Arthur Abramson
Arthur Abramson
- Philip RubinPhilip RubinHaskins Laboratories
Summary
Arthur Seymour Abramson (1925–2017) was an American linguist who was prominent in the international experimental phonetics research community. He was best known for his pioneering work, with Leigh Lisker, on voice onset time (VOT), and for his many years spent studying tone and voice quality in languages such as Thai. Born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, Abramson served several years in the Army during World War II. Upon his return to civilian life, he attended Columbia University (BA, 1950; PhD, 1960). There he met Franklin Cooper, an adjunct who taught acoustic phonetics while also working for Haskins Laboratories. Abramson started working on a part-time basis at Haskins and remained affiliated with the institution until his death. For his doctoral dissertation (1962), he studied the vowels and tones of the Thai language, which would sit at the heart of his research and travels for the rest of his life. He would expand his investigations to include various languages and dialects, such as Pattani Malay and the Kuai dialect of Suai, a Mon-Khmer language. Abramson began his collaboration with University Pennsylvania linguist Leigh Lisker at Haskins Laboratories in the 1960s. Using their unique VOT technique, a sensitive measure of the articulatory timing between an occlusion in the vocal tract and the beginning of phonation (characterized by the onset of vibration of the vocal folds), they studied the voicing distinctions of various languages. Their long standing collaboration continued until Lisker’s death in 2006. Abramson and colleagues often made innovative use of state-of-art tools and technologies in their work, including transillumination of the larynx in running speech, X-ray movies of speakers in several languages/dialects, electroglottography, and articulatory speech synthesis.
Abramson’s career was also notable for the academic and scientific service roles that he assumed, including membership on the council of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), and as a coordinator of the effort to revise the International Phonetic Alphabet at the IPA’s 1989 Kiel Convention. He was also editor of the journal Language and Speech, and took on leadership roles at the Linguistic Society of America and the Acoustical Society of America. He was the founding Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Connecticut, which became a hotbed for research in experimental phonetics in the 1970s and 1980s because of its many affiliations with Haskins Laboratories. He also served for many years as a board member at Haskins, and Secretary of both the Board and the Haskins Corporation, where he was a friend and mentor to many.
Keywords
Subjects
- Cognitive Science
- Language Families/Areas/Contact
- Linguistic Theories
- Phonetics/Phonology
- Biology of Language
1. Career Overview
Arthur Seymour Abramson (1925–2017) was an American linguist who was prominent in the international experimental phonetics research community, best known for his pioneering work, with Leigh Lisker, on voice onset time (VOT), and for his many years spent studying tone and voice quality in languages such as Thai. He was born on January 26, 1925, and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey. From an early age, Abramson had a facility for language. As a child he learned biblical and post-biblical Hebrew and Yiddish, in addition to his native English, and French and Latin in high school. During his undergraduate years, he picked up a little German, and as a graduate student (who took a more than two-year break in his education to teach English in Thailand), he learned to speak Thai. In addition, with a growing interest in Southeast Asia, he learned Sanskrit after returning to graduate school.
Abramson’s college education began at Rutgers University, where he majored in botany and minored in French. This led to some teaching in the Jersey City school system. His academic career was interrupted by World War II. In 1943, after completing his first year of college, he joined the U.S. Army, serving for three years as a field hospital X-ray technician. After his service ended in 1946, he completed his undergraduate degree at Yeshiva University in 1949 in a unique program that combined French and Jewish studies (in Hebrew). After graduating, he began teaching at Columbia University Teacher’s College. Inspired by Ilene Kitchen, an applied linguist there, and André Martinet, the head of the Linguistics Program at the Columbia University Graduate School, he found his passion—the sounds of the world’s languages.
In 1950, Abramson received his M.A. in teaching from Columbia. His interest in Southeast Asian languages and culture led him to apply for a Fulbright teaching grant. He also married Ruth “Ruby” Melamed, who agreed to go to Thailand with him should the grant be funded. It was. As a result, while still a graduate student in linguistics at Columbia, he spent the years 1953–1955 teaching English in Thailand while also learning Thai, starting in the south (Songkhla), and later moving to Bangkok. This began a decades-long relationship with the language and people of Thailand.
When Abramson returned to Columbia in 1955 to finish his Ph.D., Martinet had left and the new department head, John Lotz, his principal advisor, who was on friendly terms with adjunct professor Franklin Cooper, recommended that Abramson take a course in acoustic phonetics taught by Cooper at Haskins Laboratories in New York City. Abramson recollected,
Frank Cooper accepted an appointment as adjunct professor of Linguistics at Columbia University in the fall of 1955, an unusual step for a man whose degrees were in engineering and physics. Thus, he became a pioneer in introducing graduate students of linguistics, most of them with not much background in physics and advanced mathematics, to an acoustic approach to study and research in phonetics. As a member of that first class, I was indelibly marked by Frank’s teaching and guidance. Each week, about seven of us took the subway train down to Grand Central Station to walk over to Haskins Laboratories in its old factory building on the three floors above a necktie factory, where we spent three or four hours listening to Frank’s lectures, which were typically accompanied by revealing demonstrations. Anyone who got deeply involved in a research project was encouraged to spend extra time there. It must be said that even in those days and before, there existed courses in speech science in departments of speech and hearing, but I believe Frank’s course in Acoustic Phonetics, named after the landmark book by Martin Joos (1948), was one of the first, if not the first, to lay before students of language a new philosophy, a new outlook on how to design experiments that might answer linguistically and psychologically relevant questions about the production and perception of speech.
(Abramson, 2000, pp. 1970–1971).
In 1959, while Abramson was working on his dissertation (on Thai tones and vowels, 1960), Cooper hired him to work on a project at Haskins making X-ray motion pictures of speech in various languages. Abramson was impressed by Cooper but also by Katherine S. Harris, who was teaching a class in psychoacoustics. Harris would go on to a long and distinguished career, including at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and at Haskins, where she eventually led the speech production efforts. Abramson and Harris continued to interact and work together for much of the rest of their careers. It was also during this time that Abramson first met Leigh Lisker and discussed VOT with him. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation on Standard Thai vowels and tones in 1960. It was published two years later (Abramson, 1962). In future years he would expand his investigations to include various other languages and dialects, such as Pattani Malay and the Kuai dialect of Suai, a Mon-Khmer language.
Abramson did some part-time teaching at Hunter College and New York University while keeping his eyes open for an academic position in the northeast in order to continue part-time work at Haskins. The opportunity arose when Arthur Bronstein, a phonetician in the Speech and Hearing Department at Queens College of CUNY, contacted Arthur seeking recommendations for a speech scientist position, and was delighted when Abramson suggested himself. Because he already had some publications, he was hired as an associate professor, with a one-year interruption to serve as caretaker president at Haskins Labs while Cooper (the president) and Alvin Liberman (cofounder of speech research at Haskins) were visiting Stanford University as fellows of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. After returning briefly to teaching at CUNY, Abramson became the chair of the newly created Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1967. He was chair for seven years, finally retiring from teaching in 1992.
Abramson continued working on a part-time basis at Haskins and remained affiliated with the institution throughout his entire career. There he began his lifelong collaboration with Leigh Lisker, a linguist from the University of Pennsylvania. Their work on the voicing distinctions of the world’s languages was based on their unique VOT technique, a sensitive measure of the articulatory timing between an occlusion in the vocal tract and the beginning of phonation (characterized by the onset of vibration of the laryngeal vocal folds). In his work, Abramson and colleagues often made innovative use of state-of-art tools and technologies, including transillumination of the larynx in running speech, X-ray movies of speakers in several languages/dialects, electroglottography, and articulatory speech synthesis. Abramson’s career was also notable for the academic and scientific service roles that he took on. Most importantly, he was a friend, mentor, and inspiration to many. Arthur Abramson died on December 15, 2017, remaining active in research at Haskins until shortly before his death at the age of 92.
2. Voice Onset Time
The partnership between Arthur Abramson and Leigh Lisker began in the early 1960s, when they started talking about what Abramson has characterized as “the confusion in the linguistic literature about the phonetic bases of such widely used concepts as voicing, aspiration, and tenseness in consonants” (Abramson, 2007). Analysis of acoustic signals related to the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops demonstrated their apparent underlying complexity (see e.g., Liberman et al., 1958). Influenced by research highlighting the overlap of information-bearing portions of speech sounds (Liberman et al., 1954) and the possible link between perception and articulation (Liberman et al., 1962), Abramson and Lisker were led to consider the timing of the onset or offset of voicing relative to some critical point in the articulation of the consonant. A preliminary report of their initial work on “voicing lag” and initial stop consonants in English was read at the Sixth Annual Conference on Linguistics of the Linguistics Circle of New York, on May 6, 1961. Their cross-language studies were first presented at the Sixty-Sixth Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nov. 6–9, 1963, and the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, Dec. 28–30, 1963.
The initial collaboration of Abramson and Lisker resulted in a paper in the journal Word (Lisker & Abramson, 1964) that has become one of the most widely cited papers in all of phonetics and remains one of the best-known aspects of Abramson’s career. In this paper, “A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops,” they introduced the acoustic measure of voice onset time (VOT) to characterize the nature of stop consonant voicing distinctions. VOT is a readily identifiable aspect of the speech waveform and is defined by the time elapsed between the release of the stop consonant constriction (sometimes called the “burst”) and the onset of periodicity in the following voiced segment. The burst is visible in an acoustic spectrogram as a pronounced peak going from low to high frequency. Their insight was that the relatively complex aspects of signals previously associated with phonetic features of different hypothesized voicing categories of stop consonants, within and across languages, was a predictable consequence of relative timing of glottal vibration and supraglottal events. Using acoustic data from 11 languages, they showed that VOT effectively separates the voicing categories in production. The languages that they used, grouped by number of stop categories, included: two-category languages: American English, Cantonese, Dutch, Hungarian, Puerto Rican Spanish, and Tamil; three-category languages: Korean, Eastern Armenian, and Thai; and four-category languages: Hindi and Marathi. In subsequent work they also showed that VOT effectively separates most voicing categories and is an effective perceptual cue for these same voicing categories.
Lisker and Abramson’s 1964 paper would be the beginning of the many publications stemming from their decades-long collaboration and also the start of years of research on voicing and laryngeal function by them and other scientists. This included work on speech acoustics (Lisker & Abramson, 1964) and perception (Abramson & Lisker, 1965), and the exploration of how VOT varies with phonetic context (Lisker & Abramson, 1967). Additional data came from early physiological studies of laryngeal behavior in stop consonants that complemented the acoustic studies (Lisker & Abramson, 1970; Lisker et al., 1969; Sawashima et al., 1970), and the use of VOT in studies of categorical perception (Abramson & Lisker, 1970). The VOT studies were also conceptualized, at least by Lisker and Abramson, as studies of laryngeal behavior. Abramson and Lisker believed that it is “the primary business of a serious phonetics to determine the physical bases of phonological distinctions, not simply to find some kind of justification for the linguist’s every phonetic intuition” (Lisker & Abramson, 1971, p. 768). To that end they were critical of Chomsky and Halle’s 1968 proposal for a universal set of phonetic features (voice, tensity, glottal constriction, and heightened subglottal pressure) controlling the onset timing of laryngeal pulsing, suggesting instead that laryngeal timing control provides a more straightforward account of stop consonant distinctions. Another example of their concern with distinctive feature accounts was their analysis of a test case in French (Lisker & Abramson, 1987). They were troubled that phonological approaches of the time took little account of phonetic data and explanations. Here they were looking at the “notorious” contrast between vous la jetez vs. vous l’achetez, expressions traditionally said to be distinguished by a voicing feature. Based on perceptual identification studies and spectrographic analyses, they believed that an independent fortis–lenis contrast in French was illusory, finding no compelling evidence to reject a difference in laryngeal behavior as the appropriate explanation. There are many other instances of their use of the diversity of the world’s languages to explore linguistic issues related to voice timing. Examples include their investigation of the three-way distinction in Korean plosives (Abramson & Lisker, 1972), and a continuation of their earlier work looking at voice timing perception in Spanish word-initial stops (Abramson & Lisker, 1973). The application of the VOT measure was also expanded to include intervocalic stops (Abramson, 1977) and affricates (Abramson, 1995).
In addition to work by Abramson, Lisker, and their colleagues, there have been numerous studies of variation across languages and the acoustics, production, and perception of VOT by others in the field (Cho et al., 2019). Other related work includes a study of the influence of the lexicon on perception of VOT (Ganong, 1980); studies of second-language perception (Flege, 1984) and second-language production (Flege & Hammond, 1982); an allophonic survey of multiple languages (Keating et al., 1983); and studies of speech rate (Kessinger & Blumstein, 1997), place of articulation (Cho & Ladefoged, 1999), individual differences (Allen et al., 2003), vernacular variety (Scobbie, 2006), and phonetic cross-variation (Chodroff & Wilson, 2018). Winn (2020) has pointed out that,
other language properties interact with VOT; there is measurable influence of semantics on VOT perception (Schertz & Hawthorne, 2018), and conversely, there is influence of VOT on lexical access (Andruski et al., 1994). Furthermore, there are clinically minded studies that use VOT as a diagnostic marker for speech apraxia (Itoh et al., 1982) … among other topics.
Another clinical application was a study by Blumstein et al. (1980) that used voice onset time analysis to examine phonetic and phonemic deficits in the speech production of aphasics. The use of VOT in cross-linguistic developmental work has been significant. For example, the universality of short-lag VOT (e.g., Chodroff et al., 2019; Jakobson, 1968; Kewley-Port & Preston, 1974) as the first stage in development represents a nice addition to our understanding of the hierarchy of difficulty of different voicing categories and the underlying physiological differences between them (Whalen et al., 2007). VOT manipulation has also been used extensively in perceptual work, including some very influential papers such as Eimas et al. (1971) and Kuhl and Miller (1978).
3. Southeast Asian Languages
Abramson’s interest in Southeast Asian languages began early in his academic career. For his doctoral dissertation, he studied the vowels and tones of the Thai language, which would sit at the heart of his research and travels for the rest of his life. His official advisor at Columbia was John Lotz, but the major influence on his work at this time was Frank Cooper of Haskins Laboratories. In addition, Joseph Greenberg, a professor in anthropology, was on his Ph.D. committee. Abramson’s innovative dissertation combined acoustic analyses of Thai speech that were related to aspects of speech production with the results of perceptual tests, focusing on vowels, tone, and emphatic tone. It was later published by the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, as a monograph supplement (V. 28, #2) to the International Journal of American Linguistics (Abramson, 1962). Although Abramson had lived in Thailand and would return there frequently throughout his career, the data for his dissertation were not obtained there, but as a matter of convenience were obtained in New York. In later years data collection usually took place in Thailand. Until the end of his life, he continued to investigate Thai. Topics included: word-final stops, whereby he asserted that there was no basis for denying the primacy of laryngeal control of voicing, and thus aspiration, for both initial and final stops in Thai (Abramson, 1972b); tonal experiments with whispered Thai (Abramson, 1972a); vowel duration (Abramson, 1974); lexical tone and prosody (Abramson, 1979a); coarticulation (Abramson, 1979b); vowel length distinctions (Abramson & Ren, 1990); the Thai tonal system (Abramson, 1997); and the interaction between initial stops and the development of tone (tonogenesis) (Erickson & Abramson, 2013).
Abramson would expand his investigations to include various languages and dialects—such as Pattani Malay (Abramson, 2003), the dialect of Malay spoken in southeastern Thailand, and the Kuai dialect of Suai, a Mon-Khmer language—with a continuing focus on laryngeal distinctions of tone and voice quality. He also studied unusual phonological contrasts found in languages of the region. For example, he found that Pattani Malay distinguishes geminate from singleton stops in utterance-initial position, with the contrast signaled by amplitude and fundamental frequency rather than duration (Abramson, 1986, 1991, 1999). Voice-quality distinctions in Suai were found to be shifting toward length distinctions (Abramson et al., 2004), while those in Mon, spoken in many villages in Thailand and Myanmar, were found to be more stable (Abramson et al., 2015). At the age of 88, Abramson gave a paper on voice registers in Mon languages at the 166th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco (Abramson et al., 2013), reporting on the dialect of Ban Nakhonchum that has two voice registers, modal and breathy, phonation types that, along with other phonetic properties, commonly distinguish them. Another extremely rare aspiration distinction for fricatives was found in Sgaw, a subdialect of Karen, a tone language spoken by most in the region on the border between Myanmar and Thailand and parts of Northern Thailand (Abramson, 1995). Throughout his long career, Abramson combined investigations of acoustic and physiological measures with tests of their perceptual relevance, a productive methodology that served as a foundation for work by others on Southeast Asian languages. In this pioneering work, Abramson developed numerous collaborations over the years with researchers studying Thai and other Asian languages, forging invaluable bonds of friendship and international scientific cooperation (see, for example, Abramson et al., 2004; Pittayaporn, 2009; Tingsabadh & Abramson, 1993).
4. Experimental Methods
During World War II, while in the Army, Abramson had served for three years as an X-ray technician in a field hospital. In 1959, prior to defending his Ph.D. thesis in 1960, this expertise proved crucial to his career when he joined the Haskins staff, supported by the U.S. Office of Education and the American Council of Learned Societies, to assist on a project led by Frank Cooper to record X-ray motion pictures of speakers of various languages (Abramson & Cooper, 1963). The approach used in this project involved slowing down the X-ray film enough so that learners of the languages could see the articulation (‘stretched speech’). That meant that the audio speech signal also had to be slowed down to match the X-ray images. This synchronization of the sound with the slowed X-ray images was accomplished by using a variable-speed tape machine coupled with a vocoder, allowing the “stretching” of the sound without lowering the fundamental frequency or the formants. A pilot film was made on English at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, with Abramson serving as the speaker. Additional languages that were subsequently imaged included Hungarian, Mandarin, Russian, and Syrian Arabic. Articulatory movements are shown by acquiring X-ray images of the vocal tract in the midsagittal plane. Prepared scripts were used to illustrate selected phonetic features in the phonemic contrasts of the language, ending with several sentences to visualize the features in running speech. The articulatory movements of the Hungarian language were shown in the X-ray images from 1960. The films from 1962 examining standard Russian illustrate palatalization and consonant clusters as well as vowel allophones that go with palatalization. The images of Arabic speech from 1962 examined standard colloquial Damascan using material that was selected to show the contrast between plain and ‘emphatic’ or pharyngealized consonant positions, as far as possible by means of minimal pairs. Since this early work, imaging of the speech articulators by a variety of means, while often methodologically difficult, has continued to be used for didactic and theoretical purposes, computational modeling of the vocal tract (Gick et al., 2008; Perkell et al., 1992; Rubin et al., 1996), and in clinical and other applications (Lawson et al., 2018; Lim et al., 2021; Narayanan et al., 2014; Preston et al., 2017).
Throughout his career Abramson continued to make extensive use of instrumentation and technology to gather data, do analyses, guide his research and that of his colleagues, and test his theoretical insights. In his dissertation (1962) he used a range of what were then fairly new tools. In this predigital era, tape recorders were used for both the capture and playback of speech. Stimulus tapes were created using manual tape cutting and splicing techniques to isolate and manipulate portions of the signals. A unique tape device that he used for the experiments on the perception of vowels was the Ellemac Language Master, which played back a strip of magnetic tape cemented to a card; this allowed the researcher to listen repeatedly to short utterances and make comparisons between them. The sound spectrograph (Borst, 1956; Potter et al., 1947) provides an informative, visual display of acoustic signals known as a spectrogram, with time represented on the horizontal axis, frequency on the vertical axis, and relative intensity approximated by gradations of blackness. In addition, spectral sections can be made at any point in time displaying amplitude versus frequency. Abramson used the device for determining the formant frequencies of vowels, measuring vowel duration, and for finding out about tonal contours and other features. Abramson also took advantage of his access to more unique tools. For the creation and manipulation of synthetic vowels, he used the Haskins Pattern Playback, an early speech synthesizer developed in the late 1940s that uses an optical system to convert spectrograms to sound (Cooper et al., 1952). For experiments on vowel perception, he used the 18-channel Vocoder, a system that processes speech, first by analyzing it and then by synthesizing it (Borst & Cooper, 1957). To impose artificial pitch contours on natural, recorded speech in his experiments on tonal features, he used the Intonator (Borst & Cooper, 1957), designed and built at Haskins, to manipulate fundamental frequency as speech passed through the Vocoder (see also Garding & Abramson, 1965).
Beginning in 1968, a joint research project was forged between Haskins Laboratories and the University of Tokyo’s Logopedics and Phoniatrics Research Lab (RILP) to explore new physiological methods for studying speech production. As part of this project, a number of otolaryngologists from the University of Tokyo spent time at Haskins Laboratories as guest researchers, starting with Professor Masayuki Sawashima. As the first visiting scientist from RILP, he began working with Abramson and Lisker, using a fiberscope for the direct observation of the larynx (Sawashima et al., 1970). Other collaborations using innovative physiological methods for studying laryngeal function included high-speed (at the time) filming of the larynx (Cooper et al., 1971), and the quantification of glottal opening using transillumination during running speech, a technique that places a light source into the upper pharynx with an external photosensor for detecting light below the glottis (Lisker et al., 1969).
Continuing Abramson’s innovative use of novel technologies, Abramson et al. (1981) were the first researchers to use the newly developed Haskins articulatory synthesizer (Rubin et al., 1981) in a study that set out to experimentally explore the relationship between speech production and speech perception. To do this they incrementally increased the velopharyngeal port of the model and evaluated listeners’ perceptual judgments of the oral/nasal boundary in initial consonants. They concluded that the correlation between port size and vowel height is perceptually important, that this relationship is not confined to vowels but also occurs in dynamically articulated consonants, and that the results they obtained were in agreement with more commonly used acoustically based speech-synthesis techniques.
Abramson’s innovative use of state-of-art tools and technologies continued until the end of his life. For example, work with his student Donna Erickson, based on her dissertation research (Erickson, 1976), used the technique of electromyography (EMG) to obtain measurements of laryngeal muscle activity associated with the initial fundamental frequency of bilabial stop consonants (Erickson & Abramson, 2013) of Standard Thai. The EMG and fundamental frequency data were used to consider theories of tonogenesis. Abramson et al. (2015) made use of electroglottography (EGG), a method of examining glottal cycle patterns by measuring changes of relative vocal fold contact area. Using a portable electroglottograph, electrodes were placed on the neck on either side of the thyroid cartilage and a weak electrical current was monitored to determine the changing wave shape of the glottal pulse. Abramson et al. combined this information with analysis of acoustic data and perceptual validation to look at voice register in Mon, which is spoken in villages in Thailand and Myanmar. Their results did not support the notion that the dialect of Mon that they studied, Ban Nakhonchum, is undergoing tonogenesis.
5. Academic and Service Activities
Arthur Abramson was the founding chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut (UConn), developed along with his colleagues Philip Lieberman and Ignatius Mattingly; all three had Haskins connections. According to Abramson (Nye, 2006), Alvin Liberman urged UConn President, Homer Babbidge, a former Yale undergraduate classmate of Mattingly, to establish a committee composed of members of various departments, with Mattingly as the committee’s chair, to assess the advisability of establishing a linguistics department at UConn. The committee’s recommendation was to establish the department, and it began in 1967. Abramson noted that it was, in his opinion, originally a department of phonetics, shaped by its fit to the needs of Haskins Laboratories, that eventually branched out by adding faculty to represent other areas of linguistics. It became a hotbed for research in experimental phonetics in the 1970s and 1980s.
In addition to his extensive research and other scientific contributions over almost 50 years, Abramson’s dedication to the field of linguistics was characterized by the scientific service roles that he took on throughout his career. These included membership of the council of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), and coordinator of the effort to revise the International Phonetic Alphabet at the IPA’s 1989 Kiel Convention. An entire issue of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association was devoted to the Kiel revisions (Abramson, 1988). Abramson was the editor of the journal Language and Speech from 1979 to 1988. In addition, he took on leadership roles at the Acoustical Society of America and the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), serving in the position of LSA Secretary/Treasurer for five years (1974–1979) and also as Vice President and President (1983). He played key administrative roles at Haskins Laboratories, serving briefly as de facto president in the early years (1964–1965), as a member of and secretary to the Haskins Board of Directors, and as secretary of the Haskins Corporation (two slightly different legal entities). He was known for taking meticulous and detailed minutes of board meetings and for providing long-term continuity and stewardship for the governance of a constantly changing and relatively informal enterprise.
6. Critical Analysis of Scholarship
Fifty years after the beginning of Abramson’s initial dissertation work on Thai and his early seminal paper with Leigh Lisker on voice onset time (VOT), his influence continues to be felt. In 1964, Lisker and Abramson proposed the acoustic measure of VOT as a simple basis for characterizing the voicing categories of stop consonants across languages. Previously they had frequently been distinguished by what appeared to be the independent phonetic features of voicing, aspiration, and force of articulation. Lisker and Abramson proposed that different voicing categories within and across languages can be effectively captured by VOT, defined by the relative timing of events at the glottis and at the place of oral occlusion. “Since then, this innovative measure has been adopted by virtually every experimental phonetic study that has investigated acoustic characteristics of stop consonants, thereby greatly advancing our understanding of voicing properties of stop consonants and their typology in the world’s languages” (Cho et al., 2019).
Abramson’s impact on the field can be seen in a special issue of Journal of Phonetics, edited by Taehong Cho, Gerard Docherty, and D. H. Whalen in 2019, titled Marking 50 Years of Research on Voice Onset Time and the Voicing Contrast in the World’s Languages. In this publication, 11 studies investigating the voicing contrast in 19 languages were collected.
This special collection devotes itself to exploring the phonetic properties of voicing contrasts with a view to providing a contemporary lens on various aspects of consonantal voicing contrast within and across the world’s languages from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, and relevant points of debate that have endured alongside or as an alternative to VOT.
(Cho et al., 2019, p. 53)
Data were obtained from 270 speakers across those languages, examining VOT and other acoustic, aerodynamic and articulatory measures. Languages studied included ‘aspirating’ languages with a two-way contrast (English; three varieties of German), ‘true voicing’ languages with a two-way contrast (Russian; Turkish; Brazilian Portuguese; two Iranian languages, Pashto and Wakhi); languages with a three-way contrast (Thai; Vietnamese; Khmer; Yerevan Armenian; three Indo-Aryan languages, Dawoodi, Punjabi and Shina, and Burushaki), and Indo-Aryan languages with a more than three-way contrast (Jangli and Urdu with a four-way contrast, and Sindhi and Siraiki with a five-way contrast). The editors consider
how much VOT alone tells us about the voicing contrast in these languages, and what other phonetic dimensions (such as consonant-induced F0 and voice quality) are needed for a complete understanding of laryngeal contrast in these languages. Implications for various issues emerge: universal phonetic feature systems, effects of language contact on linguistic levelling, and the relation between laryngeal contrast and supralaryngeal articulation … [and] discuss how the distribution of VOT as measured acoustically may allow us to infer the underlying articulation and how it might be approached in gestural phonologies.
(Cho et al., 2019, p. 52)
They concluded, in part, that VOT continues to be a useful first estimate of laryngeal contrast in voicing across languages.
The continued influence of Abramson’s contributions can also be seen in a paper by Matthew Winn (2020) that contains a thorough description and comparison of different techniques for manipulating VOT. Of considerable importance and potential broad use is the inclusion of Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2019) software in the form of a script (i.e., program) that lets users modify natural speech for perceptual experiments. The use of this open-source, freely available scripting language, which is commonly used in acoustic phonetics, supports the automation of speech stimulus creation involving manipulation of VOT, making the process significantly easier and more accessible than when Abramson and Lisker conducted their early work in the 1960s.
In 2017, in a retrospective overview of VOT research, Abramson and Whalen pointed out that:
Voice Onset Time (VOT) has proven to be a robust measure of the acoustic realization of consonantal voicing distinctions in most languages. It does not cover every distinction related to laryngeal timing and consonant articulation, nor was it ever claimed to do so. Beginning from its primary definition for stops in absolute initial position, it can be extended to intervocalic and even final position, with appropriate changes in terminology. It can also be extended to cover affricates and the (rare) aspirated fricatives. When we remember that VOT is an assignment of strict boundaries to physiological events that overlap, we can see that discrepancies in measurement are to be expected, though they can be mitigated. The full range of articulatory and acoustic aspects of the devoicing gesture underlying stop consonant distinctions remains to be fully elucidated. Nonetheless, the hundreds of studies that have used VOT in the past 50 years are a strong testament to the lasting value of this measure.
(Abramson & Whalen, 2017, pp. 84–85)
As noted in an obituary for Abramson in Language by Whalen and Koenig (2018),
Very few studies of the phonetic realization of tone had been done when Arthur began his dissertation work (1962). … The thoroughness of Arthur’s investigation is seldom achieved in current times despite the greater ease of analysis and synthesis, and the results are still relevant and cited to this day.
(Whalen & Koenig, 2018, p. 972)
Language and linguistics were central to Arthur Abramson’s life. He was one of the pioneers in demonstrating the important role of experimental phonetics in linguistics. His approach combined theoretical insights, extensive fieldwork, cross-language comparisons, rigorous experimental methodology, and the innovative use of state-of-the-art technologies. He was never constrained by disciplinary boundaries and partnered with students and colleagues around the world, simultaneously wearing the different hats of student, scholar, educator, mentor, administrator, public servant, and friend. The field, community, and the public were all beneficiaries. His passion and dedication created a legacy that will live on through the future work of others to expand the insights stemming from the work of Abramson and his colleagues.
Links to Digital Materials
- Abramson, A. S. (2013). Interview with C. A. Fowler & D. P. Shankweiler. Haskins Laboratories oral histories and transcriptions. Haskins Laboratories [website].
- Abramson/Lisker VOT Stimuli (n.d.). Haskins Laboratories [website].
- UConn Linguistics (n.d.). [website].
- Winn, M. (2020). Praat script to manipulate VOT in natural speech. GitHub.
- X-ray Film Series, Haskins Laboratories, 1960–1962:
Further Reading
- Fowler, C. A., & Shankweiler, D. (2021). Language and life: Haskins Laboratories’ first half century. New Haven, CT: Haskins Press.
- Fry, D. B., Abramson, A. S., Eimas, P. D., & Liberman, A. M. (1962). The identification and discrimination of synthetic vowels. Language and Speech, 5, 171–189.
- Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review, 74(6), 431–461.
- Lieberman, P., & Blumstein, S. E. (1988). Speech physiology, speech perception, and acoustic phonetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Lotz, J., Abramson, A. S., Gerstman, L. J., Ingemann, F., & Nemser, W. (1960). The perception of English stops by speakers of English, Spanish, Hungarian, and Thai: A tape-cutting experiment. Language and Speech, 3, 71–77.
- Lubker, J. F., & Parris, P. J. (1970). Simultaneous measurements of intraoral pressure, force of labial contact, and labial electromyographic activity during production of the stop consonant cognates (p) and (b). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 47(2), 625–633.
- Whalen, D. H. (2019). Obituary: Arthur S. Abramson. Journal of Phonetics, 72, 83–84.
- Whalen, D. H., Abramson, A. S., Lisker, L., & Mody, M. (1990). Gradient effects of fundamental frequency on stop consonant voicing judgments. Phonetica, 47, 36–49.
References
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