Articulatory and Perceptual Correlates of Syllable Structure

有两个项目将研究演讲者是如何将组成演讲的大量动作组织成一个极其快速的编曲。具体而言，本研究试图建立音节隶属关系的语音定义。虽然语言学和语言科学文献提到了音节，但这个单位究竟是什么，以及辅音属于音节的开头或结尾意味着什么，还有待确定。这里要检查的数据是使用受控的速率缩放范例得出的。在这种模式下，说话者对控制语速的节拍器及时重复地发出特定结构的音节。节拍器的频率是系统地变化的，以便对广泛的语音频率进行采样。研究计划包括四个实验程序，分为两个项目。第一个项目包括两个实验，使用大约2400个音节的发音数据库，这些音节由说话者根据节拍器的节拍重复音节而产生的各种停顿元音序列组成。该数据库包括口腔发音器位置的动态测量，声门开口的记录，口腔气压的记录，以及声学记录。第一个实验将确定起音和尾音中辅音的发音差异，以及这些差异如何随着语速的增加而演变。在第一个实验中还将获得关于说话者使用发音策略来改变语速的信息，以及这些策略如何应用于不同发音的辅音。第二个实验将获得对同一数据库的感知反应，从而从听者的角度确定发音差异的哪些方面与音节化有关。这两个实验结合起来，将从发音和知觉的角度提供基本音节组织的连贯画面。第二个项目将把结果扩展到辅音集群和元音对。这个项目是专门设计来研究语言特定的语法限制对允许的片段序列如何影响说话者的生产模式。这个项目是将第一个项目的结果推广到较少约束的语言情况的第一步。

Two projects will examine how it is that speakers organize the very large number of actions which make up speech into an extremely rapid orchestration. Specifically, this research seeks to establish a phonetic definition of syllable affiliation. While the linguistics and speech science literature makes reference to the syllable, exactly what this unit is and what it means for a consonant to belong in the onset or the coda of a syllable has yet to be determined.The data to be examined here is elicited using a controlled rate-scaling paradigm. In this paradigm, speakers produce syllables of specified structure repeatedly in time to a metronome which controls the rate of speech. The rate of the metronome is systematically varied in order to sample a broad range of speech rates.The research plan includes four experimental procedures grouped into two projects. The first project comprises two experiments which work with an articulatory database of approximately 2400 syllables, composed of various stop-vowel sequences produced by speakers who repeated syllables in time to a metronome. This database includes dynamic measurements of the location of oral speech articulators, recordings of the glottal opening, recordings of oral air pressure, as well as acoustic records. The first experiment will determine articulatory differences between consonants in onsets and codas, as well as how these differences evolve in the face of speech rate increases. Also obtained in this first experiment will be information on the articulatory strategies speakers use to change speech rates, and how these strategies apply to consonants made with different articulators. The second experiment will acquire perceptual responses to the same database, thus determining which aspects of the articulatory differences are relevant to syllabification from the listener's perspective. The two experiments combined will provide a coherent picture of basic syllabic organization from both articulatory and perceptual perspectives.The second project will extend the results to consonant clusters and to tense-lax vowel pairs. This project is particularly designed to examine how language-particular grammatical constraints on allowable segment sequences affect speakers' production patterns. This project forms the first step at generalizing the results of the first project to less constrained speech situations.