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1. Piaroa voiceless stops as partial undergoers of nasal harmony

   Rosés Labrada, Jorge; Faytak, Matthew; Schnoor, Tyler; Lapierre, Myriam; Michael, Lev (July 2023, Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences)

   Skarnitzl, Radek; Volín, Jan (Ed.)

   Phonological analyses of long-distance nasal harmony (LDNH) processes classify segments as triggers, undergoers, blockers, or transparent, based primarily on researchers’ subjective judgments of nasality. Using novel field instrumental data from Piaroa (a Jodï-Sáliban language with LDNH), we investigate stop duration, voice onset time (VOT), and nasal and oral airflow during the Piaroa voiceless stops in all-oral environments and continuous nasal harmony spans. We find that nasal harmony has no effect on stop duration and VOT, but voiceless stops in nasal contexts exhibit nasal airflow above an oral baseline at the onset of closure, suggesting that voiceless stops in nasal spans are partial undergoers of LDNH. This partial undergoer behavior is consistent with a model of coactivation of antagonistic gestural specifications for velum activity of the voiceless stop undergoer and the nasal harmony span. Similar voiceless obstruent pre-nasalization is likely widespread cross-linguistically but vastly underreported due to its subtle acoustic effects. 

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2. Apparent-time variation in the use of multiple cues for perception of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in California English

   https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10831  

   Zellou, Georgia; Cohn, Michelle (January 2024, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics)

   This study examines apparent-time variation in the use of multiple acoustic cues present on coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in California English. Eighty-nine listeners ranging in age from 18-58 (grouped into 3 apparent-time categories based on year of birth) performed lexical identifications on syllables excised from words with oral and nasal codas from six speakers who produced either minimal (n=3) or extensive (n=3) anticipatory nasal coarticulation (realized by greater vowel nasalization, F1 bandwidth, and diphthongization on vowels in CVN contexts). Results showed no differences across listeners’ identification for Extensively coarticulated vowels, as well as oral vowels by both types of speakers (all at-ceiling). Yet, performance for the Minimal Coarticulators’ nasalized vowels was lowest for the older listener group and increased over apparent-time. Perceptual cue-weighting analyses revealed that older listeners rely more on F1 bandwidth, while younger listeners rely more on acoustic nasality, as coarticulatory cues providing information about lexical identity. Thus, there is evidence for variation in apparent- time in the use of the different coarticulatory cues present on vowels. Younger listeners’ cue weighting allows them flexibility to identify lexical items given a range of coarticulatory variation across (here, younger) speakers, while older listeners’ cue weighting leads to reduced performance for talkers producing innovative phonetic forms. This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between multidimensional acoustic features resulting from coarticulation and the perceptual re-weighting of cues that can lead to sound change over time. 

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3. From sonority hierarchy to posterior probability as a measure of lenition: The case of Spanish stops

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017247  

   Tang, Kevin; Wayland, Ratree; Wang, Fenqi; Vellozzi, Sophia; Sengupta, Rahul; Altmann, Lori (February 2023, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   A deep learning Phonet model was evaluated as a method to measure lenition. Unlike quantitative acoustic methods, recurrent networks were trained to recognize the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish. When applied to intervocalic and post-nasal voiced and voiceless stops, the approach yielded lenition patterns similar to those previously reported. Further, additional patterns also emerged. The results suggest the validity of the approach as an alternative or addition to quantitative acoustic measures of lenition. 

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4. How Good Does This Sound? Examining Listeners’ Second Language Proficiency and Their Perception of Category Goodness in Their Native Language

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010043  

   Nagle, Charlie; Baese-Berk, Melissa M.; Diantoro, Carissa; Kim, Haeun (March 2023, Languages)

   Language learners often transfer the sounds and prosody of their native language into their second language, but this influence can also flow in the opposite direction, with the second language influencing the first. Among other variables, language proficiency is known to affect the degree and directionality of cross-linguistic influence. However, little is known about how second language learning affects listeners’ perception of their native language. To begin addressing this gap, we examined the relationship between learners’ second language proficiency and their category goodness ratings in their native language. Thirty-nine English-speaking learners of Spanish listened to English words that began with voiced and voiceless stop consonants and were asked to rate how well the word represented the intended word on a 5-point scale. To create a voicing continuum, we manipulated the voice onset time of the word-initial stop in each target item from 125 ms of prevoicing to 100 ms of aspiration, in 25 ms steps. Proficiency did not affect the perception of voiced targets, but both proficiency and L2 stop production affected the perception of voiceless targets. 

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5. On latent nasals in Samogo

   https://doi.org/10.4000/mandenkan.2314  

   McPherson, Laura (January 2020, Mandenkan)

   Languages in the Samogo group display a phenomenon referred to as “floating” or “latent” nasals. Though belonging to the end of a word (either synchronically or diachronically) in coda position, latent nasals more often appear as mutations or modifications to either the initial consonant of the following morpheme or the preceding vowel. This paper draws together extant descriptive data on Samogo nasals and considers them in the broader typology of consonant and vowel nasality in Mande. Finally, the question of phonological representation vs. phonetic realization is considered with preliminary acoustic data from Seenku [sos]; the weak surface realization of the nasal raises questions about an analysis in which it is floating and suggests that recent developments in Gradient Symbolic Representation (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016) may be applicable to the data. 

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