Prosodic Contexts Research Articles

Exceptional prosodification effects revisited in Gradient Harmonic Grammar

This paper presents an analysis of exceptional prosodification effects, in which exceptional lexical items appear to follow a regular pattern that is found in a different prosodic context. These patterns have been analysed as cases of prosodic prespecification, where morphemes select a non-default prosodic representation. I argue that prespecification approaches should be reconsidered, and that such patterns are predicted without morpheme-specific prosody in Gradient Harmonic Grammar, a weighted constraint system with gradiently active symbols. Exceptional prosodification effects result from the interaction of two influences on constraint penalties: (i) scaling of constraint violations by prosodic context and (ii) contrastive activity values in underlying forms. This interaction is illustrated with the distribution of French nasal vowels and linking [n]. This approach reduces the amount of structure posited for URs, and provides new arguments for a more uniform syntax–prosody mapping.

Identifying a creak probability threshold for an irregular pitch period detection algorithm.

Irregular pitch periods (IPPs) are associated with grammatically, pragmatically, and clinically significant types of nonmodal phonation, but are challenging to identify. Automatic detection of IPPs is desirable because accurately hand-identifying IPPs is time-consuming and requires training. The authors evaluated an algorithm developed for creaky voice analysis to automatically identify IPPs in recordings of American English conversational speech. To determine a perceptually relevant threshold probability, frame-by-frame creak probabilities were compared to hand labels, yielding a threshold of approximately 0.02. These results indicate a generally good agreement between hand-labeled IPPs and automatic detection, calling for future work investigating effects of linguistic and prosodic context.

Marcação de foco estreito e o acento secundário em interrogativas totais no português do Brasil

Este artigo tem como principal objetivo investigar, em enunciados interrogativos totais, a relação entre a marcação prosódica do foco estreito e o acento secundário, no Português do Brasil, do ponto de vista da percepção e da produção. Foi elaborado um corpus de fala atuada, composto por 21 enunciados, para esta finalidade, de modo que fossem contempladas palavras focalizadas com variação do número de sílabas pretônicas, apresentando condições favoráveis e não favoráveis à ocorrência do acento secundário. Essas palavras apresentaram distribuição pelos seguintes contextos prosódicos: vocábulo final do enunciado, coincidindo com cabeça de I; vocábulo cabeça de sintagma fonológico (ɸ), posição mais forte; vocábulo que não constitui cabeça de ɸ, situando-se em posição fraca, à esquerda, podendo o sintagma fonológico estar ao início, meio ou final do enunciado. Esses enunciados foram submetidos a um teste perceptivo, com 20 juízes, que apontou para altas taxas de reconhecimento do foco interrogativo em todos os contextos analisados. Nossa análise permitiu identificar as seguintes estratégias de focalização: a associação de um pico geminado à posição do acento secundário na palavra focalizada; a compressão temporal do pico geminado, em palavras com apenas uma pretônica, portanto, que não apresentam condições favoráveis à ocorrência do acento secundário; o alongamento da sílaba tônica da palavra focalizada.

Discrepancy between heritage speakers' use of suprasegmental cues in the perception and production of Spanish lexical stress

AbstractThis study investigates Spanish heritage speakers' perception and production of Spanish lexical stress. Stress minimal pairs in various prosodic contexts were used to examine whether heritage speakers successfully identify the stress location despite varying suprasegmental cues (Experiment 1) and whether they use these cues in their production (Experiment 2). Heritage speakers' performance was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners. In Experiment 1, the heritage speakers showed a clear advantage over the L2 learners and their performance was comparable to that of the monolinguals. In Experiment 2, both the heritage speakers and the L2 learners showed deviating patterns from the monolinguals; they produced a large overlap between paroxytones and oxytones, especially in duration. The discrepancy between heritage speakers' perception and production suggests that, while early exposure to heritage language is beneficial for the perception of heritage language speech sounds, this factor alone does not guarantee target-like production.

The Effects of Pitch, Gender, and Prosodic Context on the Identification of Creaky Voice

Background/Aims: Creaky voice in American English plays both a prosodic role, as a phrase-final marker, and a sociolinguistic one, but it is unclear how accurately naïve listeners can identify creak, and what factors facilitate or hinder ist identification. Methods: In this study, American listeners are presented with 2 experiments containing stimuli from both high- and low-pitched male and female speakers. Other manipulations include whether the auditory stimulus is a full sentence or a sentence fragment, and whether it is completely modally voiced, completely creaky, or partially creaky (final 40-50% of the utterance). Results: Accuracy is lowest on partial creak, suggesting that creaky voice is least salient when it serves as an utterance-final marker. There are no strong gender effects aside from a weak tendency to identify creak more often in females than males in the whole creak condition in one experiment. In contrast, when no creak is present, listeners false alarm on the low-pitched males. Conclusion: Rates of identifying creak in male and female speakers are similar, suggesting that listeners have a comparable ability to hear creaky voice in all speakers.

Deconstructing variation in pragmatic function: A transdisciplinary case study

AbstractDespite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)*

Emergência de sândi consonântico em Português Europeu: uma abordagem prosódica

In European Portuguese, the domain for sandhi phenomena is the intonational phrase. Unlike the intonational phrase, the phonological phrase has been shown to be only relevant for rhythm and prominence-related phenomena (Frota, 2000, 2014). Fricative voicing between words (casa[ʒb]rancas, casa[ʃp]retas) and ressylabification before vowel-initial words (casa[zɐ]marelas) occur within the intonational phrase. In this study, we considered spontaneous productions of a Portuguese child (Luma), aged 2;04-4;00, to examine the acquisition of external consonantal sandhi. The data show that sandhi production varies according to the segmental (C#C, C#V, CFric, CVib, CLat) and prosodic context (clitic, prosodic word, position in prosodic structure). The data further confirm that sandhi occurs within the intonational phrase, supporting the analysis proposed for the adult grammar. This study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between the acquisition of the prosodic structure and the acquisition of sandhi phenomena.

Acoustic differences in morphologically-distinct homophones

ABSTRACTPrevious work demonstrates that a word's status as morphologically-simple or complex may be reflected in its phonetic realisation. One possible source for these effects is phonetic paradigm uniformity, in which an intended word's phonetic realisation is influenced by its morphological relatives. For example, the realisation of the inflected word frees should be influenced by the phonological plan for free, and thus be non-homophonous with the morphologically-simple word freeze. We test this prediction by analysing productions of forty such inflected/simple word pairs, embedded in pseudo-conversational speech structured to avoid metalinguistic task effects, and balanced for frequency, orthography, as well as segmental and prosodic context. We find that stem and suffix durations are significantly longer by about 4–7% in fricative-final inflected words (frees, laps) compared to their simple counterparts (freeze, lapse), while we find a null effect for stop-final words. The result suggests that wordforms influence production of their relatives.

The <i>loi de position</i> and the acoustics of French mid vowels

This paper reports the results of two experiments on the acoustics of French mid vowels in a variety in which close-mid vowels ([e], [ø], [o]) occur in open syllables and open-mid vowels ([ɛ], [oe], [ɔ]) in closed syllables, according to the loi de position. Open-mid allophones have consistently higher F1 realizations and more central F2 realizations than their close-mid counterparts, but are not consistently shorter. These results are problematic for accounts of the loi de position as a pattern of vowel reduction, with mid-vowel lowering and centralizing being caused by shortening. F1 and F2 distances between close-mid and open-mid allophones vary across different prosodic and consonantal contexts and these variations can be analyzed as resulting from duration-based undershoot. More broadly, the results have implications for the typology of closed-syllable vowel laxing: they suggest that tense and lax realizations cannot generally be derived from the same acoustic target via closed-syllable vowel shortening but have distinct acoustic targets.

Sentence Selection Based on Extended Entropy Using Phonetic and Prosodic Contexts for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes a sentence selection technique for constructing phonetically and prosodically balanced compact recording scripts for speech synthesis. In the conventional corpus design of speech synthesis, a greedy algorithm that maximizes phonetic coverage is often used. However, for statistical parametric speech synthesis, balances of multiple phonetic and prosodic contextual factors are important as well as the coverage. To take account of both of the phonetic and prosodic contextual balances in sentence selection, we introduce an extended entropy of phonetic and prosodic contexts, such as biphone/triphone, accent/stress/tone, and sentence length. For detailed investigation, conventional and proposed techniques are evaluated using Japanese, English, and Chinese corpora. The objective experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves better coverage and balance of contexts. In addition, speech synthesis experiments based on hidden Markov models reveal that the generated speech parameters become closer to those of the natural speech compared with other conventional sentence selection techniques. Subjective evaluations show that the proposed sentence selection based on the extended entropy improves the naturalness of the synthetic speech while maintaining the similarity to the original sample.

Perceptual category mapping between English and Korean obstruents in non-CV positions: Prosodic location effects in second language identification skills

This study examines the degree to which mapping patterns between native language (L1) and second language (L2) categories for one prosodic context will generalize to other prosodic contexts, and how position-specific neutralization in the L1 influences the category mappings. Forty L1-Korean learners of English listened to English nonsense words consisting of /p b t d f v θ ð/ and /ɑ/, with the consonants appearing in pre-stressed intervocalic, post-stressed intervocalic, or coda context, and were asked to identify the consonant with both Korean and English labeling and to give gradient evaluations of the goodness of each label to the stimuli. Results show that the mapping patterns differ extensively from those found previously with the same subjects for consonants in initial, onset context. The mapping patterns for the intervocalic context also differed by position with respect to stress location. Coda consonants elicited poor goodness-of-fit and noisier mapping patterns for all segments, suggesting that an L1 coda neutralization process put all L2-English sounds in codas as “new” sounds under the Speech Learning Model (SLM) framework (Flege, 1995). Taken together, the results indicate that consonant learning needs to be evaluated in terms of position-by-position variants, rather than just being a general property of the overall consonant systems.

Effect of prosodic domains and context availability in producing English lexical stress by Korean L2 speakers

Effect of prosodic domains and context availability in producing English lexical stress by Korean L2 speakers

Comparing Measures of Voice Quality From Sustained Phonation and Continuous Speech.

The question of what type of utterance-a sustained vowel or continuous speech-is best for voice quality analysis has been extensively studied but with equivocal results. This study examines whether previously reported differences derive from the articulatory and prosodic factors occurring in continuous speech versus sustained phonation. Speakers with voice disorders sustained vowels and read sentences. Vowel samples were excerpted from the steadiest portion of each vowel in the sentences. In addition to sustained and excerpted vowels, a 3rd set of stimuli was created by shortening sustained vowel productions to match the duration of vowels excerpted from continuous speech. Acoustic measures were made on the stimuli, and listeners judged the severity of vocal quality deviation. Sustained vowels and those extracted from continuous speech contain essentially the same acoustic and perceptual information about vocal quality deviation. Perceived and/or measured differences between continuous speech and sustained vowels derive largely from voice source variability across segmental and prosodic contexts and not from variations in vocal fold vibration in the quasisteady portion of the vowels. Approaches to voice quality assessment by using continuous speech samples average across utterances and may not adequately quantify the variability they are intended to assess.

A preliminary ultrasound study of apical consonants in stressed and unstressed position in Arrernte

In this study, we present ultrasound data from four female speakers of the Australian language Arrernte. We focus on the apical consonants—alveolar /t n l/ and retroflex /ʈ ɳ ɭ/—in stressed and unstressed position. Previous articulatory results for the Arrernte stops using electropalatography and electro-magnetic articulography (for two of the speakers in the current study) showed that the tongue is most retracted for the retroflex in unstressed prosodic context, but that both apicals have a more advanced tongue position in stressed context. In addition, jaw position was highest for the alveolar in stressed position, and lowest for the retroflex in unstressed position. Current ultrasound results show that the rear-most portion of the tongue is consistently further back for the retroflex in unstressed position. This result confirms our previous conclusion that the most prototypical retroflex is the one found in the weaker prosodic position. By contrast, the stressed retroflex has a more forward position of the rear-most portion of the tongue, while the stressed and unstressed alveolar consonants show varying patterns depending on speaker and on manner class. Results are discussed in light of the variability that is often found for apical articulations in Australian languages.

Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: effects of function, context and predictability

This study examines sociophonetic variation in different functions oflikeamong adolescents in London and Edinburgh. It attempts to determine the factors that may explain this variation. Our results suggest that the function oflikecorrelates primarily with contextual factors, rather than the phonetic factors of vowel quality, /l/ to vowel duration and /k/ realisation. In particular, the preceding and following segments and their bigram predictability emerge as highly significant, in addition to the boundary strength followinglike. In both London and Edinburgh, the vowel appears to be the only non-contextual feature that is sensitive to the function oflike: quotativebe likeis more likely to be monophthongised than other functions oflike. We argue that the more monophthongal nature of quotativelikeis due to the syntactic and prosodic context in which it occurs.

Bono Bo and Fla Mingo: Reflections of Speech Prosody in German Second Graders' Writing to Dictation.

Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means – if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children’s writing to dictation. A sample of 79 second graders were asked to write down eight sentences to dictation. We analyzed three potential reflections of speech prosody in children’s dictations: (a) Merging of preposition and definite article, potentially preferred after monosyllabic prepositions as in this case preposition and article may melt to the canonical trochaic foot in German. (b) The introduction of orthographically inadequate graphemic border markings within trisyllabic animal names, respecting borders of prosodic units like foot or syllable. (c) Omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions, deviating from the preferred strong-weak rhythm. The occurrence of border markings was evaluated via graded perceptual judgments. We found no evidence for inter-word border markings being influenced by prosodic context, probably due to a ceiling effect. However, word-internal markings within animal names, although rarely occurring in general, were clearly influenced by prosodic structure: Most of them were produced at borders of feet or syllables, while significantly fewer markings were perceived at borders of syllable constituents or within consonant clusters. Moreover, we observed significantly more omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions compared to potentially optimal positions. Thus, our results provide first evidence from writing acquisition for prosodic influences on writing in a language with scarce graphemic marking of prosody.

Prosody and object clitic placement: A comparison of Old and Modern Spanish

It has often been claimed that the Tobler–Mussafia Law, i.e. the ban on sentence-initial clitic pronouns, is based on prosodic properties such as the ban on unstressed monosyllabic words at the sentence beginning (Mussafia, 1886) or the inherent enclitic nature of the respective pronouns (Meyer-Lübke, 1897). More recent research has identified a number of extra-phonological motivations for this clitic placement, making a prosodic explanation seem superfluous. The present study addresses the question whether Old Spanish, a clear Tobler–Mussafia language, differs in its prosodic patterns from Modern Spanish, which does not show the Tobler–Mussafia placement any longer. The comparison of the data shows that Old Spanish tolerates more sentence-initial unstressed monosyllables and unstressed pretonic syllables at the sentence beginning than Modern Spanish does, contrary to expectations. Together with the observation that the direction of clitic attachment is rather due to the prosodic context (i.e. the immediate preceding or following prosodic words and potential Phonological Phrase boundaries) than to a fixed directionality parameter, this falsifies the hypothesis that the clitic placement pattern in the TML language Old Spanish is due to specific prosodic patterns.

Sensorimotor development and speech production

According to Perkell’s view [J. Perkell, J. Neurol. 25, 382–407], phonemic goals correspond to multidimensional spaces in the auditory and somatosensory dimensions. The relationships between sensory goals and motor actions in speech are acquired during infancy through feedback-based control mechanisms. Although there have been numerous studies of speech development, little is known about the specific roles of auditory and somatosensory feedback. This paper reviews a few studies of how pre-school-aged children rely on sensory feedback to reach phonemic targets. The studies looked at children with normal-hearing and deaf children with cochlear implants. Vowels and consonants were recorded in various prosodic contexts (neutral and under contrastive emphasis) and perturbation conditions (with or without artificial perturbations of the articulators). Acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual analyses were conducted to assess the degree to which children reached the targets. The data showed that although children’s productions were more variable than adults, children generally adapted their articulatory gestures to produce the appropriate sensory speech goals. The effects of perceptual acuity and phonological knowledge in speech development are discussed.

Asymmetric Correlations between English Verb Transitivity and Stress

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Differential Thresholds of Perception of Sound Duration in Different Phonetic Contexts

The paper presents the results of the study which was aimed at obtaining the values of differential thresholds for Russian stressed vowels. Two types of psychoacoustic experiments were conducted. The experimental material was formed taking into account the segmental and prosodic context. The segmental context of the vowel stimuli was relatively similar while prosodic context varied. Each vowel was presented in several word types which involved one-syllable words and three-syllable words with different stress patterns. Each word was embedded into an affirmative utterance (initial/medial/final position), an interrogative utterance (final position), and an utterance with a contrastive stress on the word. The subject listened to a sample word containing a target vowel and its modifications with increased or decreased vowel duration. The gradual increment or decrement was 1 F0 period or 10 ms on average. The task was to click the modification when the duration difference was perceived. Then the differential thresholds are calculated by means of statistical analysis. The average differential threshold was found to be 2–4 F0 periods which is approximately about 20–40 ms. The threshold value does not seem to be influenced by word duration (in syllables) or stress pattern.