Speaker-specific Structure in German Voiceless Stop Voice Onset Times

Marc Antony Hullebus, Stephen Tobin and Adamantios Gafos

Abstract:

Voice onset time (VOT), a primary cue for voicing in many languages including English and German, is known to vary greatly between speakers, but also displays robust within-speaker consistencies, at least in English. The current analysis extends these findings to German. VOT measures were investigated from voiceless alveolar and velar stops in CV syllables cued by a visual prompt in a cue-distractor task. Comparably to English, a considerable portion of German VOT variability can be attributed to the syllable’s vowel length and the stop’s place of articulation. Individual differences in VOT still remain irrespective of speech rate. However, significant correlations across places of articulation and between speaker-specific mean VOTs and standard deviations indicate that talkers employ a relatively unified VOT profile across places of articulation. This could allow listeners to more efficiently adapt to speaker-specific realisations.

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Cite as: Hullebus, M.A., Tobin, S., Gafos, A. (2018) Speaker-specific Structure in German Voiceless Stop Voice Onset Times. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 1403-1407, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2288.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Hullebus2018,
author={Marc Antony Hullebus and Stephen Tobin and Adamantios Gafos},
title={Speaker-specific Structure in German Voiceless Stop Voice Onset Times},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={1403--1407},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2288},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2288} }