F0 Movement Research Articles

Exploring and explaining variation in phrase-final f0 movements in spontaneous Papuan Malay.

This study investigates the variation in phrase-final f0 movements found in dyadic unscripted conversations in Papuan Malay, an Eastern Indonesian language. This is done by a novel combination of exploratory and confirmatory classification techniques. In particular, this study investigates the linguistic factors that potentially drive f0 contour variation in phrase-final words produced in a naturalistic interactive dialogue task. To this end, a cluster analysis, manual labelling and random forest analysis are carried out to reveal the main sources of contour variation. These are: taking conversational interaction into account; turn transition, topic continuation, information structure (givenness and contrast), and context-independent properties of words such as word class, syllable structure, voicing and intrinsic f0. Results indicate that contour variation in Papuan Malay, in particular f0 direction and target level, is best explained by turn transitions between speakers, corroborating similar findings for related languages. The applied methods provide opportunities to further lower the threshold of incorporating intonation and prosody in the early stages of language documentation.

Investigating Perception to Production Transfer in Children With Cochlear Implants: A High Variability Phonetic Training Study.

This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking children with CIs were quasirandomly assigned into the training group (TG) and the control group (CG). The 16 TG participants received five sessions of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) within a period of 3 weeks. The CG participants did not receive the training. Perception and production of Mandarin tones were administered before (pretest) and immediately after (posttest) the completion of HVPT via lexical tone recognition task and picture naming task. Both groups participated in the identical pretest and posttest with the same time frame between the two test sessions. TG showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest in identifying Mandarin tones for both trained and untrained speech stimuli. Moreover, perceptual learning of HVPT significantly facilitated trainees' production of T1 and T2 as rated by a cohort of 10 Mandarin-speaking adults with normal hearing, which was corroborated by acoustic analyses revealing improved fundamental frequency (F0) median for T1 and T2 production and enlarged F0 movement for T2 production. In contrast, TG children's production of T3 and T4 showed nonsignificant changes across two test sessions. Meanwhile, CG did not exhibit significant changes in either perception or production. The results suggest a limited and inconsistent transfer of perceptual learning to lexical tone production in children with CIs, which challenges the notion of a robust transfer and highlights the complexity of the interaction between perceptual training and production outcomes. Further research on individual differences with a longitudinal design is needed to optimize the training protocol or tailor interventions to better meet the diverse needs of learners.

Tonal context influences tone-duration interaction: Evidence from Cantonese.

Phonetic typological studies suggest that syllable duration is inversely correlated with the accompanying tone's approximate average f0, and tones with dynamic f0 movement tend to be in longer syllables rather than shorter ones. Systematic instrumental investigations on tone-duration interaction remain scant, however; existing studies might be confounded as tonal context may impact duration realization due to phonetic constraints on tonal movement. This study investigates the effect of tonal environment on the durational realization of tones in Cantonese, showing that tone-dependent duration variation is governed by the tonal context. Implications of these findings for existing phonetic typology concerning tone-duration interaction are discussed.

Range in the Use and Realization of BIN in African American English.

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic, and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as "stressed." It brings together data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and a production study in a small African American English-speaking community in southwest Louisiana to investigate the use and phonetic realization of BIN constructions. Only 20 instances of BIN constructions were found in CORAAL. This sparsity was not simply due to a dearth of semantic contexts for BIN in the interviews, since 122 instances of semantically equivalent been + temporal adverbial variants were also found. These results raise questions about the extent to which BIN constructions and been + temporal adverbial variants are used in different pragmatic and discourse contexts as well as in different speech styles. The production study elicited BIN and past participle been constructions in controlled syntactic and semantic environments. The phonetic realization of BIN was found to be distributed over the entire utterance rather than localized to BIN. BIN utterances were distinguished from past participle been utterances by having higher ratios of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration in BIN/been relative to preceding and following material in the utterance. In both studies, BIN utterances were generally realized with a high F0 peak on BIN and a reduced F0 range in the post-BIN region, with variability in the presence and kinds of F0 movements utterance-initially and utterance-finally, as well as in F0 downtrends in the post-BIN region.

The role of f0 shape and phrasal position in Papuan Malay and American English word identification.

The prosodic structure of under-researched languages in the Trade Malay language family is poorly understood. Although boundary marking has been uncontroversially shown as the major prosodic function in these languages, studies on the use of pitch accents to highlight important words in a phrase remain inconclusive. In addition, most knowledge of pitch accents is based on well-researched languages such as the ones from the Western-Germanic language family. This paper reports two word identification experiments comparing Papuan Malay with the pitch accent language American English, in order to investigate theextent to which the demarcating and highlighting function of prosody can be disentangled. To this end, target words were presented to native listeners of both languages and differed with respect to their position in the phrase (medial or final) and the shape of their f0 movement (original or manipulated). Reaction times for the target word identifications revealed overall faster responses for original and final words compared to manipulated and medial ones. The results add to previous findings on the facilitating effect of pitch accents and further improve our prosodic knowledge of underresearched languages.

Efeitos de movimentos de F0, intensidade e duração na identificação perceptiva da questão parcial e da exclamação no português brasileiro

ABSTRACT This study presents a perceptual analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese wh-question and wh-exclamation intonational contours to discriminate their acoustic and perceptual features. The corpus of this study is composed of the sentence “Como você sabe” (“How do you know” vs. “How clever you are!”), which was produced with both speech acts. Two perceptual identification experiments were designed to assess the subjects’ ability to identify these speech acts based on their prosodic characteristics, as well as the perceptual relevance of specific prosodic cues in the recognition of wh-questions and wh-exclamations. The results of the first perceptual test indicated that Brazilian listeners can identify these two speech acts by intonation only, whereas the second test showed that F0, duration and intensity cues contribute to the perceptual identification of the speech acts. Stimuli with a falling F0 movement in the last stressed syllable tend to be interpreted as wh-questions, whereas stimuli with a slightly rising F0 movement tend to be judged as wh-exclamations.

Command intonation in Brazilian Portuguese: a dialectal description from ALiB corpus

In this paper, we described the command intonational contours in the twenty-five Brazilian capitals included in the corpus “Linguistic Atlas of Brazil” (ALiB). This work aims at: (i) describing the intonational contour of twenty-five capitals from the corpus ALiB; (ii) comparing the intonation of the directive speech acts in the five Brazilian regions and (iii) proposing a phonological representation of the variation of this contour. Our corpus is composed of fifty imperative utterances produced by male and female speakers of the analyzed capitals. We observed that there is a predominance of a rising F0 movement in the prenucleus of the command contours with the phonological notation L*+H or L+H* in the twentyfive Brazilian capitals. In the nuclear position, the pitch accent can be defined for the majority of the capitals as H+L*L%, a falling F0 movement, with the variant H*L% for the capital Belém (PA). The capital that presented a different F0 movement in the nucleus was Florianópolis (SC) that showed the predominance of a rising-falling F0 movement represented as L+H*L%.

F0-related head movement in blind versus sighted speakers.

This study investigated the relationship between head movement and fundamental frequency (F0) during speech by comparing continuous speech of congenitally blind and sighted speakers from YouTube videos. Positive correlations were found between F0 (measured in semitones) and vertical head movement for both speaker groups, with a stronger correlation for blind speakers. In addition, larger head movements and larger head movement per semitone ratios were observed for sighted speakers. These results suggest that physiological processes may account for part of the F0-related head movement and that sighted speakers use the visual modality to communicate F0 information through augmented head movement.

Demarcating and highlighting in Papuan Malay phrase prosody.

Phrase-level prosody serves two essential functions in many languages of the world: chunking information into units (demarcating) and marking important information (highlighting). Recent work suggests that prosody has a mainly demarcating function in the Trade Malay language family. That is, the use of pitch accents in these languages is limited or absent, as the main prosodic events occur on the final two syllables in a phrase. The current study investigates the extent to which Papuan Malay phrase prosody is used for demarcating and highlighting, taking into account the potential influence of word stress. This is done by means of acoustic analyses on a corpus of spontaneous speech. Both the form (F0 movement) and the possible functions (demarcating and highlighting) of the final two syllables in Papuan Malay phrases are investigated. Although most results favor the demarcating function of Papuan Malay phrase prosody, a highlighting function cannot be ruled out. The results suggest that Papuan Malay might hold an exceptional position in the typology of prosodic prominence.

Complex illocutive units in language into act theory

This work presents a preliminary analysis for a prosodic description of two different spoken structures in spoken language within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT): (i) chains of two or more Bound Comments (COB) that do not form a compositional informative and prosodic unit; (ii) compositional Information Units formed by two or more Multiple Comments (CMM) of the List type, linked together by a conventional prosodic model that implements a specific meta-illocutive structure . The goal of this study is to underline specific features of the COB units and the List-type CMM units, detecting prosodic properties of Italian and Brazilian Portuguese spoken language. Through a specific script for Praat software, different parameters are automatically calculated: f0 reset, slope and variation rate, pause duration, spectral emphasis. Our results highlighted a common prosodic behavior in COB-units in terms of f0 movement (rising in the stressed syllable before the break and falling in the unstressed one just before the break), and high similarity between the two COBs and Lists, but also the need to distinguish the effects connected to the position of the stress from the specific features of the unit as detectable Textual Unit.

Variations of F2 range measures in mild dysarthria and healthy talkers

Diminished vocalic segments indexed by the extent, duration, and rate of change in the second formant (F2) are common in dysarthria and are known to reduce intelligibility in adults with multiple sclerosis (MS; Hartelius et al., 2010). When F2 range was measured over select sentences from a reading passage, results indicated that the F2 range may not be sensitive to mild dysarthria in MS (Rosen et al., 2008). However, measures of the F2 range should be further explored for sentences imposing greater speech-motor and cognitive-linguistic demands. As such, phonetic contexts requiring even small vocal tract movement may contribute to intelligibility for speakers with mild dysarthria in MS. Thus, this study will investigate the impact of sentence length and complexity on within-speaker variations of F2 movement and group differences for 12 adults with mild dysarthria in MS and 12 healthy talkers. Various F2 range measures shown to be sensitive to speech motor capabilities will be obtained from 11 audio-recorded sentences varying in length and complexity. The results of this study will provide a better understanding of the speech motor control capabilities of speakers with mild dysarthria with relatively preserved intelligibility in MS. [Work supported by ASH Foundation and the University at Buffalo MDRF.]Diminished vocalic segments indexed by the extent, duration, and rate of change in the second formant (F2) are common in dysarthria and are known to reduce intelligibility in adults with multiple sclerosis (MS; Hartelius et al., 2010). When F2 range was measured over select sentences from a reading passage, results indicated that the F2 range may not be sensitive to mild dysarthria in MS (Rosen et al., 2008). However, measures of the F2 range should be further explored for sentences imposing greater speech-motor and cognitive-linguistic demands. As such, phonetic contexts requiring even small vocal tract movement may contribute to intelligibility for speakers with mild dysarthria in MS. Thus, this study will investigate the impact of sentence length and complexity on within-speaker variations of F2 movement and group differences for 12 adults with mild dysarthria in MS and 12 healthy talkers. Various F2 range measures shown to be sensitive to speech motor capabilities will be obtained from 11 audio-record...

Effect of contrastive focus on vowel duration in Bangla

The present study looks at Bangla, spoken near Kolkata, West Bengal, which has got the status of standard Bangla in present era, belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Vowel length distinction is not phonemic in Bangla. However, the impact of various prosodic positions and information structure is quite obvious on the phonetic duration of the vowel. This paper presents an acoustic study of the effect of Contrastive focus on the duration of the high vowels /i/ and /u/ in Bangla. Six monosyllabic and six disyllabic words with the target vowels, altogether 24 words have been recorded in both Contrastive focus and Neutral focus contexts. 24 sentences as response to yes-no questions and for Neutral focus, 24 simple declarative sentences were recorded from six speakers of Standard Kolkata Bangla between age group of 20-25. In Bangla, Focus is realized by low rising pitch pattern where the f0 movement have low f0 valley followed by a rise (Hayes and Lahiri 1991). The present study...

Pitch accents in read speech: Black and White southern women

Prosodic variation between African American English and General American English has been attested to in numerous works, yet few studies have collected measures of F0 in African American English and fewer have examined F0 beyond the word level. Additionally, the analysis of prosodic variation in regional dialects of American English is not well studied. F0 movement at the level of the Intonational Phrase (IP) is known to convey both local and global information. Research on F0 movement in General American English has analyzed combinations of H(igh) and (L)ow pitch accents as categorical markers of prosodic alignment to the segmental string. Understanding the alignment of F0 contours provides key information on phonetic realization and phonological alignment in the creation of intonational categories. This pilot data explores the interaction of F0, vowel duration and word duration of prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents in the read speech of Black and White southern women. This study seeks to determine if group differences exists in the expression of pitch accents between the regionally defined socio-ethnic dialects used by the two groups. Results will be discussed in terms of dialect variation.

What happens when f0 movements and prosodic units were randomly aligned?

According to intonation phonology, surface f0 is generated from superimposition of local f0 events associated with hierarchical prosodic units (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 1980). This study conducted two experiments to investigate whether or to what extent the misalignment between f0 patterns and prosodic units would result in awkward-sounding English intonation. In Experiment 1, f0 contours of utterances from Obama Weekly Address were extracted via Praat, interpolated and smoothed using a quadratic spine, and superimposed to another Obama-Weekly-Address stretch by PSOLA algorithm. The perception result, surprisingly, showed that the resynthesized sentence still sounded quite natural in intonation, regardless of the random alignment between f0 patterns and the location of stresses and phrases. In Experiment 2, the Obama-Weekly-Address stretches were superimposed with f0 contours of three different languages that differ in the size of basic prosodic domains: Mandarin (a tone language), Korean (an accent phrase language) and Ukrainian (a stress language). The perception results showed that utterances superimposed with Korean and Ukrainian f0 contours still sounded quite natural and native, while Mandarin f0 contours sounded somehow fluctuational on English segments. These results suggested that f0 movements might not be largely determined by prosody structures, but by language-independent constrains such as physiological plausibility and expediency.

On the phrase-level function of f0 in Estonian

In intonation languages, prominence-lending pitch movements are frequently aligned with sentence focus. In some free word order languages f0 may act as an acoustic correlate of focus together with focus-sensitive variation in word order. With respect to Estonian, a flexible word order language, this raises the question of how word order, which is sensitive to focus structure, interacts with intonation. This study explored how focus and word positioning affect f0 via a production experiment involving elicitation of laboratory speech. The results showed that independently of word order, the focal word was aligned with prominence-lending f0 movement, thus demonstrating that in Estonian narrow focus is related to f0, as is typical in intonation languages.

Earlier or Higher? Comparing French rising-falling contour with rising contour in a corpus of conversation

In French intonation, a rising-falling contour (RF) has been described by many authors, but the characteristics of its phonetic realization as well at its phonological status remain controversial. Is its f0 movement temporally aligned earlier compared to the f0 movement of the simple rise (R)? Or is it scaled higher in the speaker’s pitch range? Does it convey conviction and obviousness while the simple rise rather announces that the speaker has more to say? Firstly, the present study compared the phonetic implementation of RF and R in a corpus of naturally occurring conversation. Through the application of a wavelet-based functional mixed model, we could detect significant differences between the shapes of the f0 curves corresponding to RF and R contours. Results show that RF and R mainly differ with respect to the timing of the rise and the amplitude of the falling part. They thus support the claim that these characteristics are more important than the scaling of the pitch peak for the implementation of the contrast between RF and R. Secondly, the results of a forced choice identification task performed by naïve listeners show that they consistently associate the RF contour with the expression of conviction and obviousness and the R contour with the indication that the speaker has more to say.

Focus marking in Dutch by heritage speakers of Turkish and Dutch L1 speakers

Studies on heritage speakers generally reveal effects from the dominant L2 on the weaker L1, but it is less clear whether cross-linguistic transfer also occurs in the other direction: from the L1 to the dominant L2. This study explores whether the Dutch prosody of heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands differs from that of L1 speakers of Dutch who do not speak Turkish, and whether observed differences could be attributed to an effect of Turkish. The experiment elicited semi-spontaneous sentences in broad and contrastive focus. The analysis included f0 movements, peak alignment, and duration. Although both participant groups used prosody to mark focus (e.g., time-compressed f0 movements for contrastive focus), there were also differences between the groups. For instance, while the L1 speakers of Dutch showed declination, the bilinguals remained at the same pitch level throughout the sentence. Ipek (2015) and Kamalı (2011) also noted a limited pitch range in the prenuclear area in Turkish. We argue that the prosodic differences could be due to an effect of Turkish on Dutch prosody, suggesting that the weaker L1 in Turkish heritage speakers may affect the dominant L2 in the prosodic domain.

Fundamental frequency movements in one-word imperatives

F0 contours in Spanish declarative and imperative sentences have traditionally been described as identical and it has not been until recently that several phonetic variables have been identified as markers of imperativity. These include higher overall F0s, early peak alignments in pre-nuclear pitch-accents, upstepped nuclear pitch-accents and marginal use of high boundary tones. Since previous analyses have concentrated on utterances with multiple pitch-accents, not much is know about productions with just one word. This study focuses on one-word utterances given the tendency of imperatives to be short and taking into account that some of the aforementioned phonetic markers cannot be used with a sole pitch-accent. The analysis of 117 declarative sentences and 256 imperatives produced by eight Spanish speakers demonstrated that in cases where declaratives and imperatives share the same contour (L+>H*L%), the latter tend to have higher F0 peaks (Wilcoxon signed-rank test; p<0.000). Besides, 32.4% of the imperatives showed F0 contours ending in high boundary tones, a marker not used in declaratives and only marginally found in imperatives with multiple pitch-accents. Current findings suggest that when segmental material limits F0 movements, speakers look for alternative phonetic strategies to distinguish between declaratives and imperatives.

Mechanism of Disyllabic Tonal Reduction in Taiwan Mandarin.

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that time pressure is a direct cause of tonal reduction in Taiwan Mandarin. Tonal reduction refers to the phenomenon of the tones of a disyllabic unit being contracted into a monosyllabic unit. An experiment was carried out in which six native Taiwan Mandarin male speakers produced sentences containing disyllabic compound words /ma/+/ma/ with varying tonal combinations at different speech rates. Analyses indicated that increasing time pressure led to severe tonal reductions. Articulatory effort, measured by the slope of F0 peak velocity of unidirectional movement over F0 movement amplitude, is insufficient to compensate for duration-dependent undershoot (in particular, when time pressure exceeds certain thresholds). Mechanisms of tonal reduction were further examined by comparing F0 velocity profiles against the Edge-in model, a rule-based phonological model. Results showed that the residual tonal variants in contracted syllables are gradient rather than categorical--as duration is shortened, the movement towards the desired targets is gradually curtailed.

Prosodic Consequences of Sarcasm Versus Sincerity in Mexican Spanish

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final activity and attitude was also examined. Acoustic and statistical analyses comparing both attitudes based on gender and relative communicative importance of words revealed that across speakers, sarcasm resulted in decreases in speech rate and F0 mean and increased stressed syllable length in attitudinally relevant words. In expressions of sarcasm, males significantly decreased F0 range and movement in relevant words and stressed vowel intensity in all words. They also displayed evidence of an utterance-final circumflex F0 configuration, namely in cases of sincerity. These results expand our knowledge of attitude's effects on prosody, in general, and of Mexican Spanish prosody, in particular.