Prosodic Changes Research Articles

A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language (review)

Reviewed by: A historical phonology of the Slovene language by Marc L. Greenberg Mark J. Elson A historical phonology of the Slovene language. By Marc L. Greenberg (Historical phonology of the Slavic languages 13.) Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000. Pp. 199. This book maintains the high level of scholarship which characterizes its predecessors in the Historical phonology of the Slavic Languages series. It comprises five sections: ‘Introduction’ (19–62), ‘Phonological processes at the time of Slavic settlement in the Eastern Alps’ (63–86), ‘Slovene outcomes of some Late Common Slavic and general South Slavic developments’ (87–104), ‘Slovene innovations’ (105–27), and ‘The dialectal disintegration of the Slovene speech territory’ (128–66). There are, in addition, three appendices (167–89) and two indexes (190–99). The sections are subdivided into chapters, each of which, in Sections 2–5, treats a sound change. Several features contribute to the quality of Greenberg’s contribution: (1) a comprehensive account of Slovene historical phonology with chapters on dialectal diversity, contact between Slovene and other languages, the origin of Slovene, Slovene and its relationship to West Slavic, as well as Slovene and its relationship to Serbian dialects; (2) extensive reference to and discussion of existing treatments of the historical phonology of Slovene; (3) clear delineation of areas of scholarly dispute and mention of competing hypotheses relating to them, including those of the author; and (4) detailed treatment of dialectal vowel systems and prosodic changes. The last is of special importance. The dialectal systems and prosody of Slovene are areas of special complexity, combining elements on which there is general agreement among Slavists with those generating disagreement and speculation. G’s presentation of each is admirable for its clarity and thoroughness. Especially useful are the many diagrams specifying certain evolutionary stages of the vowel system of the language and the vowel systems of contemporary dialects. These diagrams include not only the relevant phonemes but the Common Slavic origin(s) of each which, in effect, serve as an index of chapters relating to the phonological history of the time period or dialect in question. G has provided us with a scholarly reference which, in the fullness of its treatment, goes well beyond all preceding references of the subject matter. It is simultaneously a synthesis and an analysis of equal excellence and will therefore be of value to Slavists and others with a wide variety of interests relating to the phonological history of Slovene. If there is any criticism to be made, it is organizational: The treatment of dialects, so central a part of G’s discussion, is scattered, beginning in the first section and concluding in the first appendix. This not only dilutes the integrity of the treatment but forces the author, in the initial dialectal survey of the first section, to anticipate certain aspects of phonological change in Slovene before they are introduced as such in subsequent sections. Since contemporary dialectal differences are the result of, among other things, phonological changes, all consideration of dialectal phenomena might better have been undertaken in a single, final section. This notwithstanding, G’s study is a fine addition to the slowly, but ever increasing [End Page 796] inventory of references relevant to the structure, history, and dialectology of Slovene. Mark J. Elson University of Virginia Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Quote – unquote? the role of prosody in the contextualization of reported speech sequences

This paper investigates how speakers of English can use the prosodic design of utterances to identity parts of these utterances as instances of reported speech. We will show that prosodic changes can function like quotation marks in written texts by clearly delimiting left and right hand boundaries of the reported sequence. In the majority of cases, however, prosodic changes do not coincide with the boundaries of reported speech but occur nearby, functioning like a 'frame' for the interpretation of a sequence as reported or even only as a 'flag' attracting attention and inviting the listener to actively (re-)construct the corresponding boundaries. Our data analysis also provides evidence for the use of prosodic designs to typify a figure in different roles, which - due to their unique 'prosodic design' can be presented without any verbalized projection of upcoming reported speech, once they have been introduced. This is due to the 'referent-tracking' nature of some prosodic designs of reported utterances.

When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases

According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP conditio, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine of other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.

Acoustical analysis of false starts in spontaneous speech

In spontaneous speech many false starts occur, where a speaker interrupts the flow of speech to restart the utterance. The acoustic aspects of such restarts in a common database were examined for duration and fundamental frequency. Automatically identifying the type of restart could improve speech recognition performance, by eliminating one version of any repeated words (or parts), and in the case of changed words, suppressing the unwanted words, so that the recognizer operates on only desired words. In virtually all current recognizers, words in a restart either simply pass to the textual component of the recognizer or cause difficulties in having a proper interpretation in the language-model component (since the language model is invariably trained only on fluent text). The spoken data consists of 42 speakers, each speaking about 30 different utterances (median length of about 12 words). There were 60 occasions with simple repeated words (or portions), 30 cases of inserted words, and 25 occurrences of new words substituted. When a word was simply repeated in a restart, it had virtually the same prosodics usually, but occasionally the repeated word had less stress. With a substitution or insertion in the restart, the modified word was virtually always more stressed. For restarts where the speaker stopped in the middle of a word and simply ‘‘backed up,’’ the pause lasted 100–400 ms in 85% of the examples. About 75% of the interrrupted words did not have a completion of the vowel in the intended word’s first syllable. In virtually all examples, the speaker completed at least 100 ms of the word, however, before pausing for at least 100 ms. When the pause occurred at a word boundary, the words repeated after the pause were either a straight repetition with little prosodic change or a repetition where the repeated words shortened up to 50%. As for the repeated words (after the pause) prior to the inserted word, function words showed little or no shortening, but usually had lower F0; content words here exhibited significant shortening and lower F0. Such prosodic change only applied to nonprepausal words, because words immediately prior to a pause were often subject to significant prepausal lengthening. [Work supported by NSERC.]

Prosodic changes in speech following brain damage: Acoustic and neuroradiographic measures

Two prosodic parameters, fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity, along with a measure of vowel duration, were studied in 11 Broca, 7 Wernicke, 15 Parkinson, and 15 normal-control subjects performing four speech tasks: reading, counting, conversation, and vowel prolongation. Tape-recorded speech samples were played into a microprocessor controlled speech analyzer (PM 301 Voice Identification, Inc.), where F0 in Hertz and intensity in relative decibels were calculated. Measures of mean F0 and F0 variability, mean intensity and intensity variability, and duration of the prolonged vowel were analyzed. Values differed across speech tasks: Overall, F0 and intensity values were higher in reading than in the other three tasks. Further, a significant group by task interaction was found for mean F0. Broca and Parkinson patient groups had abnormally high F0 mean values, but differed from each other in F0 variability (Broca having high and Parkinson having low F0 variability) and mean intensity; surprisingly, the Broca group had intensity values significantly lower than the other groups. All three clinical groups differed significantly from normals on the duration measure. Examination of PET and CT-scan data in individual patients indicated an association between prosodic impairments and specific frontosubcortical dysfunction, areas subserving motor abilities in speech production.