Prosodic Phrase Structure Research Articles

The Medieval Prosodic Orthography of the Tiberian Masoretic Reading Tradition

Abstract The medieval accentual notations of the Tiberian Masoretic Reading Tradition (TMRT), known as the ṭaʿămē hammiqrå̄, guide the reader in the proper intonement of the Hebrew Bible. Since Dresher’s groundbreaking 1994 article, scholars of the ṭaʿămē hammiqrå̄ have increasingly understood the system to exhibit features corresponding to the prosodic phrase structure of speech. However, the lack of a suitable theoretical framework for analysing and interpreting the ṭaʿămē hammiqrå̄ has greatly hindered research on the system, leaving it largely opaque. This article presents conclusions from Pitcher (2020), a study undertaken to investigate the possibility that the correspondences identified by Dresher may point to a more significant correlation between the ṭaʿămē hammiqrå̄ and modern prosodic descriptions than has been previously considered. In this article the ṭaʿămē hammiqrå̄ are introduced as a prosodic orthography of liturgical Tiberian Hebrew and a wholly linguistic model grounded in the discipline of prosodic phonology is proposed.

Sound, structure and meaning: The bases of prominence ratings in English, French and Spanish

This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners’ perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure—English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors in predicting binary prominence ratings of individual listeners. In all three languages we find similar effects of prosodic phrase structure and acoustic cues (F0, intensity, phone-rate) on prominence ratings, and differences in the effect of word frequency and instruction. In English, where phrasal prominence is used to convey meaning related to information structure, acoustic and meaning criteria converge on very similar prominence ratings. In French and Spanish, where prominence plays a lesser role in signaling information structure, phrasal prominence is perceived more narrowly on structural and acoustic grounds. Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels for each language. Distinctions in ToBI pitch accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, unaccented) are reflected in empirical and model-predicted prominence ratings. In addition, words with a ToBI pitch accent type that is typically associated with contrastive focus are more likely to be rated as prominent in Spanish and English, but no such effect is found for French. These findings are discussed in relation to probabilistic models of prominence production and perception.

Phrasal phonology in Copperbelt Bemba

Copperbelt Bemba exhibits several rightward spreading tonal processes which are sensitive to prosodic phrase structure. The rightmost H tone in a word will undergo unbounded spreading if the word is final in a phonological phrase (φ). In an intonational phrase consisting of several single-word φ's, the rightmost H in the first word will spread through all following toneless φ's. From a rule-based perspective, this can only be accounted for by positing mutually feeding iterative rules, as a single H-tone spreading rule cannot account for the long-distance spreading. Rather, a second rule that spreads a H from the final mora of one word onto the initial mora of the following word is required, as a bridge to further unbounded spreading. Three phrase-sensitive OT constraints are proposed to account for H-tone spreading between words. One is of the domain-juncture variety, requiring the specification of two separate prosodic domains.

Experimental investigations on the prosodic realization of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in German

This study reports on experimental investigations on the prosodic patterns of restrictive and appositive relative clauses (RRCs and ARCs) in German. RRCs and ARCs are associated with distinct prosodic patterns: While RRCs involve prosodic integration with their antecedent and may involve an accent shift from the antecedent to the determiner, ARCs are prosodically separated from their host clause. In the framework of two production experiments and one perception experiment, RRC and ARC constructions were tested in regard to F0 scaling, segment duration, silent pauses, and accent placement under different conditions. The results support the intuitive prosodic patterns described in the literature: ARC constructions were realized with higher F0 scaling and longer word duration preceding the relative clause, which indicates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary, and accentuation of the determiner occurred only with RRC constructions. In perception, silent pauses were taken as cues to ARCs and accent shift as a cue to RRCs. These results suggest a difference in prosodic phrase structure reflecting the different syntactic structures. However, the production experiments also revealed that the prosodic differences are absent when the communicative situation does not require the disambiguation of the relative clause types.

Role of the Corpus Callosum in Speech Comprehension: Interfacing Syntax and Prosody

The role of the corpus callosum (CC) in the interhemispheric interaction of prosodic and syntactic information during speech comprehension was investigated in patients with lesions in the CC, and in healthy controls. The event-related brain potential experiment examined the effect of prosodic phrase structure on the processing of a verb whose argument structure matched or did not match the prior prosody-induced syntactic structure. While controls showed an N400-like effect for prosodically mismatching verb argument structures, thus indicating a stable interplay between prosody and syntax, patients with lesions in the posterior third of the CC did not show this effect. Because these patients displayed a prosody-independent semantic N400 effect, the present data indicate that the posterior third of the CC is the crucial neuroanatomical structure for the interhemispheric interplay of suprasegmental prosodic information and syntactic information.

A novel prosodic-information synthesizer based on recurrent fuzzy neural network for the Chinese TTS system.

In this paper, a new technique for the Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) system is proposed. Our major effort focuses on the prosodic information generation. New methodologies for constructing fuzzy rules in a prosodic model simulating human's pronouncing rules are developed. The proposed Recurrent Fuzzy Neural Network (RFNN) is a multilayer recurrent neural network (RNN) which integrates a Self-cOnstructing Neural Fuzzy Inference Network (SONFIN) into a recurrent connectionist structure. The RFNN can be functionally divided into two parts. The first part adopts the SONFIN as a prosodic model to explore the relationship between high-level linguistic features and prosodic information based on fuzzy inference rules. As compared to conventional neural networks, the SONFIN can always construct itself with an economic network size in high learning speed. The second part employs a five-layer network to generate all prosodic parameters by directly using the prosodic fuzzy rules inferred from the first part as well as other important features of syllables. The TTS system combined with the proposed method can behave not only sandhi rules but also the other prosodic phenomena existing in the traditional TTS systems. Moreover, the proposed scheme can even find out some new rules about prosodic phrase structure. The performance of the proposed RFNN-based prosodic model is verified by imbedding it into a Chinese TTS system with a Chinese monosyllable database based on the time-domain pitch synchronous overlap add (TD-PSOLA) method. Our experimental results show that the proposed RFNN can generate proper prosodic parameters including pitch means, pitch shapes, maximum energy levels, syllable duration, and pause duration. Some synthetic sounds are online available for demonstration.

A hierarchical stochastic model for automatic prediction of prosodic boundary location

Prosodic phrase structure provides important information for the understanding and naturalness of synthetic speech, and a good model of prosodic phrases has applications in both speech synthesis an...

Parse scoring with prosodic information: an analysis/synthesis approach

Prosody is used by human listeners to disambiguate spoken language and, in particular, the relative size and location of prosodic phrase boundaries provides an important cue for resolving syntactic ambiguity. Therefore, automatically detected prosodic phrase boundaries should provide information useful in speech understanding for choosing among several candidate parses. Here, we propose two scoring algorithms to rank candidate parses, both based on an analysis/synthesis approach that compares the recognized prosodic phrase structure (analysis) with the predicted structure (synthesis) for each candidate parse. The two scoring algorithms, one rule-based and one using a probabilistic model, yield similar overall results when evaluated in experiments with a corpus of ambiguous sentences read by FM radio announcers. To decouple the performance of the analysis and synthesis components, we have used the scoring algorithms with hand-labeled breaks, which results in disambiguation performance comparable to the performance of human subjects in perceptual experiments. Performance degrades somewhat using automatically recognized breaks.

Prosodic phrase prediction using an embedded hierarchy model of speech.

Prosodic phrase structure provides important information for the understanding and naturalness of synthetic speech, and a good model of prosodic phrases has applications in both speech synthesis and understanding. This work describes a statistical model of an embedded hierarchy of prosodic phrase structure, motivated by results in linguistic theory. Each level of the hierarchy is modeled as a sequence of subunits at the next level, with the lowest level of the hierarchy representing factors such as syntactic branching and prosodic constituent length using a binary tree classification. A maximum likelihood solution for parameter estimation is presented, allowing automatic training of different speaking styles. For predicting prosodic phrase breaks from text, a dynamic programming algorithm is given for finding the maximum probability prosodic parse. In experiments on a corpus of radio news, the model has been used to predict minor and major prosodic phrase boundaries from text in the hierarchy: orthographic word ∈ minor phrase ∈ major phrase ∈ sentence. Good results were obtained by using only a simple function word table for part-of-speech assignments and sentence punctuation; use of syntactic information did not improve performance. Out of 23 test sentences, 7 had predicted phrase breaks that matched those used by one of five radio announcers and an additional ten sentences were judged to have acceptable prosodic phrasing. This performance corresponds to correctly predicting a phrase break (major or minor) at 79% of the observed phrase locations and falsely predicting a boundary at only 4% of the boundaries where no break was observed. In comparison, the performance of a tree classifier without the hierarchical formalism yields 62% correct prediction and 3% false prediction.