Did you say susi or shushi? Measuring the emergence of robust fricative contrasts in English- and Japanese-acquiring children

Jeffrey J. Holliday, Mary E. Beckman, Chanelle Mays

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

While the English fricatives /s/ and /f/ can be well-differentiated by the centroid frequency of the frication noise alone, the Japanese fricatives /s/ and /c/ cannot be. Measures of perceived spectral peak frequency and shape developed for stop bursts were adapted to describe sibilant fricative contrasts in English- and Japanese-speaking adults and children. These measures captured both the cross-language differences and more subtle inter-individual differences related to language-specific marking of gender. They could also be used in deriving a measure of robustness of contrast that captured cross-language differences in fricative development.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2010
PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
Pages1886-1889
Number of pages4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2010

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Data collection and analysis was supported by grants NIDCD 02932 to Jan Edwards and NSF BCS-0729306 to Mary Beckman. Thanks to Tim Arbisi-Kelm and Eun Jong Kong for their work on developing the psychoacoustic measures and to Julie Johnson, Fangfang Li, Oxana Skorniakova, and Asimina Syrika for help in data preparation.

Funding Information:
Data collection and analysis was supported by grants NIDCD 02932 to Jan Edwards and NSF BCS-0729306 to Mary Beck- man. Thanks to Tim Arbisi-Kelm and Eun Jong Kong for their work on developing the psychoacoustic measures and to Julie Johnson, Fangfang Li, Oxana Skorniakova, and Asimina Syrika for help in data preparation.

Keywords

  • Acquisition
  • English
  • Gender marking
  • Japanese
  • Sibilant fricatives

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Speech and Hearing
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Signal Processing
  • Software
  • Modelling and Simulation

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