Prosodic Components Research Articles

РОЛЬ ВЕСТИБУЛЯРНОГО СЛУХА В ВОСПРИЯТИИ РЕЧИ (ОБЗОР ЗАРУБЕЖНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ)

The article presents a review of foreign studies on the participation of the vestibular system in speech perception. Although for a long time it was believed that the vestibular system is involved only in the management of balance and motor skills, there is increasing evidence that it is involved in cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and speech. There is no doubt that auditory perception is necessary for speech perception. The peripheral parts of the vestibular and auditory analyzers are anatomically closely related. But there is not enough research on how vestibular organs affect auditory perception. Evolutionarily, the vestibular apparatus appeared in animals much earlier than the peripheral hearing organs. The human vestibular apparatus consists of five paired sections: three semicircular canals and two otolith organs – the utriculus and sacculus. In the process of evolution, the semicircular canals of humans and other mammals underwent maximum changes. The ability to register auditory information was preserved only in one of the parts of the vestibular apparatus – sacculus. Vestibular (saccular) hearing allows us to register low-frequency sounds in the range from 100 to 1000 Hz. This helps speech perception, as this frequency range is associated with the perception of intonation and other prosodic components of the utterance. Saccular hearing also helps speech perception in noise. Data on the role of the vestibular apparatus in speech perception are useful for all speech and language specialists. The ability of the sacculus to respond to sound is used for instrumental diagnostics of the vestibular system – cervical vestibular myogenic evoked potentials (cVEMP).

Self-repeat as a multimodal retraction practice

Abstract The paper focuses on a particular practice of self-repeat through which participants retract their prior formulations, and explores its multimodal design and use in the dynamic construction of meaning in Hebrew conversation. Drawing on interactional approaches to language and embodied action, we show that the practice of self-repeat is used to retract a formulation judged by its producer as being inadequate and ill-calibrated in the given interactional context. This function is supported by the multimodal configuration in which the lexical repeat is cast, which involves a stable prosodic component and a variable embodied component. Through its prosodic and embodied design, the repeat is contextualized as a noticeable display of accountability for having made an ill-suited choice of words. While the self-repeat alone is sufficient in proposing a problem of calibration, it can also be followed by a lexical replacement, which makes explicit the adjusted or recalibrated term. The self-repeat practice shows how participants engage in semantic work through online and situated revision of their formulations. This exposed process of meaning construction reveals their understanding of the constitutive link between the conceptual and the normative orders as practiced in actual conversation.

A Preliminary Longitudinal Study on Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) Components in the First Year of Life

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is an essential factor of mother-infant interaction and facilitates early language processing and word learning during dyadic interactions. This study aimed to longitudinally investigate emotional and prosodic components of IDS in the first year of life by analyzing children's responses to the different prosodic trends that mothers use during the observation of mother-child interactions. Seventeen mothers and infants were recruited for this study during their first hospitalization. The study involved observing communication changes in face-to-face interactions between the mother and child at three, six, and nine months after the child's birth. We analyzed the relationship between gaze direction, smiling, speech speed, and clarity. The results showed that the IDS differs in production when compared to the age of the child; at only nine months, there is high intensity. The same is evident from the results related to the elocution velocity. The verbal sensitivity of the mother and the ability to tune in to the affective states of the child, especially at nine months, can predict the child's understanding of future language.

ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ ВОКАЛА КАК СМОДЕЛИРОВАННАЯ ФОРМА ПРОДУКТИВНОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ДЛЯ КОРРЕКЦИИ ПРОСОДИЧЕСКОЙ СТОРОНЫ РЕЧИ В ЛОГОПЕДИИ

In this study, the authors consider the concepts of "prosody", "prosodics" and "prosodic side of speech" in the context of their synonymous use in speech therapy and taking into account the integration of voice components and speech breathing in terms of their practical application. The prosodic components schematically described by the authors serve to implement the communicative function of speech, since it is through them that the speaker conveys a variety of information and his or her emotional state. Disorders of the prosodic components of speech, namely its melody, speech tempo, speech rhythm, pausing, logical stress and diction, speech breathing, timbre, strength and loudness of the voice, its pitch, flight and modulation most negatively affect the development of human communicative activity and, first of all, interpersonal communication. In this study, the authors consider in detail the experience of using vocal elements as a form of productive activity for corrective action in the restoration and development of impaired prosodic components due to certain logopathologies (speech disorders), including those of persons with disabilities. It seems to the authors that the use of vocal elements by speech therapists is most productive only if they master the initial foundations of professional vocal and pedagogical skills, which primarily include "objective feedback" and "vocal ear".

Relative construction in Hittite

SummaryThe paper proposes a novel structural analysis of Hittite determinate relative clauses on the basis of a corpus study considering a wider and fuller array of Hittite data than ever before. In Hittite, relativewh-phrases attest a wide range of linear positions: first/initial, clause-second, immediately preverbal or even postverbal. We build upon the current assumption thatwh-pronouns are clitics and thus their placement is determined by the syntax-prosody interface. As for the syntactic component, we argue against thein situconstrual ofwh-elements. Instead, we propose that what linearly appears to be clause-second, preverbal or postverbal position of thewh-pronoun is structurally associated with Spec, FinP. The prosodic component is provided by the standardly acknowledged prosodic inversion, but the prosodic domain for the placement ofwh-clitics is not clausal (CP), it is rather to be identified with a smaller domain within CP, namely, FinP. We also provide the first ever systematic treatment of splitwh-phrases which are highly problematic for existing approaches but are fully accounted for by our analysis.

Psychological Features of the Development of the Prosodic Component of Preschool Children's Speech

Psychological Features of the Development of the Prosodic Component of Preschool Children's Speech

Visual and sound gesture in dance communication

ABSTRACT The present study addresses the impact of multimodal complexity in the transmission of a dance exercise. This study examined what kind of temporal correspondence favors the clarity of a teaching instruction in the context of a dance class. From an autoethnographic perspective, we describe a real learning situation in which a teacher marks (bodily demonstration and verbal counting) a movement exercise for a dancer. We analyze (microanalysis) the components of this marking, considering the model of the visual spatial indicator and the zero velocity and the prosodic components of the voice. It was hypothesized that when the emphasis of the movement and the emphasis of the voice are synchronized in phase this favors the clarity of the instruction. Seventy-five participants – dancers; musicians; non-musicians-non-dancers – evaluated dance exercises (audiovisual clips) with different modes of synchronization between voice and movement following two testing strategies. We found that in-phase exercise markings are significantly easier to follow and understand than when they are not. The work aims to show that a neglect in the multimodal organization of the instruction can generate distortion (noise) between the conceptualization and the perception of the message, putting at risk the result of the communication.

Functional and communicative peculiarities of the prosodic component in the English fairy tale discourse

Functional and communicative peculiarities of the prosodic component in the English fairy tale discourse

Left and Right Arcuate Fasciculi Are Uniquely Related to Word Reading Skills in Chinese-English Bilingual Children.

Whether reading in different writing systems recruits language-unique or language-universal neural processes is a long-standing debate. Many studies have shown the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) to be involved in phonological and reading processes. In contrast, little is known about the role of the right AF in reading, but some have suggested that it may play a role in visual spatial aspects of reading or the prosodic components of language. The right AF may be more important for reading in Chinese due to its logographic and tonal properties, but this hypothesis has yet to be tested. We recruited a group of Chinese-English bilingual children (8.2 to 12.0 years old) to explore the common and unique relation of reading skill in English and Chinese to fractional anisotropy (FA) in the bilateral AF. We found that both English and Chinese reading skills were positively correlated with FA in the rostral part of the left AF-direct segment. Additionally, English reading skill was positively correlated with FA in the caudal part of the left AF-direct segment, which was also positively correlated with phonological awareness. In contrast, Chinese reading skill was positively correlated with FA in certain segments of the right AF, which was positively correlated with visual spatial ability, but not tone discrimination ability. Our results suggest that there are language universal substrates of reading across languages, but that certain left AF nodes support phonological mechanisms important for reading in English, whereas certain right AF nodes support visual spatial mechanisms important for reading in Chinese.

Niphalisation in Ancient Hebrew: A Perspective from the Samaritan Tradition

A development in verbal morphology common to multiple forms of ancient Hebrew involves the shift of stative, intransitive, and weakly transitive verbs from G-stem (qal) to N-stem (niphal). Like other Hebrew traditions that crystallised in the Second Temple period, the reading tradition of the Samaritan Pentateuch (consisting of the oral realisation of the constituent consonantal, vocalic, and prosodic components) presents a relatively advanced stage of the shift. Against this tendency, however, Samaritan Hebrew also at times appears to preserve archaic qal morphology. This study surveys salient manifestations of “niphalisation” in Samaritan Hebrew, contrasting them with parallel features in Tiberian Hebrew and other forms of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, especially Second Temple varieties, and seeks to reveal salient commonalities. While highlighting pertinent secondary features common to Second Temple period sources, the paper also emphasises the historical depth of the shift from qal to niphal.

The Problem of Mental Development in Children with Autistic Disorders

The clinical-psychological-pedagogical picture of autistic personality disorders of a child is highly complex and diverse compared to other mental development disorders. The divergence of researchers' views on the autism clinic leads to a scientific discussion on the problem of conceptual and terminological base of definitions and concepts, so, as a consequence, the problem has a conceptual and diagnostic orientation. Summarizing the research of scientists, we highlight the characteristic manifestations of autism in older preschool age: lack of mental activity; violation of the interaction of mental functions; unevenness, partialness of intellectual development; gross violations of purposefulness and arbitrariness of attention; lack of lively interest, interest in the new, environmental research; the tendency to perceive information as if passively absorbing it into whole blocks; the reaction of departure from the influences of the environment directed on the child; adverse reaction or no reaction at all when trying to draw attention to the objects of the surrounding reality; rapid exhaustion and oversaturation with any purposeful activity; difficulty concentrating; difficulties in symbolization, transfer of skills from one situation to another; impaired formation of social and communicative functions. Having analyzed many scientific studies, we can determine the number and variety of speech disorders in children with autistic disorders: challenging to interpret crying; limited barking; lack of imitation of sounds; phonography of speech; mutism; echolalia; words-stamps, phrases-stamps; neologisms; limited use of pronouns; lack of speech in speech; speech autonomy; speech disorders; inability to form words; violation of the semantic, syntactic, grammatical structure of speech; violation of speech melody; violation of prosodic components of speech; inability to engage in dialogue; specificity of the development of monologue speech.

Разработка ритмико-слогового тренинга как инструмента овладения интонационной выразительностью иноязычной речи

The article introduces an authorial educational product aimed to develop students’ foreign language prosodic skills. The study is conducted within the framework of modern linguodidactics focused on finding efficient tools to optimize foreign language teaching process taking into account learners’ needs and their level of language proficiency. The authors analyze the role of phonetic competence and its prosodic component in ensuring successful intercultural communication, justify the efficiency of training as an active form of foreign language teaching. Scientific originality of the paper involves developing authorial educational product, rhythmic-syllabic training, aimed to develop students’ French language prosodic skills. The conclusion is made that syllable as a basic suprasegmental unit and rhythm as a basic speech stream parameter determine French language sound.

Preliminary study exploring the relation between visual prosody and the prosodic components in sign language

Type enriched with visual prosody is a powerful tool to encourage expressive reading. Visual prosody adds cues to text to guide vocal variations in loud-ness, duration, and pitch. More vocal variations result in a less monotonous voice and thus more expression. A positive e!ect of visual prosody is known on the voice of normal hearing readers and of signed bilingual deaf readers who developed signed language and spoken language. These deaf readers rely on speech as well as sign language and both modalities can be used interchangeably to compensate each other.
 This preliminary study explores visual prosody in text in relation to Flemish Sign Language to see if sign language can be used to explain prosody. We asked deaf readers between 7 and 18 to relate prosodic cues to videos presenting prosodic components of Flemish Sign Language. We found that those readers connect the prosodic cues with the components in Flemish Sign Language as intended. Larger word-spacing cor-relates with a pause between signs, a wider font with a sign with ‘longer du-ration’, a thicker font with more ‘displacement’ in the sign, a raised font with a ‘faster velocity’ in the sign. However, some confusion occurred as participants seemed to extract only two prosodic components in the sign language: both the ‘faster velocity’ and ‘longer duration’ were referred to in terms of 'speed' and were not perceived as separate prosodic components. Participants were confused about why there were three cues in the text. Therefore, it is advised to re-evaluate and to re-design visual prosody for sign language with only ‘displacement’ and ‘speed’ in mind.

Prosody of Abuse

The relevance of the study of the prosodic structure of speech acts of abuse is due to the tasks faced by an expert linguist in the study of oral discourse. The present study is experimental; in its course, for the first time, a set of universal and individual prosodic means used when pronouncing a conflict statement with signs of verbal aggression is considered. The purpose of the article is to identify the prosodic characteristics of abuse as an illocutionary act and study the features of suprasegmental units of speech containing invective elements, including those in the structure of utterances not limited by the semantics and pragmatics of abuse. An interdisciplinary approach is applied to analyzing spoken texts based on the appeal to acoustic, auditory, and linguistic analysis methods. The study’s object was unique, authentic utterances: spontaneous sounding speech qualified by the preliminary investigation authorities as a public abuse to a government official. As a result of the study, we identified suprasegmental units that characterize the speakers’ invective speech. The prosodic components of the speech act of abuse within the framework of the utterance include the ascending-descending nature of the frequency of the main tone and increased dynamic characteristics of speech. Statements containing signs of abuse are often carriers of other goals. Prosodic accents in such utterances vary and depend on the leading speech purpose of the utterance. Together with their addresser’s speech goal, the analyzed utterances’ propositional content is manifested by a particular prosodic structure. The intonational model of such statements when solving diagnostic expert problems acts as one of the indicators of a subjective negative assessment, which contributes to identifying a speech act as an abuse.

Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching

In spite of the considerable body of pedagogical and experimental research providing clear insights into best practices for pronunciation instruction, there exists relatively little implementation of such practices in pedagogical materials including textbooks. This is particularly true for target languages other than English. With the goal of assisting instructors wishing to build effective evidence-based instructional practices, we outline a set of key principles relevant to pronunciation teaching in general, illustrated here via Spanish in particular, drawing on previous pedagogical research as well as methods and findings from experimental (applied) linguistics. With the overall goal of enabling learners to move toward greater intelligibility, these principles include the importance of perceptual training from the onset of learning, a strong prosodic component, the use of contextualized activities, and a focus on segmental and prosodic phenomena with a high functional load as well as those that are shared across target language varieties. These principles are then illustrated with innovative perception and production exercises for beginner, university-level learners of Spanish. We conclude with a discussion of ways in which the pedagogical principles exposed here can be extended beyond the production of individual activities to the design of a broader pronunciation curriculum.

Experimental approach of the prosodic component in the linguistic input of gardenpath sentences in Brazilian Portuguese

This study investigates what part the prosodic component plays in linguistic processing. Can prosodic cues be computed early in the linguistic process and influence the syntactic processing? Some studies in American English (Kjelgaard&Speer, 1999; DeDe 2010) and German (Steinhaueret al 1999) have shown that yes, furthermore, prosodic elements like intonational phrases can modify the syntactic chain during processing. Our work is based on the premises that, during the perceptive processing, an early activation of the prosodic component in the linguistic input can lead the sentence’s syntactic structure.There have been studies in Brazilian Portuguese that show how prosody influences parsing (Lourenço-Gomes 2008; Magalhães& Maia 2006), however, none that tested the effects of prosodic constituents’ organization in online tasks.

PUNCTUATION INTERFERENCE DURING TRANSLATION (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE OF MOROCCAN BILINGUALS)

Statement of the problem. This work is devoted to the study of some of the features of the translation of punctuation marks. Attention is drawn to the peculiarities of the translation of punctuation in French under the influence of the Arabic language of the Maghreb countries. The translation of punctuation is considered on the example of a work of fiction, the text of which is as close as possible to the spoken French language of the inhabitants of the suburbs of the metropolis and Francophones in North Africa. An analysis of the punctuation elements that organize the text space, which are used by the author and the translator, makes it possible to draw a conclusion about different punctuation-graphic ways of reflecting the inner and outer world, as well as the information contained about a special mode of language that conveys special modes of consciousness. Results. Questions of interference in translation occupy an important place in connection with the interest in such a phenomenon as language variants; the problem of translation of punctuation is an important part of it. First, because punctuation marks themselves are ambiguous. Also, translation difficulties are associated with the author's use of punctuation marks and their combinations. And finally, the cases of punctuation interference presented in our study should be taken into account when translating from the French language operating in the Maghreb region. Conclusion. This study and analysis of the richness of the prosodic component of the French language of the suburbs demonstrates, in particular, that oral speech is still present in a large part of the discourse of artistic practices of French-speaking writers of the XX-XXI centuries. In the French text by the Maghreb writer Faiza Gen «Kiffe kiffe demain» (Faїza Guène «Kiffe kiffe demain»), we find punctuation marks that emphasize the oral nature of statements in every possible way, reproducing pauses and emotions in writing. These are cases with a period and an exclamation mark and a question mark; especially the frequent use of ellipsis, which sometimes seems out of place. The author most likely does this for two reasons: to maximize the authenticity of living speech and to show the uniqueness of the French language in the North African region. Punctuation interference gets its meaning in the syntactic structure of a statement. At the same time, the grammatical structure of the Arabic language has its own distinctive features in the form-content relationship of all grammatical units, which is observed in the interference inherent in the speech of Moroccans in French in spontaneous oral speech.

Examining the Speech and Articulation Rates of Turkish Speaking University Students

Objectives: One of the main prosodic components of language is the rate. Speaking and articulation rates are two different measurements that reflect various aspects of each other. This study mainly aimed to present preliminary normative data related to speaking rate, reading rate, articulation rate and articulation rate in reading for Turkish-speaking adults and also aimed to compare these four measurements in terms of gender. Methods: The present study included 84 university students (42 males and 42 females) aged between 19-24 years old whose native language was Turkish. Power analysis was calculated based on the articulation rate. Speech and articulation rates were measured by taking 400-syllable conversational speech samples from each participant. A text was used from the Adult II section of the Turkish version of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test to measure their reading rates. The speaking and reading samples obtained were recorded with a voice recorder and analyzed with the PRAAT software. Results: There was a statistically significant difference both between their speaking and reading rates, and between articulation rate and articulation rate in reading. Male participants had significantly higher articulation rates in speaking and reading than females. Conclusion: The present study provided evidence that the speech rate is low and articulation rate is high in Turkish. It concluded that the significant difference between articulation rates by gender in many languages is also valid for Turkish.

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.

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ТЕМПО-РИТМИЧЕСКОЙ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ РЕЧИ У ДОШКОЛЬНИКОВ СО СТЕРТОЙ ДИЗАРТРИЕЙ С ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕМ ЛОГОПЕДИЧЕСКОЙ РИТМИКИ

One of the common speech disorders represented as a complex symptom group that reveals in disorders of the phonetic and prosodic components of speech is an erased form of dysarthria. The subject of research is the insufficiently studied peculiarities of the tempo-rhythmic organization of speech of preschoolers with an erased form of dysarthria, and a description of the unique techniques for their development. The authors identify the forms of erased dysarthria and describe its specific symptoms, disorders, including neurological ones, which negatively affect the speech development of children. The paper describes the concept of “tempo-rhythmic organization of speech” and the meaning of this prosodic component. The work mainly focuses on the description of the rhythm-based speech therapy, consideration of the aspects related to organization and the contents, which contribute to the treatment of speech disorders using structured motor exercises combined with words and music. The authors describe the structure of a lesson showing the necessity to use the rhythm-based speech therapy as a means of treating rhythmic disorders (motor, musical and speech) of preschool children with erased dysarthria. Based on the generalized practical experience of the scientists working on this issue, the paper presents and clearly describes the key elements of logopedic rhythmics that can be included in the structure of speech therapy classes to facilitate the development of the tempo and rhythm in preschool children with erased dysarthria. Since the tempo-rhythmic organization of speech is the highest level of development of the motor function of the body, based on motor support, in the exercises proposed by the authors, much attention is paid at all stages of work to improving general and fine motor skills, coordination of movements, spatial orientation, and regulation of muscle tone.