Major Syntactic Boundaries Research Articles

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.

The Impact of Parkinson's Disease on Breath Pauses and Their Relationship to Speech Impairment: A Longitudinal Study.

Purpose The purposes of this longitudinal study were to (a) examine the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) progression on breath pause patterns and speech and linguistic errors and (b) determine the extent to which breath pauses and speech and linguistic errors contribute to speech impairment. Method Eight individuals with PD and eight age- and sex-matched control participants produced a reading passage on two occasions (Time 1 and Time 2) 3 years and 7 months apart on average. Two speech-language pathologists rated the severity of speech impairment for all participants at each time. Dependent variables included the location of each breath pause relative to syntax and punctuation as well as the number of disfluencies and mazes. Results At Time 1, there were no significant differences between the groups regarding breath pause patterns. At Time 2, individuals with PD produced significantly fewer breath pauses at major syntactic boundaries and periods as well as significantly more breath pauses at locations with no punctuation than control participants. Individuals with PD produced a significantly greater number of disfluencies than control participants at both time points. There were no significant differences between the groups in the number of mazes produced at either time point. Together, the number of mazes and the percentage of breath pauses at locations with no punctuation explained 50% of the variance associated with the ratings of severity of speech impairment. Conclusion These results highlight the importance of targeting both respiratory physiological and cognitive-linguistic systems in order to improve speech production in individuals with PD.

Variability of Pause Patterns in English Read Speech of Thai EFL Learners

Research suggests that pauses are essential in oral communication in that they render intelligibility and contribute to the improvement of speech comprehension. Unfortunately, the teaching of correct pausing has received little attention in EFL classes. As a result, many Thai learners of English tend to use inappropriate phrasing and pausing, which makes their speech sound unnatural or even hinders communication. This study investigates pause patterns in read speech of two English proficiency levels of Thai learners in comparison with those produced by native English speakers. The opening section provides a brief background of the study and terminology related to pauses in spoken language and research objectives. The second section describes the research design. The results of the study presented in the third section reveal that native speakers paused exclusively at sentence ends. Additional pauses were made at major syntactic boundaries. Inter-speaker variability existed at minor syntactic boundaries. Among Thai learners, the lower proficiency group paused more frequently and produced shorter and improper lengths of information chunks than the higher proficiency group, who read in longer, but more syntactically- and semantically-unified, units and therefore paused less. The findings support previous studies that pause is, to a large extent, affected by syntactic structures. Since correct use of pauses can make a marked improvement of intelligibility in speech production, the pedagogical implication offered from the findings is to support the importance of introducing read-aloud tasks in EFL classes. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p346

Analysis of pausing behavior in spontaneous speech using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of articulation

It is hypothesized that pauses at major syntactic boundaries (i.e., grammatical pauses), but not ungrammatical (e.g., word search) pauses, are planned by a high-level cognitive mechanism that also controls the rate of articulation around these junctures. Real-time magnetic resonance imaging is used to analyze articulation at and around grammatical and ungrammatical pauses in spontaneous speech. Measures quantifying the speed of articulators were developed and applied during these pauses as well as during their immediate neighborhoods. Grammatical pauses were found to have an appreciable drop in speed at the pause itself as compared to ungrammatical pauses, which is consistent with our hypothesis that grammatical pauses are indeed choreographed by a central cognitive planner.

Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers

Can fluency in oral reading be facilitated by formatting text to preserve major syntactic boundaries? Seven-, 8-, and 9-year-old children read aloud passages under two text format conditions. In the structure-preserving condition, the ends of lines coincided with ends of clauses; in the phrase-disrupting condition, line breaks always interrupted a phrasal unit. Experiment 1 showed that oral reading fluency, as indexed by skill in phrasal reading, was rated higher when children were reading in the structure-preserving condition. In addition, the structure-preserving condition resulted in significantly fewer false starts at the beginning of lines following a return sweep. The results of Experiment 2, in which texts of varying levels of difficulty were read by slightly older readers, confirmed both findings. Measures of fluency were correlated with other language and reading measures; however, no effects of format were obtained on oral reading rate (words correct per minute). Taken as a whole, these findings indicate a benefit of keeping clausal units intact in promoting fluent reading by facilitating the transition from one line to the next.

Spoken Sentence Processing in Young and Older Adults Modulated by Task Demands: Evidence From Self-Paced Listening

Young and older adult listeners paced themselves through recorded sentences, under instructions to recall the sentence verbatim or to respond to comprehension probes. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity and speech rate. Young and older adults paused longer after major syntactic boundaries, an effect that was constant across speech rates but became more pronounced with increasing syntactic complexity. These effects were moderated by listeners' expectations of what they were to do with the linguistic input and by their recent experience with particular tasks. Older adults tended to pause longer in the recall condition, especially when it preceded the comprehension condition. Young adults paused differentially longer at major syntactic boundaries in the comprehension condition, but only when the comprehension condition preceded the recall condition. These findings are discussed in the context of two competing theories of syntactic processing.

Syntactic location facilitates word segmentation by infants

English learners begin to segment words and parse speech into prosodic units between 6 and 12 months. Recent experimental evidence suggests that segments are more fully realized at the edges of major syntactic constituents. For example, the [s] in ‘‘bass’’ will completely assimilate to [S] in the absence of a major syntactic boundary between the words ‘‘bass’’ and ‘‘shoppers.’’ In this study, we examine whether the location of words in a phrase (and hence the phonological strength of a word’s initial segment) affects infants’ segmentation. Eleven-month-olds were familiarized with stories containing the target words ‘‘acorn’’ and ‘‘shoppers,’’ using the head-turn preference procedure. For half of the infants, ‘‘shoppers’’ occurred after a major syntactic boundary, whereas ‘‘acorn’’ did not. For the other half, ‘‘acorn’’ occurred after a strong syntactic boundary, but ‘‘shoppers’’ did not. Infants in the first condition listened significantly longer to isolated versions of ‘‘shoppers’’ than to ‘‘acorn.’’ In contrast, infants in the second condition listened equally long to both familiar words. These findings suggest that words located at major syntactic boundaries are easier to segment. Our results also provide further evidence that infants’ segmentation of vowel-initial words is delayed compared to their segmentation of consonant-initial words.

The binding problem for syntax, semantics, and prosody: H.M.'s selective sentence-reading deficits under the theoretical-syndrome approach

In this case study, a "hippocampal amnesic" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading either was or was not the primary goal. In four experiments, H.M. produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without self-correction. H.M.'s misreadings typically reduced semantic and syntactic complexity and caused ungrammaticality by omitting short high-frequency function-words. H.M. also produced each word more slowly and paused longer than controls at three points: before beginning to produce a sentence, between words in unfamiliar phrases, and at major syntactic boundaries unmarked by commas. H.M.'s selective sentence-reading deficits were unrelated to word-specific factors, ambiguity, and sentence length, and were not attributable to his cerebellar damage, speed-accuracy trade-off, general slowing, general cognitive decline, left-to-right reading processes, or limitations in working-memory capacity. However, present results supported a ''theoretical-syndrome approach'' under which all of H.M.'s deficits (in reading sentences, in comprehending and producing spoken sentences, in reading isolated words and pseudo-words, in visual cognition, and in recall from episodic memory) form part of a general, theoretically coherent syndrome that generalises to other patients.

Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions

It has been suggested that prosodic disambiguation of sentences is largely a matter of prosodic phrasing. Ambiguities can be resolved if a prosodic break aligns with a major syntactic boundary of one structure but not another. The placement of pitch accents is viewed as playing only a supporting role (cf. Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Huffnagel, & Fong, 1991). This view of prosodic disambiguation does not apply tho all structures of a language. We report five experiments studying ambiguous sentences like (i) and (ii): (i) I asked the pretty little girl WHO is cold. I asked the pretty little girl who is COLD. (ii) Joshua began to wonder WHEN his girlfriend got a tattoo. Joshua began to wonder when his girl friend got a TATTOO. The presence of a prominent pitch accent on the interrogative constituent ( who, when) biased listeners to a emmbedded question interpretation whereas its absence biased thhem to a relative clause(i) or temporal adjunct(ii) analysis. The results suggest that accent, like prosodic breaks, can play a central role in guiding sentence comprehension.

Intonation component of a text-to-speech system for Hindi

In this paper, we describe some features of the fundamental frequency (F 0) contours of speech in Hindi and propose an approach to represent and activate this intonation knowledge for an unrestricted text-to-speech system for Hindi. As in most languages, the declarative sentences in Hindi show a declining pattern of F 0 contour, whereas interrogative sentences show a rising F 0 contour. The backdrop declining or rising pattern is characterized by local falls and rises which are determined by the phonological pattern of the constituent words. In complex declarative sentences the F 0 contour resets at major syntactic boundaries. Experiments to obtain the inherent F 0 of segments are described. The intonation knowledge derived from analysis of speech is coded in a production system format. Intelligibility and naturalness of the synthesized speech improved significantly after incorporation of the intonation rules.

Analysis of hesitations in spontaneous speech

Spontaneous speech differs from read speech in several ways, especially in hesitation phenomena. This paper reports results on hesitation pauses (filled and unfilled) and restarts. For comparison purposes, the acoustic correlates of (unintended) hesitation pauses are compared to those for intentional pauses. A distinction is made between grammatical pauses (at major syntactic boundaries) and ungrammatical ones. Such pause types cannot be separated based on silence or prepausal duration, but rather in the pitch of the prepausal word. Ungrammatical pauses tended to have few F0 continuation rises, whereas virtually all grammatical pauses were accompanied by a prior F0 rise of at least 10 Hz. While silent pauses are easy to locate in speech recognition applications, filled pauses (e.g., “err,” “umm”) resemble words in continuous speech. Filled pauses at major syntactic boundaries were about 300–450 ms, whereas those within syntactic units were shorter. Filled pauses had falling or flat and low F0 patterns. Ones at syntactic boundaries tended to start higher in F0 and then fall, whereas filled pauses internal to a syntactic unit had lower F0 patterns. Concerning restarts in spontaneous speech, when a work was completely repeated, it had virtually the same prosodics in both its instances. When a word was changed in the restart, its second instance was more stressed. [Work supported by Canadian government.]

More on domain‐final lengthening and foot‐level shortening in spoken English

The stressed syllables of spoken English tend to be lengthened when they occur before major syntactic boundaries (domain‐final lengthening) and to be shortened when they are followed by unstressed syllables within the same metrical foot (foot‐level shortening). The nature of the interaction between these two factors has been investigated. A first study [B. Rakerd, W. Sennett, and C. A. Fowler, Phonetica 44, 147–155 (1987)] suggested that their effects are independent. In that study, the syllabic structure of metrical feet spanning word boundaries were manipulated, where those boundaries either coincided with noun‐phrase/verb‐phrase boundaries or did not, and we compared stressed syllable durations. A limitation on the comparison was that the phonetic details of the metrical feet of interest were matched but not held constant across syntactic conditions. In the present study, the procedure to control phonetic details throughout has been refined. With this modification, a significant interaction was observed between domain‐final lengthening and foot‐level shortening; specifically, it was found that the intervals between lengthenings delimited the domains over which substantial shortening could occur. The whole pattern of results will be discussed in light of current theories of foot‐level shortening.

The influence of higher level linguistic information on production of duration and pitch patterns at syntactic boundaries

Syntactic parsing strategies like “minimal attachment” have mainly been studied for written language. However, there is recent interest in whether parsing strategies are used for speech. An alternative view is that, because speech contains acoustic patterns that covary with structure, and these influence listeners' syntactic interpretations, acoustic patterns can indicate structure, and so strategies are unnecessary. A critical assumption of the latter view remains to be tested: Speakers reliably produce acoustic correlates of structure for minimal and nonminimal attachment sentences. The present study investigated this, comparing productions of minimal and nonminimal attachment sentences. Longer duration and more extreme pitch fall-rise were expected for a sentence containing a major syntactic boundary in the critical region (i.e., nonminimal attachment). Surprisingly, phrase-final lengthening did not appear; duration for the syntactic boundary condition was shorter. Additional experiments suggest why. When subjects assign sentence-focus-stress to material in the critical region of a no-boundary sentence, stress is represented by increased duration or pitch rise. Thus both syntactic and nonsyntactic linguistic information influence the form of the acoustic patterns produced, and determine whether the expected differences are observable across sentences. Implications for parsing models and for investigations of speech production and perception will be discussed.

Syntactic clause boundaries, speech timing, and stuttering frequency in adult stutterers.

Nine adult male stutterers read aloud sentences designed to test influences of major syntactic boundary locations on stuttering frequency and on aspects of speech timing. The stutterers were found to produce the same durational cues to syntactic boundary location previously found in normal speech production. Like normals, stutterers lengthen the duration of a word when it occurs in clause-final position, and they are more likely to place a pause following a word if that word precedes a major syntactic boundary. Moreover, these syntactically regulated speech timing effects occurred for stuttered as well as fluent sentences, indicating that the presence of stuttering episodes did not interrupt the processing of syntactic structure in the speech production of these stutterers. Finally, there was no evidence that the presence of a major syntactic boundary led to an increase in stuttering frequency. Taken together, these results suggest that the mechanisms which underlie stuttering in adults are most likely independent of those which underlie the planning and processing of syntactic units.

Durational cues which mark clause boundaries in mother–child speech

Research has shown that infants prefer maternal speech artificially segmented at major syntactic boundaries to speech segmented at other loci. Potential causes for this preference are examined. Phrase and clause boundaries are usually marked by distinctive F 0 contour, pre-boundary vowel lengthening and pausing. This study examined patterns of pre-boundary lengthening in mother-child speech. It was found that maternal speech to children on the verge of expressive language ability was characterized by a statistically significant increase in the degree of pre-boundary lengthening normally to be expected in conversational speech. Observable but non-significant pre-boundary lengthening was observed in maternal speech to children using one-word utterances and to children using combinatorial language. It is suggested that maternal speech exaggerates a salient cue to the identification of major syntactic units in conversational speech.

Some phonetic and syntactic constraints on lingual coarticulation during /kl/ sequences

The effects of vowel context, juncture and rate of utterance on anticipatory co-articulation in /kl/ sequences were studied with the technique of electropalatography, which records details of the location and timing of tongue contacts with the hard palate during speech. Four subjects produced test items in which a variety of different prosodically-marked syntactic junctures fell between the /k/ and /l/, at two different rates of utterance and in two different vowel environments. Co-articulation was measured as the time interval from the release of the /k/ closure to the onset of anterior tongue movement for the /l/. Subjects showed considerable variation in co-articulatory patterns used in most of the test items but there was a clear tendency towards more extensive co-articulation in the fast rate of utterance. Major syntactic boundaries seemed to have little effect on the degree of co-articulation except in the slow rate of utterance, where for three of the four subjects the onset of the anterior movement for /l/ was consistently delayed. Vowel context had little consistent effect in either fast or slow rates.

Perception of word‐final voicing in two sentence contexts

Stressed syllables produced before major syntactic boundaries typically exhibit a marked lengthening, suggesting that listeners may have expectations regarding the relative length of syllables occurring immediately before a major syntactic boundary. We investigated the possible consequences of such expectations for the perception of word‐final stop voicing, which may be cued by vowel and/or closure duration. We examined labeling performance for two continua of synthetic stop‐vowel‐stop words varying in vowel and closure duration. These continua were embedded in synthetic, monotone sentences in which the target stimuli occurred either at the end of an initial subordinate clause or one word before a clause boundary. For half of stimuli, a pause occurred at the boundary; for the other half, no pause occurred. Expectation of phrase‐final lengthening produced a large effect on labeling performance, but only when a pause occurred at the clause boundary. The implications of these findings for perception of voicing as a function of syntactic and phonetic context will be discussed. [Supported by NIH grant no. NS‐12179 to Indiana University.]

A qualitative dynamic analysis of reiterant speech production: phase portraits, kinematics, and dynamic modeling.

The departure point of the present paper is our effort to characterize and understand the spatiotemporal structure of articulatory patterns in speech. To do so, we removed segmental variation as much as possible while retaining the spoken act's stress and prosodic structure. Subjects produced two sentences from the "rainbow passage" using reiterant speech in which normal syllables were replaced by /ba/ or /ma/. This task was performed at two self-selected rates, conversational and fast. Infrared LEDs were placed on the jaw and lips and monitored using a modified SELSPOT optical tracking system. As expected, when pauses marking major syntactic boundaries were removed, a high degree of rhythmicity within rate was observed, characterized by well-defined periodicities and small coefficients of variation. When articulatory gestures were examined geometrically on the phase plane, the trajectories revealed a scaling relation between a gesture's peak velocity and displacement. Further quantitative analysis of articulator movement as a function of stress and speaking rate was indicative of a language-modulated dynamical system with linear stiffness and equilibrium (or rest) position as key control parameters. Preliminary modeling was consonant with this dynamical perspective which, importantly, does not require that time per se be a controlled variable.

Click location in sentences: A test of the linguistic competence of seven-year-old fluent and disfluent males

Ten fluent and ten disfluent 7-yr-old males were presented simple and complex fully grammatical, anomalous and scrambled sentences. A click (35-msec 1-kHz tone burst) had been superimposed within three positions to the right or left of the major syntactic boundary in each sentence. The subjects heard the sentence, repeated the sentence, and marked on a preprinted version of the sentence where they heard the click. It was expected that children with greater language facility would more probably locate the click veridically. By the same reasoning, less complex syntactic structures should be expected to influence click placement less than more complex utterances. The following results were obtained: (a) the disfluent group gave a greater number of correct responses than the fluent group; (b) more correct responses were observed for simple sentences than for complex sentences for both groups; and (c) fewer correct responses were observed for both simple and complex grammatical sentences than for anomalous and scrambled sentence types.

Some perceptual cues to syntax: Palatalization and alveolar flapping

The application of certain phonological rules of American (but not British) English is inhibited across a major syntactic boundary, e.g., palatalization of alveolar obstruents in the environment of a following palatal vowel [Cooper, Egido, and Paccia, J. Exptl. Psychol. (1978)], and flapping of intervocalic alveolar stops [Egido and Cooper, J. Phonet. (1979)]. We report an experiment testing whether listeners can use the presence or absence of palatalization and flapping to parse syntactically ambiguous sentences (e.g., “The last time we met Ann was horrible”). Twelve such sentences were LPC analyzed and resynthesized with a “neutral” pitch contour; flapped and palatalized segments were also cross‐spliced with their nonflapped and nonpalatalized counterparts. Subjects were asked to match each resulting utterance to one of two possible syntactic structures. For native speakers of American English, both flapping and palatalization proved reliable perceptual cues to the absence of a major syntactic boundary. On the other hand, neither feature was effective for British English speakers. Our results suggest that for such contrasts to be of use in speech perception, they must be present in the listener's own speech.