity — had not been measured before in infant speech. The study makes empirical contributions

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