Phrasal Stress Research Articles

An Analysis of the Acquisition of English Phrase Stress by Non-English Major University Students

Phonological acquisition is the foundation of second language acquisition and plays an important role in the learning of English by university students. Although many non-English majors can achieve high scores in various English examinations, they have problems with their speaking and listening. One of the reasons for this situation is misplaced stress. A comparison with native English speakers revealed some problems in the acquisition of phrasal stress by non-English majors: high pitch, long duration of pronunciation, strong and unstable sound intensity, etc. This study is an attempt to offer some suggestions for the acquisition of stress by non-English majors.

Production of Lexical and Phrasal Stress by Native Speakers and Korean Learners of English

Production of Lexical and Phrasal Stress by Native Speakers and Korean Learners of English

MELODY OF AN ORAL RELIGIOUS SERMON

The article is devoted to the study of the melodic organization of the texts of Anglican and Lutheran sermons, which are an integral part of services in the respective churches. Examining the compositional features of the texts of the researched sermons made it possible to identify four compositional parts that are necessarily present in both types of sermons (topic manifestation, citation, interpretation, conclusion), each of which is characterized by relative semantic and structural independence and pursues a specific pragmatic task. The research material, consisting of oral English and German sermons, was subjected to perceptual, auditory and instrumental analysis. A complex auditory and instrumental analysis of the melodic characteristics of preachers’ speech allows us to conclude that there is unity not only in the pragmatic tasks of preachers in the two most common Protestant trends, but also in the prosodic features of the texts of oral sermons. Integral melodic parameters include the use of emphatic phrasal stress on informative and/or emotionally significant parts of phrases in supraphrasal units, the distribution of maximums of the fundamental frequency over the compositional parts of the text, the width of the frequency range of phrases, which is achieved not only at the expense of high indicators of maxima fundamental frequency in sermon phrases, but also due to lowering the lower limit of fundamental frequency values. Distinctive features include the use of different pitch levels in peculiar parts of the text: in the initial part of the Anglican sermon, there is a predominance of low pitch level, while in the Lutheran sermon, the low voice level is the most used in the final part of the sermon. On the basis of the identified integral prosodic means involved in the organisation of the analysed texts, it is possible to state that Anglican and Lutheran sermons belong to the same type of preaching discourse.

Англи хэлний авиаг бусад хэлний авиатай харьцуулан судлахуй

It is a rare when pronouncing a word syllable in an indistinguishable manner. A syllable of a word is stressed or pronounced a little louder. Word stress is various such as dynamic or force stress, tonic stress, quantitative stress, and phrasal stress, and semantic stress. Semantic stress is used in a word distinguished from other ones in a sentence for meaning. When Hyman .L Professor of Linguistics studied the word stress from more than 400 foreign languages, 25% of them are first syllable, 20% of them are on the final syllable, and 18% of stressed on first of the final syllable. Mongolian word stress is stable while the word stress from English and Russian is free. For native language from the most of the world countries, the word stress is stable. For a language stress plays various roles. English is common and individual. This article discusses the classification, types, and functions of stress and its place in the word. Stress in Mongolian, Russian and English languages have common properties and their specific features. The authors of this article studied a certain level of general aspects and specific features and tried to identify them.

Givenness and Stress Rejection

This paper addresses the impact of givenness on phrasal stress assignment in German. It has been observed for English that nuclear stress is rejected on given elements that are part of the focused material if another focused word is available to bear nuclear stress. It is shown that the same effect applies to German. There are various proposals of constraints that militate against prosodic prominence on given elements. The present paper reviews these proposals and argues in favor of a constraint that is restricted to banning nuclear stress on given elements, but not phrasal stress in general. The argument is based on the observation for German that phrasal stress commonly occurs on pre-focal given constituents and may as well be present in post-focal position. The paper offers an analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory that captures the aforementioned stress rejection effect as well as the variability observed with regard to post-nuclear phrasal stress positions.

MELODIC ORGANIZATION OF THE PREACHER'S SPEECH IN FILM DISCOURSE

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the melodic organization of monological expressions of preachers of different ranks - the characters of English-language feature films. Based on the fact that the preacher's speech functions are not limited to preaching from the pulpit, but include speeches outside the temple and private conversations with parishioners on spiritual topics, these three types of speech activities were studied. The research material, which consisted of oral English sermons, speeches and conversations taken from five modern films, was subjected to auditive, auditory and electroacoustic analysis. Auditive analysis involved the selection from the general text of those phrasal units that most clearly demonstrate the prosodic characteristics in all parts of the studied sermons, speeches and conversations. Auditory analysis was aimed at determining the type of spiritual speech and identifying the degree of participation of certain prosodic parameters (melodic contour, phrasal stress, volume, tempo, rhythm, pause) in the realization of the intention of speech and expression of emotions in different parts of the text. Based on the auditive analysis, firstly, the prosodic differences between the three speech realizations at the level of perception were confirmed, and secondly, it was found that the melodic component of intonation is the second most informative component involved in speech differentiation and enhancing its influential effect.The complex auditory and instrumental analysis of the melodic characteristics of the preachers’ speech allows to conclude that there are integral and distinctive melodic parameters inherent in the three types of speech behaviour of the speakers during the sermon, speeches outside the church and conversations with parishioners in private. The private priests’ conversation with parishioners is characterized by the lowest melodic indicators, where facial expressions and kinetic means of expressiveness and emotionality come to the fore.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ФОРМУВАННЯ АНГЛОМОВНОГО ФОНЕТИЧНОГО АСПЕКТУ ЯК КОМУНІКАТИВНО-ЛІНГВІСТИЧНОЇ СУБКОМПЕТЕНЦІЇ СТУДЕНТІВ-ФІЛОЛОГІВ У МОВНОМУ ЗВО

The article is devoted to the substantiation of theoretical aspects of teaching English phonetic competence. Its definitions and its structural components are given. The ways and methods of teaching phonetic competence that favour the development of pronunciation skills as part of the overall process of speech skills and abilities development in the process of learning a foreign language are identified. It has been proven that phonetic skills can be considered to be formed when phonemic hearing developed and connections established between the auditory and acoustic and phonemic aspects of speech, as a result of which the language acquires a sufficient degree of accuracy. A number of prerequisites for successful learning of phonetic material are examined: formation of auditory processing, rhythm and intonational skills, i.e. ability to listen and hear, development of phonemic hearing, pronunciation skills, i.e. automaticity of articulation base of a foreign language, ways of intonation, development of internal speech as a psychophysiological basis for external speech. The research is focused on the stages and content of pronunciation learning, which includes mastering the necessary knowledge of pronunciation of individual sounds and phrases, the formation of automaticity of sounds and sound combination perception, i.e. the shaping of their auditory images, assimilating the mechanisms of sounds and sound combination articulation – the need to get acquainted with intonation, phrasal stress and rhythm of a foreign language. The study aims the importance of adjusting the phonetic skills that the students have already acquired in accordance with the phonetic system of the language under study and the need to supplement it with those elements of pronunciation that are absent in the native language or a second one. The article presents examples of exercises for practice and correct phonetic design of different statement types. Fragments of formation of receptive rhythmic and intonation skills at training ascending and descending intonation to improve professionally oriented phonetic competency are illustrated.

Surface Electromyography-Based Recognition, Synthesis, and Perception of Prosodic Subvocal Speech.

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate a novel communication system designed to translate surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals from articulatory muscles into speech using a personalized, digital voice. The system was evaluated for word recognition, prosodic classification, and listener perception of synthesized speech. Method sEMG signals were recorded from the face and neck as speakers with (n=4) and without (n=4) laryngectomy subvocally recited (silently mouthed) a speech corpus comprising 750 phrases (150 phrases with variable phrase-level stress). Corpus tokens were then translated into speech via personalized voice synthesis (n=8 synthetic voices) and compared against phrases produced by each speaker when using their typical mode of communication (n=4 natural voices, n=4 electrolaryngeal [EL] voices). Naïve listeners (n=12) evaluated synthetic, natural, and EL speech for acceptability and intelligibility in a visual sort-and-rate task, as well as phrasal stress discriminability via a classification mechanism. Results Recorded sEMG signals were processed to translate sEMG muscle activity into lexical content and categorize variations in phrase-level stress, achieving a mean accuracy of 96.3% (SD=3.10%) and 91.2% (SD=4.46%), respectively. Synthetic speech was significantly higher in acceptability and intelligibility than EL speech, also leading to greater phrasal stress classification accuracy, whereas natural speech was rated as the most acceptable and intelligible, with the greatest phrasal stress classification accuracy. Conclusion This proof-of-concept study establishes the feasibility of using subvocal sEMG-based alternative communication not only for lexical recognition but also for prosodic communication in healthy individuals, as well as those living with vocal impairments and residual articulatory function. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14558481.

There is no Post-focal De-phrasing in English

This paper studies the relationship between prosodic phrasing and prominence by addressing the questions of whether every prosodic phrase must have a head (a most prominent sub-constituent), and if so, how the head is marked. I study these questions by examining the intermediate phrase (iP) in English. If every iP must have a head, and this head must be marked by a pitch accent, then in an environment without any pitch accent, there should be no head/non-head distinction. And if there is no head, there should be no iP in this context either. I conducted a production study in English, and found durational evidence suggesting the presence of iP boundaries in an accent-less context. I also searched for durational evidence for iP-level prominence distinctions in this context, but here my results are mixed. One theoretical possibility that is compatible with my findings is that every phrase must have a head, but the head of an iP can be marked by something other than pitch accent, for example by phrasal stress.

On the Phonology and Semantics of Deaccentuation

The deaccentuation of given and/or repeated elements is familiar from many dialects of English. We propose that deaccentuation is essentially an optional postlexical phonological process of stress retraction triggered by two constraints: *Stress-Copy, which assigns a violation to a stress peak on a word with a segmentally identical copy in the left context, and Rightmost, which assigns a violation to every word between a stress peak and the right phrase edge. We quantify deaccentuation by defining it as being perceived with less stress than expected, where expected stress is calculated by an implementation of Liberman and Prince's (1977) phrasal stress algorithm. We provide empirical evidence for our analysis based on the first inaugurals of six former U.S. presidents.

Timing patterns in a hybrid metrical system

Duration is a cross-linguistically common correlate of metrical prominence, but it is also a well-known multi-purpose phonetic cue. The confounding impact of factors such as word length, segmental structure, phrasal stress, or boundary effects on the expression of word-level metrical prominence has been widely acknowledged in the phonetic literature. Yet, there are few studies which attempt to disentangle various factors affecting temporal patterns in a rigorous way. The present study investigates timing patterns in a hybrid (lexical-grammatical) metrical system of Ukrainian, in which increased duration signals both lexical (unpredictable) and rhythmic (predictable) stress. We perform extrinsic pairwise comparisons of vowels and consonants based on segmentally identical word pairs differing only in the location of stress (σˈσσˌσ/ˌσσˈσσ). This experimental design allows us to empirically distinguish between the effects of metrical prominence and lengthening at the word edges, simultaneously controlling for the potential confounding influence of polysyllabic shortening and intrinsic segmental length. The analysis of the data collected from 14 native speakers suggests that vocalic duration is a robust cue for lexical stress, whose domain extends to the pretonic syllable. Furthermore, a subtle increase in duration of the word-final vowel serves as a cue for rhythmic stress in Ukrainian.

Irish English PEPS-C (2015 edition) and Learners of ESL

Introduction: Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) is a computerised test for assessing the abilities to understand and use speech prosody in communication. It has been used to obtain a profile of strengths and weaknesses in different prosodic forms and functions for different clinical populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome) and second language learners. The 2015 edition of PEPS-C incorporates four new subtests addressing the understanding and production of lexical stress and phrasal stress, and collapses four form subtests (Intonation/Short-Item Input and Output, Prosody/Long-Item Input and Output) into two (Discrimination, Imitation). However, the suitability of these new tasks has not been reported in any published studies, although they are likely to be relevant for learners of English. Moreover, the present authors update the Irish English (IE) version of PEPS-C to the 2015 edition for another research project on prosodic skills in children with spina bifida. Hence, this paper reports the making of PEPS-C 2015 (IE) and examines the usefulness of this test in assessing a group of non-native speakers of English, as compared to a group of native speakers of IE. Methods: PEPS-C 2015 for Irish English was developed by adapting the test items of the UK English version of the test. The PEPS-C 2015 (IE) was then trialled on 25 native speakers of Irish English and 10 Spanish speakers who speak English as a second language (ESL). Results: All native speakers of Irish English showed competence (scored ≥75% correct) in the comprehension and expression of prosodic form and functions assessed. For the ESL speakers, the test identified two areas of possible difficulty for this group: Phrase Stress Comprehension and Expression, and Contrastive Stress Comprehension. Conclusion: The PEPS-C 2015, with its extra stress tasks, might therefore be useful as a prosody assessment tool for ESL speakers, particularly those with a Romance first language or at an early stage of learning, but further research is needed.

THE PROSODIC PARAMETERS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF IMPERATIVES IN THE INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE

The article is devoted to highlighting the results of the study of prosodic parameters in the implementation of the imperatives in the texts of two types of institutional discourse, namely, lecture and preaching. Proceeding from the presence of common intentional criteria of lecture and preaching discourse (transfer of knowledge and formation of point of view / belief), these discourses are considered in the article as a special type of institutional teaching discourse with a similar compositional structure. In the implementation of the operational strategies of the lecturer and the preacher, an important role is played by the methods of stimulating the audience to communicative actions, which are carried out, in particular, by imperative utterances. The work contains a description of the results of a phonetic study of imperative utterances and their linguistic interpretation, as a result of which a systematic description of the prosodic organization of various types of imperatives used in lecture and preaching discourses is presented, the characteristic patterns of the intonation structure of the studied speech realizations are highlighted. On the basis of the conducted research, it was stated that loudness, tempo, phrasal stress and melodic contour are the main prosodic means of realizing motivation in any part of the text of a lecture or a sermon. Depending on the degree of participation of prosodic parameters in the implementation of imperatives, three main prosodic components were identified that participate in the differentiation of the type of lecture or sermon. In lecture discourse, the prosodic parameters that differentiate the classroom / online lecture are melody, stress and tempo. In preaching discourse, the main prosodic markers of the differentiation of temple / distant preaching are melody, rhythm and loudness. The audit analysis made a statement of the existence of a certain pattern in the use of imperatives, depending on the type of lecture and preaching discourses and their compositional part, and demonstrated the concentration of the largest number of differential intonation features in the introduction and the smallest - in the general main part of the texts. The main result of the audit analysis was the advancement of certain intonational parameters as informative for the implementation and differentiation of imperatives in various types of discourse.

The Impact Of Lexical Stress Type and Position of a Vowel Within a Phrase on Vowel Formant Bandwidths

The article sets out to explore the impact of different types of lexical stress and word position within a phrase as well as the interaction of these factors on formant bandwidths. The findings contribute to establishing the role of these formant features as acoustic correlates of the Russian lexical stress. The experimental material for analysis is presented by the Russian sound [a] embedded in a word in a natural language carrier phrase. The word position is changed from phrase initial to the phrase final one and in each position the target word is uttered with a neutral and an emphatic stress by four speakers. The Praat software is used to extract the mean values of the first four formant bandwidths of the target vowel. Two-way ANOVA is carried out to establish the significance of difference between neutrally and emphatically stressed vowels in all the three phrasal positions. The impact of phrasal position and stress type is clearly pronounced and is valid for all the four speakers. Specific trends in bandwidth alterations are hard to identify in most cases because of inconsistent fluctuations of formant bandwidths and a heavy influence of the speakers' idiolects: formant bandwidths expand, contract or remain unchanged. An explanation of the results obtained is suggested.

Analyzing second language proficiency using wavelet-based prominence estimates

Prosodic characteristics, such as lexical and phrasal stress, are one of the most challenging features for second language (L2) speakers to learn. The ability to quantify language learners’ proficiency in terms of prosody can be of use to language teachers and improve the assessment of L2 speaking skills. Automatic assessment, however, requires reliable automatic analyses of prosodic features that allow for the comparison between the productions of L2 speech and reference samples. In this paper we investigate whether signal-based syllable prominence can be used to predict the prosodic competence of Finnish learners of Swedish. Syllable-level prominence was estimated for 180 L2 and 45 native (L1) utterances by a continuous wavelet transform analysis using combinations of f0, energy, and duration. The L2 utterances were graded by four expert assessors using the revised CEFR scale for prosodic features. Correlations of prominence estimates for L2 utterances with estimates for L1 utterances and linguistic stress patterns were used as a measure of prosodic proficiency of the L2 speakers. The results show that the level of agreement conceptualized in this way correlates significantly with the assessments of expert raters, providing strong support for the use of the wavelet-based prominence estimation techniques in computer-assisted assessment of L2 speaking skills.

To Mark the Publication of the Monograph “Phrasal Stress in Phonetic, Functional and Semantic Aspects” by A. V. Pavlova and N. D. Svetozarova (Moscow, 2017)

To Mark the Publication of the Monograph “Phrasal Stress in Phonetic, Functional and Semantic Aspects” by A. V. Pavlova and N. D. Svetozarova (Moscow, 2017)

COMMON AND VARIOUS IN THE WORD-ORDER OF CHINESE AND RUSSIAN SENTENCES

The purpose of this article is to identify some essential coincidences and differences in word order in the Russian and Chinese simple sentences and determine how to use the established features in the study of these languages. The object of this research are simple sentence models in Russian and Chinese. The subject of the study is the structural, semantic and functional differences of the vocabulary in Russian and Chinese utterances. The methods of functional syntactic and lexical-semantic analysis, comparative and descriptive methods are used. As a result of the study, it was found that the Russian sentence of three words: subject, predicate and object, has all six possible variants of the word order, while its Chinese equivalent has only three variants. At the same time, in both Russian and Chinese, the main, namely expressively neutral model is “subject — predicate — object». The conclusions are that the change of words order in utterance is closely related to phrasal stress and actual division. Every change in direct words order usually indicates a change in the shades of meaning and the subtext of what is expressed, if the subject and object are unchanged in essence.

Root and semi-phrasal compounds: A syntactic approach

We present a syntactic account of the derivation of two types of attributivenominal compounds in Spanish, Russian and Greek. These include right-headed “root” compounds, which exhibit more “word”-like properties and single stress domains, and left-headed “semi-phrasal” compounds with more phrasal properties and independent stress domains for the two compound members. We propose that both compound structures are formed on a small clause predicate phrase, with their different properties derived from the merger of the predicate member of the small clause as a root or as a larger nominal unit with additional functional projections. The proposed structures provide an explanation of observed lexical integrity effects, as well as specific predictions of patterns of compound formation crosslinguistically.

Prosodic end-weight reflects phrasal stress

Prosodic end-weight refers to the well-documented tendency of prosodically heavier constituents to be preferred at the ends of domains when other factors (e.g. semantics, accessibility, and syntactic complexity) are controlled. Various explanations for prosodic end-weight have been put forth, including complexity deferral, final lengthening, rhythm, phonotactics, and nuclear stress. This article adduces several new arguments for phrasal stress as a unified explanation for prosodic end-weight and proposes a constraint-based theory of the stress-weight interface in sentential prosody.

Jaw Displacement and Metrical Structure in Japanese : The Effect of Pitch Accent, Foot Structure, and Phrasal Stress( Articulatory Phonetics: Focus on Japanese)

Jaw Displacement and Metrical Structure in Japanese : The Effect of Pitch Accent, Foot Structure, and Phrasal Stress( Articulatory Phonetics: Focus on Japanese)