Theodore Rachel M, Miller Joanne L, DeSteno David
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Jun;125(6):3974-82. doi: 10.1121/1.3106131.
Previous research indicates that talkers differ in phonetically relevant properties of speech, including voice-onset-time (VOT) in word-initial stop consonants; some talkers have characteristically shorter VOTs than others. Previous research also indicates that VOT is robustly affected by contextual influences, including speaking rate and place of articulation. This paper examines whether these contextual influences on VOT are themselves talker-specific. Many tokens of alveolar ti (experiment 1) or labial pi and velar ki (experiment 2) were elicited from talkers across a range of rates. VOT and vowel duration (a metric of rate) were measured for each token. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that (1) VOT increased as rate decreased for all talkers, but the magnitude of the increase varied significantly across talkers; thus the effect of rate on VOT was talker-specific; (2) the talker-specific effect of rate was stable across a change in place of articulation; and (3) for all talkers VOTs were shorter for labial than velar stops, and there was no significant variability in the magnitude of this displacement across talkers; thus the effect of place on VOT was not talker-specific. The implications of these findings for how listeners might accommodate talker differences in VOT during speech perception are discussed.
先前的研究表明，说话者在语音的语音相关属性方面存在差异，包括单词开头塞音的语音起始时间（VOT）；一些说话者的VOT特征性地比其他说话者短。先前的研究还表明，VOT受到语境影响的强烈影响，包括语速和发音部位。本文研究这些对VOT的语境影响本身是否具有说话者特异性。从不同语速的说话者那里引出了许多齿龈音ti（实验1）或唇音pi和软腭音ki（实验2）的语音样本。测量了每个语音样本的VOT和元音时长（语速的一个指标）。分层线性模型分析表明：（1）对于所有说话者，VOT随着语速降低而增加，但增加的幅度在不同说话者之间有显著差异；因此，语速对VOT的影响具有说话者特异性；（2）语速的说话者特异性效应在发音部位变化时是稳定的；（3）对于所有说话者，唇音的VOT比软腭塞音短，并且这种差异的幅度在不同说话者之间没有显著变化；因此，发音部位对VOT的影响不具有说话者特异性。本文讨论了这些发现对于听众在语音感知过程中如何适应说话者在VOT方面差异的意义。
