2021/10/07 by Charalambos Themistocleous, Themistocleous, Charalambos, Valantis Fyndanis +3
Computer Science · Engineering · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Sound (cs.SD) #cs.CL #cs.SD #eess.AS #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.03756
arxiv created 2021/10/07 · openalex publication_date 2021/10/07 · arxiv updated 2021/10/11 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The aim of this study is to determine the effect of language varieties on the spectral distribution of stressed and unstressed sonorants (nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/) and on their coarticulatory effects on adjacent sounds. To quantify the shape of the spectral distribution, we calculated the spectral moments from the sonorant spectra of nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/ produced by Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek speakers. To estimate the co-articulatory effects of sonorants on the adjacent vowels' F1 - F4 formant frequencies, we developed polynomial models of the adjacent vowel's formant contours. We found significant effects of language variety (sociolinguistic information) on the spectral moments of each sonorant /m/, /n/, /l/, /r/ (except between /m/ and /n/) and on the formant contours of the adjacent vowel. All sonorants (including /m/ and /n/) had distinct effects on adjacent vowel's formant contours, especially for F3 and F4. The study highlights that the combination of spectral moments and coarticulatory effects of sonorants determines linguistic (stress and phonemic category) and sociolinguistic (language variety) characteristics of sonorants. It also provides the first comparative acoustic analysis of Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek sonorants.