Effect of prosodic prominence and markedness on perception of Bengali stops
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the effects of prosodic prominence and markedness on the perception of Bengali stops. Both these issues have been studied in the past from the perspective of speech production, but not from the perspective of speech perception. This study investigates these two theoretical issues from the perspective of speech perception. ☐ Previous studies, both acoustic and articulatory, have shown that stress and focus as prosodic prominence phenomena enhance speech production. That is, when speech segments are in positions of prominence, they show lengthened and strengthened articulatory properties and clearer acoustic signals. However, we do not know what effect the enhancement has on speech perception. ☐ Second, the Markedness Theory suggests that in speech production, an unmarked sound is basic and more natural compared to its marked counterpart which bears an additional property making them more complex to articulate. The question in this case is whether speech perception shows the same pattern as speech production, that is, are unmarked sounds perceived with higher perceptual accuracy following the speech production patterns or is it the opposite and marked sounds are perceived with higher perceptual accuracy due to the additional properties which may make them more perceptually salient. ☐ The experiment developed in the current study investigates both these questions with Bengali as the language of investigation. Bengali, with its four-way stop contrast, yields four different types of stop categories, voiceless unaspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced aspirated stops. These four stop categories are viewed as sets of marked and unmarked stop pairs, and the experiment developed in this study to study the effect of markedness compares the perception of voiced stops with voiceless stops and aspirated stops with unaspirated stops. The voiced aspirated category also has a combination of both the marks, voicing and aspiration, and this study tests whether there is best perception of the voiced aspirated stops because of a cumulative effect of both the marks. Additionally, with fixed initial stress, Bengali also presents a situation where the perception of stops in stressed vs. non-stressed positions is compared with the systematically controlled experiment developed for this study. ☐ Results from this study show that there is indeed an effect of stress on speech perception. The perceptual accuracy of the stops increased significantly when they were in positions of stress. However, this was not true for the effect of focus. Focus did not have a significant effect on the perception of the stops. ☐ Results from this study also show that there is a significant effect of voicing and aspiration as markedness properties on the perception of the stops. There is also a cumulative effect of voicing and aspiration with the best perception of the voiced aspirated stops, which has a combination of both the marks. Additionally, it was also revealed that aspiration as a markedness property, increases the perceptual accuracy of the stops even more than voicing. Thus, a hierarchical effect of two different kinds of marks was observed.
Description
Keywords
Bengali stops, Markedness, Prosodic prominence, Speech perception, Voicing, Aspiration