An acoustic analysis of voicing in American English dental fricatives
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1 An acoustic analysis of voicing in American English dental fricatives Bridget Smith Ohio State University In this study, an acoustic analysis of the dental fricatives as produced by American English speakers from the Buckeye Corpus (Pitt et al. 2006) reveals that the dental fricatives are subject to variation in voicing based on phonetic environment, much more than is usual for discrete phonemes whose phonological distinction is based on voicing. A comparison with the voicing of /f/ and /v/ confirms this. The results of the study show that while voicing (presence or absence of glottal pulses) is apparently not contrastive, much more variability is observed for the voiced phoneme than the voiceless. This may be related to the fact that the environments in which the voiceless phoneme are found are relatively unchanged from those which caused voicelessness in Old English. It may also be explained by the much lower token frequency of the voiceless fricative compared to the voiced. The very high token frequency of the voiced dental fricative, due to its presence in several very high frequency function words, allows for a much greater range of variation. It may be that the enlarged acoustic space brought about by this variation in place, manner, and voicing in these function words, was the cause of this phonemic split. The question may be asked, how do we classify sounds that are distinguished more by their ranges of variation rather than having a unique acoustic space? Further study in production and perception may reveal whether we should continue to consider the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives in American English as two phonemes, possibly with a different distinctive feature than voicing, or begin to look at them as two allophones (out of the many allophones found) of one dental fricative phoneme. 1. Introduction The Modern English digraph <th> actually represents two dental fricatives, which are classified as distinct phonemes differing in voicing. The voiceless dental fricative (IPA /θ/) can occur word-initially or word-finally, and medially in loanwords and certain compounds. The voiced dental fricative (IPA /ð/) occurs word-initially only in function words such as articles and demonstratives. /ð/ occurs medially in most words that have it, though it can also occur word-finally in certain derivational words such as bathe or teethe. There are a few minimal pairs, such as thigh and thy, either and ether, teeth and teethe, and some near-minimal pairs such as breath and breathe. Despite the existence of minimal pairs in all positions, these phonemes carry little, if any, functional load. Minimal pairs cannot generally be used in the same position in a sentence, belonging generally to different classes of words. This distribution is easily explained through the historical development of these sounds. In Old English, the thorn <þ> and edh <ð> characters interchangeably represented both the voiced and voiceless variant, which were at that time in complementary distribution. It is generally assumed that thorn or edh in initial and final position was voiceless, while between voiced sounds, it was voiced. /f/ and /v/ (and /s/ and /z/) had a similar distribution. Early on in Middle English, /f/ and /v/ (and /s/ and /z/) became phonemic, due to a confluence of factors, not least of which was the introduction of large numbers of loanwords containing these sounds in contrastive positions. Late during the Middle English period, it was noticed that there were two <th> variants, presumably a voiced and a voiceless phoneme
2 (Bullokar 1580). Function words such as the, that, this, then, etc., are assumed to have begun with a voiceless dental fricative in Old English, but their Modern English counterparts have become voiced. Because they are often unstressed and not discrete from adjacent words, they are more likely to assimilate to surrounding voiced sounds. Another possible contributing factor is that the high frequency of these function words may have allowed a large amount of variation, which became generalized as a voicing contrast. Note that the phonologization of these sounds occurred after the paradigm leveling that reduced the number of different forms of these function words. For example, the definite article, the, is inflected for case, gender, and number in Old English, yielding approximately 12 distinct forms of this word. The increased frequency of single forms of certain types of words may have created the situation that allowed reduction and variation of these high frequency words that now carry much less grammatical information. Word-final /ð/ appeared shortly thereafter, with the loss of verb endings stranding the medially-voiced fricative at the end of the verb. The greatest number of instances of /θ/ that occur outside of the original conditioning environment are in more recent loanwords such as author, arithmetic, and arthritis, and in forms that have undergone some kind of analogy or reanalysis, such as Arthur or anthem. The dental fricatives are relatively understudied, in comparison to other sounds. They are difficult to measure acoustically, and are perceptually weak and easily confusable with /f/ and /v/. Because the voiced phoneme /ð/ appears word-initially in function words and word-finally in verbs (where the voiceless phoneme /θ/ does not appear), psycholinguistic tasks are difficult to conceive, and because /θ/ and /ð/ may vary along multiple dimensions at once, forced choice tasks along a single dimension would not be particularly informative. Categorical replacement of /θ/ and /ð/ by /f/ and /v/ or /t/ and /d/ in certain dialects and sociolects has been studied, such as in AAVE (Wolfram 1970, 1974, among others) or London Cockney English (Wells 1982; Hughes, Trudgill & Watt 2005, among others). Polka, Colantonio & Sundara (2001) found that English-speaking infants were less able to distinguish between /d/ and /ð/ than between /b/ and /v/, which suggests that the variation in production of the dental fricative which the infants are exposed to overlaps to some extent with the alveolar (dental) stop, so that they are unable to interpret a phonemic pattern until they are much older. A number of studies have looked at acoustic measurements to distinguish place of articulation among various groups of fricatives, and have either avoided /θ/ and /ð/ (for example, Hughes and Halle, 1956), or were least successful in distinguishing /θ/ from /f/. While spectral characteristics are effective at sorting /s/ from /ʃ/, F2 transition may be more effective for /f/ and θ/ because their spectral characteristics are so similar, and vary by speaker (Heinz and Stevens, 1961), though, this also is disputed (Jongman, 1989;
3 Jongman et al, 1998). Behrens and Blumstein (1988) proved greater amplitude and longer duration for sibilants than non-sibilants (voiceless), which has been confirmed in other studies. Voicing distinctions have not been given as much attention as place distinctions. In the early literature on fricatives, emphasis was placed on puzzling out the distinctions in place of articulation, possibly because it was assumed that presence or absence of phonation, or regular glottal pulses, was sufficient to distinguish between voiced and voiceless fricatives. Even in some modern literature, it is considered the acoustic parameter that seems to be most salient (Pirello, Blumstein, and Kurowski, 1997:3754, though they are by no means alone in this judgment). Denes (1955), however, noted that duration of a word-final fricative, and comparatively, the duration of the preceding vowel, could be manipulated to give the impression of voicing for longer vowels and shorter fricatives, and of voicelessness for shorter vowels and longer fricatives. Raphael (1971) confirmed these findings, and noted that when the voicing characteristic is cued by vowel duration, perception is continuous rather than categorical (1296). The idea of voicing being a continuous variable is echoed by Pirello, Blumstein, and Kurowski (1997), when referring to the production results of Stevens et al. (1992), in that the feature voicing in fricatives is manifested in a continuous way and as such cannot be characterized in terms of a binary distinction relating to the presence or absence of glottal excitation (3754). Coarticulation Whereas Stevens et al (1992) used voiced and voiceless fricatives to condition partial voicing of a following fricative, Pirello, Blumstein, and Kurowski (1997) elicited fricative+vowel syllables following a voiced and voiceless velar stop. They believed that the difficulty of categorization found by Stevens et al (1992) was due to difficulty with producing and/or analyzing the fricative+fricative formulations, and argued that presence of glottal excitation present in at least 30 ms of either the beginning or the end of the fricative was enough to correctly classify voiced from voiceless fricatives. These fricatives were measured for duration and amplitude of the first harmonic of the fricative as compared to the following vowel. In this way, they were categorized as voiced and voiceless, using Stevens et al s (1992) rubric. In this way, word-initial /s/ and /z/, and /f/ and /v/ from read speech were classified with 93% accuracy. Previous studies have relied upon lab-produced read speech. While this allows researchers to exert some measure of control over variation, and creates tokens that can be easily compared across speakers, it does not give us a real picture of what these fricatives look like in everyday speech. Accumulated anecdotal evidence led this researcher to wonder just how strong the voicing distinction between /ð/ and /θ/ is in conversational speech, and whether it is based on phonation or if, in conversational speech, duration and intensity play a greater role. This study attempts to answer these questions: What constitutes voicing? When does voicing occur? What phonetic factors may be related
4 to voicing? Does the phonological description of phoneme match up with the phonetic realizations of /ð/ and /θ/? A parallel examination of /f/ and /v/ was conducted to find out what measures might be significant in distinguishing the voiced from the voiceless segments, and to provide a control group for comparison. 2. Methods Eight speakers (4 men, 4 women) were selected from the Buckeye Corpus (Pitt et al. 2006), which is a body of 40 sociolinguistic interviews of Ohio residents. One of the male subjects data was excluded from this analysis because of speech differences possibly resulting from a head injury. From approximately 15 minutes of conversational speech per speaker, around 400 /ð/ and /θ/ and 300 /v/ and /f/ tokens were measured altogether. Between 15 and 25 /θ/ tokens were collected from each speaker, /ð/ tokens, /f/ tokens, and /v/ tokens. An additional 71 /ð/, 5 /θ/, 2 /f/, and 31 /v/ tokens total were not included for measurement because they were deleted, assimilated, or realized as an entirely different sound. /ð/ following /n/ or /l/ was most the most frequent case of complete assimilation. Most of the alternate realizations occurred in an unstressed environment. Although no acoustic measurements were taken of these tokens, the surrounding environments and stress patterns were noted. 2.1 Measurement procedures In Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2007), an acoustical analysis software, intervals were measured for the duration of frication of /θ/, /ð/, /f/, and /v/. Because of the variability of conversational speech, no uniform cue existed for determining the beginning or end of the fricative. Obvious frication was used as a marker, where it was present. Reduced amplitude of formants as compared to surrounding vowels was a reliable marker for those tokens displaying little or no frication, but sometimes these markers were not available, and a judgment call using perception and examination of the waveform and spectrogram had to be made. In those cases in which the sound was unable to be differentiated from surrounding sounds, it was marked as assimilated or deleted. The beginning and ending of periods of voicing within the fricative were also measured. Intervals were marked as voiced if periodicity in the waveform or presence of a voice bar in the spectrogram indicated regular glottal pulses. To minimize confusion with the phonological feature [+voice], these are described as having voice bar. The immediately preceding and following segments adjacent to each fricative, and their voicing status, were marked and noted. Absolute intensity and intensity relative to surrounding sounds were measured. Duration and percentage of voicing were the other measurements recorded.
5 3. Results Though disappointing, it was not surprising that, due to the variation found in conversational speech, duration was not a conclusive measurement of voicing in either the labiodental or dental fricatives. Intensity, likewise, did not pattern in any way that aligned with phoneme or voicing. This was most likely due to the range of sonority found in the fricatives, as well as the greater degree of environmental voicing found in conversational speech. Some tokens were approximant-like, while others were stop-like, and intensity varied greatly among them all. Voicing, as found by Pirello et al. (1997), was more determinative of phoneme for /f/ and /v/, as shown in Fig. 1. Here, tokens were not categorized by whether or not voicing was present for an arbitrary period of time, such as the 30 ms suggested by Stevens et al. (1992) or Pirello et al. (1997). Rather, it is shown as a percentage of the duration of the fricative that voice bar was present. The amount of voice bar evidenced by /f/ is generally less than 40%, with 75% of the tokens having less than 20%. /v/ has more variation, but the median value is 100% voiced, and 75% of tokens have greater than 40% voicing. While the conversational speech does exhibit greater variation in voicing than lab speech, the amount of voicing is generally phonemically dependable, though perhaps not entirely predictable by this method. Figure 1. Percentage of voice bar found in /f/ and /v/. When /θ/ and /ð/ were analyzed for percentage of voice bar, the results were much less clear. Figure 2 shows that there is much greater variation in both /θ/ and /ð/. The two box plots overlap to such a degree that predicting phoneme based on voicing in this case would not be much better than chance.
6 The median values are different, with /θ/ at about 20% voiced, and /ð/ at about 45%. But the range of maximum and minimum values, excluding outliers, overlaps from 0% to about 65%. This is much greater than the variation for /f/ and /v/, and certainly not what we expect for a phonemic distribution based on voicing, even if voicing is continuous and variable. Figure 2. Percentage of voice bar found in /θ/ and /ð/. When only the voicing of immediately adjacent segments is taken into account, suggestive of voicing assimilation, the percentage of voice bar accounted for in this way is significantly better than that accounted for by phoneme. Figure 3a shows percentage of voice bar divided into two groups, based on 1) whether there was a voiceless segment, including a pause, immediately adjacent to the dental fricative (either /θ/ or /ð/), or 2) if the dental fricative was surrounded only by voiced sounds. These are the smaller white boxes, overlaid on the same gray box plot as in Figure 2, to illustrate the differences. The amount of variation in the voiceless column, which was less to begin with, is further reduced. The more drastic change can be seen in the voiced column, which looks more like the phonemic pattern found for /v/, with a median value of 100% voiced, and the variation much more contained, with 75% of tokens being 60% or more voiced. There is much less overlap between these two groups. In comparison, when this procedure is applied to /f/ and /v/, the amount of variation is drastically increased. Figure 3b illustrates how /f/ and /v/ are better sorted for voicing according to phoneme.
7 Figures 3a and b. Comparison of percent voicing for environmental conditions (1 = adjacent voiceless segment, including a pause, 2 = surrounded by voiced segments) compared with phonemic distribution as in Figs. 1 and 2, for a) /θ/ and /ð/, and b) /f/ and /v/. Because it is likely that the categories of phoneme and of environmental voicing overlap to some degree, a partial correlation statistic was run on each of these data sets in order to determine how much variation was accounted for by phoneme, excluding that accounted for by environmental condition, and how much was accounted for by environmental condition, excluding that accounted for by phoneme. r 2 (% accounted for) by phoneme, partialling out environment r 2 (% accounted for) by environment, partialling out phoneme dental fricative labio-dental fricative Table 1. Partial r 2 comparing percentage of variation accounted for by phoneme and environment, partialling out the variation accounted for by the other factor (environment and phoneme, respectively). As is evident from the box plots above, the percentage of voice bar evident in the labio-dental fricatives is much better accounted for by phonemic description of voicing. Even though in /f/ and /v/, 20% of the variance is accounted for by environment alone, /f/ is primarily voiceless, and /v/ is primarily voiced, with phoneme alone accounting for 52% of the variance (that is not coincident with environment). In contrast, the percentage of voice bar in the dental fricative seems to be accounted for better by sorting for environment. 59% of the variance is accounted for by a voiced or voiceless environment (not
8 coincident with phoneme). When phoneme alone is the distinguishing factor, and environment is partialled out, only 22% of the variance in voicing is accounted for. 4. Discussion The results of this investigation seem to indicate that the voicing contrast between the dental fricatives is not dependent on actual phonation, at least not in conversational speech. Duration and intensity are also not reliable measures of phonemic voicing in conversational speech. In fact, the very environments which conditioned voicing of the Old English dental fricative are more or less the same environments that predict voice bar in the modern dental fricatives. Even the voiced phonemes in function words can be voiceless, although these are the same words that we assume caused the phonologization with their voicing. We should not immediately jump to the conclusion that there is no phonemic distinction, but it does call into question whether the distinguishing feature between the two phonemes is voicing. Other continua along which these sounds vary, that is place and manner of articulation, may be more distinctive in differentiating between the two phonemes. If we continue to think of voicing as the distinctive feature (and possibly even if we look to manner of articulation), the variation of /ð/ occupies a much larger acoustic space, and encompasses that of /θ/. This raises a couple of interesting questions. One is whether one phonemic category can contain another, and if so, are they still distinct phonemes? Another is whether the term phoneme may be gradiently applied. Perhaps /θ/ is more phonemic than /ð/, that is, it is more specific, while /ð/ may be an underspecified category which consists of a number of allophones, varying in place, manner, and voicing. This investigation has raised more questions than it has answered. Further work must be done to replicate these findings and then try to answer the questions it has created. 5. References Boersma, Paul & David Weenink Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version ) [Computer program]. Retrieved February 2007, from [ Bybee, Joan, and Paul Hopper Editors. Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Campbell, Ruth & Derek Besner This and THAP -- constraints on the pronunciation of new, written words. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Section A. Vol 33:4, Edwards, Harold T Applied Phonetics: The sounds of American English. 3rd ed. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson-Delmar Learning. Frauenfelder, Uli, Mark Scholten, Alain Content Bottom-up inhibition in lexical selection: Phonological mismatch effects in spoken word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes. 16, (5/6), Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill & Dominic Watt English Accents and Dialects: An introduction
9 to social and regional varieties in the British Isles. 4 th ed. London: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc. Johnson, Keith Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Ladefoged, Peter Vowels and Consonants. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson The Sounds of the World s Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. Maddieson, Ian, & Kristin Precoda UPSID-PC The UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. (Data on the phonological systems of 451 languages, with programs to access it.) Accessed from [ /sales/software.htm] Miller, Joann Mapping from acoustic signal to phonetic category: Internal category structure, context effects, and speeded categorization. Language and Cognitive Processes. 16(5/6): Mitchell, Bruce & Fred C. Robinson A Guide to Old English. 6th ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Norris, Dennis, James McQueen, & Anne Cutler (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology. 47: Ohala, John J What s Cognitive, What s Not, in Sound Change. Lingua E Stile. 27: Ohala, John J The Phonetics of Sound Change. Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives ed. by Charles Jones, London: Longman. Pierrehumbert, Janet Exemplar Dynamics: Word Frequency, Lenition, and Contrast. In Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Ed. by Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pirello, Karen, Sheila E. Blumstein & Kathleen Kurowski The Characteristics of Voicing in Syllable-Initial Fricatives in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Pitt, Mark A., Laura Dilley, Keith Johnson, Scott Kiesling, William Raymond, Elizabeth Hume, & Eric Fosler-Lussier, comps Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. (1st release) [ Columbus, Ohio: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University (Distributor). Polka, Linda, Connie Colantonio, & Megha Sundara A cross-language comparison of /d/ - /ð/ perception: Evidence for a new developmental pattern. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 109(5): Repp, Bruno & Alvin Libermann Phonetic Category Boundaries are Flexible. In Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition. Ed. by Steven Harnad. Cambridge University Press Stevens, Kenneth N.; Sheila E. Blumstein, Laura Glicksman, Martha Burton, Kathleen Kurowski Acoustic and Perceptual Characteristics of Voicing in Fricatives and Fricative Clusters. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
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