Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T22:15:09.983Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Durational correlates for differentiating consonant sequences in Russian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2008

Lisa Davidson  and
Kevin Roon
Lisa Davidson
Affiliation:
New York [email protected], [email protected]
Kevin Roon
Affiliation:
New York [email protected], [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Russian, the same consonant sequences are permitted in various phonotactic environments. The presence of a word boundary or reduced vowel can be phonologically contrastive, and both learners and experienced listeners may rely on fine acoustic cues to discriminate between phonotactic possibilities. In this study, durational characteristics of consonant sequences are examined to establish whether speakers use duration to distinguish (a) word-initial clusters (#C1C2), (b) consonant–schwa–consonant sequences (#C1əC2), and (c) sequences divided by a word boundary (C1#C2). Both monolingual native Russian speakers and bilingual Russian–English speakers produced several types of target sequences: stop+consonant, fricative+consonant, and nasal+consonant. Results show that C2 is significantly longer in C1#C2 than in other sequences. For #C1C2, when C1 is a stop, there is no significant difference in duration when compared with other sequence types, though C1s of other manners are significantly shorter. Differences in C1 burst duration for stops are consonant-specific, but a longer interconsonantal duration is a reliable cue to schwa presence in #C1əC2. These results are discussed with respect to their implications for gestural coordination, segmentation, and language learning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 137 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Avanesov, Ruben Ivanovich. 1984. Russkoje literaturnoje proiznoshenije [Russian literary pronunciation]. Moscow: Prosveshchenije.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2006. Praat 4.3: Doing phonetics by computer. http://www.praat.org (13 February 2008).Google Scholar
Bradley, Travis. 2007. Morphological derived-environment effects in gestural coordination: A case study of Norwegian clusters. Lingua 117, 950–985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradlow, Ann, Pisoni, David, Akahane-Yamada, Reiko & Tohkura, Yoh'ichi. 1996. Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101, 2299–2310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browman, Catherine & Goldstein, Louis. 1988. Some notes on syllable structure in articulatory phonology. Phonetica 45, 140–155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Browman, Catherine & Goldstein, Louis. 1990. Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In Kingston, John & Beckman, Mary (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the grammar and physics of speech, 341–376 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browman, Catherine & Goldstein, Louis. 1995. Gestural syllable position effects in American English. In Bell-Berti, Fredericka & Raphael, Lawrence (eds.), Producing speech: Contemporary issues for Katherine Safford Harris, 19–33 New York: American Insititue of Physics.Google Scholar
Burton, Martha & Robblee, Karen. 1997. A phonetic analysis of voicing assimilation in Russian. Journal of Phonetics 25, 97–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrd, Dani. 1996. Influences on articulatory timing in consonant sequences. Journal of Phonetics 24, 209–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrd, Dani. 2000. Articulatory vowel lengthening and coordination at phrasal junctures. Phonetica 57, 3–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byrd, Dani & Tan, Cheng Cheng. 1996. Saying consonant clusters quickly. Journal of Phonetics 24, 263–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chitoran, Ioana. 1998. Georgian harmonic clusters: Phonetic cues to phonological representation. Phonology 15, 121–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cho, Taehong & Keating, Patricia. 2001. Articulatory and acoustic studies on domain-initial strengthening in Korean. Journal of Phonetics 29, 155–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Lisa. 2005. Addressing phonological questions with ultrasound. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 19, 619–633.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, Lisa. 2006a. Phonology, phonetics, or frequency: Influences on the production of non-native sequences. Journal of Phonetics 34, 104–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Lisa. 2006b. Schwa elision in fast speech: Segmental deletion or gestural overlap? Phonetica 63, 79–112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dmitrieva, Olga. 2005. Final devoicing in Russian: Acoustic evidence of incomplete neutralization. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 117, 2570.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elson, Benjamin. 1956. Sierra Popoluca syllable structure. International Journal of American Linguistics 13, 13–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flege, James Emil & Hillenbrand, James. 1984. Limits on phonetic accuracy in foreign language speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 78, 708–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fougeron, Cécile & Keating, Patricia. 1997. Articulatory strengthening at the edges of prosodic domains. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101, 3728–3740.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friederici, Angela & Wessels, Jeanine. 1993. Phonotactic knowledge of word boundaries and its use in infant speech perception. Perception & Psychophysics 54, 287–295.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gafos, Adamantios. 2002. A grammar of gestural coordination. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20, 269–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gow, David & Gordon, Peter C.. 1995. Lexical and prelexical influences on word segmentation: Evidence from priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 21, 344–359.Google ScholarPubMed
Hall, Nancy. 2006. Cross-linguistic patterns of vowel intrusion. Phonology 23, 387–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halle, Morris. 1971. The sound pattern of Russian. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, William. 1980. Introduction to Russian phonology and word structure. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce. 1984. The phonetics and phonology of Russian voicing assimilation. In Aronoff, Mark & Oehrle, Richard (eds.), Language sound structure, 318–328. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Henderson, Janet & Repp, Bruno. 1982. Is a stop consonant released when followed by another stop consonant? Phonetica 39, 71–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hohne, Elizabeth & Jusczyk, Peter. 1994. Two-month-old infants’ sensitivity to allophonic differences. Perception & Psychophysics 56, 613–623.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, Daniel & Ward, Dennis. 1969. The phonetics of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter, Hohne, Elizabeth & Bauman, Angela. 1999. Infants’ sensitivity to allophonic cues for word segmentation. Perception & Psychophysics 61, 1465–1476.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klatt, Dennis. 1976. Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 59, 1208–1220.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lehiste, Ilse. 1960. An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture. Phonetica Supplement 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehiste, Ilse. 1972. The timing of utterances and linguistic boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 35, 1773–1781.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Bjorn, Lyberg, Bertil & Holmgen, Karin. 1981. Durational patterns of Swedish phonology: Do they reflect short-term memory processes? Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Luce, Paul & Lyons, Edward A.. 1999. Processing lexically embedded words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 25, 174–183.Google Scholar
Lulich, Steven. 2004. Russian [v]: An acoustic study. Folia Linguistica 38, 63–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matteson, Esther & Pike, Kenneth. 1958. Non-phonemic transition vocoids in Piro (Arawak). Miscellanea Phonetica 3, 22–30.Google Scholar
Mattys, Sven, White, Laurence & Melhorn, James. 2005. Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134, 477–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mayo, Lynn Hansberry, Florentine, Mary & Buss, Soren. 1997. Age of second-language acquisition and perception of speech in noise. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 40, 686–693.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McQueen, James. 1998. Segmentation of continuous speech using phonotactics. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 21–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morelli, Frida. 1999. The phonotactics and phonology of obstruent clusters in Optimality Theory. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Norris, Dennis. 1994. Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous speech recognition. Cognition 52, 189–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, Dennis, McQueen, James, Cutler, Anne & Butterfield, Sally. 1997. The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology 34, 191–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oller, D. Kimbrough. 1973. The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 54, 1235–1247.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ozhegov, Sergei Ivanovich. 1990. Slovar’ russkogo jazyka [Dictionary of the Russian language]. Moscow: Russkij jazyk.Google Scholar
Padgett, Jaye. To appear. Russian voicing assimilation, final devoicing, and the problem of [v]. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.Google Scholar
Padgett, Jaye & Tabain, Marija. 2005. Adaptive Dispersion Theory and phonological vowel reduction in Russian. Phonetica 62, 14–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pye, Shizuka. 1986. Word-final devoicing of obstruents in Russian. In Hawkins, Sarah (ed.), Cambridge papers in phonetics and experimental linguistics, vol. 5, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Quené, Hugo. 1992. Durational cues for word segmentation in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 20, 331–350.Google Scholar
Salverda, Anne Pier, Dahan, Delphine & McQueen, James. 2003. The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition 90, 51–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sancier, Michele & Fowler, Carol. 1997. Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English. Journal of Phonetics 25, 421–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Donia. 1982. Duration as a cue to the perception of a phrase boundary. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 71, 996–1007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solé, Maria Josep. 1997. Timing patterns in the production of a foreign language. In Díaz, Lourdes & Pérez, Carmela (eds.), Views on the acquisition and use of a second language: The 7th Annual European Second Language Association Conference, 539–551. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.Google Scholar
Tajima, Keiichi, Port, Robert & Dalby, Jonathan. 1997. Effects of termoral correction on intelligibility of foreign accented English. Journal of Phonetics 25, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Timberlake, Alan. 2004. A reference grammar of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Andrea. 2000. Phonotactic and acoustic cues for word segmentation in English. In Yuan, B., Huang, T. & Tang, X. (eds.), The 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. 3, 782–785. Beijing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Richard. 1996. Consonant clusters and cue preservation in Tsou. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Yanagawa, Mariko. 2007. Consonant timing in L2 English: The emergence of a default pattern. In Cole, Jennifer & Hualde, José Ignacio (eds.), Laboratory Phonology 9. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Zsiga, Elizabeth. 1994. Acoustic evidence for gestural overlap in consonant sequences. Journal of Phonetics 22, 121–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zsiga, Elizabeth. 2003. Articulatory timing in a second language: Evidence from Russian and English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25, 399–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar