Overview

This project aims to shed new light on how the basic dynamics of speech production and perception are shaped by phonological contrast and may, at the same time, vary between individuals of the same language community in a systematic fashion. Gaining new insights into how the range of individual variation within a language relates to known patterns of variation between languages and how either one is shaped by phonological contrast is crucial to our knowledge about:

1. why and how languages differ from each other,

2. what aspects of language variation are universal to all spoken language users,

3. how sound systems evolve, and

4. the cognitive relationship between speech production and perception.

There is, however, a dearth of cross-linguistic studies with a suitable number of participants such as to allow for generalizations about within- versus cross-language variation. To address these questions, our UK–German research team looks at both production and its online processing in perception. We use state-of-the-art methodologies to obtain sufficiently large datasets, combined with advanced statistical techniques, to study the forces that shape individual and cross-linguistic variation in speech production and perception in interaction with phonological contrast. We exploit differences in the phonological structures of American English, French, and German to systematically vary nasality and lip rounding, so that we can gauge whether different types of contrast behave similarly within a language. The project's more general impact is to contribute to our emergent knowledge of the dynamics of the perception-production link both in individuals and at a language-specific level.

Overview

This study examines the impact of vocal effort on nasal coarticulation, using a combination of acoustic and articulatory methods to shed light on its phonetic effects. It further investigates individual variability of nasal coarticulation across different levels of vocal effort to explore its potential utility in forensic speaker comparison.

Many Speech Analyses is a large-scale collaborative project, in which teams of speech researchers independently analyse the same set of data to answer the same research question. Each team's analysis is then cross-reviewed and aggregated in a meta-analysis. Through international collaboration, the goal of the project is to increase the robustness and generalisability of the research outcome.

Project website