Position In Utterance Research Articles

How Infants Link Nonce Phrases to Scenes With Objects and Predicates.

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity, or the object's motion. Infants heard the syllables in either a Verb-Subject (VS) or Subject-Verb (SV) order. Learning was tested using preferential looking. The results showed that infants learned the nouns and verbs equally well. In addition, in both the VS- and SV-consistent conditions, infants learned the meaning of the utterance-final syllable, but not the utterance-initial one. A follow-up experiment that manipulated the prosodic cues of the test phrases confirmed that infants had decomposed the bisyllabic phrases into two distinct word-units. Thus, any biases potentially favoring noun or verb learning played a smaller role than utterance position did when noun and verb learning were equally supported by context.

Investigating pausing and gesturing patterns in children with and without developmental language disorder

Abstract This study aims at observing the co-occurrence of filled (FP) and unfilled pauses (UP) and gestures in the narratives of children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Although children with DLD are known to be more “disfluent” than typically developing children (TD), little is known about the role of pauses in children’s speech and their interaction with gestures. 22 French-speaking children with DLD and 22 age- and gender-matched controls, between 7 and 10, recounted a cartoon excerpt. We annotated pauses and their position in utterances, and we coded gestures according to their function. Despite a similar pausing rate across groups, results show that TD children produced more utterance-beginning FPs and more mid-utterance UPs, while children with DLD produced more standalone FPs and mid-utterance UPs. Furthermore, multimodal patterns of co-occurrence, specific to pause type, emerged. While both groups had similar gesture rates and produced mostly referential gestures, TD children produced slightly more beat gestures during FPs and more self-adaptors and pragmatic gestures during UPs. Children with DLD produced more referential gestures and object-adaptors during UPs. These differences point to the temporal relationship between gestures and pauses and the multiple ways these two phenomena may interact according to the child’s profile.

On the Functional Convergence of Pragmatic Markers in Arizona Spanish

Tags, compared to other types of pragmatic markers (PMs), are typically considered as separate yet related phenomena and are usually differentiated by their syntactic positions and discourse functions, among other factors. The current work explores this differentiation utilizing 36 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals in southern Arizona, USA. Standard language variation and change (LVC) methodologies were used in the extraction, coding, and statistical analyses of this dataset (n = 591), with four PM variants identified for study through an exploratory methodology: the tags no and qué no and the discourse markers (DMs) you know and saber. The results of our analyses indicate that, while utterance position, self-reported gender, and length of residence were all significant in the multivariate analysis, discourse function was dropped from the statistical model. Therefore, we interpret this finding as an indication that functional differences between these two pragmatic resources have been levelled through grammaticalization, demonstrating that for Arizona Spanish, tags and DMs belong in the same functional category of PMs. Furthermore, an analysis of codeswitching behavior triggered by the incoming variant you know demonstrates that it is becoming incorporated into the Spanish pragmatic system, patterning similarly to its counterpart saber in terms of function and position, without attrition of the native variant.

Creaky voice across language and gender: A study of Canadian English-French bilingual speech

This study addresses how non-contrastive creaky voice varies among languages and across speakers (as a function of gender). Spontaneous speech from 9 English-French bilingual speakers born and raised in Ontario/Québec was collected from publicly available online data sources, amounting to roughly 5 min of speech per speaker-language pair and 13 992 vowels total. This corpus will reach 40 speakers by the conference. Acoustic analysis consisted of pitch tracking in Praat, providing a proportion of unreliable f0 tracks for each vowel as well as one spectral slope measure (H1*-H2*) and two Harmonics-to-Noise Ratios (CPP and HNR05) as acoustic correlates of creaky voice. Statistical significance was tested using mixed-effects regression models, with fixed effects of language, gender, and utterance position, and maximal by-word and by-speaker random effects. The main results for gender show that men's vowels have more unreliable f0 tracks, lower H1*-H2*, lower HNR05 and somewhat lower CPP, suggesting that male speakers are creakier overall. Regarding language, English displays more unreliable pitch tracking compared to French, providing some evidence for language-dependent vocal settings. Other acoustic correlates of creak, however, do not show consistent cross-linguistic differences.

Form (Prosody)-Meaning (Pragmatics) pairings of discourse markers: A case study of Nǐ zhīdào (‘You Know’) as a construction in Chinese media interviews

This article makes the first empirical corpus-based study of the actual performance of the discourse marker (DM) nǐ zhīdào (NZ) in Chinese media interview conversations from the perspective of synchronic Construction Grammar (CxG).1 The main objective is to pair the prosody of NZ at varying utterance positions (‘form’ properties at prosodic and discourse structural levels) with its pragmatic functions (‘meaning’ properties at the discourse communicative level), to enhance our understanding within the existing literature, specifically in relation to pragmatics in spontaneous speech, and provide implications for the broader study of discourse markers. The analysis of the ‘form’ properties of NZ reveals distinct, context-specific attributes of such prosodic metrics as duration, tempo, pause, F0, and intensity at varying utterance positions; the analysis of its ‘meaning’ properties discovers pragmatic functions with characteristic utterance distributions; and the form-meaning pairing between prosody and pragmatics highlights the roles of prosody in deciphering and materializing pragmatics and of pragmatics in underlying and motivating prosody. This study has shown that insights gained from CxG can enhance our understanding of the fields of pragmatics, discourse, and interaction, and specific linguistic phenomena whose importance has been entrenched in these domains can be sufficiently explained using CxG. It follows that the notion of construction can be extended to the discourse (e.g., dialogue and conversation) level to approach the complexities of spoken language and address diverse elusive pragmatic issues like DMs effectively.

A usage-based account of paragogic /e/ in 20th century New Mexican Spanish

Abstract This study tests if New Mexican Spanish speakers’ productions of words that variably display paragogic /e/ (rincón ∼ rincon e ‘corner’) are predictable from their lexical frequency, utterance position, and the frequency with which these words occur in an utterance position that conditions paragoge. In the study, the variable that measures the frequency with which words occur in the conditioning context is referred to as the FCC. The analysis of 77 word types and 2,235 tokens produced by 24 speakers demonstrates that the likelihood that a speaker produces paragogic /e/ increases when words are produced at the end of an utterance. The study also finds novel evidence for the mediating effect of lexical frequency on the effect of the FCC variable: the influence of the frequency with which words are produced in utterance-final position on the likelihood of paragogic /e/ is strengthened as lexical frequency decreases. Together with research on reductive phonological processes (e.g., Forrest, John. 2017. The dynamic interaction between lexical and contextual frequency: A case study of (ING). Language Variation and Change 29(2). 129–156), it seems that the effect of the FCC variable is amplified by lexical frequencies that already harbor the phonological process. These novel findings invite scholars to reconsider the assumption that such effects require many exemplars to shape lexical representation and speech production.

Building an elicited imitation task as a measure of implicit grammatical knowledge

Elicited imitation tests (EIT) are often used to measure the effects of a form?focused intervention on the development of L2 learners’ implicit grammatical knowledge, which is intuitive and retrieved without conscious awareness. This study investigated the relationship between an EIT focused on the English past tense and a set of other tests; it also examined whether the past-tense morpheme type, grammaticality of the verbs, their position in the stimulus utterances, and the explicitness of the test instructions influence learners’ imitation accuracy. Forty-four university-level students, all native speakers of Mandarin and enrolled in an English for academic purposes program in Canada, completed an EIT along with four other tests over two consecutive sessions. Results revealed that only the imitation of irregular verbs was significantly correlated with the other tests. In addition, the participants were more accurate in repeating the grammatical and correcting the ungrammatical regular verbs but neither the position of the verbs nor the type of instructions significantly influenced imitation. These findings suggest that several factors can influence learners’ performance and the knowledge that they draw upon during an EIT.

Linguistic and paralinguistic constraints on the function of(eu) acho queas DM in Brazilian Portuguese

LikeI thinkin English,(eu) acho quein Brazilian Portuguese can function as a discourse marker (DM) with more than one meaning, and these meanings are curiously diametrically opposed. Certainty, doubt or uncertainty is inferred by hearers in an interactional context. In a sample of audio-video recorded interviews, the occurrences of this DM were classified by meaning, and association tests between meanings and linguistic factors (pronoun realization, polarity, position in utterance), real-world features (type of evidence from which the speaker says something, and discursive topic), prosody (F0, intensity and duration), and facial expressions were carried out. Differences that distinguish these factors were identified among certainty, doubt and uncertainty uses. The certainty meaning of(eu) acho quewas associated with pronoun presence, more formality and topics in which the speaker had direct evidence. Uncertainty and doubt were associated with pronoun absence, less formality and topics in which the speaker did not have direct evidence. Patterns of intensity and duration acted to distinguish the certainty, doubt and uncertainty meanings of(eu) acho que. In a conditional decision tree, the position in utterance, presence of a pronoun, type of speaker’s evidence, discursive topic, and duration helped to disambiguate the meanings of(eu) acho que. These results suggest the relevance of a multilevel approach to describe DM, in different languages, at least with respect to mental state verbs.

Functions of Russian verb-derived discourse markers slušaj and smotri from the perspective of information management and interpersonal regulation

While a significant amount of research related to discourse markers in the Russian language has been devoted to particles, very few scholars have focused on verb-derived discourse markers such as slušaj (‘listen’), smotri (‘look’), znaeš’ (‘y'know’), ponimaeš’ (‘d'you understand’), and vidiš’ (‘d'you see’). In this paper, I focus on slušaj and smotri, exploring their functions of information management and interpersonal regulation in talk-in-interaction. Based on data collected from YouTube interview videos, I examine the features of slušaj and smotri in terms of speaker roles, position in utterances, utterance structure, and lexical co-occurrence. A qualitative analysis supported by quantitative results shows how slušaj and smotri perform their information management and interpersonal functions in requesting/providing information, reformulating utterances, establishing contact, and indicating empathy. Considering the similarities and differences observed from the analysis, the results of this study suggest that slušaj is likely to be an interpersonal marker typical of response utterances, while smotri is an information-oriented marker leading a hearer to understand an utterance.

A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females: Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability and change at the laryngeal and supralaryngeal levels in the discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females at two times, 10 years apart. Recognizing the multiple discourse roles of euh, we divided out occurrences according to utterance position. We quantified the frequency of euh, and evaluated acoustic changes in formants, fundamental frequency, and voice quality across time and utterance position. Results showed that euh frequency was stable with age. The only acoustic measure that revealed an age effect was harmonics-to-noise ratio, showing less noise at older ages. Other measures mostly varied with utterance position, sometimes in interaction with age. Some voice quality changes could reflect laryngeal adjustments that provide for airflow conservation utterance-finally. The data suggest that aging effects may be evident in some prosodic positions (e.g., utterance-final position), but not others (utterance-initial position). Thus, it is essential to consider the interactions among these factors in future work and not assume that vocal aging is evident throughout the signal.

Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Problems of Romanizing Word-Initial Glottal Stops in Modern Standard Arabic

The present study addresses issues related to the romanization of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) words pronounced with an initial glottal stop, both through transliteration and phonemic or phonetic transcription. The study argues that, in MSA, an utterance-initial glottal stop which is an integral part of a word or a prefix is phonemic, while an epenthetic glottal stop is non-phonemic, and that each type should be represented differently in romanization. This argument is supported by evidence from near-minimal pair tests and comparisons between MSA words with epenthetic glottal stop and English vowel-commencing words, as well as insights from cognitive phonology. In this context, a number of authentic transliterations and transcriptions, drawn from widely used romanization systems as well as essential works in phonetics and Arabic language teaching, are examined to see how word-initial glottal stops are romanized in different utterance positions. This has revealed a number of recurrent problems in representing word-initial glottal stops as well as the words immediately preceding them when they occur in utterance-medial position. It is suggested that most of these problems could be avoided by observing the distinction between phonemic and epenthetic glottal stops.

Cayuga word melodies—A corpus phonetic study

This work investigates the intonation of Cayuga, an endangered language of North America, now spoken by some 50 speakers in upstate New York and southern Ontario. Word prominence in Cayuga has been described as sensitive to both word shape and utterance position (Foster, 1982; Michelson, 1988). Non-utterance-final words in Cayuga are known to exhibit f0 prominence on the word-final syllable, although prominence occurs on earlier syllables in utterance-final contexts. This work constitutes an initial corpus phonetic investigation into the interaction of word-shape and utterance position on f0 realization in Cayuga. This study's corpus consisted of approximately 52 min of spoken Cayuga narratives by two L1 speakers (2736 hand-segmented word tokens). The results of the study corroborated some of the earlier descriptions. Words for both speakers exhibited prominence on word-finally in utterance non-final contexts. In utterance final contexts, however, sensitivity to word shape, differed between speakers. By comparing the two locations of prominence, we note small differences both in the alignment and scaling of peaks. Word-final prominence is, on average, scaled higher than utterance-final prominence (210 versus 204 Hz). Finally, utterance-final prominence is aligned earlier in the syllable than word-final prominence (33% vs 49% of vowel duration respectively).

Disentangling the Effects of Position and Utterance-Level Declination on the Production of Complex Tones in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec.

Phrase-final position is cross-linguistically the locus of both processes of phonetic reduction and processes of phonetic enhancement. In tone languages, phrasal position is a conditioning environment for processes of tone sandhi/allotony, though such patterns emerge from local processes of tonal enhancement or reduction. The current article examines the production of tone in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered language of Mexico with nine lexical tones and fixed, stem-final stress, across phrasal and utterance positions via three experiments. In the first two experiments, the findings show that speakers lengthen syllables and expand the tonal F0 range in utterance-final position. The effect of this range expansion is high tone raising, low tone lowering, and falling contour lowering. Rising contour tones undergo substantial leveling when produced in a non-utterance-final context, similar to Taiwanese Mandarin. These findings suggest that postural changes in F0 range are controlled, intonational effects in tonal languages and not paralinguistic. In the third experiment, we examine utterance-level declination and raising within sentences consisting entirely of level tones. We show that utterance-level F0 changes are independent from local tonal hyperarticulation effects in phrase-final position. Together, the experiments largely support prosodically-conditioned phonetic undershoot as a control mechanism in tone production and demonstrate how tonal complexity may constrain universal tendencies in speech production.

Extended discourse‐pragmatic usage ofnowin Nigerian English

AbstractApart from the occurrence ofnowas a temporal adverb and as an attention pragmatic marker, there is the existence of a third type ofnowwhich until now has not been explored in Nigerian English. This paper, examines the phonetic properties, meaning, frequency, syntactic patterns, and extended discourse‐pragmatic functions of an indigenisednowin Nigerian English. The paper takes its data from conversations in the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and analyses this nativisednowfrom a grammatical‐pragmatic approach. The results reveal that this third type ofnowhas adopted the tonal structure of some indigenous Nigerian languages and occurs mainly at the final position of utterances. This Nigerian indigenisednowperforms only interpersonal functions as it serves as an emphasis marker and as a mitigation marker.

The noun-verb distinction in established and emergent sign systems

In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan homesigns. We show that a distinction between nouns and verbs is marked (by utterance position and movement size) and thus present in all groups–even homesigners, who have invented their systems without a conventional language model. However, there is also evidence of emerging crosslinguistic variation in whether a base hand is used to mark the noun-verb contrast. Finally, variation in how movement repetition and base hand are used across Nicaraguan groups offers insight into the pressures that influence the development of a linguistic system. Specifically, early signers of NSL use movement repetition and base hand in ways similar to homesigners but different from signers who entered the NSL community more recently, suggesting that intergenerational transmission to new learners (not just sharing a language with a community) plays a key role in the development of these devices. These results bear not only on the importance of the noun-verb distinction in human communication, but also on how this distinction emerges and develops in a new (sign) language.

Non-durational acoustic correlates of word-initial consonant gemination in Kelantan Malay: The potential roles of amplitude and f0

This study reports on non-durational acoustic correlates of typologically rare word-initial consonant gemination in Kelantan Malay (KM) by focusing on two acoustic parameters – amplitude and f0. Given the unusual characteristics of the word-initial consonant contrast and its potential maintenance in domain-initial environments, this study sets to examine the extent to which amplitude and f0 can potentially characterise such a contrast in KM in addition to the cross-linguistically established acoustic correlate of closure duration. The production data involved elicited materials from sixteen KM native speakers. RMS and f0 values were measured at the start of the vowel following stops and sonorants produced in isolation (i.e. utterance-initial position) and in a carrier sentence (i.e. utterance-medial position). Results indicate that the consonant contrast is reflected in systematic differences in (i) vowel onset amplitude and f0 following the target consonant and (ii) the ratios of amplitude and f0 across two syllables of disyllabic words. There are also effects of utterance position, manner of articulation and voicing type on the magnitude of contrast between singletons and geminates with utterance-initial voiceless stops generally showing the greatest magnitude difference. The conclusion is drawn that the KM word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast can be associated with a set of acoustic parameters alongside closure duration.

“West” or “Vest”? Pronunciation of English Consonants [w] and [v] in the Utterances of Slovak EFL Speakers

The paper investigates the pronunciation of the labiodental fricative [v] and the labial-velar approximant [w] in the word-initial position in English utterances by Slovak speakers. The objective of the study is to explore which of the two consonants appear to be more problematic for Slovak learners of English. 40 students from a Slovak university produced spontaneous monologues in English, which were recorded using a computer and a standard microphone. Afterwards, two native English speakers conducted a subjective auditory analysis in an attempt to identify errors in the subjects’ pronunciation. The results demonstrate that Slovak learners of English frequently encounter difficulties in pronouncing the two consonants, sometimes substituting [v] for [w] and vice versa. The data obtained indicate that the subjects were beset with problems mispronouncing the two sounds to almost the same degree. Possible causes of the erroneous pronunciation seem to involve native language interference, devoting extra effort to approach authentic English pronunciation, and the neglect of pronunciation instruction.

‘정말’, ‘진짜’의 담화 기능과 운율 특성

The aim of this study is to investigate the functions and prosodic features of ‘joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ in spoken language corpus(TV drama speech corpus). ‘Joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ have the meaning of ‘truth without falsehood’ realized as nouns or adverbs, and also realized with a discourse markers with a discourse functions. Functions of discourse markers ‘joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ are ‘emphasis(with speaker’s negative manner)’, ‘gap-filler’. Unlike nouns and adverbs, discourse markers that performs these functions have salient prosodic features in the position in utterance, prosidic boundary, tonal patterns, duration, pause and F0 difference between the minimum value and the maximum value in end syllable.

Voice quality variation over the course of the English utterance

The presence of atypical voice quality (e.g. breathy and creaky voice) can be used to diagnose voice disorders, but it is also clear that healthy English speakers’ voices vary as a function of phrasing. For example, ends of declarative utterances tend to be produced with creakier voice quality. Yet for speakers who have no diagnosed voice disorder, it is still unclear what factors affect voice variation over an utterance, and how consistent these variations are across speakers. This in turn limits diagnostic utility of perceived non-modal voice. Therefore, the goal of this project is to determine how the voice varies over the course of English utterances. We recorded electroglottographic (EGG) and audio waveforms of 20 male and female speakers of Californian English reading sentences of various lengths that were designed to avoid non-modal voice associated with certain segments. The EGG waveforms were analyzed for contact quotient and f0 at the beginning, middle, and end of the utterance. Discussion will focus on how voice quality differs by position in utterance, and the extent to which it is predictable from f0. We also discuss whether voice quality varies as a function of gender, utterance length, and speakers’ average voice quality.