Coleman, J. (2003). Discovering the acoustic correlates of phonological contrasts. Journal of Phonetics, 31, 351-372.
Summary: Shelly
This study aims to examine whether phonological contrasts could be explained by the exemplar model. Previous studies have discovered some phenomenon which shows that the phonological contrast between two minimal words at their final parts could be influential as early as at the beginning of the word, or even at the preceding word (ex., the /l/ in lend is slightly longer and darker than the one in lent). In order to explore which properties or dimensions are employed in the realization of contrasts, the author examined the materials drawn from a speech database, which contains 1066 monosyllabic word types spoken by a Southern British English speakers in a controlled sentence frame. The results showed that there are indeed several acoustic correlates of phonological contrasts, including local contrasts (e.g., /b/ and /m/ in B and me, respectively, contrast in nasality and continuance), and nonlocal contrasts (e.g., the friction of /t/ is more anterior before an /s/ than before an /ʃ/.) Such results implied that these phonological contrasts are stored as different phonetic exemplars in our mental space. However, how exactly do people group exemplars as one phonological representation? The author suggested that the different semantic meanings among these phonetic representations may serve as an important factor for people to phonologically discern one group of phonetic exemplars from another.
No comments:
Post a Comment