Intonational Features Research Articles

TEACHING POLYPHONIC TECHNIQUES TO CHINESE STUDENTS USING PIANO ENSEMBLES OF CHINESE COMPOSERS

Chinese piano music is a unique phenomenon. Developing under the influence of Western European culture, it has not lost its uniqueness and national identity. Polyphony as a structure of multi-voice music is not characteristic of Chinese piano music, however, elements of polyphonic artistic expressiveness are present in composers’ works quite often. Their use is connected with the solution of a specific artistic problem in each individual work, form- building, as well as with the effective emphasis on the features of intonation, rhythm, and national colour of Chinese music. In musicology, the concept of “Chinese style” appeared, which synthesised the components of national, regional, genre style and even the style of an era into one musical system. The “Chinese style” has become a label for the national cultural identity of Chinese piano music in the world music art. Piano ensemble is a genre that occupies a significant place in the work of Chinese composers. It reflected the traditions and innovations of the “Chinese style”, including in the aspect of the use of polyphonic techniques.

Perception and adaptation of receptive prosody in autistic adolescents

A fundamental aspect of language processing is inferring others’ minds from subtle variations in speech. The same word or sentence can often convey different meanings depending on its tempo, timing, and intonation–features often referred to as prosody. Although autistic children and adults are known to experience difficulty in making such inferences, the science remains unclear as to why. We hypothesize that detail-oriented perception in autism may interfere with the inference process if it lacks the adaptivity required to cope with the variability ubiquitous in human speech. Using a novel prosodic continuum that shifts the sentence meaning gradiently from a statement (e.g., “It’s raining”) to a question (e.g., “It’s raining?”), we have investigated the perception and adaptation of receptive prosody in autistic adolescents and two groups of non-autistic controls. Autistic adolescents showed attenuated adaptivity in categorizing prosody, whereas they were equivalent to controls in terms of discrimination accuracy. Combined with recent findings in segmental (e.g., phoneme) recognition, the current results provide the basis for an emerging research framework for attenuated flexibility and reduced influence of contextual feedback as a possible source of deficits that hinder linguistic and social communication in autism.

ESL teachers’ metalanguage as evidence of their metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system

The present study investigated six experienced English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system through analysis of their metalanguage. Participants’ metalanguage related to intonation was collected while completing three tasks: (1) a semi-structured interview, (2) a simulated teaching demonstration, and (3) a pronunciation needs assessment. Qualitative content analysis revealed information related to their metalinguistic knowledge of the intonation subsystems of parsing, prominence, and pitch contour. Although broad patterns of metalinguistic knowledge across participants were evident, metalanguage variation showed individual differences in conceptualization and descriptiveness of the subsystems, suggesting a lack of a systematic and in-depth understanding of the characteristics and functions of the interrelated subsystems. Findings highlight the need to enhance teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system, with more emphasis on the interconnectivity of intonational features and contextual meaning-making phenomena of intonation. The study provides implications for second language (L2) teacher educators and education programmes, suggesting that more attention should be given to teachers’ use of metalanguage for explicit pronunciation instruction. In addition, more training opportunities are needed to foster a systematic and in-depth understanding of the intonation system.

Intonation words in initial intentional communication of Mandarin-speaking children.

Intonation words play a very important role in early childhood language development and serve as a crucial entry point for studying children's language acquisition. Utilizing a natural conversation corpus, this paper thoroughly examines the intentional communication scenes of five Mandarin-speaking children before the age of 1;05 (17 months). We found that children produced a limited yet high-frequency set of intonation words such as " [a], [æ], [ε], [ən], [ə], eng [əŋ], [o], and [i]." These intonation words do not express the children's emotional attitudes toward propositions or events; rather, they are utilized within the frameworks of imperative, declarative, and interrogative intents. The children employ non-verbal, multimodal means such as pointing, gesturing, and facial expressions to actively convey or receive commands, provide or receive information, and inquire or respond. The data suggests that the function of intonation words is essentially equivalent to holophrases, indicating the initial stage of syntactic acquisition, which is a milestone in early syntactic development. Based on the cross-linguistic universality of intonation word acquisition and its inherited relationship with pre-linguistic intentional vocalizations, this paper proposes that children's syntax is initiated by the prosodic features of intonation. The paper also contends that intonation words, as the initial form of human vocal language in individual development, naturally extend from early babbling, emotional vocalizations, or sound expressions for changing intentions. They do not originate from spontaneous gesturing, which seems to have no necessary evolutionary relationship with the body postures that chimpanzees use to change intentions, as suggested by existing research. Human vocal language and non-verbal multimodal means are two parallel and non-contradictory forms of communication, with no apparent evidence of the former inheriting from the latter.

Интонация и ударение на прости двусъставни изречения

The research deals with the intonational characteristics and the stress in simple sentences taken from Bulgarian classic literature. By using software for acoustic analysis, we observe the intonational contours of simple sentences, aiming at characterizing the specific intonational features of the verb and its outer complement. We also observe the intonational features of the predicate in cases of different word order (SVO, SOV, VSO, etc.) The main goal is to summarize the data on stress and intonation of simple sentences from our corpus and to represent it as models of the prosody of simple predicates in Bulgarian.

Basic Intonation Patterns of Galician Spanish

This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. Because of this, previous studies have often included Galician L1 speakers, for whom transfer is expected when speaking Spanish L2. However, GS is the single L1 of half the children in Galicia, and it is spoken almost exclusively by about a quarter of Galicians. Our study focuses on this population and investigates the relative frequency and distribution of tonal units in GS when direct transfer from Galician is unlikely. A corpus of 1706 sentences (statements, questions, imperatives, and vocatives in neutral and biased contexts) was obtained from 28 participants through a discourse completion task. Results showed that patterns previously attributed to direct transfer from Galician L1 (for example, upstepped final accents in neutral declaratives or falling contours in unmarked interrogatives) are widespread in GS as L1. Findings also show commonalities with other L1 Spanish varieties, both in Europe (for example, L* L% as the unmarked declarative ending) and America (for example, the L* + H prenuclear accent of Caribbean varieties).

М. Вайнберг. «Детская тетрадь» № 2 ор. 19: Вопросы жанровой и стилевой преемственности

The article examines the cycle of preludes for piano by M. Weinberg "Children’s Notebook". The significance of this work in the composer’s oeuvre and its autobiographical nature are analyzed. Semantic and stylistic intersections of the composition with works by foreign and Russian composers of the 19th–20th centuries (Chopin, Schumann, Mussorgsky, and Shostakovich) are noted, as well as references to various genre prototypes. The compositional and dramaturgical principles of the cycle, as well as tonal and intonational features, are explored. Parallels are drawn between Weinberg’s composition and Mussorgsky’s vocal cycle "The Nursery", as well as Shostakovich’s "24 Preludes" op. 34. Previously, the cycle of preludes "Children’s Notebook" No. 2 by Weinberg has not been considered from a genre and stylistic perspective.

PITCH AND TEMPORAL PECULIARITIES OF TEENAGERS’ SPEECH IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH

The present study intends to investigate the prosodic features of British and American Teenagers’ Speech. The concept of age, being universal, is the basis of social existence and has cultural specificity. Age determines a person’s place in society and workplace, and reaching certain age leads to new obligations, rights and social roles. Thus, a person’s age characteristics reflect the movement along an individual life trajectory and compliance with social norms. The speech of young people is an interesting linguistic phenomenon and has certain intonation features, special accentuation. Among the prosodic features of the speech of young people, the strengthening of the affricate, vowel stretching, ascending or descending of intonation in certain parts of the syntagm are noted. Studies of young people’s speech show that deviations from normative variants of intonation patterns are becoming a fairly common phenomenon. The work uses a complex methodology of analysis and processing of language material, which includes the method of building intonation curves, instrumental phonetic analysis, and statistical method of data processing. Audio recordings of spontaneous speech of 24 teenagers, of which 12 British and 12 American boys and girls aged 14 to 17, have served as the research material. The total duration of the audio recordings is 33 minutes. Common and distinctive pitch and temporal characteristics that mark the speech of two groups of teenagers have been established. The speech of British teenagers is marked by: a wider pitch range, a slower tempo of speech, i.e. a lower speech rate and articulation rate, greater pause saturation and average duration of pauses, the predominance of short pauses and pauses of medium duration. The speech of American teenagers is determined by: a narrower pitch range, a faster tempo of speech, i.e. a higher speech rate and articulation rate, less pause saturation, the prevalence short pauses compared to the speech of British teenagers.

Intonational Features of Spontaneous Narrations in Monolingual and Heritage Russian in the U.S.—An Exploration of the RUEG Corpus

This article presents RuPro, a new corpus resource of prosodically annotated speech by Russian heritage speakers in the U.S. and monolingually raised Russian speakers. The corpus contains data elicited in formal and informal communicative situations, by male/female and adolescent/adult speakers. The resource is presented with its architecture and annotation, and it is shown how it is used for the analysis of intonational features of spontaneous mono- and bilingual Russian speech. The analyses investigate the length of intonation phrases, types and number of pitch accents, and boundary tones. It emerges that the speaker groups do not differ in the inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones or in the relative frequency of these tonal events. However, they do differ in the length of intonation phrases (IPs), with heritage speakers showing shorter IPs also in the informal communicative situation. Both groups also differ concerning the number of pitch accents used on content words, with heritage speakers using more pitch accents than monolingually raised speakers. The results are discussed with respect to register differentiation and differences in prosodic density across both speaker groups.

"Two Legends" for Piano by F. Liszt in Line with his Spiritual and Aesthetic Positions

The purpose of the study is to investigate the poetic and intonation features of “Two Legends” for the piano in the context of spiritual search and to reveal the compositional guidelines of F. Liszt, aimed at embodying the poetry of non-antithetical content. The research methodology is determined by the use of historical-logical, analytical, cultural, hermeneutic, comparative methods, as presented in the works of representatives of the intonation approach of B. Asafiev in Ukraine – in the works of D. Androsova, O. Markova, O. Muravska, O. Roschenko, and O. Socol. Scientific novelty. For the first time in domestic cultural studies, the specifics of F. Liszt's spiritual ideas are highlighted according to their presentation in the named piano spiritual works of the late period of the composer's work, marked by his approach to the symbolic principles of thinking. Conclusions. The analysis of the symbolic meaning of the music of F. Liszt's “Two Legends” for piano showed that these are works based on the choice of the program plot – life descriptions of the images of the Saints – Francis of Assisi (XIII century) and the follower of the first Francis of Paoli (XV century), who represented the closely related to Byzantine Orthodoxy, the discovery of mysticism and aestheticism in Catholicism. In the compositional solution, monophonic recitatives (the theme-image of Francis of Assisi in the First Legend), the motif of the Cross, which in the context of the program acquires an interpretation in the aspects of the Old Christian confession, are essential. The tonus peregrinus in the leitmotif of St. Francis in “Second Legend” also stands out, testifying to the imitation of the old liturgy of Byzantine origin. Compositionally, this poetry affirms the Divine unity of the world, in this case it is a presentation of a form devoid of thematic antitheticity. In his spiritual works, Liszt turns to the two-part nature of non-contrasting juxtapositions, which model compositional primary liturgical features. Keywords: legend, romanticism, symbolism, musical style, musical genre, musical symbols.

Սրբազան արժեքներ՝ մեղեդային շնչով. զրադաշտական տեքստերի երաժշտական ոգին

Analyzing a number of evidences of Zoroastrian melodies, the earliest manifestations of Iranian ancient culture and especially music, we can state that we are talking about ancient sources in Persian music, which were created under the influence of religious prayers and became an integral part of the culture. Zoroastrian traditions, including traditions of musical and poetic art, were preserved or transformed under the conditions of the common Indo-Iranian cultural complex. And the Zoroastrian musical tradition was interconnected with the social structure of the society and the changes in it. The holy book of religion, Avesta is not only a religious, cultural, legal source, but also a source, the texts of which became the basis for new religious songs. These works were performed during religious rituals and were originally the monopoly of the priests. As in religion, so in Zoroastrian melodies, the themes relate to justice and light and have reached the present day. The most prominent of the melodies are based on the famous "Mantras" from the Gathas, performed to the accompaniment of various instruments, of which the role of the trumpet, an instrument used by the semi-mythical Yima, is symbolic. Some researchers conclude that even thanks to the Avesta, a special musical language was formed, its intonation features were updated and enriched. And the tradition of singing the sacred texts of the Avesta stimulated the development of vocals and the entire musical culture, which flourished during the Achaemenid dynasty, when musicians were considered representatives of a worthy class, and it continued under the Sassanids, reaching its peak. Musicians working in the Persian court continued the rich musical traditions. We referred to the activities of Barbad Mervezi, a famous musician, poet, nightingale of Iran, who had a series of songs for the days of the Zoroastrian calendar. And one of the recent researches shows that the most famous Zoroastrian singer, the prophet Zarathustra, sang hymns from the Avesta using 4 different musical methods. Zoroastrian music survived until the Middle Ages, and Nizam's mentions of the presence of Zoroastrian melodies in the repertoire of court musicians are a vivid evidence.

METHODS OF TEACHING CHORAL CONDUCTING IN CHINA (BASED ON THE WORKS OF XIAN XINGHAI AND HUANG ZI)

The article studies the specifics of the educational cycle of choir conducting in Chinese universities, highlights the origins of the formation of the style of choral compositions by Chinese authors, analyses Xian Xinghai’s choirs “On the Taihang Mountains”, “Yellow Water Ballad” and Huang Zi’s choir “Fluttering Flag” in the aspect of pedagogical problems. The most effective methods for working on the selected works at different stages of training are revealed. The musical, stylistic, rhythm and intonation features of the choirs are indicated, the importance of the imagery of the poetic texts is emphasised. The conclusion is made about the expansion of the educational process in Chinese institutions in the field of choral conducting.

Intonation as a means of conveying an utterance in Komi prose

Introduction. The purpose of this paper is to study intonation features and means of conveying speech acts in Komi works of art. The voice as a source of information was not in the focus of the attention of Komi linguists, the issues of Komi intonation and the means of their reflection have not been studied. In this regard, the address to the general characteristics of how Komi prose writers reflect the intonation features of their characters’ speech is considered relevant in the Komi language and allows us to speak about a new method of studying the perception of phrasal intonation. Materials and Methods. The material for the study based on the examples from the works of modern fiction of Komi classics. The methodological basis of the study was a set of such linguistic methods as descriptive, perceptual analysis of phrasal intonation, linguistic analysis of the text, elements of structural and semantic analysis. Results and Discussion. The study of intonation allowed us to state a number of prosodic signs. The described speech of the characters of literary works was studied according to various parameters of acoustics: duration, intensity, pitch, timbre, tempo, rhythm; by means of non-speech sounds, through an indication of the features of articulation, diction; by similarity with the phenomena of the sounding world. It was found that the author’s remarks of works of art describe the speech volume of the characters in particular detail, the intensity of the sounding speech. Conclusions. The research material has shown that the language functions of intonation can be fully and consistently reflected not only in live sounding speech, but also in writing in the form of the speech of the literary hero of prose works. The functions and expressive possibilities of intonation are contained in the author’s designations of prosodic characteristics of speech. An important role is played by the individual style of the author, which is distinguished by sensitivity to the sound side of the speech of thier characters.

The intonation of neighboring varieties

Abstract Despite the presence of several cross-variety studies on spoken varieties of regional Italian, research on the intonational transition across geographically close varieties is still scarce. This article tackles this issue by providing a first cross-variety comparison of question intonation in three neighboring varieties of Italian spoken in Campania, namely Neapolitan, Salerno and Cilento Italian. The three varieties are chosen based on their position with respect to the isoglosses identifying the Eboli-Lucera line. Such comparison is made possible using the methodological protocol outlined by Gili Fivela et al. (2015) and specifically concerns yes-no, wh- and disjunctive questions. This explorative study aims at identifying intonational features differenced by frequency of occurrence across space, thereby providing a basis for further quantitative studies on spatial distribution. Based on a corpus elicited with a combination of Discourse Completion Task and reading task, we analyze the phonological features of question tunes in Cilento Italian, while also comparing them to their counterparts in Neapolitan and Salerno Italian. Results show that the three varieties present systemic, realizational and phonotactic differences as well as differences in the frequency of occurrence of tonal events. The intraregional variation across Campania Italian varieties hints at an intonational transition featuring a smooth geographic cline.

Piano etudes by Lo Maisho: trends in the development of the genre

In the modern professional piano art of China, the genre of piano etude is an important part of musical culture and occupies a special place in the history of Chinese music. The first samples of etudes for piano by Chinese composers date back to the 20s of the last century and were created as pieces for the development of the pianist's technical skills. During the development of the genre, the artistic value of the sketches has increased: from a play of a technical nature, the sketches have become independent, dramaturgically constructed compositions. The composers rely on the intonation features of national music, use the melodies of traditional Chinese songs, and resort to modern writing techniques. However, innovation is usually limited to this. The young Chinese composer Luo Maisho created a series of etudes in which, on the one hand, he inherits traditional methods of composition, on the other, he violates the established foundations. For the first time, the metrorhythm region becomes a donor for structural transformations. The author of the article introduces the work of the young composer, offers an excursion into the history of the development of the piano etude genre in China, provides an analysis of the metrorhythmic organization of Lo Maisho's etudes. Thus, the purpose of the study is to analyze new trends in the development of the piano etude genre in China, the subject is the metrorhythmic organization of the musical fabric. In piano studies, Lo Maisho reaches a new level in the progression of the genre. He identifies new trends in Chinese piano music, introducing elements of folk songs, imitation of the sounds of traditional musical instruments, reflecting the imagery and various cultural characteristics of the peoples of various regions of China, introduces new techniques of metrorhythmic organization. The composer does not limit himself to the use of pentatonics, but resolutely strives for innovations in the genre of etude. It is noteworthy that the author departs from the established tradition, which is based on the use of Western European techniques combined with the intonation culture of Chinese melodies, he offers new forms of compositional solutions.

КОЛОРИСТИЧНА ЛЕКСИКА У ТВОРЕННІ ЕМОЦІЙНОГО ТА ЕСТЕТИЧНОГО ЕФЕКТУ В ПОЕЗІЇ СИЛЬВІЇ ПЛАТ

Sylvia Plath's poetry has become an indisputable fact of the literary life of the English-speaking world, and thanks to numerous translations, including into Ukrainian, it has exerted an influence on other literatures. Sylvia Plath belongs to those original authors whose works never cease to amaze readers and critics. Sylvia Plath published little during her life, after her death thousands of pages of not only poetry and novels, but also diaries and epistolary heritage remained – an inexhaustible source for searching for the deep essence of the poetess. It is noteworthy that the collection of her poetry, which was published by her ex-husband, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 – an award given for new literary achievements. This award was given for poems that were more than twenty years old at the time. Very different topic, the mosaic of poetic style is the source of an increasing number of studies in the direction of both traditional literary studies and modern cultural, linguistic, and intertextual studies. The main motives and images of Sylvia Plath's poetic works are created around the theme of female loneliness against the background of the traditional patriarchal understanding of her gender role and personal frustration with this loneliness, using a wide range of expressive means of poetic language and linguistic structures, which found their embodiment in lexical-semantic and stylistic intonation features of the poet's work. The article is devoted to the characteristics of the color vocabulary in Sylvia Plath's poetry.

CNN-Based Identification of Parkinson's Disease from Continuous Speech in Noisy Environments.

Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by dopaminergic neuron degeneration. Parkinsonian speech impairment is one of the earliest presentations of the disease and, along with tremor, is suitable for pre-diagnosis. It is defined by hypokinetic dysarthria and accounts for respiratory, phonatory, articulatory, and prosodic manifestations. The topic of this article targets artificial-intelligence-based identification of Parkinson's disease from continuous speech recorded in a noisy environment. The novelty of this work is twofold. First, the proposed assessment workflow performed speech analysis on samples of continuous speech. Second, we analyzed and quantified Wiener filter applicability for speech denoising in the context of Parkinsonian speech identification. We argue that the Parkinsonian features of loudness, intonation, phonation, prosody, and articulation are contained in the speech, speech energy, and Mel spectrograms. Thus, the proposed workflow follows a feature-based speech assessment to determine the feature variation ranges, followed by speech classification using convolutional neural networks. We report the best classification accuracies of 96% on speech energy, 93% on speech, and 92% on Mel spectrograms. We conclude that the Wiener filter improves both feature-based analysis and convolutional-neural-network-based classification performances.

Comparative Analysis of Phonetic Systems of the Russian, French and Chinese Languages

This choice of this material for comparison - the phonetic systems of three languages: Russian, French and Chinese - is due to the fact that in the process of teaching the Russian language to foreign students, teachers face the need to work with a multilingual audience, which may include speakers of different and often unrelated languages while the formation of phonetic skills is an indispensable condition for adequate verbal communication and successful verbal communication in general. It was these circumstances that led to the choice of three languages for comparative analysis. The main purpose of such a comparison is the possibility of predicting possible interference errors in the speech of foreigners at the phonetic level. Comparative analysis revealed that, despite the colossal structural difference between French and Chinese, there are many points of contact, on the basis of which it is quite realistic to predict common pronunciation errors for French and Chinese audiences. As a result of the study, the authors came to the conclusion that similar features of the phonetic systems of French and Chinese, leading to interference errors, can be due to the belonging of both languages to the vocal type. Problems related to the rules of positional changes associated with the consonantism characteristic of the Russian language are also common to speakers of French and Chinese. When comparing the rhythmic and intonational features of the three languages, it becomes obvious that in this aspect, the speakers of French and Chinese are also characterized by common typical mistakes: the lack of reduction of unstressed vowels, the incorrect allocation of a stressed syllable, and the indistinguishability of intonational structures. The relevance of the study is due to the need to develop nationally-oriented courses in phonetics, which would allow to correctly build work on the localization and prevention of interference errors in the speech of foreign students in a multilingual audience.

Прозодични и интонационни особености на различните части на речта във въпросителните изречения

This paper focuses on the prosodic and intonation features of question words in simple and complex sentences, as well as on the differences in prosody and intonation of these words when functioning as different parts of speech (e.g. who came (who = N) and which person (who = A). The study of this topic is significant, as it sheds light on the prosodic and intonation correspondences in question-answer sentence pairs, as well as on the distinctive intonation of words capable of performing different functions in the sentence structure.

Comparing segmental and suprasegmental features in speaker gender perception: An acoustic distance approach

Segmental (e.g., articulation) and suprasegmental (e.g., intonation) speech features provide meaningful perceptual cues to speaker gender. Yet, the relative perceptual importance of these features remains poorly understood. Further, proposed methods for quantifying these features often require labor-intensive measurement by human judges. This study used an acoustic-only method to quantify segmental and suprasegmental features among 60 speakers with varied gender identities (e.g., non-binary, transgender and cisgender men and women) and compared these acoustic measures to human perceptual judgements of speaker gender. Thirty listeners rated confidence in speaker gender and masculinity/femininity for each speaker. To obtain acoustic distance among speakers, three conditions were created that manipulated which acoustic features were present in the speech utterances. Acoustic distance was calculated in each of the three conditions between each speaker and a cisgender man and woman who were perceptually rated as most gender prototypical. Acoustic distances for the three conditions were fit to regression models to determine which was most predictive of listeners’ perceptual judgements. Both segmental and intonation features predicted perceptual measures. However, segmental cues better explained listener’s ratings, suggesting their greater perceptual weighting in listeners’ judgements of speaker gender.