History in the making: Voicing alternation as stop lenition via an automatic analysis of large-scale corpora in French and Spanish
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Argitaratua
2025-01-29
Yaru Wu
Ioana Chitoran
Ioana Vasilescu
Martine Adda-Decker
Lori Lamel
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0773-2680
Ioana Vasilescu
Martine Adda-Decker
Lori Lamel
Laburpena
This study focuses on voicing alternation in French and Spanish stops, i.e. canonically voiceless /ptk/ realized as voiced [bdg] or canonically voiced /bdg/ realized as voiceless [ptk]. Forced alignment with voicing variants was used to annotate large speech corpora in French and in Spanish. The following factors of variation were examined: position in the word, preceding and following context, duration of the stop and that of surrounding phones, speech rate, part of speech, and the weight of these factors on voicing alternation. The voicing nature of the stops (whether the stop is phonologically voiceless /ptk/ or voiced /bdg/) turns out to be the factor that contributes the most to the prediction of voicing alternations among all investigated factors for Spanish, according to the random forest model. Whereas for French, the same factor comes after contextual and acoustic factors in the ranking. These results suggest that stop voicing patterns differently in these two Romance languages, although they both have a similar voiced-voiceless phonological contrast.
Nola aipatu
Wu, Yaru, Ioana Chitoran, Ioana Vasilescu, Martine Adda-Decker, eta Lori Lamel. 2025. «History in the Making: Voicing Alternation As Stop Lenition via an Automatic Analysis of Large-Scale Corpora in French and Spanish». Anuario Del Seminario De Filología Vasca "Julio De Urquijo" 57 ((1-2):975-90. https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.25987.
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References
Adda-Decker, Martine & Lori Lamel. 1999. Pronunciation variants across system configuration, language and speaking style. Speech Communication 29(2-4). 83–98.
Adda-Decker, Martine & Lori Lamel. 2018. Discovering speech reductions across speaking styles and languages. In Francesco Cangemi, Meghan Clayards, Oliver Niebuhr, Barbara Schuppler, Margaret Zellers. (eds.) Rethinking Reduction: Interdisciplinary perspectives on conditions, mechanisms, and domains for phonetic variation, 101–128. Berlin & Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.
Broś, Karolina, Marzena Żygis, Adam Sikorski & Jan Wołłejko 2021. Phonological contrasts and gradient effects in ongoing lenition in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. Phonology 38. 1–40.
Bybee, Joan, & Shelece Easterday. 2019. Consonant strengthening: A crosslinguistic survey and articulatory proposal. Linguistic Typology 23(2). 263–302.
Chitoran, Ioana, José Ignacio Hualde, Oana Niculescu. 2016. Gestural undershoot and gestural intrusion – from perceptual errors to historical sound change. In Gilles Adda, Verginica Barbu-Mititelu, Joseph Mariani, Dan Tufiș & Ioana Vasilescu (eds.), 2nd ERRARE Workshop: Errors by humans and machines in multimedia, multimodal, multilingual data processing, Sinaia, Romania, 11-13 September 2015, 123–316. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
Chitoran, Ioana, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Bianca Vieru. 2018. Connected speech in Romanian: Exploring sound change through an ASR system. In Daniel Recasens & Fernando Sánchez Miret (eds.) Production and perception mechanisms of sound change, 129–143. München: Lincom Europa.
Cohen Priva, Uriel & Emily Gleason. 2020. The causal structure of lenition: A case for the causal precedence of durational shortening. Language 96. 413–443.
de Carvalho, Joaquim Brandão, Tobias Scheer & Philippe Ségéral (eds.). 2008. Lenition and fortition (Studies in Generative Grammar 99). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Hallé, Pierre & Martine Adda-Decker. 2007. Voicing assimilation in journalistic speech. In Jürgen Trouvain (ed.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS XVI, 6-10 August 2007, Saarbrücken, Germany, 493–496. Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes.
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Lori Lamel & Gilles Adda. 2002. The LIMSI broadcast news transcription system. Speech communication 37(1-2). 89–108.
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Gilles Adda, Martine Adda-Decker, Alexandre Allauzen, Véronique Gendner, Lori Lamel & Holger Schwenk. 2005. Where are we in transcribing French broadcast news? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2005. 1665–1668. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2005-544.
Gurevich, Naomi. 2013. Lenition and contrast: the functional consequences of certain phonetically conditioned sound changes. New York: Routledge.
Honeybone, Patrick. 2008. Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength: tracing concepts through the history of phonology. Lenition and fortition 99. 9–92.
Hualde, José Ignacio & Marianna Nadeu. 2011. Lenition and phonemic overlap in Rome Italian. Phonetica 68. 215–242.
Hualde, José Ignacio & Pilar Prieto. 2014. Lenition of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. Phonetica 71. 109–127.
Hutin, Mathilde, Yaru Wu, Adèle Jatteau, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2021. Synchronic Fortition in Five Romance Languages? A Large Corpus-Based Study of Word-Initial Devoicing. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021. 996–1000. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2021-939.
Jatteau, Adèle, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2019. Final devoicing of fricatives in French: Studying variation in large scale corpora with automatic alignment. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 295–299. https://hal.science/hal-02270089 (28/12/2023).
Katz, Jonah. 2016. Lenition, perception and neutralisation. Phonology 33. 43–85.
Lamel, Lori, Sandrine Courcinous, Julien Despres, Jean-Luc Gauvain, Yvan Josse, Kevin Kilgour, Florian Kraft, Viet Bac Le, Hermann Ney, Markus Nußbaum-Thom, Ilya Oparin, Tim Schlippe, Ralf Schlüter, Tanja Schultz, Thiago Fraga da Silva, Sebastian Stüker, Martin Sundermeyer, Bianca Vieru, Ngoc Thang Vu, Alexander Waibel & Cécile Woehrling. 2011. Speech recognition for machine translation in Quaero. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign. 121–128.
Lavoie, Lisa M. 2001. Consonant strength: Phonological patterns and phonetic manifestations. New York: Routledge.
McCullagh, Peter. 2019. Generalized linear models. New York: Routledge.
Meunier, Christine & Robert Espesser. 2011. Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French: The role of lexical factors. Journal of Phonetics 39(3). 271–278.
Niebuhr, Oliver & Christine Meunier. 2011. The phonetic manifestation of French /s#∫/ and /∫# s/sequences in different vowel contexts: On the occurrence and the domain of sibilant assimilation. Phonetica 68(3). 133–160.
Ohala, John J. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. In Leiv E. Breivik & Ernst H. Jahr (eds.), Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes, 173–198. Berlin & Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110853063.173.
Popescu, Anisia, Mathilde Hutin, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2023. Stop devoicing and place of articulation: a cross-linguistic study using large-scale corpora. In Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague 2023 (ICPhS 2023), 3186–3190. Prague: Guarant International. https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/429.pdf (05/01/2024).
Posner, Rebecca. 1996. The Romance languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Qi, Peng, Yuhao Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Jason Bolton & Christopher D. Manning. 2020. Stanza: A Python natural language processing toolkit for many human languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07082.
Ryant, Neville & Mark Liberman. 2016. Large-scale analysis of Spanish/s/-lenition using audiobooks. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 22ICA 28(1). p. 060005. https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0000500.
Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer. 2008. The Coda Mirror, stress and positional parameters. In de Joaquim Brandão Carvalho, Tobias Scheer & Philippe Ségéral (eds.), Lenition and fortition (Studies in Generative Grammar 99), 483–518. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Snoeren, Natalie D., Pierre A. Hallé & Juan Segui. 2006. A voice for the voiceless: Production and perception of assimilated stops in French. Journal of Phonetics 34(2). 241–268.
Van Engen, Kristin J., Melissa Baese-Berk, Baker, Rachel E., Arim Choi, Midam Kim & Ann R. Bradlow. 2010. The Wildcat corpus of native- and foreign-accented English: Communicative efficiency across conversational dyads with varying language alignment profiles. Language and Speech 53. 510–540. https://doi.org/doi: 10.1177/0023830910372495.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Bianca Vieru & Lori Lamel. 2014. Exploring pronunciation variants for Romanian speech-to-text transcription. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU 2014). 161–168.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Nidia Hernandez, Bianca Vieru & Lori Lamel. 2018. Exploring Temporal Reduction in Dialectal Spanish: A Large-scale Study of Lenition of Voiced Stops and Coda-s. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018. 2728–2732. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1256.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Yaru Wu, Adèle Jatteau, Martine Adda-Decker & Lori Lamel. 2020. Alternances de voisement et processus de lénition et de fortition : une étude automatisée de grands corpus en cinq langues romanes. Revue TAL (Traitement automatique des langues) 61. 11–36. https://hal.science/hal-03040177 (28/12/2023).
von Wartburg, Walter. 1950. Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachräume. Bern: Francke
Wu, Yaru, Mathilde Hutin, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2022. Extracting Linguistic Knowledge from Speech: A Study of Stop Realization in 5 Romance Languages. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France. 3257–3263. https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.348/ (28/12/2023).
Adda-Decker, Martine & Lori Lamel. 2018. Discovering speech reductions across speaking styles and languages. In Francesco Cangemi, Meghan Clayards, Oliver Niebuhr, Barbara Schuppler, Margaret Zellers. (eds.) Rethinking Reduction: Interdisciplinary perspectives on conditions, mechanisms, and domains for phonetic variation, 101–128. Berlin & Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.
Broś, Karolina, Marzena Żygis, Adam Sikorski & Jan Wołłejko 2021. Phonological contrasts and gradient effects in ongoing lenition in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. Phonology 38. 1–40.
Bybee, Joan, & Shelece Easterday. 2019. Consonant strengthening: A crosslinguistic survey and articulatory proposal. Linguistic Typology 23(2). 263–302.
Chitoran, Ioana, José Ignacio Hualde, Oana Niculescu. 2016. Gestural undershoot and gestural intrusion – from perceptual errors to historical sound change. In Gilles Adda, Verginica Barbu-Mititelu, Joseph Mariani, Dan Tufiș & Ioana Vasilescu (eds.), 2nd ERRARE Workshop: Errors by humans and machines in multimedia, multimodal, multilingual data processing, Sinaia, Romania, 11-13 September 2015, 123–316. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
Chitoran, Ioana, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Bianca Vieru. 2018. Connected speech in Romanian: Exploring sound change through an ASR system. In Daniel Recasens & Fernando Sánchez Miret (eds.) Production and perception mechanisms of sound change, 129–143. München: Lincom Europa.
Cohen Priva, Uriel & Emily Gleason. 2020. The causal structure of lenition: A case for the causal precedence of durational shortening. Language 96. 413–443.
de Carvalho, Joaquim Brandão, Tobias Scheer & Philippe Ségéral (eds.). 2008. Lenition and fortition (Studies in Generative Grammar 99). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Hallé, Pierre & Martine Adda-Decker. 2007. Voicing assimilation in journalistic speech. In Jürgen Trouvain (ed.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS XVI, 6-10 August 2007, Saarbrücken, Germany, 493–496. Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes.
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Lori Lamel & Gilles Adda. 2002. The LIMSI broadcast news transcription system. Speech communication 37(1-2). 89–108.
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Gilles Adda, Martine Adda-Decker, Alexandre Allauzen, Véronique Gendner, Lori Lamel & Holger Schwenk. 2005. Where are we in transcribing French broadcast news? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2005. 1665–1668. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2005-544.
Gurevich, Naomi. 2013. Lenition and contrast: the functional consequences of certain phonetically conditioned sound changes. New York: Routledge.
Honeybone, Patrick. 2008. Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength: tracing concepts through the history of phonology. Lenition and fortition 99. 9–92.
Hualde, José Ignacio & Marianna Nadeu. 2011. Lenition and phonemic overlap in Rome Italian. Phonetica 68. 215–242.
Hualde, José Ignacio & Pilar Prieto. 2014. Lenition of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. Phonetica 71. 109–127.
Hutin, Mathilde, Yaru Wu, Adèle Jatteau, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2021. Synchronic Fortition in Five Romance Languages? A Large Corpus-Based Study of Word-Initial Devoicing. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021. 996–1000. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2021-939.
Jatteau, Adèle, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2019. Final devoicing of fricatives in French: Studying variation in large scale corpora with automatic alignment. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 295–299. https://hal.science/hal-02270089 (28/12/2023).
Katz, Jonah. 2016. Lenition, perception and neutralisation. Phonology 33. 43–85.
Lamel, Lori, Sandrine Courcinous, Julien Despres, Jean-Luc Gauvain, Yvan Josse, Kevin Kilgour, Florian Kraft, Viet Bac Le, Hermann Ney, Markus Nußbaum-Thom, Ilya Oparin, Tim Schlippe, Ralf Schlüter, Tanja Schultz, Thiago Fraga da Silva, Sebastian Stüker, Martin Sundermeyer, Bianca Vieru, Ngoc Thang Vu, Alexander Waibel & Cécile Woehrling. 2011. Speech recognition for machine translation in Quaero. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign. 121–128.
Lavoie, Lisa M. 2001. Consonant strength: Phonological patterns and phonetic manifestations. New York: Routledge.
McCullagh, Peter. 2019. Generalized linear models. New York: Routledge.
Meunier, Christine & Robert Espesser. 2011. Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French: The role of lexical factors. Journal of Phonetics 39(3). 271–278.
Niebuhr, Oliver & Christine Meunier. 2011. The phonetic manifestation of French /s#∫/ and /∫# s/sequences in different vowel contexts: On the occurrence and the domain of sibilant assimilation. Phonetica 68(3). 133–160.
Ohala, John J. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. In Leiv E. Breivik & Ernst H. Jahr (eds.), Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes, 173–198. Berlin & Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110853063.173.
Popescu, Anisia, Mathilde Hutin, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2023. Stop devoicing and place of articulation: a cross-linguistic study using large-scale corpora. In Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague 2023 (ICPhS 2023), 3186–3190. Prague: Guarant International. https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/429.pdf (05/01/2024).
Posner, Rebecca. 1996. The Romance languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Qi, Peng, Yuhao Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Jason Bolton & Christopher D. Manning. 2020. Stanza: A Python natural language processing toolkit for many human languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07082.
Ryant, Neville & Mark Liberman. 2016. Large-scale analysis of Spanish/s/-lenition using audiobooks. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 22ICA 28(1). p. 060005. https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0000500.
Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer. 2008. The Coda Mirror, stress and positional parameters. In de Joaquim Brandão Carvalho, Tobias Scheer & Philippe Ségéral (eds.), Lenition and fortition (Studies in Generative Grammar 99), 483–518. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Snoeren, Natalie D., Pierre A. Hallé & Juan Segui. 2006. A voice for the voiceless: Production and perception of assimilated stops in French. Journal of Phonetics 34(2). 241–268.
Van Engen, Kristin J., Melissa Baese-Berk, Baker, Rachel E., Arim Choi, Midam Kim & Ann R. Bradlow. 2010. The Wildcat corpus of native- and foreign-accented English: Communicative efficiency across conversational dyads with varying language alignment profiles. Language and Speech 53. 510–540. https://doi.org/doi: 10.1177/0023830910372495.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Bianca Vieru & Lori Lamel. 2014. Exploring pronunciation variants for Romanian speech-to-text transcription. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU 2014). 161–168.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Nidia Hernandez, Bianca Vieru & Lori Lamel. 2018. Exploring Temporal Reduction in Dialectal Spanish: A Large-scale Study of Lenition of Voiced Stops and Coda-s. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018. 2728–2732. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1256.
Vasilescu, Ioana, Yaru Wu, Adèle Jatteau, Martine Adda-Decker & Lori Lamel. 2020. Alternances de voisement et processus de lénition et de fortition : une étude automatisée de grands corpus en cinq langues romanes. Revue TAL (Traitement automatique des langues) 61. 11–36. https://hal.science/hal-03040177 (28/12/2023).
von Wartburg, Walter. 1950. Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachräume. Bern: Francke
Wu, Yaru, Mathilde Hutin, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel & Martine Adda-Decker. 2022. Extracting Linguistic Knowledge from Speech: A Study of Stop Realization in 5 Romance Languages. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France. 3257–3263. https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.348/ (28/12/2023).
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