Abstract
The research deals with natural perception of word boundaries by native speakers of Standard Russian. A specific feature of Russian word rhythmic structure is a so-called “prosodic core”: not only stressed, but also first pre-stressed vowels differ in duration and quality from vowels that occur in other positions, a phenomenon that is also commonly described as two degrees of reduction. The purpose of this study is to find out whether native Russian speakers are able to use acoustic differences between vowels [ɐ] (Degree 1 reduction) and [ə] (Degree 2 reduction) in order to recognize word boundaries correctly. The stimuli for the experiment were nonce words, five-syllable sequences including two stressed vowels; they were presented to the participants of the experiment in a form of fictional foreign names. The listeners were asked to choose between two possible ways of segmentation of these fivesyllable sequences into a first name and a second name of a person. The results of the experiment show that native Russian speakers used the acoustic differences between vowels for segmentation, but the results were statistically significant only for some of the stimuli. However, for half of stimuli the listeners performed correct segmentation at chance level. In addition, artificial modification of first pre-stressed vowel duration was performed for some of the stimuli; the participants’ responses show that vowel duration influences the degree of success in the segmentation task.
Highlights
The successful perception of speech in native and foreign language consists of several stages, one of them is the ability to define word boundaries within a phrase
With regard to word rhythmic structure, Modern Standard Russian has a specific feature: “disyllabic prosodic core, where stressed and first pre-stressed syllables are contrasted with all other syllables” (Knyazev & Pozharitskaya, 2005: 123). This rhythmic structure imposes restrictions on the repertory of vowels that can be present in certain syllables. We suggested that these constrictions can have a delimitative function in Russian: if the sequence of two stressed vowels indicates the presence of word boundary, hypothetically the sequence of a syllable with Degree 2 reduction and a stressed syllable can indicate the boundary as well because such disyllabic sequences are prohibited by Russian phonotactics
The research confirmed that in the recorded pronunciation of the speaker Degree 1 and Degree 2 reduction vowels significantly differ in duration and F1 frequency
Summary
The successful perception of speech in native and foreign language consists of several stages, one of them is the ability to define word boundaries within a phrase. The sources of information about word boundaries in native language (in the absence of pauses which are, relatively unreliable sources, too), are rhythmic structure, phonotactic constraints, lexical knowledge and phonetic detail» (Weber & Broersma, 2012: 6—7). One of the basic examples that show the role of lexical knowledge in segmentation is the case when a listener that is presented with a long sequence of sounds unambiguously recognizes an embedded word of his mother tongue which in turn helps him define the boundaries of two adjacent words. More complex mechanisms based on mental lexicon are contextual predictability and word frequency
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