Intonation System Research Articles

A Description of Tucumán Spanish Intonation in Argentina

AbstractThis paper documents for the first time the intonation system of Tucumán Spanish, an understudied variety of Argentinian Spanish. Semi-spontaneous speech illustrating the intonation of main sentence types, i.e. broad focus statements, partial and absolute interrogatives, and imperatives and vocatives, was elicited from 31 native speakers of Tucumán Spanish via an adapted version of the Argentinian Intonation Survey (Prieto and Roseano, 2009-2013). The two authors listened to the recordings and transcribed them using the Tones and Break Indexes conventions (ToBI) (Beckman et al. 2002, Prieto and Roseano 2010, Hualde and Prieto 2015). Transcriptions of prenuclear and nuclear configurations together with their respective frequencies allowed both an appreciation of the most used configurations within each sentence type along with detailed variation at the phonetic level. For example, yes/no questions were consistently realized with a low nuclear pitch accent L* and an ascending boundary tone. However, there was variation in the height of the boundary tones yielding the frequent contour L* ¡H%, and the less frequent L* H%. Altogether, these detailed patterns document the systematic phonetic variation of the intonation system of TS and provide a basis for future research to determine the phonological status of this variation.

Harmony outside the Iron Cage: Tanaka Shōhei’s Strategic Deconstruction of the Music-Theoretical Edifice

Tanaka Shōhei was a major figure in both Japanese and comparative musicology. Convinced by his tutor in Tokyo (Mendenhall) that Japanese music must embrace harmony in order to become “modern,” Tanaka was admonished by his advisor in Berlin (Helmholtz) that the Japanese must not adopt twelve-tone equal temperament because of its adverse effects on the ear—contradictory advice given that the latter was considered the simplest way of enabling the smooth functioning of the former. His solution involved a system of musical intonation whereby the octave was divided into fifty-three (as opposed to twelve) tones. In the context of his overall project, however, this theoretical innovation was only the first step. His goal was to reproduce a sort of harmonic “rationality” in Japanese music, while preserving its expressive melodic freedom: in Weberian terms, he wanted a different sort of modernity, one that escaped the confines of the iron cage.

Question Word Intonation in Tashlhiyt Berber: Is ‘high’ good enough?

The present study investigates the intonational marking of question words (qwords) in Tashlhiyt Berber. The first part of the study identifies a number of possible prosodic patterns on qwords as employed in conversational contexts. When they occur in a direct interrogative, qwords are marked with a rise in pitch towards a H(igh) target and a subsequent fall. By contrast, when the qword is embedded, no tonal targets occur on it. The second part consists of a detailed investigation of the alignment and scaling of qwords in utterance-initial position and in narrow focus. While the H target is consistently present somewhere on the qword, neither a local F0 maximum nor a high plateau region is characterized by stable alignment with any specific position in the segmental string. Scaling of the starting point (%L) and endpoint (H) of the rise characteristic of the qword exhibited a dependency on alignment: The rise is somewhat truncated if the peak is aligned early in the word. This study’s results shed more light on the intonation system of Tashlhiyt and support earlier findings suggesting that tonal placement in this language is prone to a typologically unusual degree of variability.

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСНОВЫ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ ЭМОТИВНОЙ ФУНКЦИИ ИНТОНАЦИИ

The current paper focuses on responses to major questions that determine the correctness of researching the emotive function of intonation: 1) the problem of classifying emotions; 2) universal / idioethnic nature of expressing emotions by means of intonation; 3) intonation pattern structure significant for adequate description of intonation emotive types; 4) the place of emotive intonation patterns in language intonation system; 5) variety of emotive intonation patterns; 6) methods of planning experiments for studying emotive intonation.

Prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish

Abstract This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation experiments with a total of 5 balanced bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM), 5 Spanish dominant bilingual speakers of YS and YM, and 5monolingual speakers of YS suggest that in YS contrastive focus is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the Intonation Phrase, followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety importantly differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. De la Mota 2010). However, the systematic behavior described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish dominant and monolingual speakers, whereas the data produced by the balanced bilingual speakers is characterized by a much higher amount of idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems in language contact settings is, among other things, a matter of gradual consolidation or strengthening of features.

An intonational investigation of five sentence types in Kannada

Kannada (ISO 639-3 kan) is a Dravidian language spoken by almost 40 million people, primarily in Karnataka state in southern India. It is the official language of Karnataka and one of the scheduled languages of India. Despite its prominence, there is little published in English on the language’s intonation systems. This project furthers knowledge of Kannada intonation that is available to speakers of English, with implications for pedagogy and cross-cultural communication. Two female and two male native speakers were recorded in dyads, participating in a scripted conversation containing five types of sentences. F0 contours were examined to determine intonational tunes for different sentence types.

ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION PROBLEMS OF THE TERTIARY LEVEL STUDENTS IN BANGLADESH: A CASE STUDY

INTRODUCTION:In Bangladesh, English has been in use for more than four centuries, first as the language of the early merchants, missionaries and settlers; then as the language of the British colonial power; later as the associate official language in the postcolonial Pakistan period and finally - in the last few decades after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971- as the most important and widely used perceived second language. Even it has been about seventy years since the British left the Indian sub -continent; it continues to play an important role in numerous domains of Bengali life. Numerous newspapers, journals and magazines are published in English in Bangladesh. English also enjoys a very privileged position in the education sector. English-medium education, with higher education, particularly in private sector, is often accessible only through English. As a result, the teaching of English has turned into a profitable business. In job sector, too, English is a determining factor. Therefore, in The National Education Policy 2010, English Education has been given much priority to build strong, confident and international based citizens and nation to compete with modern world.The policy suggests to take appropriate steps from the very early stage of education to ensure English writing and speaking skills with further emphasis in the forthcoming classes as per needs. English is also suggested to be taught as a compulsory subject at the degree level of all colleges and universities. The study also recommends to appoint English teachers to high schools and higher education for ensuring better English education. In the policy, English is also suggested to remain as a medium of instruction in higher education along with Bangla. (National Education Policy 2010).Thus, while the demand of English, on the whole, is soaring, the spoken English with correct pronunciation is the most neglected area in Bangladesh. Let alone secondary and higher secondary students, even tertiary students of Bangladesh have so many unfixed problems in pronunciation. L1 interference is dominantly present in their English pronunciation. Thus, their pronunciation is influenced by different Bangladeshi dialects and standard Bangla as well. As they are not familiar with International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols, they cannot differentiate between Bangla and English phonology. Moreover, they do not get much motivation to improve their English pronunciation by the teachers. Therefore, with the aim of dealing with pronunciation difficulties of Bangladeshi tertiary learners of English, the present study surrounds the following questions:1. What English sounds do the tertiary students of Bangladesh face problems to produce with?2. What kinds of factors are responsible for the difficulties of English pronunciation by the students?3. How much influence do the dialects of Bangla have on English pronunciation of the students?REVIEW OF LITERATURE:Various researchers showed that English pronunciation problem is a common phenomenon in many countries where English is a second or foreign language.In tracing out difficulties faced by Bangladeshi speakers of English, Rahman (1996), in a study, has found that in Bangladesh, English is spoken with an accent related to the mother tongue which pays little attention to sound patterns, stress, rhythm and intonation system of English. Haque et al. (1990, as cited in Rahman, 1996, p.15) shows that a Bengali vowel is not conditioned by length. On the other hand, length distinguishes English vowel sounds /i: i,o: o, u: u/. Bengali speakers do not usually make any distinctions between long and short vowels. For example- they pronounce /ful/ and /fu:l/ in the same way. He again found that the chief difficulty for a Bengali learner is using the weak forms /a/ and /i/ in unstressed syllables. This is not usually observed by a Bengali speaker.Along the same context, Mujaffar (1999) observes that Bangladeshi speakers pronounce the voiced palatal plosive /z/ and the voiced palato alveolar affricate /^/ as allophones of same phoneme. …

Surface and Structure: Transcribing Intonation within and across Languages

Intonation is the phonologically structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings. As in other speech sound domains, analyzing intonation involves mapping continuously variable physical parameters to categories. The categories of intonation are organized in a set of relations and rule-governed distributions that define the intonation system of a language. From physical realizations, as shown by pitch tracks, surface or phonetic tonal patterns can be identified in terms of tonal targets. Whether surface patterns correspond or not to categories within a given intonation system requires looking at their distributions and contrastiveness. In this paper, I assume the view that a transcription is an analysis of the intonation system, which ultimately aims to identify the contrastive intonation categories of a given language and establish how they signal meaning. Under this view, it is crucial to discuss the ways surface pitch patterns and structural pitch patterns (or phonological categories) are related. Given that intonational analysis is driven by system-internal considerations and that cues to a given category can vary across languages, it is also important to address the issue of how a language-specific transcription can be reconciled with the need and ability to do cross-language comparison of intonation. Bearing on these two issues, I discuss surface and structure in intonational analysis, drawing on mismatches between (dis)similarities in the phonetics and phonology of pitch contours, across languages and language varieties.

Analytical Decisions in Intonation Research and the Role of Representations: Lessons from Romani

This paper presents an analysis of the intonational system of Greek Thrace Romani. The analysis serves to highlight the difficulties that spontaneous fieldwork data pose for traditional methods of intonational research largely developed for use with controlled speech elicited in the laboratory or under laboratory-like conditions from educated speakers of standardized languages. It leads to proposing a set of principles and procedures which can help deal with the variability inherent in spontaneous data; these principles and procedures apply particularly to data from less homogeneous speech communities but are relevant for the intonation analysis of any linguistic system. This approach relies on the understanding that autosegmental-metrical representations of intonation are phonological representations, not means of faithfully depicting pitch contours per se. It follows that representations should capture what is contrastive in the intonational system under analysis. In turn, this entails that new categories are posited, taking the meaning of tonal events into account and after due consideration of all legitimate sources of phonetic variation. It is argued that following this procedure allows for more robust analyses and is particularly advantageous when data are highly variable. This view is discussed in light of the analysis of Greek Thrace Romani, and in combination with recent proposals for greater uniformity and phonetic transparency in intonational representations, traits which are said to lead to greater insights in typological and cross-varietal research. It is shown that these goals are not better served by a level of broad phonetic transcription which encodes an arbitrary selection of phonetic variants.

THE PECULIARITIES OF SPEECH AND MUSIC INTERACTION IN SPEECH-AND-MUSIC WORKS

The article is devoted to revealing the peculiarities of speech and music integrated functioning in the generative process of a speech-and-music work. Various forms of speech and music interaction are presented, among which the simultaneous generation of speech and music component is regarded as the most productive while a speech-and-music product created by adding a musical component to the poetic text is considered to be the most controversial. In the paper the author dwells on the importance to understand what exactly helps the composer to feel the most essential points in such a complex unity that is a poetic text and to adequately convey the poet’s original intention. Factors enabling adequate speech-and-music synthesis include the elements of intonation system, primarily rhythm and meter. Additionally, the nature of a speech-and-music work is predetermined by the means of lexical and syntactic language levels: The author stresses upon the special role of emotional-and-pragmatic potential, which accumulates the author’s concept of a poetic text, conveyed with the help of the integrated interaction of all language means. The paper substantiates the expediency and feasibility of the further study of speech and music relations by the comparison of emotional-and-pragmatic potentials of a poetic and a speech-and-music work.

An E-Learning System of Phrase Accent and Intonation for Learners of Japanese, Based on Phonetic Segment Labels and Fundamental Frequency

An E-Learning System of Phrase Accent and Intonation for Learners of Japanese, Based on Phonetic Segment Labels and Fundamental Frequency

Neural correlates of prosodic boundary perception in German preschoolers: If pause is present, pitch can go

Children׳s perception of prosodic phrasing provides a head start into the discovery of speech structure. Based on the close prosody–syntax correspondence, children can infer the underlying syntactic structure from the acoustic modulations of prosodic boundaries, typically consisting of co-occurring pitch changes, preboundary lengthening, and pausing. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed that listeners are to some degree flexible in the detection of major prosodic boundaries that are not marked with all three of the suprasegmental cues. Adults and 6-year-olds still showed the brain response for prosodic boundary perception, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), when pauses marking boundaries were deleted. In contrast, younger children at 3 years did not show this ability yet, but required pausing to complement the other boundary cues. Following the hypothesis that German weights duration cues more heavily than pitch cues, we here examined 3-year-olds׳ brain responses to prosodic phrasing, testing the role of boundary-related pitch changes. Results revealed that children at this age even showed the CPS in response to pitch-neutralized boundaries with only pausing and preboundary lengthening being present. These results indicate differential roles of acoustic cues in boundary perception, with a preferential reliance on duration cues over pitch changes in 3-year-olds. This preference likely results from the characteristics of the German intonation system and furthers the discussion of cross-linguistic differences in the weighting of prosodic boundary cues.

Effects of production training and perception training on lexical tone perception – A behavioral and ERP study

The present study recorded both behavioral data and event-related brain potentials to examine the effectiveness of a perception-only training and a perception-plus-production training procedure on the intentional and unintentional perception of lexical tone by native English listeners. In the behavioral task, both the perception-only and the perception-plus-production groups improved on the tone discrimination abilities after the training session. Moreover, the participants in both groups generalized the improvements gained through the trained stimuli to the untrained stimuli. In the ERP task, the Mismatch Negativity was smaller in the post-training task than in the pre-training task. However, the two training groups did not differ in tone processing at the intentional or unintentional level after training. These results suggest that the employment of the motor system does not specifically benefit the tone perceptual skills. Furthermore, the present study investigated whether some tone pairs are more easily confused than others by native English listeners, and whether the order of tone presentation influences non-native tone discrimination. In the behavioral task, Tone2-Tone1 (rising-level) and Tone2-Tone4 (rising-falling) were the most difficult tone pairs, while Tone1-Tone2 and Tone4-Tone2 were the easiest tone pairs, even though they involved the same tone contrasts respectively. In the ERP task, the native English listeners had good discrimination when Tone2 and Tone4 were embedded in strings of Tone1, while poor discrimination when Tone1 was inserted in the context of Tone2 or Tone4. These asymmetries in tone perception might be attributed to the interference of native intonation system and can be altered by training.

Huichol (Wixxrika) Word Accent: Typology, Interactions, and Implications

The analysis of systems of tone, stress, and intonation in the world’s languages is a center of debate in modern phonology. While prototypical cases of stress languages such as English and tone languages such as Yoruba are well understood, languages on the peripheries of these prototypes, especially those with interactions between tone and stress systems, often pose challenges to researchers and theorists. The interaction between stress and tone in Huichol (Uto-Aztecan) language of western Mexico, can be understood using van der Hulst’s (2014) concept of accent, a lexically underlying mark of prominence. This analysis is based on both published and original Huichol-language data that Huichol is an accentual language with one accented mora per word. Huichol has privative tone that interacts with the accentual system: accented moras are assigned high tone. Thus, Huichol should be classified as a tone-accent language.

Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa

AbstractThis article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and content question formats and the pattern of a held mid-high tone observed in polarity questions, as well as the function of Cha’palaa grammatical features such as the case marking system, the nominal classifiers and the verb classification system as formats for repair initiation. It considers a selection of examples from a video corpus to illustrate a broad range of sequence types of opened and restricted other-initiated repair, noting that Cha’palaa had the highest relative rate of open repair in the cross-linguistic sample. It also considers the extension of OIR to other practices such as news uptake and disagreement in the Cha’palaa corpus.

Teaching Effect of Contrasting Intonation Systems

Not many language learners have been taught the sound system systematically. Intonation is no exception. This paper aims to show the effectiveness of contrasting TL (target language) and L1 (first language) intonation systems for the learners to become aware of the TL intonation system as something new and different from what they are familiar with. The Japanese-speaking subjects showed a better understanding of the English intonation system after the instruction on the functions of the five-tone choices in English speech. While they were “aware” of “intonation” as a phenomenon, they did not know “how intonation works”, nor were very aware of any differences between TL intonation and the intonation they are familiar with, such as L1 and mother tongues. Therefore, it is better not only to teach the technical rules in intonation, but also to develop the ability to use intonation in TL appropriately in context. Teaching TL intonation system by contrasting with L1 can help the learners to systematically learn how intonation works in TL.

Does first language prosodic transfer affect second language prosody?

Learners of English have been found to transfer their L1 prosody into the prosody of L2 (Ramírez Verdugo, 2006). However, the effect of this transfer is not known or may not be universal. Besides, while English uses fundamental frequency in its intonation system, to indicate prominence in syllables and in phrases, and to signal differences in sentence intonation, Awutu uses it to signal lexical tone, a common phenomenon of tone languages. The present study investigates the effect of transfer of some prosodic features of Awutu, a language of Ghana, on English. To achieve this, 10 speakers of Awutu who are non-native speakers of English were asked to read narrow and broad focus statements and questions in both Awutu and English. The data were subjected to acoustic analysis for fundamental frequency using the Computerized Speech Laboratory. Preliminary findings show that Awutu speakers of English raise their fundamental frequency on focused words to show prominence. However, the pitch tracks of both statements and questions show that even though these speakers transfer some sentence prosody from Awutu, they do not show any consistency in the transfer. These findings suggest that the nature of L1 prosodic transfer into L2 may be language-specific.

Visual intonation in two sign languages

In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.

Phonological theory informs the analysis of intonational exaggeration in Japanese infant-directed speech

To date, the intonation of infant-directed speech (IDS) has been analyzed without reference to its phonological structure. Intonational phonology should, however, inform IDS research, discovering important properties that have previously been overlooked. The present study investigated "intonational exaggeration" in Japanese IDS using the intonational phonological framework. Although intonational exaggeration, which is most often measured by pitch-range expansion, is one of the best-known characteristics of IDS, Japanese has been reported to lack such exaggeration. The present results demonstrated that intonational exaggeration is in fact present and observed most notably at the location of boundary pitch movements, and that the effects of lexical pitch accents in the remainder of the utterances superficially mask the exaggeration. These results not only reveal dynamic aspects of Japanese IDS, but also in turn contribute to the theory of intonational phonology, suggesting that paralinguistic pitch-range modifications most clearly emerge where the intonation system of a language allows maximum flexibility in varying intonational contours.

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.