Prosodic Contexts Research Articles

Vertical larynx actions and intergestural timing stability in Hausa ejectives and implosives.

The current project undertakes a kinematic examination of vertical larynx actions and intergestural timing stability within multi-gesture complex segments such as ejectives and implosives that may possess specific temporal goals critical to their articulatory realization. Using real-time MRI (rtMRI) speech production data from Hausa non-pulmonic and pulmonic consonants, this study illuminates speech timing between oral constriction and vertical larynx actions within segments and the role this intergestural timing plays in realizing phonological contrasts and processes in varying prosodic contexts. Results suggest that vertical larynx actions have greater magnitude in the production of ejectives compared to their pulmonic counterparts, but implosives and pulmonic consonants are differentiated not by vertical larynx magnitude but by the intergestural timing patterns between their oral and vertical larynx gestures. Moreover, intergestural timing stability/variability between oral and non-oral (vertical larynx) actions differ among ejectives, implosives, and pulmonic consonants, with ejectives having the most stable temporal lags, followed by implosives and pulmonic consonants, respectively. Lastly, the findings show how contrastive linguistic 'molecules'- here, segment-sized phonological complexes with multiple gestures- interact with phrasal context in speech in such a way that it variably shapes temporal organization between participating gestures as well as respecting stability in relative timing between such gestures comprising a segment.

Suppletion in Global Perspective

Abstract This paper documents and analyzes a system of suppletive alternations that are conditioned by top-down prosodic context. In Mandar (Austronesian), seven heads supplete at the right edge of the phonological phrase to satisfy an output constraint on foot structure. When phrase-external phonological context makes it possible to resolve this output constraint in a more optimal way, this suppletion is suspended. These effects suggest that the mechanism which regulates suppletion, vocabulary insertion, must be situated within a phonological calculus that can access global context and respond to output constraints.

Transitional probability between characters as a component of sentence processing in Chinese

Abstract This study explores the role of transitional probability (TP) in sentence processing in Chinese, a writing system that presents unique challenges due to its character-based structure and lack of word boundaries. The research investigates how the statistical regularities of character meaning, as captured by TP, aid in word segmentation and impact reading comprehension. Utilizing a moving window task, the study examines the processing speed of characters in high versus low TP conditions. Findings reveal that characters in high TP bigram conditions (indicating a consistent semantic association within a bigram) are processed more quickly, underscoring the importance of this statistical property of characters in Chinese sentence reading. These findings challenge conventional notions in Chinese linguistics concerning the relationship between characters, morphemes, and semantics, and suggests an alternative perspective on (and the need for reevaluation of) character-level semantics. The study also highlights the influence of prosodic context on reading speed, indicating that anticipatory linguistic patterns shape reader processing.

Phonation Patterns in Spanish Vowels: Spectral and Spectrographic Analysis

This article provides a detailed examination of voice quality in word-final vowels in Spanish. The experimental task involved the pronunciation of words in two prosodic contexts by native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects. A total of 400 vowels (10 participants × 10 words × 2 contexts × 2 repetitions) were analyzed acoustically in Praat. Waveforms and spectrograms were inspected visually for voice, creak, breathy voice, and devoicing cues. In addition, the relative amplitude difference between the first two harmonics (H1–H2) was obtained via FFT spectra. The findings reveal that while creaky voice is pervasive, breathy voice is also common, and devoicing occurs in 11% of tokens. We identify multiple phonation types (up to three) within the same vowel, of which modal voice followed by breathy voice was the most common combination. While creaky voice was more frequent overall for males, modal voice tended to be more common in females. In addition, creaky voice was significantly more common at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The analysis of spectral tilt shows that H1–H2 clearly distinguishes breathy voice from modal voice in both males and females, while H1–H2 values consistently discriminate creaky and modal voice in male participants only.

Semantic Prosody in Holy Qur’an: A Corpus Study of the Collocations and Meanings of the Verb Waqa’a‘Fell’

This paper presents a comprehensive corpus study focusing on the semantic prosody of the verb “waqa’a” within the Holy Qur’an. Its primary objective is to analyze the attitudinal nuances and semantic behaviors exhibited by the verb “waqa’a” across the Qur’anic corpus. Furthermore, it examines how the study of semantic prosody enhances the understanding of Arabic and its implications in the interpretation of the Qur’an. The research methodology entails an extensive examination of the positive, negative, and neutral collocations in which “waqa’a” occurs, along with an exploration of the attitudinal connotations embedded within each prosodic context. Data for this investigation were gathered from The Quranic Arabic Corpus, utilizing meticulous word-by-word and morphological search techniques. The findings of this investigation reveal that “waqa’a” exhibits a multifaceted semantic spectrum, encompassing meanings such as “to fall,” “to occur,” and “to fulfill.” These meanings are found to convey negative, positive, and neutral attitudinal meanings. The paper substantiates these findings with concrete examples drawn from the Qur’an itself. By delving into the semantic prosody of Qur’anic vocabulary, this study not only unveils connotations and contextual insights but also contributes to the enhancement of translation precision and a more profound comprehension of the Qur’an’s profound message. Consequently, this research augments our understanding of the usage of “waqa’a” within the sacred text and further enriches our appreciation of the Arabic language.

Multimodal cues to intonational categories: Gesture apex coordination with tonal events

This study argues for a multimodal view of the identification, representation, and implementation of intonational structure, with evidence from gesture apex-tone coordination in Turkish. Many studies have reported consistent synchronisation of atomic prominence markers across modalities (i.e., pitch accents and gesture apexes). This is prima facie evidence that gesture and prosody are implemented together, and therefore the former can play a role in the identification and perception of the latter through apex-tone synchronisation. However, only few studies considered the full intonational context when investigating synchronisation (e.g., potential alignment of apexes with boundary tones). This is particularly relevant for Turkish as there is disagreement in the literature about whether all words in Turkish bear a pitch accent. In this study, we test the synchronisation of apexes with all intonational events in Turkish natural speech data annotated for gesture and prosody, resulting in 820 gesture apex and 3697 tonal event annotations. The study uses syllable duration (160ms) to determine synchronisation between these anchors via equivalence tests while also integrating gestural and prosodic context as factors that can affect the temporal distance between these units through mixed-effects linear regression. The findings showed that apexes were chiefly synchronised with pitch accents (71%), indicating that prominence was the primary constraint for synchronisation. However, analysis of cases with no prosodic prominence provides the first evidence for a hierarchical constraint on synchronisation, since apexes were preferentially synchronised with the tones marking prosodic words (76%) and not with the markers of prosodic constituents higher in the hierarchy. This finding supports the claim that there may be accentless words in Turkish since the absence of prominence caused a systematic shift in the synchronisation behaviour of apexes. More generally, the study shows how multimodal evidence from gesture can be used in the identification of phonological categories, and that prosodic structure is likely to be expressed through multimodal cues as a composite signal.

Prosodic modulations on the formant excursions of diphthongs

The excursions of the first two formants of diphthongs in Chinese, English, and Japanese were investigated to see how diphthongs are affected by the hierarchical prosodic structure. The production of /ai, au, ou/ was examined in Chinese and English, and /ai, au, ae/ in Japanese. Three prosodic contexts were examined: word-final, list-final, and IP (intonational phrase)-final positions. The results of GAM analysis of F1 and F2 show that (1) F2 was more affected than F1; (2) diphthong offset was more affected than the onset; (3) only the diphthong onset in Japanese was affected by the prosody. The by-language analysis further shows that the offset of diphthongs at word-final positions in Chinese was less resistant to the coarticulatory effect: F2 raises earlier and higher toward the end of the diphthong due to the influence of the following coronal consonant. Meanwhile, in English and Japanese /ai, ae/ with lower F2 and higher F1 and /au, ou/ with higher F1 and F2 at word-final positions were found, indicating hypoarticulation at lower prosodic boundaries. Some of the diphthong onsets in Japanese were influenced as well. The result suggests hyperarticulation as a prosodic strengthening effect in English and Japanese.

Phonation Variation as a Function of Checked Syllables and Prosodic Boundaries

The phonation variation in Shanghainese is influenced by both phonemic phonation contrast and global prosodic context. This study investigated the phonetic realization of checked and unchecked syllables at four different prosodic positions (sandhi-medial, sandhi-final, phrase-final, and IP-final). By analyzing both acoustic and articulatory voice measures, we achieved a better understanding of the nature of checkedness contrast and prosodic boundaries: (1) Different phonetic correlates are associated with the two laryngeal functions: The checkedness contrast is mostly distinguished by the relative degree of glottal constriction, but the prosodic boundaries are mostly associated with periodicity and noise measures. (2) The checkedness contrast is well maintained in all prosodic contexts, suggesting that the controls for the local checkedness contrast are rather independent of global prosody.

Creaky Voice and Prosodic Boundaries in Spanish: An Acoustic Study

Abstract This study investigates vocalic creak in connection to the demarcation of prosodic boundaries in Spanish. Data from a picture task from 10 native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects was examined word-medially and word-finally. A total of 800 vowels were analyzed acoustically to determine if they involved creak; duration of creak relative to vowel duration was also recorded. The role of prosodic context, vowel quality and gender were examined. Our results show that creak is one of the cues that signals the end of prosodic constituents, particularly at higher prosodic levels: it averages 64% of realizations word-finally, but only 4% medially; and it is more pervasive in higher prosodic domains. Creak is more likely in males than females (80 vs. 53%), and vowel quality has no effect on creak word-finally, although word-medially /a/ is more frequently creaked than other vowels. We discuss the implications of our results in comparison with previous studies on creaky voice in Spanish and English, in particular Garellek, Marc & Patricia Keating. 2015. Phrase-final creak: Articulation, acoustics, and distribution. In Paper presented at the 89th meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, Oregon, 8–11 January, which report a higher rate of creak for Mexican Spanish females compared to males utterance-finally, and Kim, Ji Young. 2017. Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish. Silvia Perpiñán. In David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar & Adriana Soto-Corominas (eds.), Selected papers from the 44th linguistic symposium on romance languages (LSRL), 191–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, which found creaky voice utterance-finally in L2 Spanish and heritage Spanish speakers, but not in L1 Spanish participants.

Reactive feedback control and adaptation to perturbed speech timing in stressed and unstressed syllables

This study examines speakers’ reaction to focally applied temporal real-time auditory feedback perturbation in a word-initial unstressed syllable (Unstressed condition) and a similar word-medial stressed syllable (Stressed condition) in a three-syllabic word. Speakers compensate locally in both conditions for the perturbed syllable’s nucleus (V; compressed by the perturbation) but not for the complex onsets (CC; stretched by the perturbation). The perturbation of the first, unstressed syllable causes a global slowing down of all segments following the perturbation (syllable two and three), while the perturbation in the Stressed condition elicits local adjustments only in the perturbed (second) syllable. When viewed in a larger prosodic context, the timing strategy in the Unstressed condition indicates that speakers aim to keep relative durations within the word constant when the word-initial onset is auditorily stretched, leading to a compensatory pattern for both CC and V in word-proportional durations. In the Stressed condition, increasing the stressed vowel’s duration seems to be of the highest priority, causing all other segments to take up a shorter portion within the word. Adaptation effects of the stressed vowel indicate a durational representation on the segment level. Further adaptation effects additionally suggest a representation of timing/coordination in larger prosodic units. Complementary investigation of aperiodicity, spectral skewness, and intensity (RMS) indicates that spectral properties can change along with compensatorily increased duration.

Variation in Realizations of /r/ in Saudi Arabian Arabic: An Auditory and

the topic of this study is the realization of /r/ in Saudi Arabian Arabic as a function of prosodic context and speaker age, with a particular focus on the tap variant.

Coarticulation across morpheme boundaries: An ultrasound study of past-tense inflection in Scottish English

It has been hypothesized that morphologically-complex words are mentally stored in a decomposed form, often requiring online composition during processing. Morphologically-simple words can only be stored as a whole. The way a word is stored and retrieved is thought to influence its realization during speech production, so that when retrieval requires less time, the articulatory plan is executed faster. Faster articulatory execution could result in more coarticulation. Accordingly, we hypothesized that morphologically-simple words might be produced with more coarticulation than apparently homophonous morphologically-complex words, because the retrieval of monomorphemic forms is direct, in contrast to morphologically-complex ones, which might need to be composed online into full word forms. Using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging, we tested this hypothesis with nine speakers of Scottish English. Over two days of training, participants learned phonemically identical monomorphemic and morphologically-complex nonce words, while on the third consecutive testing day, they produced them in two prosodic contexts. Two types of articulatory analyses revealed no systematic differences in coarticulation between monomorphemic and morphologically-complex items, yet a few speakers did idiosyncratically produce some morphological effects on articulation. Our work contributes to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are stored and processed during speech production.

Korean laryngeal contrast revisited: An electroglottographic study on denasalized and oral stops

In several Korean dialects, domain-initial nasal onsets undergo denasalization as a recent sound change. Nasal stops may be realized as prevoiced or even devoiced stops. This makes it necessary to examine the interplay of phonetic properties of the denasalized and the three oral stop series as a whole, in synchrony and diachrony. What are their concomitant and conflicting properties? Our study provides a bigger picture of the laryngeal contrast in Seoul and Gyeonggi Korean by examining the acoustic distributions related to the laryngeal properties of the four stop series, using acoustic and electroglottographic data. VOT and f0 play important roles in the distinction of the four stop series, in line with previous studies. While the contribution of voice quality is relatively minor, we show that it plays an essential role of disambiguation when the VOT–f0 space gets crowded: When lenis stops can be confused with other stops, there is an enhancement of breathy voice. Finally, we discuss stop variation according to prosodic contexts. We highlight the basis of both syntagmatic variation and paradigmatic contrast in their phonetic implementations. They illustrate a constant reorganization to reconcile contrast maintenance with constraints from articulatory and perceptual systems, as well as language-specific structures.

Acoustic model-based subword tokenization and prosodic-context extraction without language knowledge for text-to-speech synthesis

This paper presents text tokenization and context extraction without using language knowledge for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. To generate prosody, statistical parametric TTS synthesis typically requires the professional knowledge of the target language. Therefore, languages suitable for TTS synthesis are limited to only rich-resource languages. To achieve TTS synthesis without using language knowledge, we propose acoustic model-based subword tokenization and unsupervised extraction of prosodic contexts. The subword tokenization can determine language units suitable for prosody generation. The context extraction can retrieve contexts from pairs of subwords and prosody. The proposed methods function without language knowledge and can improve F0 prediction accuracy. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that 1) the training of proposed subword tokenization, which uses the expectation-maximization algorithm and deep neural networks, is empirically stable, 2) the proposed subword tokenization tokenizes text into subwords that are close to language-specific units, and 3) the proposed methods outperform the conventional methods using language model-based tokenization in terms of synthetic speech quality.

How the Study of Speech Motor Control Can Inform Assessment and Intervention in Childhood Apraxia of Speech

Purpose The study of speech motor control has led to great advancements in the current understanding of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). There remains a significant need to bridge the gap between theory and practice to fully understand the clinical implications of past research. Method This review article reviews the speech motor control research in CAS and discusses how these works have offered key information about the underlying motor deficits (Grigos et al., 2015; Terband et al., 2019), the influence of structured practice on speech performance (Case & Grigos, 2016; Grigos & Case, 2018), and the role of task complexity (Case, 2019; Case & Grigos, 2016; Grigos & Case, 2018). We highlight salient points from this existing literature and clinical implications to the assessment and treatment of CAS. Conclusion The study of speech motor control has shed light on a number of key factors related to CAS. Even within perceptually accurate speech, children with CAS display differences in movement patterning and timing control. Assessment must aim to more directly tax speech motor skills to obtain a thorough and accurate illustration of production deficits. Intervention is challenged with the task of not only improving production accuracy but also facilitating more efficient motor planning and programming. Motor-based intervention that applies motor learning principles and introduces variability across motor, phonetic, and prosodic contexts is believed to achieve this goal, though research is needed to better understand changes in speech motor control with treatment.

Elicitation context does not drive F0 lowering following voiced stops: Evidence from French and Italian

Consonant-intrinsic F0 (CF0) effects are mainly the result of raising F0 following voiceless obstruents, rather than of lowering F0 following voiced obstruents. However, there are also documented instances where lowered F0 following voiced obstruents is enhanced. Given that both voicing and F0 are affected by prosodic context, it is possible that CF0 is lowered in some contexts but not others. This possibility is investigated by examining CF0 in French and Italian in isolated citation forms. Results are comparable to carrier-phrase contexts, where no F0 lowering after voiced obstruents is observed. Possible sources of the apparent cross-linguistic differences are discussed.

The acquisition of phonological alternations: The case of the Mandarin tone sandhi process

AbstractPhonological processes can pose a learning challenge for children, where the surface form for an underlying contrast may vary as a function of the phonological environment. Mandarin tone sandhi is a complex phonological process that requires knowledge about both the tonal and the prosodic context in which it applies. The present study explored the productive knowledge of tone sandhi processes by 108 3- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 33 adults. Participants were asked to produce novel tone sandhi compounds in different tonal contexts and prosodic structures. Acoustic analysis showed that 3-year-olds have abstracted the tone sandhi process and can productively apply it to novel disyllabic words across tonal contexts. However, even 5-year-olds still differed from adults in applying tone sandhi in response to the trisyllabic prosodic structure. The results are discussed in terms of the factors that influence how tone sandhi processes, and phonological alternations more generally, are acquired.

The glottal stop between segmental and suprasegmental processing: The case of Maltese

• Maltese uses the glottal stop as both an underlying and epenthetic segment. • Words with and without an initial underlying glottal stop can become homophonous. • Epenthetic glottal stops are partly prosodically conditioned. • Listeners take prosodic information into account in the late stages of speech perception. • The interaction between prosodic and segmental processing needs to be considered. Many languages mark vowel-initial words with a glottal stop. We show that this occurs in Maltese, even though the glottal stop also occurs as a phoneme in Maltese. As a consequence, words with and without an underlying (phonemic) glottal stop (e.g., a glottal stop-zero minimal pair qal /Ɂɑ:l/ vs. ghal /ɑ:l/ Engl., ‘he said’-‘because’) can become homophonous in connected speech. We first tested the extent of this phonetic marking of vowel-initial words in a production experiment and found that even in fluent productions, about half of the vowel-initial words are marked with an epenthetic glottal stop. The epenthetic glottal stop is more likely to occur when the preceding word is longer, showing a kind of preboundary lengthening at a phrase-level prosodic boundary. A subsequent perception study (Experiment 2) using a two-alternative forced-choice task with a minimal pair of a glottal stop-initial and a vowel-initial word indicated that listeners are sensitive to the durationally conditioned prosodic context before the test word, and they are more likely to perceive a vowel-initial word when the preceding word is lengthened. An additional eye-tracking study (Experiment 3) using onset-overlap pairs (e.g., qafla /Ɂɑflɑ/ - afda, /ɑfdɑ/ → [Ɂɑfda], Engl., ‘to trust’ - ‘chord’) showed no early influence of prosodic cues on segmental processing. But a gating experiment (Experiment 4) replicated the prosodic effect observed in Experiment 2. Taken together, our results indicate an interaction between prosodic processing and segmental processing that comes into effect relatively late in speech processing.

Do Sound Segments Contribute to Sounding Charismatic? Evidence from a Case Study of Steve Jobs' and Mark Zuckerberg's Vowel Spaces

The paper presents a case study of two popular US American CEOs. It compares the acoustic vowel space sizes of the more charismatic speaker Steve Jobs and those of the less charismatic speaker Mark Zuckerberg, as part of an initial acoustic step to examine a traditional claim of rhetoric that clearer speech makes a speaker sound more charismatic. Analysing about 2,000 long and short vowel tokens from representative keynote speech excerpts of the two speakers shows that Jobs’ vowel space is, across various segmental and prosodic context factors, significantly larger than that of Zuckerberg, whose vowel space is strongly reduced particularly when addressing investors. The differences in vowel-space size are consistent with the claim of rhetoric that a clear articulation is a key characteristic of a charismatic speaker. The discussion of the results describes further experimental steps required to back up the link between clear pronunciation and speaker charisma.

An Electropalatographic Study of Variability in Arrernte Consonant Production

Arrernte is a language with a relatively large consonant inventory, and a relatively small vowel inventory. In this study, electropalatography is used to examine lingual consonant production according to lexical stress, in the context of the two most common vowels in the language, the central vowels /a/ and /ə/. The consonants examined are /t̪ n̪ l̪ t n l ʈ ɳ ɭ ɻ c ɲ ʎ j k ŋ w/. Data are for two female speakers and are taken from a large database of read texts. Results show very little articulatory variation in consonant production depending on the contexts examined. Although consonants before a stressed vowel have greater duration than consonants before an unstressed vowel, there is no consistent difference in tongue-palate contact patterns between the two prosodic contexts. The main exception to this pattern is the retroflex stop, nasal and lateral, which show a more posterior contact before an unstressed vowel: it is suggested that this is because the preceding stressed vowel contains the primary cues to retroflex place of articulation.