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Why Some Things Are Um-bearable: Perceptual and Articulatory Influences on Place Assimilation

Why Some Things Are Um-bearable: Perceptual and Articulatory Influences on Place Assimilation. Stephen J. Winters swinters@ling.osu.edu February 28, 2003. “ UM -Bearable!”. - ESPN.com headline after Michigan State’s football team lost to Michigan, 49-3, on November 2nd, 2002.

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Why Some Things Are Um-bearable: Perceptual and Articulatory Influences on Place Assimilation

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  1. Why Some Things Are Um-bearable: Perceptual and Articulatory Influences on Place Assimilation Stephen J. Winters swinters@ling.osu.edu February 28, 2003

  2. “UM-Bearable!” -ESPN.com headline after Michigan State’s football team lost to Michigan, 49-3, on November 2nd, 2002

  3. “300 episodes? That’s un-possible!” --Ohio State Lantern headline on The Simpsons’ 300th episode, February 13th, 2003

  4. “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” --Jebediah Springfield, in The Simpsons episode, “Lisa the Iconoclast,” February 18th, 1996

  5. But, seriously... • Cross-linguistically, nasals undergo place assimilation more often than stops. • For example: • Both nasals and stops assimilate in: • Korean, Yakut, English… • And nasals but not stops assimilate in: • Hindi, Malayalam, Toba Batak… • But there are no languages in which stops undergo assimilation while nasals do not.

  6. Why Nasals? • Ohala & Ohala (1993): “Although nasal consonants as a class are highly distinct from other consonants, their place cues are less salient than those for comparable obstruents.” • Boersma (1998): “...the nasals /m/ and /n/ are perceptually much more alike than the plosives /p/ and /t/, so that the listener will rely less on place information for nasals than for plosives, so that the speaker has more freedom to mispronounce a nasal than a plosive.” • Shin (2000): “All the peculiar assimilatory patterns of nasals are due to the fact that the place features of nasals are less salient compared to oral stops and fricatives.”

  7. Perception and Phonology • Some basic theories on the interaction of perception and phonology: • Kohler (1990): “speakers are likely to sacrifice articulations that would be difficult for listeners to hear.” • Ohala (1981): listener-based, “innocent misapprehensions” • Hume & Johnson (2001): independent, external “filters”

  8. Independent, External “Filters” old phonological system new phonological system PERCEPTION audition recognition PRODUCTION coordination aerodynamics p p’ GENERALIZATION cognitive categories {has no place assimilation} {has place assimilation} CONFORMITY communication society Hume & Johnson’s (2001) model of external influences on phonology

  9. Perception and Phonology, part 2 • Hume & Johnson’s (2001) model is essentially an extension of the Ohalian (1981) proposal. • “To understand how perception filters p, suppose that p requires the perception of a distinction that is somewhat hard to hear. In some instances, the difficult distinction required by p will be missed, simply misheard, so p will undergo a change to p’.” • “The filtering action imposed by production takes a similar form. The cognitive symbolic representation p requires that the speaker make a sound that is hard to say. In some instances the speaker will fail to produce the sound and say something else and in this way contribute to a change in p.”

  10. Back at the Ranch • Does perception cause nasals to undergo place assimilation more often than stops? Yes, if: • 1. Place distinctions are harder to perceive in nasals than in stops. (Kohlerian view) • 2. Nasals in heterorganic consonant clusters (“inpossible”) are often misperceived as homorganic to the other consonant in the cluster (“impossible”). (Ohalian/Hume & Johnson view)

  11. Is this true? • The results of several perceptual studies indicate that place cues are not more confusable in nasals than in stops. • Ohala (1990): V{C}CV, V{N}CV sequences • Hura, Lindblom, Diehl (1992): Names--”ShanipTerry” • “Planned comparisons revealed a significant difference for nasal and stop consonants vs. fricatives...no significant difference was found between nasals and stops.” • Singh & Black (1966): Consonant confusions • “The two nasal sounds /m/ and /n/ were highly intelligible among all groups of speakers and listeners.”

  12. Is this false? • There is some evidence for the hypothesis that nasals have weaker place cues than stops. • Malecot (1956): cross-spliced transitions and nasal murmur cues • Mohr & Wang (1968): similarity estimation • Pols (1983): consonant confusions in reverberation and noise (Dutch listeners)

  13. Up Close and Personal • More recent studies have failed to show significant differences between the perception of nasals and stops. • Winters (2001): VCCV and VNCV syllables • Winters (2002): VCCV and VNCV syllables in noise

  14. Why the conflicting evidence? There are a couple of reasons why these studies may have yielded different results: 1. Presence/absence of audible release bursts in stops. 2. The relative strength of perceptual cues for nasals may be language-specific. Note: language-specific differences in perception might explain language-specific patterns of place assimilation. English: [¿mbEr«bl`] [¨Eg ka¨] “unbearable” “red car” Dutch: [vi d« ba;N kåEIxt] {not attested} “wie de baan krijgt...”

  15. Experimental Plan A • Proposal: test the perception of nasals and stops by Dutch and English listeners in a phonological context for place assimilation. • Task: AX discrimination • Listeners decide: same/different • Longer decision times, more errors --> greater perceptual confusability • Low-level task (language-independent?) • Phonological context: VCCV sequences • First consonant: nasals and stops, with and without bursts

  16. Stimulus Construction • Male and female speakers of both Dutch and English • Production items: “Say VC,” or “Don’t say VC1, say VC2.” • Consonants varied by manner and place of articulation • Vowels were /a/, /u/ and /i/. Only /a/-vowel tokens were included for use in the discrimination experiment. • Original productions were cut from carrier contexts and presented to listeners in a pre-test. • Only productions which were always identified correctly in this pre-test were included in the discrimination experiment. • Except: Dutch coronals

  17. Examples: Dutch and English Coronals vs. Labials Dutch male: “an” English male: “an” Dutch male: “am” English male: “am” Dutch female: “an” English female: “an” Dutch female: “am” English female: “am” • All of the listeners in the pre-test tended to identify the Dutch coronals as labials.

  18. Example VCCV Stimuli, English Female speaker “anka” “angka” “atka” (no burst) “akka” (no burst) “atka” (burst) “akka” (burst) • VCCV stimuli were constructed by simply adjoining VC syllables with corresponding CV syllables.

  19. Stimulus Presentation • All nine place combinations in the consonant cluster. • First consonant: nasal, stop with burst, or stop without burst • Equal number of same and different VCCV pairs. • Equal number of pairs differing in first consonant and in second consonant. • Pairs only differed in place of articulation. • They did not differ in manner or language of speaker.

  20. Stimulus Presentation, part 2 • Total of 2592 pairs. • The experiment was split into six parts, each lasting approximately one hour. • Ten listeners from each language group (Dutch, English) • All listeners were paid $8 an hour. • Task: determine if two sounds are “same” or “different” as quickly and as accurately as possible.

  21. Discrimination: Analysis of responses to different pairs SAME responses DIFFERENT responses lesser perceptual “distance” greater perceptual “distance” short RTs long RTs short RTs same/different threshold

  22. Discrimination: Analyzing Contexts • Ohala’s (1981) theory suggests heterorganic clusters should be confusable with homorganic clusters, if perception motivates place assimilation. • For example, if /anpa/ --> [ampa], we expect: • [anpa] ~ [ampa] should be confusable • [anpa] ~ [aNpa] should not be (as) confusable • Analysis: first pair type is labelled “assimilatory”, second is “non-assimilatory”

  23. Discrimination: General Conclusions 1. Release bursts increase the discriminability of stops. 2. No difference between nasals and burstless stops. 3. No effect of language of listener. Also: no interaction between language of listener and manner of articulation. 4. Persistent effect of coronal differences between the two languages (dental in Dutch, alveolar in English). 5. Perceptual motivation for assimilatory confusions in stops, but not in nasals.

  24. The big picture • 1. Perception does not motivate nasal susceptibility to place assimilation. • 2. This finding suggests other motivations for nasal place assimilation. • Namely: articulatory constraints or difficulty. • Heterorganic nasal + stop clusters may be more “difficult” to articulate than heterorganic stop + stop clusters.

  25. What’s that mean? There are (at least) two senses of articulatory “difficulty”: 1. Physical work or energy (Lindblom 1983, Kirchner 1998) 2. Inability to reproduce accurately and consistently This second sense of “difficulty” is in the spirit of Hume & Johnson’s (2001) model… …and it is easier to measure directly.

  26. Experimental Plan B • Plan: measure Dutch and English speakers’ ability to produce nasals and stops in heterorganic sequences accurately and consistently. • Task: listeners hear VCCV stimuli and repeat what they have heard. • Hypothesis: heterorganic nasal + stop sequences should be reproduced less accurately than heterorganic stop + stop sequences.

  27. Stimulus Presentation • Same VCCV stimuli from discrimination experiment. •  Also included vowels /i/ and /u/. • Presented to listeners over headphones in sound-proof booth. • Listeners repeated each stimulus three times. • Heard each stimulus twice; total of 6 repetitions. • Economic incentive. • Cognitive load: eight new digits, after each 27 stimuli. • Ten listeners/repeaters from both language groups.

  28. Analyzing Repetition Accuracy • Phonemic transcriptions were made for each repetition. • A-prime calculated for repetitions of first consonant in cluster. • A-prime: combination of “hits” and “false alarms” • Hits: [atpa] repetition for [atpa] stimulus • False Alarms: [atpa] repetition for [akpa] stimulus • False Alarms indicate bias towards one type of response • A-prime subtracts effects of bias • A-prime = (.5 + (H - FA) * (1 + H - FA)) /( 4 * H * (1 - FA))

  29. Conclusions for Production Experiment • Nasals are more difficult to produce accurately in heterorganic clusters than stops. • Mistaken productions of these clusters most often yield homorganic clusters. • 3 . Speakers produce nasals more consistently in homorganic clusters than stops with bursts. • 4. General conclusion: articulatory constraints motivate nasal susceptibility to place assimilation.

  30. Production and Practice • What motivates articulatory constraints? • Percentage of words with stop + stop and nasal + stop heterorganic clusters, CELEX database: • Stops Nasals • English 3.5% 1.3% • Dutch 4.6% 0.9% • 2. Bursts are rare in homorganic stop + stop clusters. • à Articulatory skills may be molded by language-specific experiences and knowledge.

  31. General Conclusions • Articulation, not perception, motivates nasal susceptibility to place assimilation. • These articulatory influences may depend on language-specific experiences. • Whether similar influences exist in other languages is unknown. • “Filters” on phonology may be neither external to phonology, nor independent.

  32. old phonological system {has no place assimilation} p language-specific experiences PERCEPTION audition recognition CONFORMITY communication society New and Improved Model? PRODUCTION coordination aerodynamics new phonological system {has place assimilation} p’

  33. Thanks! I would like to thank Mary Beckman, Allison Blodgett, Annemarie Bodaar, Jos Bosch, Robin Dautricourt, Hope Dawson, Mariette Dijkstra, Tjeerd Dijkstra, Josja Eggen, Jim Harmon, Tsan Huang, Edgar Huitema, Beth Hume, Keith Johnson, Matt Makashay, Jeff McCune, Julie McGory, Grant McGuire, Jeff Mielke, John Nerbonne, Misun Seo, Laurie Stowe, Giorgos Tserdanelis, Pauline Welby, Suzanne Winters, Peggy Wong, and Kiyoko Yoneyama for their help in making this project a reality. This material is based on work supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship.

  34. References Boersma, P. 1998. Functional phonology: formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives. PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Henderson, J. B., & Repp, B. H. 1982. Is a stop consonant released by another stop consonant? Phonetica39, 71-82.  Hume, E. and Johnson, K. 2001. A model of the interplay of speech perception and phonology. In The role of speech perception in phonology (E. Hume and K. Johnson, eds.), 3-26. New York: Academic Press.  Hura, S.L., Lindblom, B., and Diehl, R.L. 1992. On the role of perception in shaping phonological assimilation rules. Language and Speech35, 59-72. Kirchner, R. 1998. An effort-based approach to consonant lenition. PhD dissertation, UCLA. Kohler, K. 1990. Segmental reduction in connected speech in German: phonological facts and phonetic explanations. In Speech production and speech modelling (W. J. Hardcastle and A. Marchal, eds.), 69-92. Netherlands: Kluwer. Lindblom, B. 1983. Economy of Speech Gestures. In Speech Production (P. MacNeilage (ed.)). New York: Springer Verlag. Malecot, A. 1956. Acoustic cues for nasal consonants:an experimental study involving a tape-splicing technique. Language32, 274-284. Munson, B. 2000. Phonological pattern frequency and speech production in children and adults. PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University.  Ohala, J.J. 1981. The listener as a source of sound change. In Papers from the parasession on language and behavior: Chicago Linguistics Society (Masek, C.S., R.A. Hendrik, M.F. Miller, eds.). Chicago: CLS. 178-203.  Ohala, J.J. 1990. The phonetics and phonology of aspects of assimilation. In Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and the physics of speech (J. Kingston and M. Beckman, eds.), 258-275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ohala, J.J. and Ohala, M. 1993. The phonetics of nasal phonology: theorems and data. In Phonetics and Phonology, Vol. 5: Nasals, Nasalization and the Velum (M.K. Huffman and R.A. Krakow, eds.), 225-249. Pols, L.C.W. 1983. Scaling of consonant confusion matrices. Speech Communication2(4), 275-293. Shin, E. 2000. English place assimilation: optimality theoretic analysis from a functional approach. ms., Yonsei University. Singh, S and J.W. Black. 1966. Study of twenty-six intervocalic consonants as spoken and recognized by four language groups. JASA39, 372-387. Smith, B. (1992)  Relationships between duration and temporal variability in children’s speech. JASA91, 212174. Winters, S. 2001. VCCV perception: putting place in its place. OSU WPL55, 70-87. Columbus, OH: Ohio State. Winters, S. 2002. Perceptual influences of place assimilation: a case study. Submitted ms., The Ohio State University.

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