Accentual Phrase Research Articles

On the morphological status of -te, -ta, and related forms in Japanese: evidence from accent placement

The morphological structure of Japanese predicate forms with the morphemes /te/, /ta/, /tara/, /tari/, and /taQte/ (the t-morphemes) has been a point of contention. Modern grammarians have tended to consider the t-morphemes as inflectional affixes that directly follow the stem (the “attachment-to-stem” analysis). On the other hand, in the current school grammar (gakkoo bunpoo), as well as in some contemporary scholarly works, they are regarded as particles or the like following the infinitive form (ren’yookei) of a predicate (the “attachment-to-infinitive” analysis). This paper argues for the second view. With experimental data, it will be demonstrated that a t-morpheme may be separated from its host (the preceding item) by an accent phrase boundary with the host having the accent pattern expected for an infinitive form whereas inflectional affixes like /reba/ (provisional) and /ru/ (present indicative) lack this property. This prosodic contrast agrees well with the “attachment-to-infinitive” analysis while it is hard to account for under the “attachment-to-stem” analysis.

Domain of final lowering in spontaneous Japanese

There are two opposing predictions about the domain of final lowering (FL) in Japanese intonation. One predicts that the domain is the last mora of utterance whereas the other predicts that the domain is much wider (with no clear specification of the domain). X-JToBI annotated part of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (the CSJ-Core, 44 h speech spoken by 201 speakers) was analyzed to determine the domain of FL in Tokyo Japanese. Mean normalized F0 values of the four constituent tones of accented accentual phrases (AP) were compared across utterances differing both in the number of constituting APs (from 1 to 5) and the syntactic strength of sentence- or clause-boundaries (three levels). It turned out that all tones in the last AP of utterance were considerably lowered in all utterances regardless of utterance length. This suggests strongly that the domain of FL is the last AP in Japanese. It also turned out that FL occurred in much wider contexts than hitherto believed. FL was observed not only in typical sentence boundaries but also in various syntactic clauses, and there was correlation between the degree of FL and the strength of syntactic boundaries.

An Experimental Study on Korean Pitch Patterns of the First Syllable in an Accentual Phrase: A Case Study of Korean Heritage Teenage Learners in the United States

An Experimental Study on Korean Pitch Patterns of the First Syllable in an Accentual Phrase: A Case Study of Korean Heritage Teenage Learners in the United States

Prosodic variation enhancement using unsupervised context labeling for HMM-based expressive speech synthesis

This paper proposes an unsupervised labeling technique using phrase-level prosodic contexts for HMM-based expressive speech synthesis, which enables users to manually enhance prosodic variations of synthetic speech without degrading the naturalness. In the proposed technique, HMMs are first trained using the conventional labels including only linguistic information, and prosodic features are generated from the HMMs. The average difference of original and generated prosodic features for each accent phrase is then calculated and classified into three classes, e.g., low, neutral, and high in the case of fundamental frequency. The created prosodic context label has a practical meaning such as high/low of relative pitch at the phrase level, and hence it is expected that users can modify the prosodic characteristic of synthetic speech in an intuitive way by manually changing the proposed labels. In the experiments, we evaluate the proposed technique in both ideal and practical conditions using speech of sales talk and fairy tale recorded under a realistic domain. In the evaluation under the practical condition, we evaluate whether the users achieve their intended prosodic modification by changing the proposed context label of a certain accent phrase for a given sentence.

중국인 학습자의 한국어 강세구 성조패턴과 기울기 특성

The purpose of this study is to analyse prosodic characteristics of accentual phrases (AP, hereafter) produced by Chinese learners of Korean in Korean text reading. The study is restricted only to the initial APs. Subjects are students who have been studying Korean at a beginner level. The results showed that Chinese learners of Korean tended to make errors in the realization of the tonal patterns of the initial 2 syllables of the initial APs. Also they showed different F0 slopes across the initial and second syllables in the initial APs. Chinese learners of Korean, therefore, need to focus on the prosodic characteristics of the initial 2 syllables of Korean APs to realize fluent Korean intonation.

Pitch Cues in L2 Speech

This study examines the implementation of pitch cues in L2 (second language) speech by conducting an acoustic analysis of the global and local pitch cues in L1 (first language) Mandarin speakers’ L2 Korean. Results of the study show: (1) while the phonological patterns of AP (accentual phrase) and IP (intonational phrase) tones in L2 speech largely resemble those in L1 speech, the L2 production is characterized by the significantly lowered and reduced overall pitch range. (2) The L2 speakers tend to exaggerate a local pitch cue in signaling questions possibly to compensate the overall compressed pitch range. (3) The prosodic patterns support the L2 speakers’ constrained speech planning strategy and developmental changes in L2 acquisition. The findings of this study help to understand the prosodic interface and acquisition when L1 and L2 are typologically different in prosody.

Towards a model of Singaporean English intonational phonology

Singaporean English (SgE) is a variety of English spoken in Singapore. Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make SgE distinct from other varieties of English. Although the intonation of SgE has been described previously [Deterding (1994), Lim (2004), Ng (2011)], no phonological model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of intonational phonology for SgE within the Autosegmental-Metrical phonology framework. Three native speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length and stress pattern. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is characterized by a general LH (rising) contour. The L can be attributable to either an L* tone on a lexically-stressed syllable or an L initial boundary tone if the stressed syllable occurs late in the AP. The AP-final syllable always has a phonologically High boundary tone (Ha). The initial AP is realized in a large pitch range, and subsequent APs within the same ip are realized in successively reduced pitch ranges. Tones of larger prosodic units will also be discussed.

Speech rhythm in Korean: Experiments in speech cycling

Korean has not been unanimously classified for rhythm class, and it lacks stress. Thus, it does not fit into views that rhythm rests on alternations of metrical strength. The goal was to examine what, if any, elements are used in Korean for rhythm purposes. It was hypothesized that the onsets of accentual phrases act as beats. The materials were 6 sentences; each was 9 syllables and three APs long. The number of syllables in each AP varied. Syllable composition also varied between CV and CVC. Native speakers repeated each sentence, fitting each repetition into beat intervals at three different metronome rates. Each AP was expressed as a ratio of the entire cycle. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment suggests that speakers keep AP onsets in phase although syllable count and composition also affect phase. The results support our hypothesis that AP onsets operate similarly to stresses. The second experiment that used waltz rhythm showed that it is the only level of prominence, and no differentiation between the strength of these beats, such that it would produce waltz rhythm, is possible. The results suggest that Korean rhythm is not characterized by multiple levels of alternation between strong and weak constituents.

A metrical theory of Korean word prosody

The location or even the existence of stress in Korean has been contro - versial. At the same time, it has been widely assumed that Korean has phonemi- cally long vowels, allowed in the phrase-initial position. This article considers these two key issues of Korean word-level prosody anew. I claim that the long vowel in Chonnam and Traditional Seoul dialect is an acoustic manifestation of the metrical head, and show that an analysis based on accent rather than phono - logical vowel length yields a simpler account of the vowel shortening in verbal suffixation. I propose that in Chonnam and Traditional Seoul, there is a two- syllable left-edge window, where stress falls on the initial syllable if accented and, otherwise, on the second syllable. Acoustic analyses show that duration, pitch, and intensity all have significant effects in predicting the location of metri- cal head in Chonnam. In Traditional Seoul, however, only duration and second syllable pitch have such effects. I argue that the weaker relics of metrical promi- nence in Traditional Seoul reflect the historical shift of its prosodic system from lexical to phrasal. Implications of the metrical head on the Accentual Phrase the- ory of Korean (Jun 1993) are discussed with focus on the interpretation of pitch in Korean phonology.

Notes de recheche sur l'accentuation et le phrasé prosodique à la lumière des corpus de français

In this paper the main rules for stress assignment in French, the constraints relative to the formation of minor prosodic units (Accentual Phrases) and major prosodic units (Intonational Phrases, IP) are first recalled. A procedure developed in order to annotate semi-automatically these phenomena in different French corpora is then described. Finally the results of two studies are presented. The first one is conducted on a 4-hour long corpus (designed for the statistical study of regional variation in Swiss French). It aims at testing the robustness of two phonological rules implicated in the formation of Accentual Phrase in French (deaccentuation of pre-nominal adjectives (a sequel to the Align-XHead constraint), accentual clash avoidance rule). The second summarizes the main results obtained in the author’s PhD thesis (Avanzi, 2012). It is conducted on a set of data containing approximately 800 dislocated-sentences. It questions the weight of syntactic and information structure cues in front of prosodic structure cues in order to identify Intonational Phrase boundaries.

Apprenants hispanophones de FLE et accentuation en français

The aim of this research is to examine whether Spanish speakers transfer some accentual acoustic properties from Spanish to French L2. Native Spanish learners of French and native speakers of French were instructed to read French sentences that contained a trisyllabic pseudoword ending with an open syllable (e.g. poutila) or closed syllable (e.g. poutilar). In half of the sentences, the pseudoword was a noun in a stressed position, while in the other half it was an adjective in an unstressed position. Acoustic analyses (duration, F0 and amplitude) were performed on the three vowels of the pseudoword, as well as on the first vowel following the pseudoword. Results showed that Spanish speakers have acquired the knowledge that, contrary to Spanish, stress is fixed in French (on the last syllable), but not that stress is realized at the accentual phrase level rather than at the word level as in Spanish.

Using the ToBI transcription to record the intonation of Slovene

The paper presents ToBI, a transcription method for prosodic annotation. ToBI is an acronym for Tones and Breaks Indices which first denoted an intonation system developed in the 1990s for annotating intonation and prosody in the database of spoken Mainstream American English. The MAE_ToBI transcription originally consists of six parts – the audio recording of the utterance, the fundamental frequency contour and four parallel tiers for the transcription of tone sequence, ortographic transcription, indication of break indices between words and for additional observations. The core of the transcription, i. e. of the phonological analyses of the intonation pattern, is represented by the tone tier where tonal variation is transcribed by using labels for high tone and low tone where a tone can appear as a pitch accent, phrase accent and boundary tone. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, the system soon began to be used for the prosodic annotation of other variants of English and many other languages, as well as in different non-linguistic fields, leading to the creation of many new ToBI systems adapted to individual languages and dialects. The author is the first to use this method for Slovene, more precisely, for the intonational transcription and analysis of the corpus of spontaneous speech of Slovene Istria, in order to investigate if the ToBi system is useful for the annotation of Slovene and its regional variants.

다문화가정 이주여성의 운율구 경계짓기와 억양패턴

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to provide basic data for development of Korean teaching programs for immigrant women from multicultural families through the acoustic analysis of their prosodic phrasing and intonation pattern. The results showed that immigrant women showed some differences in most of the prosodic characteristics from a Korean women’s group: Immigrant women realized the first word of a sentence in an intonational phrase while Korean women did in an accentual phrase. They also haven’t yet correctly learned the tone type of the first of an accentual phrase which differs de pending on the type of its first segment yet. As a result, they showed many diverse intonation patterns compared to Korean women. Furthermore, the immigrant women’s groups showed some differences between them in a few prosodic characteristics. Philippine women, whose residence duration in Korea is relatively longer than that of Vietnamese women, were more similar to Korean women: Vietnamese women read a sentence with a larger number of intonational phrases than Philippine women did. And they realized sentence-final boundary tone of a yes-no question not only in ‘H%’ but also in ‘HL%’ while, like Korean women, Philippine women did only in ‘H%’.

When syntax meets prosody: Tonal and duration variability in French Accentual Phrases

Though two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or to the existence of an additional level of phrasing ranked between the AP and the Intonation Phrase. This paper examines the effect of syntactic boundary strength on two phonetic correlates of boundary marking in French, for the AP level. Specifically, preboundary lengthening and tonal cues associated to four boundary levels are investigated through duration and f0 measures. Results show that the alignment of the AP boundary with a major syntactic break significantly modifies the degree of preboundary lengthening associated with the boundary. More precisely, AP-final syllables aligned with a NP/VP break are longer than AP-final syllables contained within a complex NP, though they are not marked by a stronger tonal boundary. Effects of speech rate on the tonal composition of the AP are also reported. We discuss the implications in the light of current models of French prosodic structure and the syntax/prosody interface.

A entoação das sentenças clivadas em português brasileiro e a interface sintaxe-fonologia

This study, developed within the theoretical framework of Intonational Phonology (cf. Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986; Ladd 1996; Jun, 2005), is a comparative study of the intonational structure of neutral and cleft sentences (cleft, inverted cleft, and reduced inverted cleft sentences) in Brazilian Portuguese (hereafter PB). According to results obtained by Frota (1994), Vigário (1998) and Fernandes-Svartman (2007c), in special syntactic structures in European Portuguese, the intonational contour undergoes local, and sometimes global alteration, compared to the contour of neutral sentences. Our hypothesis is that alteration in the intonational contour in special syntactic structures also occurs in PB, as is the case with cleft sentences. The results attained by this study confirm this hypothesis, to the extent that significant differences between the intonational contour of neutral sentences and the intonational contour of cleft sentences in PB were found. While neutral sentences showed tonal accents associated with practically each prosodic word of the sentence, and an absence of phrasal accents associated with boundaries of phonological phrases, cleft sentences showed: (i) tonal accent obligatorily associated with the head prosodic word of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped; (ii) phrasal accent optionally associated with the right boundary of this same phonological phrase; and (iii) absence of tonal accents associated with intermediary prosodic words (between the head prosodic word of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped and the head prosodic word of the last phonological of the intonational phrase). In the case of the cleft sentences, the presence of a phrasal accent associated with the right boundary of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped may, theoretically, be related to the codification of a special syntactic position occupied by this subject in such structures: outside the IP, in the CP specifier position.

Prosodic typology in Japanese dialects from a cross-linguistic perspective

In the typology of prosodic phrasing in Japanese dialects that the author has proposed previously, the dialects are categorized into those in which an accentual phrase (AP) generally contains only one word, and those in which it can contain two or more words. This paper shows that this typology can be applied to languages that have the same sort of AP as in Japanese, such as Seoul Korean, French and Northern Bizkaian Basque. It is also shown that the cross-linguistic difference similar to that in AP-level prosodic phrasing can also be observed in languages in which AP is difficult to define, such as English and Spanish. In order to describe these languages in a unified framework, it is proposed that they be divided according to how densely pitch events (such as post-lexical pitch accents and AP boundaries) are distributed with respect to the number of words. This division may hold a clue to language-specific mapping between prosody and syntax/focus.

A cross-language study of breathing rhythm related to different linguistic structures in Chinese and Korean

This paper investigates correlations between respiration patterns and different linguistic structures in Chinese and Korean.The study includes comparative analysis between the Korean and Chinese scripts of poetry and news with same meaning and different languages, and the subjects included 4 native speakers (2 males, 2 females) for each language. It can be made certain by measuring physiological and acoustic parameters by means of two respiratory sensors for chest and abdomen and electroglottalgraphy. Preliminary results show that due to the poetry has fixed frame, therefore regardless of language and sex, the respiratory rhythm of the poetry is quite similar in two languages. In contrast, for news scripts, the data show that breathing groups of the Chinese quite correspond to intonation units. In contrast,the Korean is more flexable in planning breathing rhythm,generally breathing resets appears not only in intonation phrase but in accentual phrase,and chest respiration is mostly used for the accentual phrase. It suggests that different linguistic structures operate powerfully upon preplanning and respiratory patterns. Furthermore, the results show the correlation of voice quality variation and respiratory rhythm in different languages.

The perceptual sensitivity to the prosodic cues in disambiguation of the ambiguous and the biased ambiguous sentences

This study explores the perceptual sensitivity to the prosodic cues in disambiguating the structurally ambiguous sentences by English native speakers and Korean learners of English. Also, this study aims to investigate that even the biased ambiguous interpretations due to their semantic factors were also affected by the prosodic cues. The perception experiment was conducted by the cognitive experimental tool, E-prime. In the perception test, one of the meanings of the sentences were presented on the screen, and then the acoustic stimuli were provided to the participants. The acoustic stimuli were given in two phases - the normal stimuli and the reinforced stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge the correspondence between the semantic and acoustic stimulus. The recognition rate increased, while the response time was shortened, when the reinforced stimuli were given. To be specific, English natives sensitively respond to the phrasal accent and phrase final lengthening, while Korean learners are sensitive to the substantial pause. With regarding to the biased ambiguous sentences, Korean learners do not rely on their baseline preference and easily shifted their resolution according to the prosodic factors they heard. while native speakers much rely on their internally fixed interpretation beside of the meticulous prosodic cues.

Patterns of accentual lengthening in English four-syllable words

Previous work on English disyllabic and trisyllabic words cannot distinguish two types of views on accentual lengthening: (1) phrasal accent affects a single, multisyllabic domain (the entire word), vs. (2) phrasal accent affects multiple, potentially separate, domains (e.g., the primary stressed syllable and the final syllable). In the present paper, we distinguish these views by examining the effect of phrasal accent on the durational patterns of English four-syllable words. We studied words of three types, with different positions of primary and secondary lexical stress: pattern 1000 (e.g. ˈpresidency), pattern 2010 (e.g. ˌdemoˈcratic), and pattern 1020 (e.g. ˈsuffoˌ cating). Our results show that accent-related lengthening can affect multiple, potentially distinct, sites: the primary-stressed syllable, the secondary-stressed syllable rhyme (if the word has secondary stress), the onset of the word-initial syllable, and the final syllable. In addition, lengthening can “spill over” from a primary-stressed syllable onto a following unstressed syllable. Patterns of accent-related lengthening on onsets vs. rhymes are qualitatively different for stressed vs. word-edge sites, suggesting separate lengthening mechanisms.

Speech cycling in Korean

This paper reports the results of a cycling experiment in Korean, a paradigm in which speakers produce short phrases in time with a metronome. It was hypothesized that in Korean the onsets of accentual phrases would act as beats in this task, playing the same part as stress plays in English; therefore, the accentual phase onsets would remain in the same phase within a cycle independently of their composition. Speakers read Korean sentences with three accentual phrases that had the same number of syllables or differed so one of the accentual phrases had twice as many syllables as the others; the composition of the syllables also varied between CV and CVC. The results so far suggest that speakers keep the accentual phrases in phase although the variation of syllable count and composition also affected phasing. This provides evidence that cycling is a viable task in Korean and supports our hypothesis about the role of the accentual phrase in Korean rhythm. Finally, the relative importance of the syllable cyc...