Place of Articulation

Besides manner of articulation and glottal activity, which have been more studied, place of articulation also plays an important role in determining the relative strength of a consonant. This is so because the joint contribution of magnitude and duration of articulatory gestures (glottal, velo-pharyngeal, and oral) defines a global level of intraoral pressure that can be related to strength (Malécot, 1970).
This aerodynamic criterion has been used to explain the role that a back place of articulation can have in reducing oral volume and thus increasing intraoral pressure, namely strength. This can interfere with glottal activity (e.g. in passive devoicing).
I will provide examples of diachronic change in several languages which show a tight relationship between back places and strength. These examples are mainly from Semitic languages, such as Arabic, but also from some others, such as Samoan (Austronesian) and Vlach Romani (Indo-European).
A relation has been proposed between order of diffusion of linguistic change and place of articulation. However, there is controversy about the relative order between labials and coronals. I will examine different proposals and I will present articulatory, aerodynamic and perceptual data to support the idea that coronal consonants are weaker than labial consonants. The lesser the mass of the articulatory organ, the faster the movements and the shorter the duration of the gesture, which leads to weakness. In addition, certain kinds of coronals might be associated with a relatively descended position of the jaw, which can cause an increase of the oral volume and, consequently, a decrease of the intraoral pressure. Nevertheless, further study is needed on the link between jaw gestures and different types of labials and coronals. To finish, there are some optimal durations for the correct perception of each manner, which vary depending on the place of articulation, and these thresholds seem to favour the weakening of coronals much more than that of labials or dorsals (García Santos, 2002).

An individual who is engaged in learning a second language is prone to transfer some L1 features, ranging all the way from phonological to pragmatic, into the L2 either intentionally or unintentionally. Accordingly, this study set out to focus on the phonological transfers and the pronunciation errors which are made by Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). To achieve a clear understanding of such errors, the researchers randomly selected 300 male and female EFL learners attending general English courses. The data were collected through participants’ self-reports, teachers’ reports, and learners’ performance on a reading aloud task which were recorded for further analyses. Qualitative data were analyzed inductively through content analysis. Based on the results of data analyses, the researchers were able to compile a final list of the errors including the definition of the errors and the degrees of explicit recognition of those errors as stated by the teachers and learners. Some of the most frequent errors were replacing those sounds which are absent in Persian (/w/, /θ/, /ð/, /ɔ/, /ɪ/) with those present in Persian,  replacing short vowels with long vowels, difficulty in producing diphthongs, and difficulty in producing consonant clusters. It was also observed that there is a significant and positive relationship between the pronunciation knowledge of teachers and that of learners (r = 0.701, p < 0.05) as estimated by self-reports. However, the observed gap between the knowledge of teachers and that of learners suggested that possessing a high degree of pronunciation knowledge by teachers cannot guarantee the same level of this knowledge among learners. It was, therefore, concluded that in the Iranian EFL context, pronunciation instruction calls for a serious reconsideration.

This paper is concerned with the contrastive analysis of the frequency system of common standard Persian and English consonants. Two corpora were selected from Iranian newspapers. One of them is Keyhan newspaper that is published in Persian and the other one is Tehran Times newspaper that goes under press in English in Iran. Common standard Persian and English consonants were enumerated and analyzed by themselves and with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation. Results indicated a significant difference between the frequency of eleven Persian consonants and their English counterparts. Nouns comprised the highest frequency of consonants and while prepositions, determiners and conjunctions had the lowest. With respect to manner of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages in all manners with stops as the most frequent in both. As for the place of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages ...

Many technology systems have used voice recognition applications to transcribe a speaker's speech into text that can be used by these systems. One of the most complex tasks in speech identification is to know, which acoustic cues will be used to classify sounds. This study presents an approach for characterizing Arabic fricative consonants in two groups (sibilant and nonsibilant). From an acoustic point of view, our approach is based on the analysis of the energy distribution, in frequency bands, in a syllable of the consonantvowel type. From a practical point of view, our technique has been implemented, in the MATLAB software, and tested on a corpus built in our laboratory. The results obtained show that the percentage energy distribution in a speech signal is a very powerful parameter in the classification of Arabic fricatives. We obtained an accuracy of 92% for non-sibilant consonants /f, χ, ɣ, ʕ, ћ, and h/, 84% for sibilants /s, sҁ, z, Ӡ and ∫/, and 89% for the whole classification rate. In comparison to other algorithms based on neural networks and support vector machines (SVM), our classification system was able to provide a higher classification rate.

This study documents and accounts for the behavior of the place of articulation of latent segments in the Panoan languages Shipibo-Konibo and Capanahua. In these languages, the lexical category of the word governs the place of articulation (PoA) of latent consonants. Latent segments only surface when they are syllabified as syllable onsets. They surface as coronal consonants when they are part of verbs; but they occur as non-coronal consonants when they belong to nouns or adjectives. In non-verb forms, by default, they are neutralized to dorsal in Shipibo-Konibo, and to labial in Capanahua. The analysis proposed consists in using the well-known markedness hierarchy on PoA, |Labial, Dorsal > Coronal > Pharyngeal|, and harmonically aligning it with a morphological markedness hierarchy in which non-verb forms are more marked than verb forms: |NonVerb > Verb|. This creates two fixed rankings of markedness constraints: one on verb forms in which, as expected, coronal/laryngeal is deemed the least marked PoA, and another one on non-verb forms in which the familiar markedness on PoA is reversed so that labial and dorsal become the least marked places of articulation. The study shows that although both Panoan languages follow the general cross-linguistic tendency to have coronal as a default PoA, this default can be overridden by morphology.

The predominant way to synthesize stop consonants is currently to use an articulatory model controlled by vocal tract parameters. We propose a new method to make this synthesis in various vocalic contexts. To generate the formant transitions, the basic principle is to apply an opening function on the (equal-length section) area function derived from the linear predictive (LP) model of speech signals. The definition of this opening function is empirically based on morphological considerations, and the main parameter is the place of articulation. Syllabic sounds with /b d g / in /a i u / vowel contexts are generated using LP synthesis with reflections coefficients corresponding to the interpolated area function. We show that the general structure of the formant transitions can be well represented using this model, and provide intelligible sound examples. Index Terms: syllable synthesis, co-articulation, stop consonants, place of articulation, acoustic tube model, formant

© 2004 S. Karger AG, Basel Fax +41 61 306 12 34 E-Mail karger@karger.ch Accessible online at: www.karger.com www.karger.com/journals/pho ... Dr. Harvey Sussman Department of Linguistics University of Texas Austin, TX 78712 (USA) +1 (512) 471-1701 sussman@mail.utexas.edu

Consonant harmony (CH) is a phenomenon commonly found in child language. Cross-linguistically, Place of Articulation (PoA), specifically the Coronal Node, undergoes CH, while regressive harmony seems to be the preferred directionality that CH takes (cf. Goad 2001a, b; Levelt 1994; Rose 2000, 2001). In the present study, drawing on naturalistic data from nine children acquiring Greek L1, we place emphasis on the fact that multiple factors need to be considered in parallel, in order to account for CH patterns: Not only PoA, but also Manner of Articulation (MoA) contributes to CH; consequently, (de)voicing or continuity harmony emerges. Although regressive harmony is generally favoured, markedness scales and word stress highly affect directionality. Coronal, stop and voiceless segments trigger and undergo CH depending on their degree of prominence and their position in the word. Harmony can be partial or full, i.e. either place or manner or both place and manner of articulation are targeted. Progressive harmony emerges when the triggers belong to the stressed syllable or when they are stops. Cases of double, bidirectional and recursive harmony are also reported. In general, Greek CH patterns are the product of combined factors determined by phonological principles and input frequency in the ambient language. In other words, the degree to which Greek CH patterns are different from cross-linguistic findings depends on the combination of UG principles and language specific/environmental effects, as well as the prominence of certain of these factors over others.

Purpose This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time. Method The technique of ultrasound imaging was employed to record tongue movement at 5 time points throughout short utterances of the form V1#CV2. Vocalic anticipation was examined with generalized additive modeling, an analytical approach allowing for the estimation of both linear and nonlinear influences on anticipatory processes. Results Both adults and children exhibit nonlinear patterns of vocalic anticipation over time with the degree and extent of vocalic anticipation varying as a function of the individual consonants and vowels assembled. However, noticeable developmental discrepancies were found with vocalic anticipation being present...