Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2009 Jun;125(6):3974-82.
doi: 10.1121/1.3106131.

Individual talker differences in voice-onset-time: contextual influences

Affiliations

Individual talker differences in voice-onset-time: contextual influences

Rachel M Theodore et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Jun.

Abstract

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.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
VOT (ms) as a function of vowel duration (ms) for talkers E1M2 (left panel) and E1M4 (right panel). In both panels, each filled circle represents one token of ∕ti∕ and the solid line represents the linear function relating VOT to vowel duration.
Figure 2
Figure 2
VOT (ms) as a function of vowel duration (ms) for talker E2F2 at two places of articulation, labial ∕pi∕ and velar ∕ki∕. Each black square represents one token of ∕pi∕ and each gray circle represents one token of ∕ki∕. The solid lines represent the calculated function relating VOT to vowel duration at each place of articulation.

References

    1. Adams, S. G., Weismer, G., and Kent, R. (1993). “Speaking rate and speech movement velocity profiles,” J. Speech Hear. Res. JSPHAH 36, 41–54. - PubMed
    1. Allen, J. S., and Miller, J. L. (2004). “Listener sensitivity to individual talker differences in voice-onset-time,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. JASMAN10.1121/1.1701898 115, 3171–3183. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Allen, J. S., Miller, J. L., and DeSteno, D. (2003). “Individual talker differences in voice-onset-time,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. JASMAN10.1121/1.1528172 113, 544–552. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Boersma, P. (2001). “Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer,” Glot International 5, 341–345.
    1. Bradlow, A. R., and Bent, T. (2008). “Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech,” Cognition CGTNAU10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.005 106, 707–729. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types