Prosodic Analysis Research Articles

Study into prosodic morphological analysis in Korean and Standard Chinese partial reduplication and contrastive analysis using optimality theory

Study into prosodic morphological analysis in Korean and Standard Chinese partial reduplication and contrastive analysis using optimality theory

Prosodic analysis based on cluster -Focus on the statement to the nation by former president Park Geun-hye

Prosodic analysis based on cluster -Focus on the statement to the nation by former president Park Geun-hye

Phonological variation of the present progressive aspect marker -tu- in Malawian Tonga: A prosodic analysis

This paper investigates principles which govern the various realisations of the present progressive aspect marker -tu- in Malawian Tonga. It is realised as zero when the morphological stem involved has two or more syllables. It is realised as -tu- when the stem involved is monomoraic. -tu- also surfaces before object markers. It is also realised as -t- or -tw- when it precedes vowel-initial verb stems. The main claim made in the paper is that -tu- is a lexical foot-head and a bona fide marker of the present progressive aspect. Since all foot-heads in Bantu languages are required to belong to the prosodic stem, its deletion when it falls before verb stems with two or more syllables ensures that there is no foot-head falling outside the prosodic stem. Preservation of -tu- before monomoraic verb stems and object markers is attributed to the fact that the foot-head -tu- in these forms is now part and parcel of the disyllabic prosodic stem. Finally, the realisation of -tu- as -t- or -tw- before vowel-initial verb stems ensures that prosodic stems have proper onset.

Flapping before a stressed vowel: The case of whatever

In English, word-internal intervocalic alveolar stops are predominantly flapped when preceding an unstressed vowel (water, charity) and optionally flapped at word boundaries preceding unstressed and stressed vowels (that is, private airplane). In this study, we show that /t/ is flapped in whatever although it is word-internal and precedes a stressed vowel. The data were elicited in a sentence reading task, with four speakers of Appalachian English. The duration of /t/ and the acoustic correlates of stress were examined. A comparison of vowel duration and amplitude patterns in whatever versus everwhat (both words are relative pronouns in free relative clauses in this dialect, N = 699) showed that the second syllable is stressed in whatever. A comparison of /t/ durations showed no significant differences among whatever, watermelons, waterlilies, water buffalo (N = 533, M = 30.1 ms). These results may be interpreted as: (a) whatever is an exception to the word-internal flapping environment, or (b) the word-internal flapping environment must be modified to include preceding stressed vowels at morpheme boundaries, or (c) whatever consists of two phonological words and falls within the word-final flapping environment. Prosodic and syntactic analyses of free relative clauses consistent with the last interpretation are discussed.

A sociophonetic approach to variation in Japanese pitch realizations

AbstractThis paper explores the flattening of Japanese sentential pitch as a possible nationwide change in progress among younger generations. Comparative data collected by identical protocols are examined in terms of speakers’ age, gender, and native dialects (in the city of Sapporo and in a rural town in Hokkaido, and in the city of Kagoshima in Kyushu). The paper also stresses the significance of including different registers in prosodic analysis and addressing potential problems with standard practices in which read-aloud materials comprise the primary resource. Based on naturalistic speech production data (i.e., spontaneous speech from a picture story description), our results reveal that: (1) regardless of the accentual discrepancies in their native dialects, younger generations characteristically speak in phonetically flattened realizations of pitch accompanying consistent, steeper declination, and (2) an age-linked differentiation also exists in prosodic phrasing, which is closely linked to the flattening of sentential pitch.

RESOLVING VERBAL REDUPLICATION PARADOXES IN MALAWIAN TONGA

The paper describes three verbal reduplication paradoxes in Malawian Tonga, a southern Bantu language spoken in the northern part of Malawi. RED exhibits characteristics of being either total or partial and being prefixed or suffixed to the Base. The problem of whether the relevant level of prosodic (reduplicative) stem analysis is the syllable or the mora and, thus, whether the minimal size of RED should be two syllables or two moras, is considered. The paper argues that this language offers three possibilities for reduplication namely, partial prefixal reduplication, total suffixal reduplication, and partial suffixal reduplication. Thus, the language takes optionality between prefixal and suffixal reduplication, although the latter appears to be the default one. The paper also argues that the relevant unit of Prosodic Stem analysis is, typically, the syllable and that reduplicative Prosodic Stems, like the Base stem, are therefore required to be minimally bisyllabic, like in many other Bantu languages.

Units and Constituency in Prosodic Analysis: A Quantitative Assessment

Drawing on methods from quantitative linguistics, this paper tests the hypothesis that the intonation unit is a valid language construct whose immediate constituent is the foot (and whose own immediate constituent is the syllable). If the hypothesis is true, then the lengths of intonation units, measured in feet, should abide by a regular and parsimonious discrete probability distribution, and the immediate constituency relationship between feet and intonation units should be further demonstrable by successfully fitting the Menzerath-Altmann equation with a negative exponent. However, out of 16 texts from the Aix-MARSEC database, only six share a common probability distribution and only eight exhibit a tolerable fit of the Menzerath-Altmann equation. A failure rate of ≥50% in both cases casts doubt on the validity of the hypothesis.

Análisis pragmaprosódico del marcador discursivo bueno

En líneas generales los marcadores del discurso han sido estudiados desde un enfoque gramatical, léxico, pragmático o pragmasintáctico, si bien, son pocos los estudios que han centrado su atención hacia el plano suprasegmental o prosódico. Nuestro trabajo parte de una hipótesis previa sobre la que ciertos rasgos prosódicos (acento, duración silábica, pausa, fronteras tonales) se asocian a la diversidad funcional de este tipo de unidades lingüísticas. De este modo, desarrollaremos de forma cualitativa y a título ejemplificador un análisis prosódico sobre el marcador discursivo bueno mediante la herramienta informática Praat, de acuerdo con la bibliografía al uso. Nos centraremos así en el estudio de ciertos rasgos prosódicos presentados como rasgos distintivos (pausas, reducción fonológica, nivel tonal, contorno melódico) a partir de la propuesta de Hidalgo (2010). Para ello estudiaremos el corpus de conversaciones coloquiales de Briz y Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2002) que recoge 19 conversaciones secretas en diversas situaciones informales sobre la modalidad del español coloquial peninsular. Para el caso particular de bueno, nos hemos apoyado también en la información ofrecida por el Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (Briz, et al., 2008) que incluye el corpus del Grupo Val.Es.Co. (Briz, 2002) como referencia principal en el análisis de tales unidades.

Prosodic analysis of storytelling speech in Japanese fairy tale

This paper presents a prosodic analysis of storytelling speech in Japanese fairy tale. Recent advances in TTS technologies bring us high quality synthetic speech especially on acoustic aspects. On prosodic aspects, however, there is still room for improvement in the expressiveness since most systems use one-sentence speech synthesis scheme. For instance, storytelling applications expect speech synthesis to be capable of having a control mechanism beyond one sentence. In this paper, a prosodic database is built for real storytelling speech of professional narrators on Japanese fairy tale aiming at investigating the actual storytelling strategies and ultimately reflecting them on the expressiveness of speech synthesis. After conducting a baseline speech segmentation for phones, words, and accentual phrases in a semi-automatic way, a multi-layered prosodic tagging is manually performed to extract information on various changes of “story states” relevant to impersonation, emotional involvement, and scene flow control. Storytelling speech materials of six professional narrators for Japanese fairy tale are prepared to analyze their storytelling strategies. In particular, the dynamics of pitch contours is investigated in terms of expressiveness control beyond sentence considering narrator dependency as well. Based on the findings obtained, pitch control schemes are discussed for storytelling speech synthesis.

How salient are onomatopoeia in the early input? A prosodic analysis of infant-directed speech

Onomatopoeia are frequently identified amongst infants' earliest words (Menn & Vihman, 2011), yet few authors have considered why this might be, and even fewer have explored this phenomenon empirically. Here we analyze mothers' production of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech (IDS) to provide an input-based perspective on these forms. Twelve mothers were recorded interacting with their 8-month-olds; onomatopoeic words (e.g. quack) were compared acoustically with their corresponding conventional words (duck). Onomatopoeia were more salient than conventional words across all features measured: mean pitch, pitch range, word duration, repetition, and pause length. Furthermore, a systematic pattern was observed in the production of onomatopoeia, suggesting a conventionalized approach to mothers' production of these words in IDS.

Expression of emotions and physiological changes during teaching

We investigated the expression of emotions while teaching in relation to a teacher’s physiological changes. We used polyvagal theory (PVT) to frame the study of teaching in a teacher education program. Donna, a teacher-researcher, experienced high levels of stress and anxiety prior to beginning to teach and throughout the lesson we used her expressed emotions as a focus for this research. We adopted event-oriented inquiry in a study of heart rate, oxygenation of the blood, and expressed emotions. Five events were identified for multilevel analysis in which we used narrative, prosodic analysis, and hermeneutic-phenomenological methods to learn more about the expression of emotions when Donna had: high heart rate (before and while teaching); low blood oxygenation (before and while teaching); and high blood oxygenation (while teaching). What we learned was consistent with the body’s monitoring system recognizing social harm and switching to the control of the unmyelinated vagus nerve, thereby shutting down organs and muscles associated with social communication—leading to irregularities in prosody and expression of emotion. In events involving high heart rate and low blood oxygenation the physiological environment was associated with less effective and sometimes confusing patterns in prosody, including intonation, pace of speaking, and pausing. In a low blood oxygenation environment there was evidence of rapid speech and shallow, irregular breathing. In contrast, during an event in which 100 % blood oxygenation occurred, prosody was perceived to be conducive to engagement and teacher expressed positive emotions, such as satisfaction, while teaching. Becoming aware of the purposes of the research and the results we obtained provided the teacher with tools to enact changes to her teaching practice, especially prosody of the voice. We regard it as a high priority to create tools to allow teachers and students, if and as necessary, to ameliorate excess emotions, and change heart rate, oxygenation levels, and breathing patterns.

Systems, Prosodies, and the Phonology of French: New Insights from a Case Study of the Clitic Pronouns

The preverbal clitic pronouns of French manifest in their phonology three phenomena which have exercised phonologists and variationists for many years: liaison, schwa or e-caduc, and variable (l). Hitherto these have been treated as separate phenomena, of which the clitics are sometimes invoked as instances (the main instance, in the case of (l)). This article, by contrast, takes the preverbal clitic pronoun system as a whole and applies some of the key constructs of Firthian Prosodic Analysis to its synchronic phonological analysis. Using a polysystemic approach, we present subsystems of pronouns and the structural and phonematic contrasts that characterize them. We show how these systems of contrasts and Firthian constructs such as the ‘prosody’ afford new, insightful ways of formalizing these phonological phenomena, which have the potential for broader application to the language. Our analysis is theoretical, but we demonstrate briefly how some of its testable predictions are confirmed by empirical findings in the existing literature, illustrating its potential to provide new insights and a more holistic framework for further analysis of these and other variable phonological features of French.

From Mimicry to Language: A Neuroanatomically Based Evolutionary Model of the Emergence of Vocal Language.

The auditory cortex communicates with the frontal lobe via the middle temporal gyrus (auditory ventral stream; AVS) or the inferior parietal lobule (auditory dorsal stream; ADS). Whereas the AVS is ascribed only with sound recognition, the ADS is ascribed with sound localization, voice detection, prosodic perception/production, lip-speech integration, phoneme discrimination, articulation, repetition, phonological long-term memory and working memory. Previously, I interpreted the juxtaposition of sound localization, voice detection, audio-visual integration and prosodic analysis, as evidence that the behavioral precursor to human speech is the exchange of contact calls in non-human primates. Herein, I interpret the remaining ADS functions as evidence of additional stages in language evolution. According to this model, the role of the ADS in vocal control enabled early Homo (Hominans) to name objects using monosyllabic calls, and allowed children to learn their parents' calls by imitating their lip movements. Initially, the calls were forgotten quickly but gradually were remembered for longer periods. Once the representations of the calls became permanent, mimicry was limited to infancy, and older individuals encoded in the ADS a lexicon for the names of objects (phonological lexicon). Consequently, sound recognition in the AVS was sufficient for activating the phonological representations in the ADS and mimicry became independent of lip-reading. Later, by developing inhibitory connections between acoustic-syllabic representations in the AVS and phonological representations of subsequent syllables in the ADS, Hominans became capable of concatenating the monosyllabic calls for repeating polysyllabic words (i.e., developed working memory). Finally, due to strengthening of connections between phonological representations in the ADS, Hominans became capable of encoding several syllables as a single representation (chunking). Consequently, Hominans began vocalizing and mimicking/rehearsing lists of words (sentences).

Mamma Mia, A Singable Translation!

The article discusses and analyzes approaches to translating singable texts. It presents a linguistic (prosodic, lexical and structural) analysis of the Slovenian translation of the musical Mamma Mia! The aim of the qualitative and quantitative study is to investigate the translation strategies used to produce a singable target text. The results of the analysis suggest that producing a prosodic match is a basic requirement, whereas the lexical, structural and/or poetic characteristics of the source text are subject to changes. Overall, the findings show that the function and the purpose of the translation play a crucial role in the prioritization of translation strategies.

Prosodic analysis of neutral, stress-modified and rhymed speech in patients with Parkinson's disease

Background and objectiveHypokinetic dysarthria (HD) is a frequent speech disorder associated with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). It affects all dimensions of speech production. One of the most common features of HD is dysprosody that is characterized by alterations of rhythm and speech rate, flat speech melody, and impairment of speech intensity control. Dysprosody has a detrimental impact on speech naturalness and intelligibility. MethodsThis paper deals with quantitative prosodic analysis of neutral, stress-modified and rhymed speech in patients with PD. The analysis of prosody is based on quantification of monopitch, monoloudness, and speech rate abnormalities. Experimental dataset consists of 98 patients with PD and 51 healthy speakers. For the purpose of HD identification, sequential floating feature selection algorithm and random forests classifier is used. In this paper, we also introduce a concept of permutation test applied in the field of acoustic analysis of dysarthric speech. ResultsProsodic features obtained from stress-modified reading task provided higher classification accuracies compared to the ones extracted from reading task with neutral emotion demonstrating the importance of stress in speech prosody. Features calculated from poem recitation task outperformed both reading tasks in the case of gender-undifferentiated analysis showing that rhythmical demands can in general lead to more precise identification of HD. Additionally, some gender-related patterns of dysprosody has been observed. ConclusionsThis paper confirms reduced variation of fundamental frequency in PD patients with HD. Interestingly, increased variability of speech intensity compared to healthy speakers has been detected. Regarding speech rate disturbances, our results does not report any particular pattern. We conclude further development of prosodic features quantifying the relationship between monopitch, monoloudness and speech rate disruptions in HD can have a great potential in future PD analysis.

John Rupert Firth?s Model of Linguistics: A Critical Study

The attempt was made to clarify Firth’s main interests in linguistics. His writings show that the study of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Context’ should be central in linguistics, in addition to the development of a model called ‘Prosodic Analysis’, where he laid out his views as to how language works and how linguists should approach its analysis. For Firth, the analysis of language comes within the range of a social theory. A general linguistic theory should then study language as a social behavior, and context within the context of culture. Firth also advocated the investigation of corpora of written texts, which can be strategically selected to exemplify a restricted language.

SEA_AP: A SEGMENTATION AND LABELLING TOOL FOR PROSODIC ANALYSIS

This paper introduces a tool that performs segmentation and labelling of sound chains in phono units, syllables and/or words departing from a sound signal and its corresponding orthographic transcription. In addition, it also integrates acoustic analysis scripts applied to the Praat programme with the aim of reducing the time spent on tasks related to analysis, correction, smoothing and generation of graphics of the melodic curve. The tool is implemented for Galician, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Our goal is to contribute, by means of this application, to automatize some of the tasks of segmentation, labelling and prosodic analysis, since these tasks require a large investment of time and human resources.

Rule-Based Storytelling Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis

In recent years, various real life applications such as talking books, gadgets and humanoid robots have drawn the attention to pursue research in the area of expressive speech synthesis. Speech synthesis is widely used in various applications. However, there is a growing need for an expressive speech synthesis especially for communication and robotic. In this paper, global and local rule are developed to convert neutral to storytelling style speech for the Malay language. In order to generate rules, modification of prosodic parameters such as pitch, intensity, duration, tempo and pauses are considered. Modification of prosodic parameters is examined by performing prosodic analysis on a story collected from an experienced female and male storyteller. The global and local rule is applied in sentence level and synthesized using HNM. Subjective tests are conducted to evaluate the synthesized storytelling speech quality of both rules based on naturalness, intelligibility, and similarity to the original storytelling speech. The results showed that global rule give a better result than local rule

Towards the generation of dialogue acts in socio-affective ECAs: a corpus-based prosodic analysis

We present a corpus-based prosodic analysis with the aim of uncovering the relationship between dialogue acts, personality and prosody in view to providing guidelines for the ECA Greta’s text-to-speech system. The corpus used is the SEMAINE corpus, featuring four different personalities, further annotated for dialogue acts and prosodic features. In order to show the importance of the choice of dialogue act taxonomy, two different taxonomies were used, the first corresponding to Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts and the second, inspired by Bunt’s DIT++, including a division of directive acts into finer categories. Our results show that finer-grained distinctions are important when choosing a taxonomy. We also show with some preliminary results that the prosodic correlates of dialogue acts are not always as cited in the literature and prove more complex and variable. By studying the realisation of different directive acts, we also observe differences in the communicative strategies of the ECA depending on personality, in view to providing input to a speech system.

Developing second language oral ability in foreign language classrooms: The role of the length and focus of instruction and individual differences

ABSTRACTThe current study aimed to examine how instruction can impact the global, segmental, prosodic, and temporal qualities of second language (L2) oral ability in foreign language (FL) settings (i.e., a few hours of target language input per week). Spontaneous speech was elicited via a timed picture description task from 56 Japanese freshman college students who had studied English through FL instruction from Grades 7 to 12 without any experience abroad. The tokens were rated for global accentedness and then submitted to segmental, prosodic, and temporal analyses. According to statistical analyses, (a) the participants' oral performance widely varied in relation to the length and focus of FL instruction, the frequency of their conversations in the L2, and aptitude; and (b) their diverse proficiency levels were predicted in particular by the amount of extra FL activities inside (i.e., pronunciation training) and outside (i.e., cram school) of high school (but not junior high) classrooms. The results in turn suggest that whereas extensive FL instruction (>875 hr) itself does make some difference in L2 oral ability development, its pedagogical potential can be increased by how students optimize their most immediate FL experience beyond the regular syllabus.