Phoneme similarity and confusability

1970

The findings of Marsh and Sherman4s invest 1970, of the speech sound discrimination ability of kinder subjects, are discussed in this paper. In the study a colt) made between performance when speech sounds were presented c tion, in ten .son was. isolation a.nd when speech sounds were presented in k. word itext, using minimal sound contrasts. The findings of the Marsh 40 Sherman-' 'CONFUSABILITY OF CONSONANT PHONEMES

Benjamins Current Topics, 2012

Phonological Typicality (PT) is a measure of the extent to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in the lexical category to which it belongs. There is a general coherence among words from the same category in terms of speech sounds, and we have found that words that are phonologically typical of their category tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than words that are less typical. In this paper we describe in greater detail the operationalisation of measures of a word's PT, and report validations of different parameterisations of the measure. For each variant of PT, we report the extent to which it reflects the coherence of the lexical categories of words in terms of their sound, as well as the extent to which the measure predicts naming and lexical decision response times from a database of monosyllabic word processing. We show that PT is robust to parameter variation, but that measures based on PT of uninflected words (lemmas) best predict response time data for naming and lexical decision of single words.

2011

The workshop covers a wide range of topics from morphology to stringology to formal language theory. This volume contains the 14 regular and 3 short papers that were presented at the workshop. In total, 30 papers (25 regular and 5 short papers) were submitted to a doubly blind refereeing process, in which each paper was reviewed by 3 program committee members. The overall acceptance rate was 57%. The program committee was composed of internationally leading researchers and practitioners selected from academia, research labs, and companies.

The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 199–217), 2015

Although the general notion of “phonological similarity” has figured prominently in linguistic scholarship, the manner in which talkers determine similarity between phonological units is not well understood. Recent research has shown that perceptual similarity does not account for input-output mappings between languages as well as it does within a language. I argue that this disparity arises due to the fact that, unlike phonological similarity within a language, phonological similarity between languages is highly influenced by an abstract, between-system level of analysis that is only relevant cross-linguistically. I review an array of findings in cross-linguistic research to demonstrate, first, a dissociation between acoustic distance and phonemic correspondence and, second, a consistent preference for relating segments and natural classes cross-linguistically on the basis of phonemic correspondence. This type of abstract comparison helps to explain why effects of perceptual similarity are often masked in cross-linguistic circumstances, and I point to possible bases of these comparisons: (1) inventory niches based on contrastive feature oppositions and/or relative phonetics, and (2) distributional parallelisms.

2012

Structuralists famously observed that language is “un systême oû tout se tient”(Meillet, 1903, p. 407), insisting that the system of relations of linguistic units was more important than their concrete content. This study attempts to derive content from relations, in particular phonetic (acoustic) content from the distribution of alternative pronunciations used in different geographical varieties.

Journal of Memory and Language - J MEM LANG, 2004

The aim of the present research was to determine whether the effect that phonological similarity has on immediate serial recall is influenced by the consistency and position of phonemes within words. In comparison to phonologically dissimilar lists, when the stimulus lists rhyme there is a facilitative effect on the recall of item information and a detrimental effect on order memory (Experiment 1). When stimuli share the initial consonant and vowel (Experiment 2) or the same initial and final consonant (Experiment 3), there is no beneficial effect of similarity for item information, coupled with a detrimental effect on order memory. Contrary to the predictions made by non-linguistic models of STM, the influence that similarity has on both the recall of item information and memory for the position of items in a list is dependent on which components of the items are shared within a list.

Cognition, 2005

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo-words sounded more similar to a target pseudo-word. Our results are generally consistent with the structural alignment theory of comparisons between complex mental representations, suggesting that phonological word similarity parallels similarity involving other kinds of information including visual objects and scenes, events, and word meanings. We use our results to test new metrics of word similarity, and identify predictions for future similarity research both in the domain of word sounds and in other cognitive domains. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Speech research Lab Progress Report, 2006

1982

This paper contrasts two kinds of relations among spoken syllables. One relation is based on a single common phoneme; the second is based on overall similarity of whole syllables. On the basis of recent studies with multidimensional visual stimuli, we hypothesized that preliterate children respond primarily to overall similarity relations among syllables, whereas literate adults respond primarily to common phoneme relations. These hypotheses were tested in two experiments using spoken syllables. Experiment 1 investigated the classification of syllables by preliterate children (mean age: 4 years 4 months) and college students. Experiment 2 studied the memory confusions among syllables by children (mean age: 4 years 8 months) and college students. The results ~f both experiments suggest that overall similarity relations are primary for preliterate children, while common phoneme relations are primary for adults. Moreover, children's limited use of common phoneme relations is not confined to tasks that require explicit judgments about language. Implications for the learning of reading are discussed.

2015

The production and perception of L2 vowels are influenced by the L1 vowel system. Most studies on L2 vowel production evaluate the learners' pronunciation using subjective listening tests. In this study we present a novel objective method for investigating learner vowel confusability based on acoustic measurements. Monosyllabic words uttered by Spanish learners of Dutch are analyzed, and basic acoustic featuresformant frequencies and duration-are extracted. Native Dutch speakers' measurements are used to obtain models for the Dutch vowels, which are employed to compute likelihood ratios and similarity distributions of the Spanish realizations in comparison to the Dutch target vowels. The likelihood ratios are presented in a matrix format similar to a confusion matrix crossing the target vowels by the vowels as classified. Results based on spectral features alone confirm the existence of an attractor effect of L1 vowels on L2 vowels. Overall, including duration in the analyses decreases the number of confusions. Comparing the confusion values on different feature sets helps analyzing the impact of the specific features. The results of the present study suggest that although the Spanish learners' use of duration is not native-like, it does help reduce confusability among Dutch vowels.