English Prosody Research Articles

Acoustics of the alignment of narrow focus prosody and lexical stress in native and nonnative English productions.

This study examined the acoustic correlates of the alignment between lexical stress and narrow focus prosody in English and investigated how this alignment is learned by second language learners whose native language is prosodically distinct from English. A production experiment was conducted where native English speakers and Korean learners of English were asked to read aloud sentences with a narrow focus on trisyllabic words with various stress patterns (e.g., ánimal, Novémber, submaríne). In the native English productions, the stressed syllables were characterized by either a rising F0 contour (for word-initial stress) or increased periodic energy (for word-medial and -final stress). The Korean speakers (KSs) produced stressed syllables with a rising F0 contour regardless of stress position, differing from the native speakers, and they exhibited greater periodic energy for word-medial and -final stressed syllables, similar to the native speakers. In addition, the KSs with higher English proficiency showed more native-like patterns by exhibiting a post-focus F0 drop immediately after word-initial stressed syllables. These findings are discussed in the context of existing literature and potential factors contributing to the challenges observed in L2 prosody learning.

Developing Interpreter Trainees’ Speech Comprehensibility: Does Nativeness of the Instructor Matter?

This study examines the effect of native vs. non-native prosody instruction on developing interpreter trainees’ speech comprehensibility in English as a foreign language (EFL) using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Twenty-three groups of 28 interpreter trainees at a University in Iran (six different branches) took part in the study, all groups receiving the same amount of instruction (9 hours over 3 weeks). Three control groups listened to/viewed authentic audio recordings and movies in English, discussed their contents, and completed a variety of speaking tasks but received no specific prosody instruction. Twenty experimental groups spent part of the instruction time on theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises with, English prosody by thirteen nonnative instructors, and seven native instructors. Three experts evaluated the comprehensibility of the trainees in elicited speech samples collected during the pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest, and subsequently presented in random order. The findings revealed that the experimental groups gained between 1 and 2 points on the 0 to 10 comprehensibility scale, and lost little in the delayed posttest; however, hardly any changes were observed in the control groups. We conclude that native and non-native English instructors’ prosody teaching were equally effective in enhancing EFL students’ speech comprehensibility.

Content Knowledge and the Teaching of English Stress, Rhythm and Intonation to Malaysian Learners of English

This paper makes a positive response to the CEFR Companion, which requires learners to speak the target language with appropriate prosodic features defined as stress, rhythm and intonation. When, as in Malaysia, the teaching of English is aligned with the CEFR, teachers are expected to teach prosody to enable their students to progress, despite the serious practical problem that they may not have the necessary content knowledge. The paper aims to provide teachers with the content knowledge, while leaving to teachers the prerogative to decide what and how to teach in their own classrooms. It outlines some basic prosodic concepts and covers what learners have to do when speaking English other than producing acceptable speech sounds. Although teachers who read up on English prosody may develop greater knowledge and increased awareness of prosodic features, just knowing about these things is not enough, and it is also essential to know how to recognize and produce them. In order to enable learners to acquire appropriate prosodic features, teachers require support at the point of need in the classroom, and the discussion includes suggestions how this can be done with modern technology.

Production and Interpretation of Accentual Intonation Tunes in L2 Acquisition

Intonation is one of the most problematic aspects of the English prosody for L2 speakers. Studies on Nigerian English (NigE) intonation have claimed that Standard English intonation differs significantly from native Englishes but studies on the interpretation and production of accentual intonation tunes of L2 acquisition have been rare. Fifty final-year university undergraduates from Nigeria (25 males and 25 females) were purposively sampled. Each of the respondents was given 10 English sentences to produce and interpret. Interpretations of each of the respondents was captured and converted to simple percentages while the voice production of each of the respondents was elicited from a Speech Filing System (SFS) installed on Hp250 laptop. Respondents' frequency of occurrence at production level showed appropriate use of 134 (26.8%) while inappropriate use amounted to 366 (73.2%) out of 500 expected results of accentual tunes. Production on gender basis revealed males and females appropriate use at 67 (13.4%) each and inappropriate use was 183 (36.6%) respectively, both sexes showing no difference in accentual tunes use. Findings revealed that out of the 500 expected results for interpretation of accentual tunes, respondents appropriately interpreted the English sentences in 360 (72%) instances while 140 (28%) respondents misinterpreted the English sentences. Though, results of respondents revealed competence in the interpretation of accentual tunes (72%) but at the production level, respondents did not apply accentual tunes (26.8%) on English expressions. This study concludes that Nigerian spoken English accent differs significantly from native Englishes and should be described as an outer circle English.

The effect of providing feedback and feedforward in prosody instruction for developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees

AbstractThe present study examines the effect of feedback (FB) and feedforward (FF) in prosody instruction for developing listening comprehension skills in the nonnative language by interpreter trainees, using a pretest–posttest–delayed posttest design. Three groups of 25 interpreter trainees at Bu‐Ali Sina University in Iran took part in the study, all groups receiving the same amount of instruction (10 h over 5 weeks). The control group listened to/viewed authentic audio recordings and movies in English, discussed their contents, and completed a variety of listening comprehension tasks but received no prosody instruction. The first experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises with, English prosody by an instructor by providing FB when teaching prosody while the second experimental group was provided FF when teaching prosody. Versions of Longman's Test of English as a Foreign Language English proficiency test (paper‐based) were used to assess listening comprehension at pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest. The findings revealed that the prosody instruction by providing FB enhanced the listening comprehension skills of the interpreter trainees more than by providing FF. The practical implications of the study would be that in the given circumstances where only limited curricular time is available for instruction and practice, a judicious choice can be made to lend priority to providing FB in prosody instruction for developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees rather than to the providing FF.

Multilingual Implications for Reading Prosody Assessment

We believe that reading prosody assessment is culturally situated. In this conceptual article, we problematize some of the phrasing used for prosody indicators and explore how three of the most spoken languages in the United States (other than English) enact aspects of prosody when reading. We probe potential linguistic and sociocultural implications and contribute to the discussion of equitable assessment practices in reading education. Using a multilingual and sociocultural lens, we identify elements of prosody in other languages that could impact how prosody in English is produced. We discuss extratextual features that impact prosody and implications for the rubrics used by assessors. We end by providing recommendations for the field related to increasing our understanding of multilingual fluency and promoting multilingual mindsets in fluency classroom assessment.

Prominence and intonation in Singapore English

Previous work on Singapore English prosody has focused largely on establishing the acoustic correlates of lexical stress and examining where the language falls within a rhythm-class typology. Little attention, however, has been paid to how lexical prominence, if present, interacts with phrasal prominence. In this study, we examine the extent to which f0 realizations vary across lexical items with differing stress patterns, while taking into account that prosodic phrasing requirements necessitate an f0 rise to the phrase-final syllable. We show that across target types of varying stress placement, syllable length, and constituency, f0 realizations are highly consistent, involving a rise from the start of the target word or phrase which culminates with a peak on the phrase-final syllable. The location of lexical prominence is the primary influence on the scaling of f0 across the entire target, with stress-initial targets having a higher mean f0. Exploratory analysis of duration and intensity measures further corroborates the prominence-lending nature of the phrase-final syllable, with some evidence for marking of prominence on non-final lexically stressed syllables. The findings support the primarily post-lexical role that f0 plays in marking phrase edges, instead of lexical heads, in Singapore English, in line with a previously proposed AM model of Singapore English intonation. The implications of these findings for the study of prosodic typology and sociolinguistic variation in Singapore English are also discussed.

Effects of L1 and L2 Communication Apprehension on Speaking Skills of Japanese University Students

This study explores the effect of communication apprehension in both L1 and L2 on proficiency in word stress of Japanese university students. Two structured, closed-ended questionnaires, the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA) and the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) were utilized along with speaking scores. A target word in an exclamatory sentence was used to examine word stress that affects intelligibility in spoken English. Acoustic correlates of the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables were investigated with four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (fo) range, fo slope, duration, and intensity. Results showed that of the four parameters, word stress represented by fo range and fo slope showed a significant negative correlation with L1 communication apprehension. In addition, speaking scores were related to L1 communication apprehension and word stress proficiency represented by fo range. These findings also suggest the effect of communication apprehension on English prosody as demonstrated by fo. In addition, speaking scores were related to L1 communication apprehenison and proficiency in word stress represented by fo range. These findings suggest the effect of communication apprehension on English speaking skills.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The effect of prosodic structure on cue integration in pitch perception

Listeners integrate voice quality cues when perceiving pitch, and listeners’ pitch perception strategy is modulated by their musicality. Prior work has shown that speakers of English, Mandarin and Cantonese performed similarly on stimuli based on English prosody (pitch contour being driven by stress), but it remains unknown whether the prosodic structure of the stimuli affects pitch perception. 47 L1-English and 95 L1-Cantonese speakers participated in a pitch classification experiment. The stimuli included two F0 peaks modelled after Cantonese prosody (pitch movement being mostly modulated by tones), they were resynthesized to contrasting in two spectral slopes creating four permutations. The first peak had a consistent F0, while the second peak varied in F0 along an 11-step continuum. Listeners judged whether the second ‘ma4-ma1-ma4’ was higher in F0 than the first word. Listeners also completed a musicality test. Results show that all participants integrated spectral cues in pitch perception similarly with breathier-tenser stimuli favoring hearing a higher pitch and vice versa, and individuals with high musicality integrate spectral cues less. However, the effect of musicality was significantly smaller for Cantonese than for English speakers, differing from stimuli modelled after English prosody. Overall results suggest an effect of prosody on speakers’ pitch perception.

Declarative or declarative question?—On the acoustics of English prosody of Hong Kong trilingual children with autism spectrum disorder

The current study investigated the production of English prosody (i.e., focus marking) of trilingual Cantonese children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their typically developing (TD) peers (i.e., Cantonese and American English children without ASD) using declarative questions. Speech materials were segmented at word and syllable levels, and word duration, f0, f0 range and intensity were extracted. Acoustic data were fitted using linear mixed-effects models with different explanatory variables followed by a likelihood ratio test. Between group comparison showed that the ASD group had significantly more fluctuating f0 range in post-focus words than the TD groups, which is likely to be an indication of hypercorrection, i.e., over-application of perceived prosodic pattern in English declarative questions. Within groups, the Cantonese children showed different patterns to the English children in terms of the interaction between the acoustic measures and on-focus expansion and post-focus compression. The Cantonese ASD group showed some degree of post-focus compression in terms of duration and mean f0, while the Cantonese TD group only had such pattern in terms of mean f0. The English TD group had a tendency of on-focus expansion in terms of duration and f0 range, but post-focus words showed significantly higher mean f0 than the pre- and on-focus ones, probably due to the question intonation.

Nominal Compounds in Old English Meter and Prosody

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

May the illocutionary force be with you: the anaphora rule in english-spanish voice-over translation

"This paper explores the rendition possibilities of English deaccenting by anaphora rule (given information) in Spanish voice-over translation by means of a study of 9 unscripted programmes, including documentaries, reality shows and news interviews. The intonational component of source languages in translation has barely gained any attention in Audiovisual Translation (AVT), even when English prosody is immensely rich from a communicative and pragmatic perspective. In addition, we cannot expect to find a one-to-one relationship between the intonational systems of source and target languages, nor consider all parts of the source text equally relevant. For this reason, the deaccenting of old information in oral English and the pragmatic and illocutionary load that it carries need to be properly rendered in the target language, in our case Spanish, by means of the resources available in this language, which may not only be prosodic, but also syntactic and semantic."

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

Raiding the demotic: verse as evidence for speech prosody in Old and Middle English

This article reviews the isomorphism which may or may not have existed between the speech-prosodic principles pertaining in Old English (OE) and in later Englishes, and the metrical patterns evident in both OE and (early) Middle English lyric poetry. A key question is this: was there isomorphism in OE between rules of right-edge phrasal prominence in speech and purely metrical prominence? Recent theories of OE metrical prominence, particularly those of Russom (2017 and earlier works) show that many normative OE half-lines have a structure which can be adequately described without making reference to right-edge prominence. That very adequacy is a challenge to metrists since well-known eurhythmic phenomena of promotion (of erstwhile weaker syllables to relative stress position within the verse line) and demotion (of erstwhile stressed syllables to relatively less-stressed positions) depend crucially on phrasal right-headedness: if that right-headedness didn't exist in OE, where did it originate? And if it did exist in OE, why didn't poets then make use of the metrical opportunities the language afforded? What can revisiting and studying isomorphism (or the lack of it) between the forms of language and of verse teach scholars about English poetic history?

Early metrical and lexicographical evidence for functional stress-shifts

Only three English diatones,outlaw,rebel,record, out of the current 235-item list in Hotta (2015), are on record prior to the seventeenth century; the latest record of diatonicoutlawis 1786 (Sherman 1975: 63). Whether this type of functional prosodic contrast was inherited or innovative is controversial. We revisit the Old English metrical evidence for functional stress-shifting and present new attestations of verb–noun pairs in Middle English verse in an effort to establish if the limited inherited stress-shifting model survives, and, if so, whether or how it accommodates the incoming loan vocabulary. The additional verse attestations support the idea of continuity, yet the scarcity of data falls short of statistical verifiability. A search into detailed lexicographical information for 1200–1550 reinforces the hypothesis of continuity by documenting the differential patterns of borrowing of nouns and verbs, prefixed and unprefixed. Taken together, these two sources endorse a proposal that in its earliest stages functional stress-shifting was predicated on prefixation, and that the ongoing conflict between prefixal defooting andAlign-L(Root, PrWd) in ME is a necessary component of the diachronic account of English prosody.

Comparing the nativeness vs. intelligibility approach in prosody instruction for developing speaking skills by interpreter trainees: An experimental study

The present study investigates the relative contribution of the Nativeness vs. Intelligibility approach in prosody instruction for developing English speaking skills by Iranian interpreter trainees. Three groups of student interpreters were formed. Participants were assigned to groups at random. The speaking skill pretest scores revealed that the three groups were homogeneous before starting the training program. The Control group listened to authentic audio tracks in English, and discussed their contents, watched authentic English movies, and did exercises to improve speaking skills without receiving prosody training. The Nativeness approach group instead spent part of the time on the theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises in, English prosody with the overall aim to train students to acquire native-like speaking skills. The Intelligibility approach group spent part of the time on the theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises in, English prosody emphasizing the requirement that students produce intelligible speech. The total instruction time was the same for all three groups, i.e., 18 h. Students then took a posttest in speaking skills. The results show that both experimental groups performed better than the control group. Moreover, the Intelligibility approach group outperformed the Nativeness approach group in developing speaking skills.

Pronoun Prosody in English and Mandarin and Its Acquisition by Mandarin-Speaking English Learners

Pronoun Prosody in English and Mandarin and Its Acquisition by Mandarin-Speaking English Learners

Investigation on Productivity of Synonym Words with Different Semantic Prosody in English

“Semantic prosody” has been researched since the first claim of Sinclair in (1987). Since then, semantic prosody became one of the most important issues in language studies as a linguistic phenomenon. In 1993, Louw defined semantic prosody as a special tendency of words, which might be in a pleasant environment that creates a ‘positive semantic prosody’ or in an unpleasant environment that creates a ‘negative semantic prosody’. The current research is based on a corpus analysis design, in “COCA” and “COHA”. Two synonym pair words of “Start/Begin” and “Guide/Lead to” were chosen as a case study. Representative number of each word was estimated by “Cochran’s formula”. This study is concentrated on investigation of the fact that while negative semantic prosodies are much more frequent than words with positive semantic prosody, but based on the linguistic positivity bias and “The Pollyanna hypothesis” which is introduced by Boucher and Osgood (1969), in English, the productivity of words with positive semantic prosody in synonym pairs, is more than productivity of negative semantic productivity. This fact might be due to the social interactions, the emotional content of words and linguistic behavior. It is notable to say that people tend to talk more about the brighter side than the darker side of life. This discrepancy makes words’ choosing somehow problematic for translators and English learners.

The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech. More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers. An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.