Prosodic Patterns Research Articles

Facial expressions in different communication settings: A case of whispering and speaking with a face mask in Farsi

Abstract This study addresses the importance of orofacial gestures and acoustic cues to execute prosodic patterns under different communicative settings in Farsi. Given that Farsi lacks morpho-syntactic markers for polar questions, we aim to determine whether specific facial movements accompany the prosodic correlates of questionhood in Farsi under conditions of degraded information, that is, whispering and wearing face masks. We hypothesise speakers will employ the most pronounced facial expressions when whispering questions with a face mask to compensate for the absence of F0, reduced intensity and lower face invisibility. To this end, we conducted an experiment with 10 Persian speakers producing 10 pairs of statements and questions in normal and whispered speech modes with and without face masks. Our results provide support to our hypotheses that speakers will intensify their orofacial expressions when confronted with marked conditions. We interpreted our results in terms of the ‘hand in hand’ and ‘trade-off’ hypothesis. In whispered speech, the parallel realisation of longer word duration and orofacial expressions may be a compensatory mechanism for the limited options to convey intonation. Also, the lower face coverage is mutually compensated for by word duration and intensified upper facial expressions, all of which in turn support the trade-off hypothesis.

Request for confirmation sequences in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract As a social action, requesting confirmation involves presenting a proposition to be (dis)confirmed and seeking another’s (dis)confirmation of the proposition. This article provides an overview of the lexico-syntactic and prosodic resources used by participants to perform requests for confirmation (RfCs) and to respond to RfCs in Mandarin face-to-face interactions. Drawing on statistical results of the frequencies of a variety of linguistic resources in RfC sequences, this study shows that declaratives are the most frequently used syntactic forms for RfCs in the Mandarin data. Tags, such as shiba ‘right?’, are also frequently used by the speaker to seek (dis)confirmation from the recipient. The RfCs in the data also exhibit one prominent prosodic pattern. That is, a larger number of RfC turns in Mandarin end with falling pitch movement with very moderate slope from mid (M) to low (L). This prosodic pattern stems from the interplay between tones and intonation in Mandarin. In the responses to RfCs, a majority of them are confirmations. Also, response tokens, such as dui ‘right’ and en ‘en’ with falling intonation, are used highly frequently in responses to RfCs in the Mandarin data. Findings in this study afford cross-linguistic research on RfC sequences.

Scope of Negation, Gestures, and Prosody: The English Negative Quantifier as a Case in Point.

The present paper examines how English native speakers produce scopally ambiguous sentences and how they make use of gestures and prosody for disambiguation. As a case in point, the participants in the present study produced the English negative quantifiers. They appear in two different positions as (1) The election of no candidate was a surprise (a: 'for those elected, none of them was a surprise'; b: 'no candidate was elected, and that was a surprise') and (2) no candidate's election was a surprise (a: 'for those elected, none of them was a surprise'; b: # 'no candidate was elected, and that was a surprise.' We were able to investigate the gesture production and the prosodic patterns of the positional effects (i.e., a-interpretation is available at two different positions in 1 and 2) and the interpretation effects (i.e., two different interpretations are available in the same position in 1). We discovered that the participants tended to launch more head shakes in the (a) interpretation despites the different positions, but more head nod/beat in the (b) interpretation. While there is not a difference in prosody of no in (a) and (b) interpretation in (1), there are pitch and durational differences between (a) interpretations in (1) and (2). This study points out the abstract similarities across languages such as Catalan and Spanish (Prieto et al. in Lingua 131:136-150, 2013. 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.02.008; Tubau et al. in Linguist Rev 32(1):115-142, 2015. 10.1515/tlr-2014-0016) in the gestural movements, and the meaning is crucial for gesture patterns. We emphasize that gesture patterns disambiguate ambiguous interpretation when prosody cannot do so.

Can listeners differentiate varieties using prosodic information? Lect identification in a persona-matching task

Sociolinguists and lay people have long been interested in the mechanisms by which dialect and speaker identification occur. The current study aims to test whether realizational differences found in production studies are salient factors in identification of different lects, as well as to examine differences between groups in identification. In this study, listeners were instructed to match clips containing H* and L+H* pitch accents with specific personae who represented speakers of five lects of interest (African American English, Jewish English, Appalachian English, Southern English, and Midwestern English). Listeners from different groups (Appalachian, African American, Jewish, and those who were not from any of these groups) were presented with both low-pass filtered and unfiltered versions of the clips. Results indicate that listeners performed at or above chance in the unfiltered condition. However, we did observe a consistent pattern such that listeners confused AAE and JE voices, as well as Appalachian and Southern voices, indicating that listeners may struggle to differentiate lects with similar historical development and/or prosodic patterns. Additionally, listeners showed sensitivity to the original lect in selecting a persona in the filtered condition, though they were less accurate overall compared to the unfiltered condition. Overall, listeners appear to be more sensitive to segmental phonological than prosodic information in lect identification. Additionally, when presented with a personae matching task, listeners from a variety of backgrounds perform with a high degree of accuracy, though examining patterns of confusion help to shed light on the variables that are most salient. 

Response particles in Mandarin conversation

Abstract This study examines three major response particles, o/ou, en, and a in Mandarin conversation. Using the framework of interactional linguistics, this study examines the actions implemented by these particles and their associated prosodic patterns. It discovers that, while these three particles have shared functions, they show interactional nuances that allow for more fine-grained actions. It also reveals that different particles tend to have a similar prosodic design when they implement the same action. This study sheds light on the detailed workings of these particles both prosodically and interactionally in Mandarin speakers’ everyday conversation, contributing a specific case to further cross-linguistic comparison.

Unraveling the contributions of prosodic patterns and individual traits on cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence modality.

Cross-linguistic perception is known to be molded by native and second language (L2) experiences. Yet, the role of prosodic patterns and individual characteristics on how speakers of tonal languages perceive L2 Spanish sentence modalities remains relatively underexplored. This study addresses the gap by analyzing the auditory performance of 75 Mandarin speakers with varying levels of Spanish proficiency. The experiment consisted of four parts: the first three collected sociolinguistic profiles and assessed participants' pragmatic competence and musical abilities. The last part involved an auditory gating task, where participants were asked to identify Spanish broad focus statements and information-seeking yes/no questions with different stress patterns. Results indicated that the shape of intonation contours and the position of the final stressed syllable significantly impact learners' perceptual accuracy, with effects modulated by utterance length and L2 proficiency. Moreover, individual differences in pragmatic and musical competence were found to refine auditory and cognitive processing in Mandarin learners, thereby influencing their ability to discriminate question-statement contrasts. These findings reveal the complex interplay between prosodic and individual variations in L2 speech perception, providing novel insights into how speakers of tonal languages process intonation in a non-native Romance language like Spanish.

Listening Preference for Child-Directed Speech Versus Time-Reversed Speech in Moderate-Preterm Infants Compared to Full-Term Infants.

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the experimental group. The two control groups consisted of a total of 36 infants-20 full-term infants matched for chronological age and 16 full-term infants matched for maturation age. The infants were tested using the central fixation procedure and were presented with 16 trials of CDS and backward speech. A follow-up was conducted 5 years after the initial experiment using a developmental and a five-item parent questionnaire. MPIs did not demonstrate a preference for CDS over backward speech, whereas both control groups demonstrated a listening preference for CDS over backward speech. MPIs showed a delayed use of first words and word combinations and lower scores on the five-item questionnaire compared to term infants. Twelve MPIs (67%) did not demonstrate a preference for CDS over backward speech. Four of them (33%) were later diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders. The lack of preference for CDS over backward speech in the MPIs group suggests delayed developmental pattern of speech processing compared to full-term peers. Delays in neurological maturation as well as listening experience in an unregulated environment outside the uterus during a sensitive period of brain development may affect the recognition of phonological and prosodic patterns that support listening preference for speech over backward speech.

Gheorghe Asachi – un scriitor între epoci culturale (I)

Gheorghe Asachi seems like a forgotten writer today. His place in the history of literature should not be minimized. He imposed rigor on poetry, bringing prosodic patterns untried by anyone before him. It is the most important literary contribution. He took on the themes of the era, but in a classicizing manner. He founded culture magazines, built the first forms of the public education system in Romanian, fought important philological battles. Because he placed himself wrongly, against the trend of the times, being an opponent of the revolution of 1848 and the Union of 1859, he was marginalized by the 1848 Generation and for decades his name was covered in oblivion. After Lovinescu and Călinescu, however, literary histories give it its due importance, even if without enthusiasm. Gheorghe Asachi is a founder, a pioneer, a man of the beginnings of the road. He did not create masterpieces, but he initiated several poetic genres and wrote plays, short stories and articles that fixed a profile that cannot be passed over. But above all, he created a literary mythology that made its way, sometimes ridding itself of the name of its author.

Manual and nonmanual cues used for the prosodic encoding of contrastive focus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language)

This paper explores the manual and nonmanual prosodic markers used to express contrastivefocus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). To investigate this informationunit, videos extracted from the LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015) and produced by six nativedeaf signers in two tasks were annotated and analysed. The preliminary results, basedon both quantitative and qualitative analyses, show that contrastive focus is encodedby discernible prosodic patterns in LSFB at the level of stress and intonation. Stressmarkers include variations in duration, mouth articulations, holds, and combinationsof manual cues. Regarding intonation, the results suggest a differentiation in the usageof body leans and head movements on contrastive focus and in the surroundingcontext, and support the notion of componentiality (or layering) of nonmanual markers.Ultimately, the study challenges the view of a one-to-one relationship between specificmarkers and their meanings, suggesting that meaning emerges from the interplayofmultiple resources.

The Role of Prosodic Features in Conversational Interaction : Hard Talk a Case Study

This study aims to look into the relationships between prosodic features from phonological perspective and interactional relationships and sequence organization from conversation analysis (CA) view. There are specific prosodic cues that speakers employ to signal to one another when it is their turn to talk in any speech situation. These cues serve as signs to let other people know when it is the speaker's turn to talk. It is important to demonstrate that some prosodic patterns indicate the end or continuation of a turn. Prosodic orientation, such as intonation and tone patterns, are hypothesized to reveal information about participants' matching and non-matching of a prior turn. The consistent use of the same pitch height indicates that there is agreement among the participants on a specific situation. PRAAT, a computer program is used for doing acoustic analysis to conduct the prosodic analysis following Ladefoged’s model. It is supposed that when the speaker makes a low pitch, he is no more interested in the topic raised or no more excited, but when there is a high pitch that means there is more to be added and some significant issues can be shown However, prosodic orientation is obviously used in political interviews in a manner similar to that of ordinary speech. As well as Political interviews commonly employ pauses, interrupted speech, and reasoning, some of which show a particular orientation to the preceding turns.

A - 87 A Neuropsychological Case Study of Primary Progressive Apraxia of Speech Versus Agrammatic Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS) is a lesser-known neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive speech production loss, affecting word articulation. Apraxic speech commonly occurs in primary progressive aphasias (PPAs) and as a result, is often misdiagnosed as agrammatic PPA (aPPA). The current case highlights the importance of neuropsychological evaluations and behavioral observations in delineating PPAOS from aPPA. The patient is a 71-year-old right-handed White female who presented with a 2-year history of language difficulties beginning with a lisp and progressing to an inability to produce words. MRI of the brain showed moderate white matter disease. Her neurocognitive profile was notable for primary deficits in expressive language, including oral/written production, verbal fluency, and repetition. Milder deficits were observed in aspects of executive functioning. Observed spontaneous speech was notable for impaired and effortful articulation with syllabically segmented prosodic speech patterns, some distortions and prosody alterations, and slow rate. All other cognitive domains were intact. Patients with PPAOS and aPPA typically score in the impaired range on tests that depend on rate and accuracy of speech. Apraxia was her most salient feature reported and observed on testing. We did not find learning and memory difficulties, which are more common in aPPA. Moreover, she had trial-and-error articulatory attempts, groping, and distorted substitutions, which are more commonly seen in PPAOS. Her speech was also devoid of grammatical errors which is another distinguishing feature. While subtle and confounded by her alcohol use and orthopedic injuries, her profile altogether appeared most consistent with PPAOS.

Does language matter in oral diadochokinesis (DDK) performances?

Oral diadochokinesis (DDK) typically refers to rapid repetitions of monosyllables (e.g., /pʌ/, /tʌ/, /kʌ/) or multisyllables (e.g., /pʌtʌkʌ/). DDK has been frequently included in studies of motor development and disorders and its use has increased over the past decade. One unanswered question in using DDK for investigation of speech motor control is whether the studied language serves as an important factor in DDK performances. Despite the general agreement that DDK performance (mostly DDK rates) is little affected by a speaker’s native language, few data exist on language- or dialect-specific effects on DDK, which may be explained by factors such as speaking rate and rhythmic pattern of the languages. In this study, we compare DDK performances in two languages, American English (AE) and Korean, which were chosen primarily because of the difference in their rhythmic patterns (stressed-timed versus syllable-timed). A total of 80 young adults (40 AE-, 40 Korean-speakers) performed both mono- and multi-syllable repetitions and analysis was limited to the first 5 seconds of each performance. We will present data on several aspects of DDK performance focusing on prosodic patterns (syllable and intersyllable pause durations, intensity, and F0 across syllables) in addition to average DDK rates.

The vowel inventory of Nakanamanga

Nakanamanga is an Oceanic language spoken by approximately 10,000 speakers in central Vanuatu (Lynch and Crowley, 2001), including northern Efate island and Nguna and other small islands to the north. Previous work on Nakanamanga indicates that it has five distinctive vowel qualities (/i,e,a,o,u/), as is typical of Oceanic languages, and some evidence of long vowels (Schütz, 1969). However, whether vowel length is contrastive remains unclear, and there are suggestions that vowel length exhibits complex relationships with consonantal and prosodic patterns (Schütz, 1969; McClintock, 1991; Schmidt, 2023). We present findings of a pilot study targeting vowel length in Nakanamanga, based on phonological evidence and acoustic phonetic data. A wordlist consisting of words of CVCV structures was designed after consultation with a native speaker, and recorded with the speaker in Mere-Sauwia village on Nguna. Data was processed and analysed using Praat, EMU-SDMS and R (Boersma and Weenink, 2023; Winkelmann et al., 2017; R Core Team, 2023). Results for vowel duration and first and second formant frequency at vowel midpoints provide strong evidence that Nakanamanga has ten distinct vowels, with a length contrast for all five vowel qualities. Findings lay the groundwork for larger-scale investigations of the phonetics and phonology of Nakanamanga.

The Role of Prosodic Features in Conversational Interaction : Hard Talk a Case Study

This study aims to look into the relationships between prosodic features from phonological perspective and interactional relationships and sequence organization from conversation analysis (CA) view. There are specific prosodic cues that speakers employ to signal to one another when it is their turn to talk in any speech situation. These cues serve as signs to let other people know when it is the speaker's turn to talk. It is important to demonstrate that some prosodic patterns indicate the end or continuation of a turn. Prosodic orientation, such as intonation and tone patterns, are hypothesized to reveal information about participants' matching and non-matching of a prior turn. The consistent use of the same pitch height indicates that there is agreement among the participants on a specific situation. PRAAT, a computer program is used for doing acoustic analysis to conduct the prosodic analysis following Ladefoged’s model. It is supposed that when the speaker makes a low pitch, he is no more interested in the topic raised or no more excited, but when there is a high pitch that means there is more to be added and some significant issues can be shown However, prosodic orientation is obviously used in political interviews in a manner similar to that of ordinary speech. As well as Political interviews commonly employ pauses, interrupted speech, and reasoning, some of which show a particular orientation to the preceding turns

Using prosody to express evidentiality. The case of the quotative

The goal of this study was to investigate if pure prosodic marking of evidentiality, more specifically quotation, does exist and, secondly, if the particular prosodic traits involved in such prosodic marking are arbitrary or somewhat motivated. Data containing a set of identical sentence pairs in Spanish (the only difference being the presence or absence of quotation in them) was collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task and analyzed in order to find prosodic patterns. The results suggested that an affirmative answer must be given to the first question, as the quoted fragments were consistently marked in the four languages with a break before the quoted fragment (and often after it) and a change in voice quality, more specifically by raising the pitch of the snippet. An extension of the study was carried out in three different languages from three different language families (Swedish, Polish and Hungarian) to check if the traits observed were an idiosyncratic feature of Spanish or a more widespread phenomenon. The same conclusive results were observed in all three languages. Regarding the question of the arbitrariness or motivation of the prosodic markers, the results suggest that both of the prosodic traits found are indeed motivated. Speakers use metonymically traits that are the most salient when in an everyday conversation a new speaker takes the floor (a gap and a change of voice quality) to convey that the enunciator has changed and the fragment at glance is to be attributed to an individual other than the speaker. The consistent choice of pitch raising to mark the change of enunciator (as opposed to pitch lowering, for example) is argued to be related to issues of language embodiment.

Recursivity and Focus in the Prosody of Xitsonga DPs

This paper explores the prosodic patterns of complex DP structures in Xitsonga by looking at penultimate lengthening in DPs with marked and unmarked word orders of different types. We discuss the underlying syntactic structures and prosodic realizations of Xitsonga DPs. We are particularly interested in the way in which recursion applies in the Xitsonga DP, where it surfaces in DPs with multiple modifiers of the same or different categories that appear in fronted (i.e., pre-nominal) positions. We propose that in Xitsonga nominal constituents move to a left-periphery-like position within the DP domain and that this position matches to a focus-marked phonological phrase. This type of phonological phrase is forced to remain in the phonology even if the one-word phrase violates the Binarity constraint. We argue that the penultimate lengthening effects found in Xitsonga with the reordering of DP internal elements are best analyzed as showing sensitivity to this focus-marked phonological phrase.

PHONEME-LEVEL BERT FOR ENHANCED PROSODY OF TEXT-TO-SPEECH WITH GRAPHEME PREDICTIONS.

Large-scale pre-trained language models have been shown to be helpful in improving the naturalness of text-to-speech (TTS) models by enabling them to produce more naturalistic prosodic patterns. However, these models are usually word-level or sup-phoneme-level and jointly trained with phonemes, making them inefficient for the downstream TTS task where only phonemes are needed. In this work, we propose a phoneme-level BERT (PL-BERT) with a pretext task of predicting the corresponding graphemes along with the regular masked phoneme predictions. Subjective evaluations show that our phoneme-level BERT encoder has significantly improved the mean opinion scores (MOS) of rated naturalness of synthesized speech compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) StyleTTS baseline on out-of-distribution (OOD) texts.

The pitch contour of the French discourse marker donc: A corpus-based study using generalized additive mixed modeling

AbstractIn this article, we explored the pitch contour patterns of the French discourse marker donc in realizing different pragmatic functions from native and non-native oral corpora in French. Statistical analyses using generalized additive mixed modeling revealed that even though Mandarin Chinese L1 speakers learning French also used the pitch cue to realize pragmatic functions, their prosodic pattern is different from the native pattern. Their L1 Chinese seemed to influence their usage of the pitch cue significantly. In addition, women were shown to be better than men in using the pitch cue in conveying pragmatic functions with a closer pattern to the native pattern. Overall, our study sheds new light on the relationship between speakers’ L1 and L2 regarding the interaction between pragmatic and prosodic features. It also provides new reflections on the acquisition of socio-pragmatic competence.

POSSESSIVE, KIND AND NOT SO KIND: THE DIFFERENT USES OF THE ADJECTIVAL -OV IN SERBO-CROATIAN

The paper tackles correlations between prosodic and semantic properties of Serbo-Croatian adjectives with the suffix(es) -ov/-in. A corpus study was performed to identify: (i) the types of bases that these suffixes attach to, and (ii) semantic and prosodic properties of these derivations. The results show that besides the strictly possessive/relational domain (e.g., Ivan-ov ‘Ivan’s) -ov and -in are productively combined with bases denoting plants to derive kind or material denotations (e.g., hrast-ov ‘made of oak’). These denotations also allow combinations of stems and suffixes that are not found with possessives. Specifically, only with kind or material denotations can feminine bases combine with -ov e.g., jabuk-ov ‘made of apple’ (cf. jabuk-in ‘belonging to an apple (tree)’). Moreover, kind or material forms can involve a shift in the prosodic pattern of the base. We approach these data from the perspective of Distributed Morphology (Halle-Marantz 1993). We argue that possessive -ov/-in forms always involve a phasal n projection which triggers spellout, resulting in full productivity, semantic transparency and prosodic faithfulness. Kind or material forms involve a ‘defective’ n head, which can lack a gender feature (explaining the occurrence of -ov on feminine bases). This n head acts as a phase at LF, triggering semantic transparency, while being permeable at PF, allowing prosodic shifts (Marušič 2005, 2009).

Few-Shot Learning in Emotion Recognition of Spontaneous Speech Using a Siamese Neural Network With Adaptive Sample Pair Formation

Speech-based machine learning (ML) has been heralded as a promising solution for tracking prosodic and spectrotemporal patterns in real-life that are indicative of emotional changes, providing a valuable window into one's cognitive and mental state. Yet, the scarcity of labelled data in ambulatory studies prevents the reliable training of ML models, which usually rely on "data-hungry" distribution-based learning. Leveraging the abundance of labelled speech data from acted emotions, this paper proposes a few-shot learning approach for automatically recognizing emotion in spontaneous speech from a small number of labelled samples. Few-shot learning is implemented via a metric learning approach through a siamese neural network, which models the relative distance between samples rather than relying on learning absolute patterns of the corresponding distributions of each emotion. Results indicate the feasibility of the proposed metric learning in recognizing emotions from spontaneous speech in four datasets, even with a small amount of labelled samples. They further demonstrate superior performance of the proposed metric learning compared to commonly used adaptation methods, including network fine-tuning and adversarial learning. Findings from this work provide a foundation for the ambulatory tracking of human emotion in spontaneous speech contributing to the real-life assessment of mental health degradation.