Monday 17 November 2014

listening comprehension - top down or bottom up - #2

Sidney Wood - one of my blog followers - commented on my previous post on listening comprehension by saying that the extract sounds like [ɘˈləðə]. What follows is the section (highlighted in the waveform in dark grey) which for my ears corresponds to [ɘˈləðə]:


What you see below is the waveform of the snippet in my previous post:

The latter includes the verb 'have'.

6 comments:

  1. The first one sounds like [bəˈlɪθəm] or [bəˈlɪðəm] to me. The [m] must be in my imagination.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Isn't the [ð] sound a bit longer than usual?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Or rather, doesn't it sound a bit like [dð]?

      Delete
    2. I mean a dental [d], of course.

      (A glottal stop, perhaps, as Sidney Wood said?)

      Delete
  3. The waveform of the extract shows no occlusions where two are expected, /k/ and /t/ ('look at'). The [ðə] is OK, as expected ('the papers'). You could argue that the /t/ ('at the') is assimilate to /ð/, [ðð], but there's still the missing /k/ to account for. The waveform for [lə] shows two peaks in [ə] (if I'm looking at the right place), so there's possibly a hint of [ɣ] between them: [ləɣə(ðə)]. The information we're getting from that reduced sequence would then be ell+schwa+velar+schwa etc, enough to give us 'look at' in that context. So Petr's original suggestion that this is top down perception is probably correct. But when we listen objectively to that extract and transcribe it, all we manage to pick up is [ləðə].

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Get a Dane to listen to the extract. They're used to hearing [ɣ] for /k/.

      Delete