Intonational Phrase Boundaries Research Articles

Phrase boundaries lacking word prosody: An articulatory investigation of Seoul Korean.

This electromagnetic articulography study explores the kinematic profile of Intonational Phrase boundaries in Seoul Korean. Recent findings suggest that the scope of phrase-final lengthening is conditioned by word- and/or phrase-level prominence. However, evidence comes mainly from head-prominence languages, which conflate positions of word prosody with positions of phrasal prominence. Here, we examine phrase-final lengthening in Seoul Korean, an edge-prominence language with no word prosody, with respect to focus location as an index of phrase-level prominence and Accentual Phrase (AP) length as an index of word demarcation. Results show that phrase-final lengthening extends over the phrase-final syllable. The effect is greater the further away that focus occurs. It also interacts with the domains of AP and prosodic word: lengthening is greater in smaller APs, whereas shortening is observed in the initial gesture of the phrase-final word. Additional analyses of kinematic displacement and peak velocity revealed that Korean phrase-final gestures bear the kinematic profile of IP boundaries concurrently to what is typically considered prominence marking. Based on these results, a gestural coordination account is proposed, in which boundary-related events interact systematically with phrase-level prominence as well as lower prosodic levels, and how this proposal relates to the findings in head-prominence languages is discussed.

Intonation Patterns of Chinese EFL Learners and Their Correlation with Holistic Prosody Ratings

Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners often face challenges when acquiring intonation skills. This study employed AM theory as the theoretical framework and utilized the Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) labeling system to analyze 29 recordings of first-year English major female students enrolled at a university in China. The aim is to examine the intonation patterns exhibited by these learners and explore their correlation with prosody ratings. The findings revealed that H*, L+H*, and L* were the most commonly observed pitch accent types among Chinese EFL learners. Furthermore, the L tone predominated in phrase accents and boundary tones, while the prevalent intonation pattern in intonation phrase boundaries was identified as the L-L% pattern. The study also identified negative correlations between the proportion of L* and the proportion of L-, as well as between prosody ratings and phrase accent density, and between prosody ratings and the proportion of L*. These findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge on intonation acquisition and hold significant implications for language pedagogy.

Increased Pre-Boundary Lengthening Does Not Enhance Implicit Intonational Phrase Perception in European Portuguese: An EEG Study.

Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues-pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries-the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints.

VÍRGULAS EM TEXTOS DE ALUNOS DE 11 A 15 ANOS DO ENSINO FUNDAMENTAL II: UM ESTUDO LONGITUDINAL

ABSTRACT In this article, we investigate the presence and the absence of commas in a longitudinal sample of texts of the genre report written by 11 to 15 years-old students from a school in the countryside of São Paulo State. Our hypothesis is that the comma is used when syntactic boundaries match the prosodic ones. The prosodic constituents are formed from syntactic and phonological information, according to principles defined in the Prosodic Phonology theoretical approach. The characterization of the conventional commas and the non-conventional absences of commas was made from the identification of syntactic boundaries in which they should or could be placed, taking as reference a Brazilian Portuguese grammar. The results were that the conventional comma increases during the years of schooling, as expected. However, the presence and absence of comma rates changed depending on the type of syntactic structure and on the occurrence of intonational phrase boundaries. Comma occurred predominantly in positions where intonation phrase boundaries match major syntactic boundaries, as a sentence boundary. In turn, the comma systematically does not occur in positions where the syntactic and prosodic boundaries do not match.

Word Order, Intonation, and Prosodic Phrasing: Individual Differences in the Production and Identification of Narrow and Wide Focus in Urdu

This study investigates speaker based variation in the use of word order and intonation to mark narrow and wide focus in Urdu. The identification of focus type and position, as well as the prosodic phrasing of declarative sentences produced in the target focus conditions, is also discussed. The results of a semi-spontaneous production experiment indicated no preference for a linear position, as the focused nouns were mostly placed in situ (89%). The analysis of phonetic cues showed significant inter- and intraspeaker variation in participants’ use of longer noun duration, higher F0 peak, and wider F0 range in the narrowly focused nouns, as compared with their counterparts produced in wide focus. In the identification survey conducted online, the consistent use of phonetic cues in speech production was found to influence the correct identification of narrow focus and the position of focused nouns. Another online survey, concerning the prosodic phrasing of sentences produced in narrow and wide focus, showed participants’ slight preference for a recursive Intonational Phrase boundary on the left edge of the narrowly focused nouns. The results of both the surveys show that Urdu speakers vary in their identification of focus as well as their choice of prosodic phrasing in the target contexts. This research highlights the role of individual variation in the use of word order and phonetic cues to mark narrow and wide focus in Urdu. It also illustrates that the identification of focus type and phrasing is far from uniform. These findings have implications for the analysis of intonation in general, as this study testifies that the production and identification of intonation and prosodic phrasing are not invariable and speakers and listeners differ in their use of available linguistic means (word order vs. intonational categories), the selection, as well as the manipulation of phonetic cues.

Medial catalexis in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s iambic pentameter

There is a reasonable scholarly consensus that the long (“heroic”) line of Sir Thomas Wyatt is an iambic pentameter. However, a significant number of his long lines are apparently syllabically hypometrical, calling into question this interpretation. The doubt is further compounded by Wyatt’s nontrivial use of phrase-medial inversions. I argue that it is nonetheless possible to infer an iambic pentameter intention behind Wyatt’s syllabically hypometrical lines, which can be ‘repaired’ by medial catalexis. Syllabically canonical lines are known to favour major prosodic breaks (Intonational Phrase boundaries) between the second and third foot and, to some extent, between the third and fourth. On the assumption that medial catalexis exploits the natural pauses that occur at the boundaries between Intonational Phrases, what emerges is a significant preference for catalexis to target the weak position of the third verse foot (half-line boundary), followed by the fourth (immediately following the verse-foot adjunct of the second half-line). The finding opens up further possibilities for understanding Wyatt’s other licences, and linguistically informed literary criticism of his verse. The final part of the paper offers some speculations as to the nature of medial catalexis and how it can be approached within a linguistically informed framework compatible with generative metrics.

Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

Prosody-syntax interface and prosodic phrasing in brazilian portuguese

This paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) prosodic phrasing and has two main goals: (1) to find a correlation between the prosodic constituents boundaries, as described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory (Nespor & Vogel, 2007 [1986], a.o.) and the perception and production of spontaneous and reading speech breaks, and (2) to describe the phonological characteristics and the syntactic ranking of perceived and non perceived edges. The corpus under analysis includes 5 extracts both of spontaneous and reading speech lasting about 2 minutes each. The reading speech (LE) emerged from the spontaneous speech (FE) orthographic transcription which was collected from an interview in an informal environment. In the perception test, 11 referees heard the 10 speaking extracts, without punctuation, and marked the perceived breaks in the orthographic transcription of each of them. Both the 5 speakers and the 11 referees were students at UFRJ, born in Rio de Janeiro, and were between 22 and 38 years old.The results point out that the prosodic breaks are mainly perceived at the intonational phrase (I) boundary, regardless of the speech style (FE: 91%; LE 99%). However, in LE, 64% of the foreseen I boundaries, described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, were perceived as breaks, but in FE, just 37% were perceived. The most usual nuclear contour in both styles is H+L* L% (this being the Portuguese neutral declarative contour), but its occurrence frequency at perceived breaks draws a distinction between LE and FE (67% and 30%, respectively). In FE, contours like L+H* H% and L*+H H% are also produced (34%). In general, descendant nuclei in LE are predominant, as well as the edge tone L; in FE, both the descendant and ascendant nuclei distribution and low or high boundaries are similar. After running a statistic test, the appearance of an L edge, as a predictive for perception, was globally significant. Concerning the syntactic boundary, it was statistically checked and the result points out that breaks are mainly perceived at the matrix phrase limit (LE: 59%; FE: 61%,), showing the endurance of the matrix phrase edge/I boundary mapping. In general, FE has proved to have a bigger variation on the relation of predicted, perceived and produced, as it was expected, which was also confirmed by statistics. Therefore, the results show that the foreseen I phrasing is fairly robust in both styles, once only 13% of the predicted I boundaries have not been produced as so, regarding intonation. Besides, just 1,4% of the predicted phonological phrase (f) boundaries (and produced as Is) were perceived as breaks by the referees. With this study one may conclude that LE and FE share the same prosodic grammar, performed by the same type of phonological/syntactic cues; nevertheless, these are more consistent in LE and have a more disperse way in FE, adding to a greater difficulty at the systematic perception of prosodic boundaries in FE than in LE.

Intonation Phrase formation in sentences with clausal embedding

This study investigates if and how pre- and post-focal givenness affects the insertion of Intonation Phrase (henceforth, ι) boundaries in sentences with an embedded object clause in German. This is particularly interesting because sentence-internal clause edges were found to induce prosodic structure (by ι-boundary insertion) whereas focus and givenness were found to prevent prosodic structure (by destressing or dephrasing). Thus, these aspects might constitute opposing forces in the formation of ι-structure. A production experiment was conducted which tested ι-boundary insertion in sentences with an object clause in final position under different focus conditions. The results revealed the following patterns: first, speakers variably insert an ι-boundary in all-new sentences (without a narrow focus); second, narrow focus and givenness prevent the insertion of an ι-boundary if the focused constituent precedes the sentence-internal clause edge; and, third, narrow focus and givenness reduce the frequency of ι-boundary insertion if the focused constituent follows the sentence-internal clause edge, but do not prevent it altogether (where the unfocused material is discourse-given). In order to account for these findings, a model in the framework of Optimality Theory is proposed. This model accounts for variable ι-boundary insertion by means of an ordered global tie of Match constraints and captures the effects of focus and givenness by means of constraints that enforce the strengthening of stress positions (Stress-Focus, Rightmost) and a constraint militating against nuclear stress on given material (*Stress-Given).

Representação fonológica e percepção de fala: O papel da pausa

Investigamos a percepção de pausas em fronteiras de frase entonacional (IP) no Português Brasileiro (PB) e abordamos a relação entre produção e percepção da fala. Vinte sujeitos adultos, falantes nativos do PB, sem distúrbios de linguagem e sem queixas auditivas, participaram de um teste experimental de identificação de pausa. Usamos estímulos auditivos nos quais a fronteira IP foi marcada por uma combinação de pausa e variação de altura ou apenas variação de altura. Os resultados são os seguintes: (i) quando os estímulos consistiam em uma combinação de pausa com variação de altura no limite IP, as pausas foram identificadas significativamente (ii) quando os estímulos não tinham variação de altura nos limites IP, as pausas não foram identificadas significativamente, (iii) quando somente ocorreu variação de altura, sem produção de silêncio, foram identificadas pausas na fronteira testada. Esses resultados corroboram o argumento de que a percepção de fala não depende inteiramente da recuperação de um padrão acústico e evidencia a importância da representação fonológica para a percepção e organização do estímulo auditivo percebido. Com base nos resultados, argumentamos que a percepção de pausa resultaria da ilusão perceptiva marcada pela combinação de diferentes tipos de informações linguísticas, em nível fonético-acústico e representacional.

Individual differences in the production of prosodic boundaries in American English

This study investigates individual differences in the weighting of phonetic properties in the production of prosodic boundaries in American English. The motivation of the study is to inform understanding of individual speaker variation and its accommodation in the representation of prosodic structure. In an acoustic study, 32 speakers produced eight sentence pairs differing in type of boundary (Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary versus Word boundary). Pause duration, phrase-final lengthening (three syllables before the boundary), phrase-initial lengthening (one syllable after the boundary), and pitch reset were examined. The results of a series of statistical analyses showed substantial individual differences in (1) which segmental and suprasegmental properties speakers phonetically modulated to produce IP boundaries and (2) the scope and the degree of such modulations. In addition, the results suggest that there seems to be no apparent relationship between how speakers modulated boundary-adjacent syllable durations and whether and how they used two other acoustic correlates for IP boundary, namely, pause duration and pitch reset. The current models of prosodic structure need to accommodate the fact that individuals may vary significantly while systematically modulating the acoustic correlates relevant for encoding a prosodic contrast.

Prosodically Conditioned Consonant Duration in Djambarrpuyŋu.

Cross-linguistically, segments typically lengthen because of proximity to prosodic events such as intonational phrase or phonological phrase boundaries, a phrasal accent, or due to lexical stress. Australian Indigenous languages have been claimed to operate somewhat differently in terms of prosodically conditioned consonant lengthening and strengthening. Consonants have been found to lengthen after a vowel bearing a phrasal pitch accent. It is further claimed that this post-tonic position is a position of prosodic strength in Australian languages. In this study, we investigate the effects of proximity to a phrasal pitch accent and prosodic constituent boundaries on the duration of stop and nasal consonants in words of varying lengths in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language spoken in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. Our results suggest that the post-tonic consonant position does not condition longer consonant duration compared with other word-medial consonants, with one exception: Intervocalic post-tonic consonants in disyllabic words are significantly longer than word-medial consonants elsewhere. Therefore, it appears that polysyllabic shortening has a strong effect on segment duration in these data. Word-initial position did not condition longer consonant duration than word-medial position. Further, initial consonants in higher-level prosodic domains had shorter consonant duration compared with domain-medial word-initial consonants. By contrast, domain-final lengthening was observed in our data, with word-final nasals preceding a pause found to be significantly longer than all other consonants. Taken together, these findings for Djambarrpuyŋu suggest that, unlike other Australian languages, post-tonic lengthening is not a cue to prosodic prominence, whereas prosodic domain-initial and -final duration patterns of consonants are like those that have been observed in other languages of the world.

Alongamento em fronteira de frase entoacional no Português do Brasil

Este artigo investiga o fenômeno do alongamento pré-fronteira em dados do Português Brasileiro. Para tanto, apresenta um experimento de produção delineado para verificar a ocorrência do fenômeno a partir de sentenças em contraste, caracterizadas pela mesma cadeia segmental, mas por fraseamentos prosódicos diferentes. A fronteira de frase entoacional foi eleita para o presente estudo, uma vez que se trata de uma fronteira mais robusta no interior da hierarquia prosódica e, por consequência, porque apresenta a tendência de carregar mais pistas fonéticas para sua demarcação. Não obstante, a referida fronteira foi também selecionada pela sua relevância no fraseamento prosódico e por seu consequente papel de importância no processamento da fala. Como principal resultado, o estudo apresenta amparo estatístico que permite afirmar a ocorrência do alongamento pré-fronteira nos dados analisados, resultado que é contrastado com achados anteriores para o Português. Com os resultados apresentados, o presente artigo propõe uma breve discussão sobre o papel desempenhado pelo método na análise de dados linguísticos, especialmente na área de fonética e fonologia.

Perturbation of left posterior prefrontal cortex modulates top-down processing in sentence comprehension

Communication is an inferential process. In particular, language comprehension constantly requires top-down efforts, as often multiple interpretations are compatible with a given sentence. To assess top-down processing in the language domain, our experiment employed ambiguous sentences that allow for multiple interpretations (e.g., The client sued the murderer with the corrupt lawyer., where the corrupt lawyer could either belong to The client or the murderer). Interpretation thus depended on whether participants chunk the words of the sentence into short or long syntactic phrases. In principle, bottom-up acoustic information (i.e., the presence or absence of an intonational phrase boundary at the offset of the murderer) indicates one of the two possible interpretations. Yet, acoustic information often indicates interpretations that require words to be chunked into overly long phrases that would overburden working memory. Processing is biased against these demands, reflected in a top-down preference to chunk words into short rather than long phrases. It is often proposed, but also hotly debated, that the ability to chunk words into short phrases is subserved by the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Here, we employed focal repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to perturb the left IFG, which resulted in a further decrease of the aptitude to tolerate long phrases, indicating the inability of the left IFG to assist the chunking of words into phrases. In contrast, the processing of auditory information was not affected. Our findings support a causal top-down role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in the chunking of words into phrases.

On the universality of intonational phrases: a cross-linguistic interrater study

This study is concerned with the identifiability of intonational phrase boundaries across familiar and unfamiliar languages. Four annotators segmented a corpus of more than three hours of spontaneous speech into intonational phrases. The corpus included narratives in their native German, but also in three languages of Indonesia unknown to them. The results show significant agreement across the whole corpus, as well as for each subcorpus. We discuss the interpretation of these results, including the hypothesis that it makes sense to distinguish between phonetic and phonological intonational phrases, and that the former are a universal characteristic of speech, allowing listeners to segment speech into intonational phrase-sized units even in unknown languages.

The prosodic domain of phonological encoding: Evidence from speech errors

Phonological encoding of segments is thought to occur within a prosodically-defined frame, but it is not clear which of the constituent/s within the prosodic hierarchy (syllables, phonological words, intonational phrases and utterances) serve/s as the domain of phonological encoding. This experiment investigated whether segmental speech errors elicited in tongue-twisters were influenced by position within prosodic constituents above the level of the phonological word. Forty-four participants produced six repetitions each of 40 two-intonational phrase tongue-twisters with error-prone word-initial “target” segments in phrase-initial and phrase-final words. If the domain of phonological encoding is the intonational phrase, we hypothesised that segments within a current intonational phrase would interact in more errors than would segments across intonational phrase boundaries. Participants made more anticipatory than perseveratory errors on target segments in phrase-initial words as predicted. They also made more perseveratory than anticipatory errors on targets in phrase-final words, but only in utterance-final phrases. These results suggest that the intonational phrase is one domain of phonological encoding, and that segments for upcoming phrases are activated while current phrases are being articulated.

Assessing priming for prosodic representations: Speaking rate, intonational phrase boundaries, and pitch accenting.

Recent work in the literature on prosody presents a puzzle: Some aspects of prosody can be primed in production (e.g., speech rate), but others cannot (e.g., intonational phrase boundaries, or IPBs). In three experiments we aimed to replicate these effects and identify the source of this dissociation. In Experiment 1 we investigated how speaking rate and the presence of an intonational boundary in a prime sentence presented auditorily affect the production of these aspects of prosody in a target sentence presented visually. Analyses of the targets revealed that participants' speaking rates, but not their production of boundaries, were affected by the priming manipulation. Experiment 2 verified whether speakers are more sensitive to IPBs when the boundaries provide disambiguating information, and in this different context replicated Experiment 1 in showing no IPB priming. Experiment 3 tested whether speakers are sensitive to another aspect of prosody-pitch accenting-in a similar paradigm. Again, we found no evidence that this manipulation affected pitch accenting in target sentences. These findings are consistent with earlier research and suggest that aspects of prosody that are paralinguistic (like speaking rate) may be more amenable to priming than are linguistic aspects of prosody (such as phrase boundaries and pitch accenting).

The neural oscillations of speech processing and language comprehension: state of the art and emerging mechanisms.

Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of functions in speech processing and language comprehension. On the one hand, speech contains-somewhat-repetitive trains of air pressure bursts that occur at three dominant amplitude modulation frequencies, physically marking the linguistically meaningful progressions of phonemes, syllables and intonational phrase boundaries. To these acoustic events, neural oscillations of isomorphous operating frequencies are thought to synchronise, presumably resulting in an implicit temporal alignment of periods of neural excitability to linguistically meaningful spectral information on the three low-level linguistic description levels. On the other hand, speech is a carrier signal that codes for high-level linguistic meaning, such as syntactic structure and semantic information-which cannot be read from stimulus acoustics, but must be acquired during language acquisition and decoded for language comprehension. Neural oscillations subserve the processing of both syntactic structure and semantic information. Here, I synthesise a mapping from each linguistic processing domain to a unique set of subserving oscillatory mechanisms-the mapping is plausible given the role ascribed to different oscillatory mechanisms in different subfunctions of cortical information processing and faithful to the underlying electrophysiology. In sum, the present article provides an accessible and extensive review of the functional mechanisms that neural oscillations subserve in speech processing and language comprehension.

The timing of head movements: The role of prosodic heads and edges.

This study examines the influence of the position of prosodic heads (accented syllables) and prosodic edges (prosodic word and intonational phrase boundaries) on the timing of head movements. Gesture movements and prosodic events tend to be temporally aligned in the discourse, the most prominent part of gestures typically being aligned with prosodically prominent syllables in speech. However, little is known about the impact of the position of intonational phrase boundaries on gesture-speech alignment patterns. Twenty-four Catalan speakers produced spontaneous (experiment 1) and semi-spontaneous head gestures with a confirmatory function (experiment 2), along with phrase-final focused words in different prosodic conditions (stress-initial, stress-medial, and stress-final). Results showed (a) that the scope of head movements is the associated focused prosodic word, (b) that the left edge of the focused prosodic word determines where the interval of gesture prominence starts, and (c) that the speech-anchoring site for the gesture peak (or apex) depends both on the location of the accented syllable and the distance to the upcoming intonational phrase boundary. These results demonstrate that prosodic heads and edges have an impact on the timing of head movements, and therefore that prosodic structure plays a central role in the timing of co-speech gestures.

Prosodic boundary cues in German: Evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists

This study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses, phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In line with the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while final lengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations from expectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects. That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrast between different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in which we tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results from identification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift in listeners׳ prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence, pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show different sensitivity to the three acoustic cues.