Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityFenno-Swedish VOT: Influence from Finnish?Catherine Ringen 1 and Kari Suomi 21 Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA2 Phonetics, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Oulu, FinlandAbstractThis paper presents results of an investigationof VOT in the speech of twelve speakers ofFenno-Swedish. The data show that in utterance-initialposition, the two-way contrast isusually realised as a contrast between prevoicedand unaspirated stops. Medially andfinally, the contrast is that of a fully voiced stopand a voiceless unaspirated stop. However, alarge amount of variation was observed forsome speakers in the production of /b d g/, withmany tokens being completely voiceless andoverlapping phonetically with tokens of /p t k/.Such tokens, and the lack of aspiration in /p tk/, set Fenno-Swedish apart from the varietiesspoken in Sweden. In Finnish, /b d g/ are marginaland do not occur in many varieties, and/p t k/ are voiceless unaspirated. We suggestthat Fenno-Swedish VOT has been influencedby Finnish.MethodTwelve native speakers of Fenno-Swedish (6females, 6 males) were recorded in Turku, Finland.The ages of the male speakers varied between22 and 32 years, those of the femalespeakers between 24 years and 48 years.Fenno-Swedish was the first language and thelanguage of education of the subjects, as wellas of both of their parents. The speakers camefrom all three main areas in which Swedish isspoken in Finland: Uusimaa/Nyland (the southerncoast of Finland), Turunmaa / Åboland (thesouth-western coast) and Pohjanmaa / Österbotten(the western coast, Ostrobothnia). Thespeakers are all fluent in Finnish. There were68 target words containing one or more stops.A list was prepared in which the target wordsoccurred twice, with six filler words added tothe beginning of the list. The recordings tookplace in an anechoic chamber at the Centre forCognitive Neuroscience of Turku University.The words were presented to the subjects on acomputer screen. The subjects received eachnew word by clicking the mouse and were instructedto click only when they had finisheduttering a target word. The subjects were instructedto speak naturally, and their productionswere recorded directly to a hard disk (22.5kHz, 16 bit) using high quality equipment.Measurements were made using broad-bandspectrograms and oscillograms.ResultsThe full results, including the statistical tests,are reported in Ringen and Suomi (submitted).Here we concentrate on those aspects of the resultsthat suggest an influence on Fenno-Swedish from Finnish.The set /p t k/The stops /p t k/ were always voiceless unaspirated.For the utterance-initial /p t k/, themean VOTs were 20 ms, 24 ms and 41 ms, respectively.These means are considerably lessthan those reported by Helgason and Ringen(2008) (49 ms, 65 ms and 78 ms, respectively)for Central Standard Swedish (CS Swedish),for a set of target words that were identical tothose in our, with only a few exceptions. On theother hand, the mean VOTs of Finnish wordinitial/p/, /t/ and /k/ reported by Suomi (1980)were 9 ms, 11 ms and 20 ms, respectively (10male speakers). These means are smaller thanthose of our Fenno-Swedish speakers, but thedifference may be due to the fact that while theinitial stops in our study were utterance-initial,the Finnish target words were embedded in aconstant frame sentence. 1In medial intervocalic position, the mean ofVOT was 10 ms for /p/, 18 ms for /t/ and 25 msfor /k/. In Helgason and Ringen (2008), the correspondingmeans for CS Swedish were 14 ms,23 ms and 31 ms, and in Suomi (1980) 11 ms,16 ms and 25 ms for Finnish. The differencesare small, and there is the difference in the elicitationmethods, but it can nevertheless benoted that the Fenno-Swedish and Finnish figuresare very close to each other, and that theCS Swedish VOTs are at least numericallylonger than the Fenno-Swedish ones. At anyrate, these comparisons do not suggest thatFenno-Swedish and Finnish are different withrespect to the VOT of medial /p t k/. (OurFenno-Swedish speakers produced medialintervocalic /p t k/ in quantitatively two ways:60
Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universityeither as short or long, e.g. baka was pronouncedas either [baaka] (eight speakers) or[baakka] (four speakers). However, this alternationhad no effect on VOT].) Word-final /ptk/were fully voiceless. To the ears of the secondauthor, the Fenno-Swedish /p t k/ sound verymuch like Finnish /p t k/.The set /b d g/In the realization of the utterance-initial /b d g/,there was much variation among the speakers.For eight of the twelve speakers, 95.2% of theutterance initial lenis tokens were prevoiced,whereas for the remaining four speakers, only70.6% of the tokens were prevoiced. Half of thespeakers in both subgroups were female andhalf were male. For the group of eight speakers,the mean VOT was -85 ms, and the proportionof tokens with non-negative VOT was 4.8%.The results for this group are similar to those ofHelgason and Ringen (2008) for CS Swedishwho observed the grand mean VOT of -88 msand report that, for all six speakers pooled, 93%of the initial /b d g/ had more than 10 ms prevoicing.For the CS Swedish speaker with theshortest mean prevoicing, 31 of her 38 initial /bd g/ tokens had more than 10 ms of prevoicing.For our group of eight Fenno-Swedish speakersand for all of the six CS Swedish speakers inHelgason and Ringen, then, extensive prevoicingwas the norm, with only occasional nonprevoicedrenditions.For the group of four Fenno-Swedishspeakers the mean VOT was only -40 ms, andthe proportion of tokens with non-negativeVOT was 29.4%. For an extreme speaker inthis respect, the mean VOT was -28 ms and38% of the /b d g/ tokens had non-negativeVOT. In fact, at least as far as VOT is concerned,many /b d g/ tokens overlapped phoneticallywith tokens of /p t k/. A linear discriminantanalysis was run on all initial stopsproduced by the group of eight speakers and onall initial stops produced by the group of fourspeakers to determine how well the analysiscan classify the stop tokens as instances of /p tk/ or /b d g/ on the basis of VOT. For the groupof eight speakers, 97.3% of the tokens werecorrectly classified: the formally /p t k/ stopswere all correctly classified as /p t k/, 4.8% ofthe formally /b d g/ stops were incorrectlyclassified as /p t k/. For the group of fourspeakers, 82.9% of the tokens were correctlyclassified: 1.0% of the formally /p t k/ stopswere incorrectly classified as /b d g/, and 29.4%of the formally /b d g/ stops were incorrectlyclassified as /p t k/. For these four speakers,then, /b d g/ often had positive VOT values inthe small positive lag region also frequently observedin /p t k/.Medial /b d g/ were extensively or fullyvoiced. In 9.4% of the tokens, the voiced proportionof the occlusion was less than 50%, in10.4% of the tokens the voiced proportion was50% or more but less than 75%, in 10.4% of thetokens the voiced proportion was 75% or morebut less than 100%, and in 70.0% of the tokensthe voiced proportion was 100%. Thus, whilethe medial /b d g/ were on the whole veryhomogeneous and mostly fully voiced, 3.6% ofthem were fully voiceless. These were nearlyall produced by three of the four speakers whoalso produced many utterance-initial /b d g/ tokenswith non-negative VOT values. The fullyvoiceless tokens were short and long /d/’s andshort /g/’s; there was no instance of voiceless/b/. A discriminant analysis was run on all medialstops, with closure duration, speaker sex,quantity, place of articulation, duration of voicingduring occlusion and positive VOT as theindependent variables. 96.4% of the tokenswere correctly classified (98.7% of /p t k/ and94.5% of /b d g/). The order of magnitude ofthe independent variables as separators of thetwo categories was duration of voicing duringocclusion > positive VOT > closure duration >place > quantity: sex had no separating power.Great variation was observed in both shortand long final /b d g/, and therefore the speakerswere divided into two subgroups both consistingof six speakers. This was still somewhatProcrustean, but less so than making no divisionwould have been. For group A the meanvoiced proportion of the occlusion was 89%(s.d. = 18%), for group B it was 54% (s.d. =31%). As the standard deviations suggest, therewas less inter-speaker and intra-speaker variationin the A group than in the B group.Among the group A speakers, mean voicedproportion of occlusion across the places of articulationranged from 73% to 98% in the short/b d g/ and from 63% to 99% in the long /b d g/,among the group B speakers the correspondingranges were 36% to 62% and 46% to 64%. Anextreme example of intra-speaker variation is amale speaker in group B for whom four of the24 final /b d g/ tokens were completely voicelessand nine were completely voiced. Discriminantanalyses were again run on all finalstops, separately for the two groups. For groupB, with voicing duration during the occlusion,61
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