This thesis examines the occurrence of Canadian Raising in Manitoba, using acoustic-spectral analysis. Factors such as lexical frequency and morphological complexity are examined to determine their role in Canadian Raising production within the sample population. One of the key findings is that what are usually analyzed as “raised” phones in pre-voiceless context are considerably shorter than non-raised (pre-voiced) phones, but do not exhibit substantial differences in terms of vowel quality. A method of multiple-timepoint spectral analysis used to achieve this finding is described in detail. Examination of raising-like diphthongs before /ɹ/ indicates that vowel duration differences exist in different contexts. There is some indication that morphological complexity is related to variants of “raised” phones, such that complex morphology is correlated with longer duration.

This thesis examines the occurrence of Canadian Raising in Manitoba, using acoustic-spectral analysis. Factors such as lexical frequency and morphological complexity are examined to determine their role in Canadian Raising production within the sample population. One of the key findings is that what are usually analyzed as “raised” phones in pre-voiceless context are considerably shorter than non-raised (pre-voiced) phones, but do not exhibit substantial differences in terms of vowel quality. A method of multiple-timepoint spectral analysis used to achieve this finding is described in detail. Examination of raising-like diphthongs before /ɹ/ indicates that vowel duration differences exist in different contexts. There is some indication that morphological complexity is related to variants of “raised” phones, such that complex morphology is correlated with longer duration.

The present study adopted Articulatory Phonology as a theoretical framework to investigate the aticulatory timing of English consonant clusters. Both native and non-native (Mandarin ESL learners) speakers’ performances were of interest. An acoustic approach was taken to explore the consonantal overlap in both native and non-native English speakers’ production. Also investigated in the present study were the factors that influence the overlap between consonants. Thirty-one native Mandarin speakers and eight native Canadian English speakers participated in the study. The thirty-one native Mandarin speakers were divided into three proficiency groups according to a pretest which evaluated Mandarin speakers’ English speaking proficiency. The experiment of the study was a reading task. Participants were instructed to put the words ending with the target consonant clusters in four carrier sentences and read them aloud. In total, 256 tokens (20 clusters×2 vowel environments×4 carrier sentences+12 consonants×2 vowel environments×4 carrier sentences) were recorded for each participant. The duration of each segment in the word was measured in the phonetic software, Praat. Three timing ratios: consonant to cluster, cluster to a pair of individual consonants, and cluster to rime were calculated. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed significant effect for place of articulation and manner of articulation on the articulatory timing of English consonant clusters in the coda position. Meanwhile, voicing feature, as an unexpected factor, was also reported to be an influential factor. More detailed analysis revealed that heterorganic clusters have more overlap than homorganic clusters. Within heterorganic clusters, a tongue tip consonant is more overlapped by a following tongue body consonant than a tongue body consonant is by a following tongue tip consonant. For manner of articulation, stops are found to be more overlapped by a following stop than by a following fricative. Overlapping caused by voicing feature was an unexpected outcome found in the present study. Voiceless consonant clusters have more overlap than voiced clusters. The difference between native and non-native speakers is also of interest. With respect to the amount of overlap, native speakers have more overlap than non-native speakers. Moreover, statistic tests reported a significant effect for proficiency group. From the comparison of mean values of three ratios, the performance of advanced group was close to native speakers. And intermediate and low groups exhibited similar performance. / Graduate

This dissertation is aimed at investigating the impact of postural changes within speakers on the acoustic speech signal to complement research on articulatory changes under the same conditions. The research is therefore relevant for forensic phonetics, where quantifying within-speaker variation is vital for the accuracy of speaker comparison. To this end, two acoustic studies were carried out to quantify the influence of five head positions and three body orientations on the acoustic speech signal. Results show that there is a consistent change in the third formant, a change which was most evident in the body orientation measurements, and to a lesser extent in the head position data. Analysis of the results with respect to compensation strategies indicates that speakers employ different strategies to compensate for these perturbations to their vocal tract. Some speakers did not exhibit large differences in their speech signal, while others appeared to compensate much less. Across all speakers, the effect was much stronger in what were deemed ‘less natural’, postures. That is, speakers were apparently less able to predict and compensate for the impact of prone body orientation on their speech than for that of the more natural supine orientation. In addition to the acoustic studies, a perception experiment assessed whether listeners could make use of acoustic cues to determine the posture of the speaker. Stimuli were chosen with, by design, stronger or weaker acoustic cues to posture, in order to elicit a possible difference in identification performance. Listeners were nevertheless not able to identify above chance whether a speaker was sitting or lying in prone body orientation even when hearing the set with stronger cues. Further combined articulatory and acoustic research will have to be carried out to disentangle which articulatory behaviours correlate with the acoustic changes presented in order to draw a more comprehensive picture of the effects of postural variation on speech.

The materiality of poetic language, its sensuous dimension, has generally been understood as aural or visual—patterns of sound unfolding in time, or words arranged on the page in a certain way. But a poem also has a sensuous reality in the mouth due to the movements and sensations of uttering the sequences of speech-sounds that constitute the poem. This is the articulatory dimension of the poem—the patterns of shapes, movements, sensations, and gestures that a poem orchestrates in the mouth. How is our experience of a poem informed or conditioned by the activity of enunciating the speech-sounds that constitute it? As the first full-length study of this fundamental material aspect of poetic language, this dissertation argues that the articulatory dimension of a poem, i.e. the oral-tactile-kinesthetic sensations of its utterance, can be made to signify. My first chapter traces a history of articulatory thinking drawn from disciplines ranging from anthropology to linguistics to cognitive poetics and literary studies, and develops a conceptual framework for describing and analyzing the articulatory dimension. The framework I propose relies on articulatory phonetics to describe and appreciate the aesthetics of speech-sound in a precise and rigorous way. The second chapter comprises of a series of ‘case studies’ of specific speech-sounds, showing how the affective and symbolic potential of these phonemes grow naturally out of the phenomenological experience of their utterance, and then illustrating how these potentials are evoked in actual lines of verse from poets as historically and stylistically diverse as Shakespeare, Pope, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Hughes, Stevens, and Plath. The case studies are interspersed with ‘interludes’ that fill in the developmental, anthropological, literary, and cultural history of speech-sounds that undergird the articulatory dimension. Finally, the third chapter examines how the oral physicality of speech-sounds has been imagined, mythologized, and valorized in the poetic imagination. Specifically, I show how the mouth in its activity of enunciating speech-sounds becomes a ground for figuration, a source of overarching metaphors for poetic inspiration, poetic utterance, and the poetic imagination in poets ranging from Shelley and Whitman to Frost, Stevens, Pinsky, and Seamus Heaney. / 2026-11-30T00:00:00Z

Both acoustic and palatographic measures have proven to be useful in speech science research. However, it is not known how closely or consistently these two measures are associated with each other. Therefore, this study investigated the association between changes in tongue-to-palate contact patterns and simultaneous changes in acoustic spectral moments for the fricative /s/. Twenty adults were fitted with pseudopalates and repeated VCV nonsense syllables consisting of an initial schwa followed by the target consonant /s/ and ending with one of three corner vowels (/i, ɑ, u/). EPG (electropalatography) data were quantified using three custom numerical indices (s-narrow, s-wide, and asymmetry) derived from specified zones on the pseudopalate which loosely reflected dimensional differences in the fricative groove. These indices produced general details about changes in tongue contact over time, but index values were not unique to specific contact patterns. The EPG numerical index values were then compared with differences in spectral moments (spectral mean and variance) from the time-aligned acoustic signal. On the whole, all combinations of spectral mean and variance and EPG indices resulted in some weak but significant correlations across all vowel contexts and participant groupings. The majority of these correlations were negative, meaning that as EPG index values increased, spectral mean and variance decreased. Some of the strongest of these correlations were present between s-narrow and spectral mean and variance. Therefore, in order to give a clearer picture of the link between lingual physiology and spectral moments, these variables were correlated for each individual speaker. Stronger significant correlations between s-narrow and both spectral mean and variance were identified in some participants. The majority of these correlations were also negative, suggesting that as the s-narrow index increased, the spectral mean and the variance decreased. A few participants' results that showed interesting lingua-palatal contact patterns are discussed in more detail. Generalization based on specific correlations from this study must be undertaken with considerable caution due to desynchronization of EPG data and the acoustic signal found in several tokens.

No description available.

abstract: Speech is generated by articulators acting on a phonatory source. Identification of this phonatory source and articulatory geometry are individually challenging and ill-posed problems, called speech separation and articulatory inversion, respectively. There exists a trade-off between decomposition and recovered articulatory geometry due to multiple possible mappings between an articulatory configuration and the speech produced. However, if measurements are obtained only from a microphone sensor, they lack any invasive insight and add additional challenge to an already difficult problem. A joint non-invasive estimation strategy that couples articulatory and phonatory knowledge would lead to better articulatory speech synthesis. In this thesis, a joint estimation strategy for speech separation and articulatory geometry recovery is studied. Unlike previous periodic/aperiodic decomposition methods that use stationary speech models within a frame, the proposed model presents a non-stationary speech decomposition method. A parametric glottal source model and an articulatory vocal tract response are represented in a dynamic state space formulation. The unknown parameters of the speech generation components are estimated using sequential Monte Carlo methods under some specific assumptions. The proposed approach is compared with other glottal inverse filtering methods, including iterative adaptive inverse filtering, state-space inverse filtering, and the quasi-closed phase method. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2018

Mycket av vår kognitiva förmåga beror på lagringen och bearbetande av meningen olika objekt, ord eller handlingar innefattar. Denna mening kallas för semantik där semantik inom arbetsminne har till största del ignorerats och istället tillskrivits långtids semantiskt minne. Med användning Baddley och Hitch model av arbetsminne är målet av denna studie att tillskriva semantisk bearbetning till en komponent inom modellen, undersöka skillnader mellan typer av semantiskt material till episodiskt material och hur dessa är påverkade av seriella positionseffekter. Relaterad semantik, orelaterad semantik och episodiskt material var inkluderade i studien och var representerade av ord-par. 42 deltagare, med användningen av en bekvämlighetsurvalsmetod, blev slumpmässigt tilldelade ett av tre experimentella förhållanden designade för att förändra mängden material som de kan memorera. Det första experimentella förhållandet fastställde att med direkt återkallelse hade semantiskt material högre grad av återkallelse än episodiskt material. Det andra experimentella förhållandet visade att effekten av artikulatoriskt undertryckande (articulatory suppression) inte signifikant sänker mängden som memorerat. Det tredje förhållandet demonstrerade att fördröjd återkallelse signifikant förminskade mängden orelaterad semantik. Dessa resultat visade att semantiskt material återkallas till högre grad men relaterad semantik och orelaterad semantik lagras av olika system då orelaterad semantik är påverkad av förfall (decay) eller störning (interference). Resultaten visade betydelsen av att använda simpelt och precist språk för att ge ett mer effektivt sätt att memorera och lära sig. / Much of our cognitive abilities rely on maintaining and processing the meaning of different objects, words or actions. This meaning is known as semantics however, the use of semantics in working memory have been mostly ignored and instead attributed to long-term semantic memory. Using Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory this study aims to attribute semantic maintenance to a component within the model, examine differences between types of semantic material to episodic material and how these were affected by serial position effects. Related semantics, unrelated semantics and episodic material were included in the study which were all represented by word-pairs. 42 participants, using a convenience sampling method, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions designed to alter the amount of material memorized. The first experimental condition, by using immediate recall, demonstrated that semantic materials had a significantly superior recall rate than episodic materials. The second experimental condition showed that the effect articulatory suppression didn’t significantly reduce the amount memorized. The third condition demonstrated that delayed recall significantly reduced the amount of unrelated semantics. These findings showed that semantic materials had superior recall but related and unrelated semantic material were found to be maintained by different systems as unrelated material was subject to decay or interference. The results showed the importance using simple and precise language to provide a more effective way to memorize and learn.

L'inversion acoustique-articulatoire de la parole consiste à récupérer la forme du conduit vocal à partir d'un signal de parole. Ce problème est abordé à l'aide d'une méthode d'analyse par synthèse reposant sur un modèle physique de production de la parole contrôlé par un petit nombre de paramètres décrivant la forme du conduit vocal : l'ouverture de la mâchoire, la forme et la position de la langue et la position des lèvres et du larynx. Afin de s'approcher de la géométrie de notre locuteur, le modèle articulatoire est construit à l'aide de contours articulatoires issus d'images cinéradiographiques présentant une vue sagittale du conduit vocal. Ce synthétiseur articulatoire nous permet de créer une table formée de couples associant un vecteur articulatoire au vecteur acoustique correspondant. Nous n'utiliserons pas les formants (fréquences de résonance du conduit vocal) comme vecteur acoustique car leur extraction n'est pas toujours fiable provoquant des erreurs lors de l'inversion. Les coefficients cepstraux sont utilisés comme vecteur acoustique. De plus, l'effet de la source et les disparités entre le conduit vocal du locuteur et le modèle articulatoire sont pris en compte explicitement en comparant les spectres naturels à ceux produits par le synthétiseur car nous disposons des deux signaux / The acoustic-to-articulatory inversion of speech consist in the recovery of the vocal tract shape from the speech signal. This problem is tackled with an analysis-by-synthesis method depending on a physical model of speech production controlled by a small number of parameters describing the vocal tract shape: the jaw opening, the shape and the position of the tongue and the position of lips and larynx. In order to approach the geometry of the speaker, the articulatory model is built with articulatory contours from cineradiographic images of the sagittal view of the vocal tract. This articulatory synthesizer allows us to create a table made up with couples associating a articulatory vector with the corresponding acoustic vector. The formants (resonance frequency of the vocal tract shape) are not used as acoustic vector because their extraction is not always reliable causing errors during inversion. The cepstral coefficients are used as acoustic vector. Moreover, the source effect and the mismatch between the speaker vocal tract and the articulatory model are considered explicitly comparing the natural spectrum with those produced by the synthesizer because we have the both signals