Journal of the International Phonetic Association 

About: Journal of the International Phonetic Association is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Vowel & Consonant. It has an ISSN identifier of 0025-1003. Over the lifetime, 793 publications have been published receiving 11047 citations. The journal is also known as: International Phonetic Association. Journal.

To ‘errrr’ is human: ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies

Abstract: Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disuencies (e.g. repetitions, repairs, ®lled pauses, false starts). This paper aims to promotedisuency awareness' especially in the ®eld of phonetics ± which has much to offer in the way of increasing our understanding of these phenomena. Two broad claims are made, based on analyses of disuencies in different corpora of spontaneous American English speech. First, an Ecology Claim suggests that disuencies are related to aspects of the speaking environments in which they arise. The claim is supported by evidence from task effects, location analyses, speaker effects and sociolinguistic effects. Second, an Acoustics Claim argues that disuency has consequences for phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech that are not represented in the speech patterns of laboratory speech. Such effects include modi®cations in segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality and coarticulation patterns. The ecological and acoustic evidence provide insights about human language production in real-world contexts. Such evidence can also guide methods for the processing of spontaneous speech in automatic speech recognition applications.

The Formants of Monophthong Vowels in Standard Southern British English Pronunciation

Abstract: The formants of the eleven monophthong vowels of Standard Southern British (SSB) pronunciation of English were measured for five male and five female BBC broadcasters whose speech was included in the MARSEC database. The measurements were made using linear-prediction-based formant tracks overlaid on digital spectrograms for an average of ten instances of each vowel for each speakers, These measurements were taken from connected speech, allowing comparison with previous formant values measured from citation words. I was found that the male vowels were significantly less peripheral in the measurements from connected speech than in measurements from citation words.

A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives

Abstract: Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their co-articulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interlanguage variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers

Abstract: This study describes the frequencies of the first two formants of monophthongs produced by male RP speakers in four age groups: aged 20–25, 35–40, 50–55, and 65–73 years in 2001. The eleven monophthongs were spoken in /hVd/ contexts by five men in each age group. The eleven words, together with nineteen filler words chosen to distract attention from the purpose of the experiment, were randomized four times and read by each speaker in citation form, for a total of 880 items. F1 and F2 frequencies were measured in Hz and ERB-rate. As expected, in younger compared with older speakers, F1 is higher in /e/ and especially /ae/, and F2 is higher in /u:/ and /υ/. Other vowels varied in overall dispersion of F1 or F2, but no other differences between age groups were observed. There is evidence that the oldest age group to show change in a vowel's quality has particularly large differences between individuals, so that, collectively, members of that group span much of the quality range from ‘conservative’ (older groups) to ‘progressive’ (younger groups). Such so-called ‘break groups’ have implications for theoretical explanations of sound change.

Turn transition, creak and glottal stop in Finnish talk-in-interaction

Abstract: Finnish talk-in-interaction is shown to use creak and glottal stops distinctively. Creak has turn-yielding functions, and glottal stops have turn-holding functions. Rather than either intuition or the use of large corpora with no attention to the interactional function in which the talk is embedded, the methodology used is that of interactional linguistics (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996 for a prosodic approach), which places emphasis on demonstrating participants' local orientation to linguistic categories within interactional sequences.