The paper surveys the plasticity of the speech production mechanism. At the level of phonatory behaviour, a distinction is made between the frequency of vocal fold vibration, which is reflected in the pitch of the voice, and the manner in which the vocal folds vibrate, which lends our voice different qualities. The main types of phonatory modifications are described and some of their uses in everyday communication, as well as their perceptual effects, are documented from literature. Modifications of the primary makeup of speech sounds in the supraglottal vocal tract, such as rounding or spreading of the lips, hyper- or hyponasality, and palatalization, are discussed in the following section. The two levels of description — phonatory and articulatory — are formally anchored in Nolan’s model of the sources of variability in speech. The final part of the paper examines speech variability from the perspective of the listener, regarding one’s speech as their auditory face which signals biologically, psychologically, and socially conditioned information about the speaker.
Glottal stops placed before words starting with a vowel are an integral part of the sound patterns of Czech; however, in Romance languages glottal stops are quite rare and linking to the previous word is much more common. In this study, we examine the extent to which more and less experienced Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (51 in total) use glottal stops or linking in their target language, and compare them with native speakers (29 in total). Analyses of word- and also morpheme-initial contexts reveal that the glottal stop is transferred into the learners’ target language word initially but almost never within words. In line with our hypotheses, the more experienced groups are found to use fewer glottal stops than the less experienced speakers, but still considerably more than the native control groups. We also consider the effect of lexical stress, segmental context and semantic status of the respective words on glottalization. Methodological implications for the teaching of Romance languages in the Czech context are also discussed.
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