Prosodic Parameters Research Articles

The ProA Online Tool for Prosody Assessment and Its Use for the Definition of Acoustic Models for Prosodic Evaluation of L2 Spanish Learners

Assessment of prosody is not usually included in the evaluation of oral expression skills of L2 Spanish learners. Some of the factors that probably explain this fact are the lack of adequate materials, correctness models and tools to carry out this assessment. This paper describes one of the results of the ProA (Prosody Assessment) project, a web tool for the online assessment of Spanish prosody. The tool allows the online development of evaluation tests and rubrics, the completion of these tests and their remote scoring. An example of use of this tool for research purposes is also presented: three prosodic parameters (global energy, speech rate, F0 range) of a set of oral productions of two L2 Spanish learners, collected using the tests developed in the project, were evaluated by three L2 Spanish teachers using the web tool and the rubrics developed also in the ProA project, and the obtained ratings were compared with the results of the acoustic analysis of these parameters in the material to determine to what extent there was a correlation between evaluators’ judgements and prosodic parameters. The results obtained may be of interest, for example, for the development of future automatic prosody assessment systems.

Emotional Language Processing in Bilingualism: Subjective Affect and Prosodic Markers in Simultaneous Interpreting

Emotion, as part of the overall sensorimotor, introspective, and affective system, is an essential part of language comprehension within the framework of embodied semantics. As emotional state influences semantic and syntactic processing, emotional language processing has been shown to modulate mood as well. The reciprocal relationship between language and emotion has also been informative in bilingualism. Here we take a relatively underresearched type of bilingual processing, simultaneous interpreting, as a case of extreme bilingualism and investigate the effect of emotional language rendering in the L1 on subjective affect and prosodic markers of L2 output. 18 trainee interpreters were asked to simultaneously interpret three speeches in Turkish that varied in emotionality, valence (negative, neutral, and positive), and difficulty in English. Responses to emotional language processing were analysed based on participants’ self-reported positive and negative affect using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and three prosodic parameters (intensity, pitch, and fluency). Results showed that interpreting emotionally negative speech increased negative affect, whereas interpreting emotionally positive speech did not modify positive affect. Intensity generally reflected cognitive load. Pitch and fluency, in particular, were more sensitive to changes in the valence of the source speech.

The Association between Depression Severity, Prosody, and Voice Acoustic Features in Women with Depression

The aim was to define the association between the severity of depression, prosody, and voice acoustic features in women suffering from depression and its comparisons with nondepressed people. Prosody and acoustic features in 30 women with major depression hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and 30 healthy women were investigated in a cross-sectional study. To define the severity of depression, the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRS-D) was applied. Acoustic parameters such as jitter, shimmer, cepstral peak prominence (CPP), standard deviation of fundamental frequency (SD F0), harmonic-to-noise ratio, and F0 and also some speech prosodic features including the speed of speech, switching pause duration means, and durations of produced sentences with different modals were measured quantitatively. Also, six raters judged the patient’s prosody qualitatively. SPSS V.28 was used for all statistical analyses ( p < 0.05 ). There was a significant correlation between HRS-D with jitter, SD F0, speed of speech, and switching pause means ( p ≤ 0.05 ). The means of CPP and duration of producing emotional sentences differed between the depression and control groups. The HRS-D scores were significantly correlated with switching pauses in patients (Pearson coefficient = 0.47, p = 0.05 ). The results of the perceptual evaluation of prosody judged by six raters showed an 85% correlation between them ( p ≤ 0.001 ). Some acoustic and prosodic parameters are different between healthy women and those with depression disorder (e.g., CPP and duration of emotional sentences) and may also have an association with the severity of depression (e.g., jitter, SD F0, speed of speech, and switching pause means) in women with depression disorder. It was indicated that the best sentence modal to assess prosody in patients with depression would be exclamatory ones compared to declarative and interrogative sentences.

MEANS OF PROSODIC DESIGN IN MODERN GERMAN INTERACTION

The article is devoted to means of prosodic design in modern German interaction. Prosodic devices can be defined from a phonological point of view as abstract quantities or described as articulatory, acoustic, and auditory parameters. Discourse particles are the optimal sound material for researching the general functions of prosody, also considering the ability of foreign language communication. In this work, based on perceptual and productive analysis, it is considered whether general prosodic parameters can be identified on the basis of discourse particles, and what functions and forms they have. An attempt was made to determine the inventory of the most common German discourse particles, to describe them phonetically, and finally to compare them. In addition, it is studied how and to what extent the arrangement of discourse particles is regulated by prosodic data. Participles with the appropriate linguistic means under existing conditions clarify the function of the speech act, express the speaker’s ideas, assessments or expectations regarding the reaction of the communication partner, given the interaction. When teaching German as a foreign language, it should be noted that such words as particles create the greatest difficulties for learners of this language. It should be emphasized that the main meaning of discourse particles always depends on the factors of the given speech situation. Discourse particles create a certain functional group because they express categories of interaction and co-textual information and attitudes, etc., in an undefined and especially economic way. Prosodic marking is typical of German discourse particles. Our study of the current state of prosodic design in modern German interaction using the example of discourse particles also showed that numerical issues have not yet been resolved or require further study.

Transition-Relevance Places Machine Learning-Based Detection in Dialogue Interactions

A transition-relevance place (TRP) represents a place in a conversation where a change of speaker can occur. The appearance and use of these points in the dialogue ensures a correct and smooth alternation between the speakers. In the presented article, we focused on the study of prosodic speech parameters in the Slovak language, and we tried to experimentally verify the potential of these parameters to detect TRP. To study turn-taking issues in dyadic conversations, the Slovak dialogue corpus was collected and annotated. TRP places were identified by the human annotator in the manual labelling process. The data were then divided into chunks that reflect the length of the interpausal dialogue units and the prosodic features were computed. In the Matlab environment, we compared different types of classifiers based on machine learning in the role of an automatic TRP detector based on pitch and intensity parameters. The achieved results indicate that prosodic parameters can be useful in detecting TRP after splitting the dialogue into interpausal units. The designed approach can serve as a tool for automatic conversational analysis or can be used to label large databases for training predictive models, which can help machines to enhance human-machine spoken dialogue applications.

Duration Patterns of Chinese Syllables in Commercial and Social Oral Advertisements

Information structure of an utterance is one of the key factors determining phonological unit realization patterns including the duration which is manifested differently in males and females. This article examines the influence of information load and gender on the Chinese syllable duration in commercial and social advertising discourse. The material was taken from the texts of commercial and social oral advertising produced by 6 professional speakers (3 males, 3 females). The measurements were performed in Praat on the syllables with identical phonemics and the same lexical tones occurring both on informative (previously classified as such by a minimum of 6 out of 10 listeners) and uninformative (the remaining) utterance parts. The results show that duration is one of the most important markers of a syllable information load. In both commercial and social advertisements, in over 50 % of cases informative syllables’ duration was longer than that of uninformative ones. The difference was not large but rather consistent. It means that not only duration is involved in manifesting the utterance information structure but other prosodic parameters as well. Another finding was gender difference: 1) on the whole, syllables in female speech have longer duration than in male; 2) males use the duration technique more effectively than females: the contrast between loaded and unloaded syllables is higher

A digital “flat affect”? Popular speech compression codecs and their effects on emotional prosody

IntroductionCalls via video apps, mobile phones and similar digital channels are a rapidly growing form of speech communication. Such calls are not only— and perhaps less and less— about exchanging content, but about creating, maintaining, and expanding social and business networks. In the phonetic code of speech, these social and emotional signals are considerably shaped by (or encoded in) prosody. However, according to previous studies, it is precisely this prosody that is significantly distorted by modern compression codecs. As a result, the identification of emotions becomes blurred and can even be lost to the extent that opposing emotions like joy and anger or disgust and sadness are no longer differentiated on the recipients' side. The present study searches for the acoustic origins of these perceptual findings.MethodA set of 108 sentences from the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech served as speech material in our study. The sentences were realized by professional actors (2m, 2f) with seven different emotions (neutral, fear, disgust, joy, boredom, anger, sadness) and acoustically analyzed in the original uncompressed (WAV) version and as well as in strongly compressed versions based on the four popular codecs AMR-WB, MP3, OPUS, and SPEEX. The analysis included 6 tonal (i.e. f0-related) and 7 non-tonal prosodic parameters (e.g., formants as well as acoustic-energy and spectral-slope estimates).ResultsResults show significant, codec-specific distortion effects on all 13 prosodic parameter measurements compared to the WAV reference condition. Means values of automatic measurement can, across sentences, deviate by up to 20% from the values of the WAV reference condition. Moreover, the effects go in opposite directions for tonal and non-tonal parameters. While tonal parameters are distorted by speech compression such that the acoustic differences between emotions are increased, compressing non-tonal parameters make the acoustic-prosodic profiles of emotions more similar to each other, particularly under MP3 and SPEEX compression.DiscussionThe term “flat affect” comes from the medical field and describes a person's inability to express or display emotions. So, does strong compression of emotional speech create a “digital flat affect”? The answer to this question is a conditional “yes”. We provided clear evidence for a “digital flat affect”. However, it seems less strongly pronounced in the present acoustic measurements than in previous perception data, and it manifests itself more strongly in non-tonal than in tonal parameters. We discuss the practical implications of our findings for the everyday use of digital communication devices and critically reflect on the generalizability of our findings, also with respect to their origins in the codecs' inner mechanics.

The Dance of Pauses in Poetry Declamation

In poetry declamation, the appropriate use of prosody to cause pleasure is essential. Among the prosodic parameters, pause is one of the most effective to engage the listeners and provide them with a pleasant experience. The declamation of three poems in two varieties of Portuguese by ten Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers and ten European Portuguese (EP) speakers, balanced for gender, was used as a corpus for evaluating the degree of pleasantness by listeners from the same language variety. The distributions of pause duration and inter-pause interval (IPI) both varied greatly across the subjects, being the main source of variability and strongly right-tailed. The evaluation of the degree of pleasantness revealed that pause duration predicts degree of pleasantness in EP, whereas IPI predicts degree of pleasantness in BP. Reciters perform a kind of complex “dance”, where sonority between pauses is favored in BP and pause duration in EP.

Prosodic marking of information status in Italian

Previous studies on the prosodic marking of information status argue that Italian tends to resist deaccentuation of given elements. In particular, Italian reportedly always accents post-focal given information within noun phrases (NPs), so that it is not possible to reliably reconstruct the information status of the items from the acoustic signal. However, descriptions have so far been concerned with categorical accent patterns, lacking crucial information about continuous phonetic parameters and their distribution in the utterance in ways that can contribute to prosodic marking. In this paper, we use a novel approach based on periodic-energy-related measures to explore how speakers of the Neapolitan variety of Italian modulate continuous prosodic parameters to differentiate information structure. We show that, contrary to previous findings, Italian speakers of the Neapolitan variety do mark information status prosodically within noun phrases. The discrepancy with previous work is explained by the fact that the prosodic marking of post-focal givenness is not achieved through the categorical presence or absence of a pitch accent on one specific syllable, but through the gradual modulation of phonetic parameters at various locations. Moreover, we find that these modulations occur early in the noun phrase. We also show that native speakers can make use of their knowledge of these modulations to reliably identify post-focal given elements in the absence of the pragmatic context, that is, directly from the acoustic signal.

INAUGURAL SPEECH IN GERMAN AND ITS PROCEDURE IMPLEMENTATION

The article highlights the results of the study conducted to disclose the rhetorical potential of prosody in an inaugural speech. The material for the study was the speech delivered in 2017 by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In this paper, prosody is considered from the standpoint of pragmaphonetics as one of the effective rhetorical means of persuasion, which not only forms the expressiveness of speech and makes political speeches more attractive to listeners, but also helps to achieve pragmatic goals of the speaker.The article analyzes the peculiarities of functioning of certain prosodic means (stress, pausation, speech melody, tempo and rhythm) during a politician’s public speech and defines the role of prosody in the implementation of functions specific to inaugural rhetoric. Through changes in the prosody of the speech some prosodic contrasts are created, which perform an expressive function, provide contact between the speaker and the audience, allow to avoid monotony and further enhance certain fragments of the message, thus drawing the listeners’ attention to the key concepts of the speech.According to the results of the experimental phonetic research, the importance of modifications of prosodic parameters for the realization of the communicative intentions of the speaker has been illustrated on the example of some fragments of the German president’s inaugural speech. It has been found that in order to increase the listeners’ attention, the speaker uses such prosodic means as more frequent emphasis, slowing tempo, frequent use of longer pauses, and speaking fragments of the message in an extended tone range.

Locality domains on Lenition. Spirantization (Gorgia) and Voicing in Tuscan dialects1

This article investigates the diachronic and synchronic relation between Tuscan lenition (Voicing) and spirantization (Gorgia) of voiceless Latin stops, both processes are postvocalic/lenition processes. Firstly, we set out to examine the conditions peculiar to Romance lenition (Voicing) of Latin voiceless stops from Medieval Tuscan to modern dialects. Secondly, Tuscan lenition/Voicing is compared to the local later Florentine–Senese spirantization/aspiration. Lenition is variously intertwined with the Tuscan Gorgia/spirantization. Both are positional phenomena in relation to fortition / lenition segmental scales, positional and prosodic parameters, melodic factors within words and across word boundaries. The article provides a structural description of the strong/weak consonants and their relations to the more complex objects in which they are integrated (the syllable and the foot), in order to state locality conditions/domain on lenition and locality in phonology.

MELODIC ORGANIZATION OF THE PREACHER'S SPEECH IN FILM DISCOURSE

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the melodic organization of monological expressions of preachers of different ranks - the characters of English-language feature films. Based on the fact that the preacher's speech functions are not limited to preaching from the pulpit, but include speeches outside the temple and private conversations with parishioners on spiritual topics, these three types of speech activities were studied. The research material, which consisted of oral English sermons, speeches and conversations taken from five modern films, was subjected to auditive, auditory and electroacoustic analysis. Auditive analysis involved the selection from the general text of those phrasal units that most clearly demonstrate the prosodic characteristics in all parts of the studied sermons, speeches and conversations. Auditory analysis was aimed at determining the type of spiritual speech and identifying the degree of participation of certain prosodic parameters (melodic contour, phrasal stress, volume, tempo, rhythm, pause) in the realization of the intention of speech and expression of emotions in different parts of the text. Based on the auditive analysis, firstly, the prosodic differences between the three speech realizations at the level of perception were confirmed, and secondly, it was found that the melodic component of intonation is the second most informative component involved in speech differentiation and enhancing its influential effect.The complex auditory and instrumental analysis of the melodic characteristics of the preachers’ speech allows to conclude that there are integral and distinctive melodic parameters inherent in the three types of speech behaviour of the speakers during the sermon, speeches outside the church and conversations with parishioners in private. The private priests’ conversation with parishioners is characterized by the lowest melodic indicators, where facial expressions and kinetic means of expressiveness and emotionality come to the fore.

MELODIC PECULIARITIES OF INDIAN SEAFARERS’ SPEECH BEHAVIOR

The article deals with melodic peculiarities of speech behavior of Indian seafarers. In the focus of the given article are prosodic parameters and their definition. The analysis of the English language showed that English is the most widely spread language due to the policy of British empire in the nineteenth century. There are three stages of development of the English language in India. The first stage occupies the epoch of active missionary activity of protestant British church in the seventeenth century. The second stage is closely connected to the first one, but it depended on inner factors. It was very honorable to study English in the eighteenth century, because English became the language of nobility. The third stage referred to the influence of British East Indian company. Colonizers’ language became the official one very fast. Nowadays Indian English is spoken by 350 million people. In this investigation there was an attempt to analyze the Indian seamen’s speech and define prosodic markers of their speech behavior. The purpose and the main task of the investigation was the implementation of auditory analysis, which consisted of three stages. The first stage was to define the frequency usage of intonation scales in seafarers’ speech. The results of this stage showed that the most frequently used scale was the Rising one. The second stage of the research was to identify the dominant terminal tones. The results of the analysis indicate that Rising and Falling terminal tones prevail mostly. The results of the speech tempo of Indian seamen prove the frequent usage of rapid and slow speech rate. Experimentally obtained results state that speech behavior of Indian seamen has a variable character, which makes the speech emotionally colored.

Pleasantness and Wellbeing in Poem Declamation in European and Brazilian Portuguese Depends Mostly on Pausing and Voice Quality

This work investigates the relationship between the sensations of pleasantness and wellbeing and the acoustics of poem declamation in two varieties of Portuguese: European and Brazilian. Ten speakers in each variety recited Alberto Caeiro's poem “Quando vier a primavera” to which dataset the declamation by two actors was added. Ten listeners in each variety participated in three perception tests for evaluating the degree of pleasantness and wellbeing of the entire reading in two different sessions by using a 5-degree Likert scale, and for choosing the more pleasant recitation from two recitations of a chunk of the poem. Both reciters and listeners were balanced in gender. A set of 22 prosodic parameters was used for predicting the listeners' evaluations in logistic regression models and linear discriminant analysis. Results showed that the parameters related to pausing and voice quality are the main explanatory variables with a minor role for the F0 median. The actors' recitations are preferred and gender differences are related to reciters, not listeners. Minor differences across the varieties were found.

The Prosody of Directive Speech Acts: Pragmastylistic Aspect (On the Material of the Modern German Language)

The article represents the results of a phonetic experiment devoted to the study of pragmatically, and the stylistically determined manifestation of directive speech acts in the modern German language. The experiment allowed establishing the prosodic invariant of the directive speech act and describing variant patterns realized in diverse situational conditions which demonstrated a different degree of categoricalness and revealed their differential character on the level of prosodic expressive means. The research showed that pragmatic identification and stylistic differentiation of directive speech acts is realized utilizing all prosodic parameters - pitch, intensity and tempo. The complex analysis of pitch, intensity and tempo characteristics specific for situational variants of the directive illocutive allowed defining the level of involvement of these prosodic means in the functional realization of directive speech impact.

An automatic speech segmentation tool based on multiple acoustic parameters

Speech segmentation is required not only for linguistic research based on oral corpora, but had become essential for natural language processing. Many researchers have developed different approaches to deal with the need of automatic segmentation of speech data. In this paper we discuss some of the prosodic parameters used as cues for boundary identification and present an ongoing project for the automatic segmentation of spontaneous speech developed for Brazilian Portuguese.

Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao ("You Know").

This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ni zhidao (“you know”) in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of ni zhidao were found. Ni zhidao mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of ni zhidao in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F0, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of ni zhidao. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of ni zhidao. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of ni zhidao in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian

Effects of Prosody Rehabilitation on Acoustic Analysis of Prosodic Features in Hearing-Impaired Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: The role of prosody in language acquisition and effective communication is documented in research. Nevertheless, rehabilitation of prosodic skills in children with hearing impairment using hearing aids or cochlear implants is relatively neglected compared to other speech and language areas. Objective: To detect the effect of prosodic rehabilitation using the adapted translated version of the “Prosody Treatment Program” on expression of prosodic features in Egyptian Arabic-speaking hearing-impaired school-age children fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implant devices in comparison to conventional auditory and language rehabilitation. Methods: This study was conducted on 34 children with sensorineural hearing loss in a randomized controlled trial design. Children were randomly divided into 2 groups, group A (cases) and group B (control), by block randomization. Both groups were initially evaluated for their prosodic skills using objective measures. Group A received rehabilitation for prosody using the Prosody Treatment Program for 1 h, once per week for 3 months, while group B received conventional auditory and language training and served as their control. Both groups were re-evaluated using the same protocol after 3 months of therapy. Results: A statistically significant improvement of most of the assessed prosodic parameters in group A was shown when comparing the pretherapy and posttherapy scores, as well as comparing between both studied groups after therapy. Conclusions: Prosody is amenable to motor learning. The Prosody Treatment Program seems to be an effective rehabilitation tool in improving some prosodic skills of hearing-impaired children. Prosodic rehabilitation showed superiority to conventional auditory and language training in improving the expression of some prosodic features and pragmatic language skills.

Expressive means of prosody in the address “On the State of the Country” (on the material of the speech given by Barack Obama in 2014)

This article examines the expressive potential of prosodic means based on the 2014 State of the Union Address to Congress delivered by the President of the United States Barack Obama “On the State of the Country”. Special attention is given to the discursive characteristics of the text and the peculiarities of communicative situation, including such prosodic parameters as pausation, tone and intensity, word accents, as well as capabilities of the syllabic consonants. The author employs auditive and instrumental methods for the analysis of speech fragments of the politician, which illustrates the effectiveness of modifications of suprasegmental speech characteristics for achieving the optimal rhetorical effect in the information-enriched text. The relevance of this research is defined by need for comprehensive analysis of the political discourse and techniques used to influence the audience. The scientific novelty lies in consideration of the expressive capabilities of prosodic means in the political texts with consideration of various extralinguistic factors, as well as within the specific type of political discourse – orientation genre as a speech of information-prescriptive nature. The acquired results demonstrate the expressive potential of suprasegmental means in oral speech, and can be implemented in teaching students-philologists the principles of analysis of political texts from the perspective of expressive syntax, prosody, cognitive syllabics, and rhetoric.