Stress-timed Languages Research Articles

Manifestation of speech disfluencies in preschool Cantonese-English speaking bilingual children

ABSTRACT Stuttering is characterised by disruptions in speech fluency that normally emerges between the ages of 2 to 5 when children start to formulate sentences. Current stuttering identification in children is largely based on speech disfluency criteria (>3% stuttering-like disfluencies, SLDs) developed for monolingual English-speaking children. Research in a Western language context shows that application of the criteria for monolingual to bilingual children may result in false positive diagnosis of stuttering. The applicability of these criteria to children speaking languages typologically distinct from English remains unclear. This preliminary study focused on bilingual Cantonese-English-speaking children, aiming to explore the manifestations of the speech disfluencies in Cantonese (a syllable-timed language) and English (a stress-timed language) while accounting for language dominance/proficiency and speaking task. Nineteen typically fluent Cantonese-English bilingual preschoolers were recruited for this study and their speech samples were collected across different speaking tasks (i.e. conversation and narration), and languages (i.e. Cantonese and English). The types and frequency of speech disfluencies were compared across both languages and the speaking tasks. The results showed that between 21–68% of children showed higher than 3% SLDs across different languages and speaking tasks. Linear mixed-effect analysis revealed that the prevalence of SLDs is higher in English (less dominant language) than Cantonese (more dominant language), and the prevalence is also higher in narration than conversation. These findings suggest the need for tailored stuttering identification criteria for bilingual children speaking diverse languages and emphasise the importance of considering language dominance/proficiency and speaking task when assessing stuttering in bilingual populations.

Music skills of Spanish-speaking children with developmental language disorder

BackgroundAccording to temporal sampling theory, deficits in rhythm processing contribute to both language and music difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Evidence for this proposition is derived mainly from studies conducted in stress-timed languages, but the results may differ in languages with different rhythm features (e.g., syllable-timed languages). AimsThis research aimed to study a previously unexamined topic, namely, the music skills of children with DLD who speak Spanish (a syllable-timed language), and to analyze the possible relationships between the language and music skills of these children. Methods and ProceduresTwo groups of 18 Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically-developing peers matched for chronological age completed a set of language tests. Their rhythm discrimination, melody discrimination and music memory skills were also assessed. Outcomes and ResultsChildren with DLD exhibited significantly lower performance than their typically-developing peers on all three music subtests. Music and language skills were significantly related in both groups. Conclusions and ImplicationsThe results suggest that similar music difficulties may be found in children with DLD whether they speak stress-timed or syllable-timed languages. The relationships found between music and language skills may pave the way for the design of possible language intervention programs based on music stimuli.

Effects of English Proficiency on Chinese Students Recognition and Pronunciation of English Lexical Stress

English is a stress-timed language, stress is very important in English. However, Chinese is a tonal language, which leads to pronunciation difficulties for Chinese students in learning English. This study studies the recognition and production of English lexical stress by Chinese students who are not English majors and the factors that may affect stress assignments. Eight students between the ages of 18-22 (four males and four females) who have passed CET 6 will be tested, including a phonetic quiz and a listening test. Four kinds of vocabularies were selected as research materials: Polysyllabic Word, Word with Affixes, Compound Word, and Homograph. Results indicate that: (1) For non-English major students, the correlation between English proficiency and lexical stress is not high, but is mostly affected by personal reading habits; (2) Students know very little about the word stress. They identify and pronounce stress relying on their personal habits.

Polysyllabic shortening in Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract This is the first study that investigates polysyllabic shortening in Arabic. It aims to find out the extent to which Modern Standard Arabic employs this phonetic mechanism, which is usually associated with stress-timed languages. Data were collected from 10 Jordanian speakers reading 6 sets of words representing the six monophthongs in Arabic in a carrier sentence. Based on the acoustic analysis of 180 vowels, it was found that the vowels in monosyllabic words were significantly longer than their counterparts in polysyllabic words. However, the differences between the vowels in disyllabic and trisyllabic words were much smaller. Findings suggest that polysyllabic shortening is not invoked as a mechanism to maintain the stress-timed rhythm of stress-timed languages. Rather, it seems to be a universal phonetic feature that applies in different degrees that are commensurate with the rhythm of the language in question.

Functional timing or rhythmical timing, or both? A corpus study of English and Mandarin duration.

It has been long held that languages of the world are divided into rhythm classes so that they are either stress-timed, syllable-timed or mora-timed. It is also known for a long time that duration serves various informational functions in speech. But it is unclear whether these two kinds of uses of duration are complementary to each other, or they are actually one and the same. There has been much empirical research that raises questions about the rhythm class hypothesis due to lack of evidence of the suggested isochrony in any language. Yet the alleged cross-language rhythm classification is still widely taken for granted and continues to be researched. Here we conducted a corpus study of English, an archetype of a stress-timed language, and Mandarin, an alleged syllable-timed language, to look for evidence of at least a tendency toward isochrony when much of the informational use of duration is controlled for. We examined the relationship between segment and syllable duration and the relationship of syllable and phrase duration in the two languages. The results show that in English syllables are largely incompressible to allow stress-timing because segment duration is inflexible to allow variable syllable duration beyond its functional use. Surprisingly, Mandarin does show a small tendency toward both equal syllable duration and equal phrase duration. Additionally, the duration of pre-boundary syllables in English increases linearly with break index, whereas in Mandarin, the duration increase stops after break index 2, which is accompanied by the insertion of silent pauses. We conclude, therefore, timing and duration in speech are predominantly used for encoding information rather being controlled by a rhythmic principle, and the residual equal-duration tendency in the two languages examined here show exactly the opposite patterns from the predictions of the rhythm class hypothesis.

Sentential position of V[sbnd]N combination modulates the rhythmic pattern effect during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements

Though previous research has examined how implicit meter can facilitate the processing of stress-timed languages, syllable-timed languages, such as Chinese, remain under studied. Past research has shown that among verb-noun combinations in Chinese, the processing of [2 + 2] (two disyllabic words) combination rhythmic pattern is easier than that of [2 + 1] (a disyllabic word and a monosyllabic word) pattern, though it is unclear whether this effect is modulated by the sentential position of the verb-noun combination. The present study uses eye-tracking to examine the influence of position on rhythmic pattern during silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences with [2 + 1] versus [2 + 2] VN phrases embedded in different sentential positions. Results show that the fixation duration of [2 + 1] VN phrases is significantly longer than that of [2 + 2] and that the fixation duration of VN phrases is shorter at the sentence-middle position than it is at the sentence-final position, suggesting that the rhythmic pattern effect at the sentence-middle position exhibits a reduced magnitude compared to the sentence-final position. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences with either mono- or disyllabic words after the VN phrases to further explore whether the reduction of the rhythmic pattern effect is related to the number of succeeding syllables. Results show that while the fixation duration of the [2 + 1] VN pattern is significantly longer than that of the [2 + 2] pattern, there is no significant difference between the monosyllabic versus the disyllabic conditions, nor is there a significant interaction between rhythmic pattern and syllable length post VN phrases, thus ruling out the rhythmic effect from succeeding context. Together, these patterns suggest that the reduction of the rhythmic pattern effect is caused by position rather than number of syllables after phrases.

Stress and vowel reduction by Korean Learners of English

Having a foreign accent is unavoidable for late second or foreign language learners. The reason is that physical changes in the brain influence learning a variety of aspects in a new language system (Flege, 1987; Patkowski, 1990). In other words, a well-established first language mediates the acquisition of a second language. The mediation can be called cross-linguistics influence or negative transfer (Sharwood Smith and Kellerma, 1986). In terms of suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, vowel reduction occurring in stress-timed languages such as English but lacking in syllable-timed languages is noteworthy to understand the cause of nonnative accents. The present work aims to explore patterns of vowel reduction in Korean accented English, with the goal of finding pronunciation issues in the English of Korean learners that might be due to transfer effects from an acoustic-phonetic standpoint. English speech samples from native English and Korean speakers of the Wildcat Corpus were used for data analysis. The vowel qualities, the duration ratios, and formant values of unstressed vowels produced by Korean and English speakers were analyzed. Results show that the Korean speakers tend not to reduce English unstressed vowels, assimilate them into similar vowels in their vowel inventory, and produce them as full vowels.

Mora-timed, stress-timed, and syllable-timed rhythm classes: Clues in English speech production by bilingual speakers

AbstractA growing body of literature suggests that the world's languages can be classified into three rhythm classes: mora-timed languages, stress-timed languages, and syllable-timed languages. However, scholars cannot agree on which rhythmic measures discriminate rhythm classes most satisfactorily and whether the speech rate factor should be considered. In this study, we analyze speech production by bilingual speakers, and compare their production with that of monolingual speakers and ESL speakers. Our rhythmic metric measure results show that when speech rate is taken into consideration, a combination of the two metric measures for vowels,Varco∆Vandvocalic nPVI, is most reliable in discriminating different rhythm classes, while consonants do not seem effective, whether the speech rate factor is included or not.

A Pronunciation Prior Assisted Vowel Reduction Detection Framework with Multi-Stream Attention Method

Vowel reduction is a common pronunciation phenomenon in stress-timed languages like English. Native speakers tend to weaken unstressed vowels into a schwa-like sound. It is an essential factor that makes the accent of language learners sound unnatural. To improve vowel reduction detection in a phoneme recognition framework, we propose an end-to-end vowel reduction detection method that introduces pronunciation prior knowledge as auxiliary information. In particular, we have designed two methods for automatically generating pronunciation prior sequences from reference texts and have implemented a main and auxiliary encoder structure that uses hierarchical attention mechanisms to utilize the pronunciation prior information and acoustic information dynamically. In addition, we also propose a method to realize the feature enhancement after encoding by using the attention mechanism between different streams to obtain expanded multi-streams. Compared with the HMM-DNN hybrid method and the general end-to-end method, the average F1 score of our approach for the two types of vowel reduction detection increased by 8.8% and 6.9%, respectively. The overall phoneme recognition rate increased by 5.8% and 5.0%, respectively. The experimental part further analyzes why the pronunciation prior knowledge auxiliary input is effective and the impact of different pronunciation prior knowledge types on performance.

Reflections on Americanism in English Spelling: -o(u)r

As a sociohistorical approach to Americanism in the ‘-o(u)r’ spelling, the present study investigates both dynamics and fluidity that occur in a process of their own spelling reforms in the US and the UK. It also examines to what extent British English and American English have been consistent in their use of ‘-our’ and ‘-or’ respectively, when it comes to the issue of fluidity in particular. However, despite such an apparent contrast between the two varieties of English, British English is revealed to share more with the American ‘-or’ ending than American English with the British ‘-our’ ending. This study attempts to account for this unbalancing state of affairs based on a phonological rationale leading to the isochrony of stress-timed languages including English. Aligned with this approach is a general tendency to show that the Americanism for the ‘-or’ spelling is gradually on the rise not only in Kachru’s expanding circle countries but also in some, but not all, of the ex-colonial countries belonging to Kachru’s outer circle. (Hannam University)

Reflections on Americanism in English Spelling: -o(u)r

As a sociohistorical approach to Americanism in the ‘-o(u)r’ spelling, the present study investigates both dynamics and fluidity that occur in a process of their own spelling reforms in the US and the UK. It also examines to what extent British English and American English have been consistent in their use of ‘-our’ and ‘-or’ respectively, when it comes to the issue of fluidity in particular. However, despite such an apparent contrast between the two varieties of English, British English is revealed to share more with the American ‘-or’ ending than American English with the British ‘-our’ ending. This study attempts to account for this unbalancing state of affairs based on a phonological rationale leading to the isochrony of stress-timed languages including English. Aligned with this approach is a general tendency to show that the Americanism for the ‘-or’ spelling is gradually on the rise not only in Kachru’s expanding circle countries but also in some, but not all, of the ex-colonial countries belonging to Kachru’s outer circle. (Hannam University)

Perception of lexical neutral tones in mandarin compounds: Electroencephalographic evidence from an oddball paradigm

The present electroencephalographic (EEG) study was designed to investigate the perception of Mandarin neutral tone (T0) by adult Mandarin speakers. For this purpose, we examined the event-related brain potential (ERP) correlates of T0 processing in two-character Mandarin compounds. Eighteen native Mandarin speakers were tested using a modified oddball paradigm. Sixty strong-strong and 60 strong-weak (T0) disyllabic Mandarin compounds were selected from the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. Participants performed one explicit task of stress discrimination (i.e., deciding whether the fourth word in sequences of 4 spoken words had the same stress pattern as the previous words or a different one) and one implicit task of passive listening. Behaviorally, accuracy showed that Mandarin listeners were able to correctly discriminate T0 from the canonical strong-strong stress pattern in 87.2% of cases. Neurophysiologically, larger N200 and P200 were observed for the infrequent strong-weak stress pattern compared to the canonical strong-strong one. Critically, a N325 was replicated in Mandarin, with a larger N325 for strong-weak than for strong-strong compounds. Consistently with a previous interpretation proposed by Böcker et al. (1999) for Dutch, we argue that the N325 might be a manifestation of the extraction of stress pattern in Mandarin also. Taken together, the present data on T0 perception in Mandarin are discussed in the context of the Prosody-Assisted-Processing (PAP) model (Isel et al., 2003), a cognitive model of spoken compound processing based on stress-timed languages, which postulates an early involvement of prosody in order to guide the morphological analysis at the lexical level.

An Investigation of Conversational Implicature of Functional Words in Some Selected English Exchanges

English is a stress-timed language in that content words (i.e. in connected speech including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are stressed whereas functional words including articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliaries and conjunctions are unstressed. Nonetheless, functional words have come strong (i.e. they are stressed) under certain circumstances. Accordingly, the main aim of the current study is to investigate the implied meaning of functional words in some selected conversational exchanges that have been downloaded from the internet . The main concluding points that the study has reached can be summarized as follows: firstly, it is found that functional words have both strong and weak forms under certain contexts. Secondly, functional words are used in strong forms when speakers try to demonstrate contrast, emphasis or indirectness. Additionally conversational implicature (related to the use of functional words) is used when speakers try to shift subjects, or make overgeneralization or avoid confrontation.

An acoustic analysis of the rhythm of Yemeni Arabic

Previous studies have found that different Arabic dialects display different degrees of stress-timing features forming a continuum that ranges from more stress-timed to less stress-timed Arabic dialects. This study investigated the vocalic durational intervals of speakers from two groups of speakers, Yemeni younger generation (YYG) and Yemeni older generation (YOG), both in reading and spontaneous speech by means of two indexes, namely, nPVI and Varco V. The results revealed that Yemeni speakers displayed stress-timing features in both the read passage and spontaneous speech. However, whereas the rhythmic patterns in read speech appeared to be comparable for both YYG and YOG speakers, significant differences were found in spontaneous speech, in terms of the nPVI and VarcoV measurements, where the rhythmic output of YYG speakers appeared to be more stress-timed than their older counterparts. The high values obtained by both indexes in the study show that YA patterns with prototypical stress-timed languages such as English, Dutch, Thai and the highly stress-timed western Arabic dialects.

The realization of English rhythm by Busan Korean speakers*

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the realization of speech rhythm in English as spoken by Korean learners of English. The study particularly aims to examine the rhythm metrics of English read speech by learners who speak Busan or the South Kyungsang dialect of Korean. Twenty-four learners whose L1 is Busan Korean and eight native speakers of English read a passage wherein five sentences were segmented and labeled as vocalic and intervocalic intervals. Various rhythm metrics such as %V, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indexes (PVIs) were calculated. The results show that Korean learners read English sentences with significantly more vocalic and consonantal intervals at a slower speech rate than native English speakers. The analyses of rhythm metrics revealed that when the speech rate was not normalized, Korean learners’ English showed more variability in the length of consonantal and vocalic intervals. However, speech-rate-normalized rhythm metrics for vocalic intervals indicated that Korean learners transferred their L1 rhythmic structures (a syllable-timed language) into their L2 speech (a stress-timed language). Overall, the results suggest that Korean learners’ English reflects the rhythmic characteristics of their L1. The effect of the learners’ L1 dialect on the realization of L2 speech rhythm is also speculated.

The development of spectral features in the speech of Indian children

Indian children represent a unique population of bilinguals who learn two or more languages of different isochrony. Most of their native languages are syllable-timed, whereas in school the language of learning is English, which is a stress-timed language. Exposure to multiple languages with different types of rhythmic patterns as stimulus during the development stage differentiates these children from monolinguals acquiring rhythms of a single language. Thus, to partially fill this gap, a comparative study in 115 children (aged four to eight years) and 18 adults was carried out. We investigated the frequencies around the pitch and first formant which encodes prosodic information in speech. It was found that the harmonic content in speech increases even after four years (where children exhibit or possess intelligent speech) and the spectra of adults were more distributed and had more peaks at higher frequencies as compared to the power spectra of children, where energy in higher frequency was less. This study has implications in finding speech abnormalities in Indian children with speech disorders.

Rhythmic speech and stuttering reduction in a syllable-timed language

ABSTRACTSpeaking rhythmically, also known as syllable-timed speech (STS), has been known for centuries to be a fluency-inducing condition for people who stutter. Cantonese is a tonal syllable-timed language and it has been shown that, of all languages, Cantonese is the most rhythmic (Mok, 2009). However, it is not known if STS reduces stuttering in Cantonese as it does in English. This is the first study to investigate the effects of STS on stuttering in a syllable-timed language. Nineteen native Cantonese-speaking adults who stutter were engaged in conversational tasks in Cantonese under two conditions: one in their usual speaking style and one using STS. The speakers’ percentage syllables stuttered (%SS) and speech rhythmicity were rated. The rhythmicity ratings were used to estimate the extent to which speakers were using STS in the syllable-timed condition. Results revealed a statistically significant reduction in %SS in the STS condition; however, this reduction was not as large as in previous studies in other languages and the amount of stuttering reduction varied across speakers. The rhythmicity ratings showed that some speakers were perceived to be speaking more rhythmically than others and that the perceived rhythmicity correlated positively with reductions in stuttering. The findings were unexpected, as it was anticipated that speakers of a highly rhythmic language such as Cantonese would find STS easy to use and that the consequent reductions in stuttering would be great, even greater perhaps than in a stress-timed language such as English. The theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.

The role of syllables in intermediate-depth stress-timed languages: masked priming evidence in European Portuguese

The role of syllables as a sublexical unit in visual word recognition and reading is well established in deep and shallow syllable-timed languages such as French and Spanish, respectively. However, its role in intermediate stress-timed languages remains unclear. This paper aims to overcome this gap by studying for the first time the role of syllables at early stages of visual word recognition in Portuguese (European), a language where the spelling-sound correspondences are less transparent than Spanish but less opaque than French, and also with fuzzier syllabic boundaries than both languages. To that purpose, 36 native speakers of Portuguese performed a lexical decision task combined with a masked priming paradigm. Ninety-six dissyllabic Portuguese target words, and 96 nonwords, half of which with a CV (ru.mor [rumor]) and the other half with a CVC first-syllable structure (forno [oven]), were preceded by a briefly presented nonword prime (50 ms) that could be syllable congruent (e.g., ru.mis-RU.MOR, for.pa-FOR.NO), syllable incongruent (e.g., rum.pa-RU.MOR, fo.rou-FOR.NO), or unrelated (e.g., ca.fas-RU.MOR, pou.me-FOR.NO) with the targets. Results were clear-cut and showed a facilitative syllabic priming effect in Portuguese, as target words preceded by syllable congruent primes were recognized faster and more accurately than when preceded either by incongruent or unrelated primes, although the effect was restricted to CV words. For nonwords there were no signs of syllabic effects. The findings are discussed attending to the characteristics of the Portuguese language and to current models of visual word recognition.

The role of the secondary stress in teaching the English rhythm

In the phonological literature in English, which is a stress-timed language, the existence of at least three levels of stress is usually taken for granted. Words, phrases, utterances or sentences have a prominent element in one of their syllables, which usually correlates with a partner in the same unit, called the secondary stress. It so happens that in multi-syllable words or groups bearing more than two content words, there is also a tertiary stress. Function words neighbouring the content words are usually not stressed or they are reduced. In standard writing, the primary stress is indicated by an acute accent, the secondary stress by a grave accent while the lack of stress is not marked at all. This article proposes that the distinction between primary and secondary stress should have more prevalence in the pronunciation teaching curricula, as they expose the rhythm of English and convey the intended meaning clearly.
 
 Keywords: Stress-timed language, primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary stress, rhythm.

Is Language Special? Anticipation Timing Accuracy of End of Turns in Known and Unknown Languages

Structured signaling in the acoustic environment between two individuals usually leads to turns to avoid interference. Turn-taking in human communication is a precise system that enables interlocutors to interact very efficiently. Previous studies have detected criteria that allow for optimized timing within a conversation. For instance, lexico-syntax seems to be of outstanding relevance. Other aspects still under consideration in this context are prosody and rhythm beside others. In the current study, we focused on the question if language carries universal acoustic features which might make turn-taking in human communication uniquely efficient in contrast to e.g. 'turn-taking' in animals. We aimed at getting an impression of how language specific properties other than content and grammatical structure affect anticipation performance. Therefore, we contrasted the Anticipation Timing Accuracy (ATA) for mother-tongue stimuli in German, for items in six foreign languages (English, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, and Korean) and for simple sinusoidal tones. Results showed significant differences between the ATA of the foreign language stimuli. German subjects anticipated the ends of utterances in Indo-European languages and in stress-timed languages (German, English, Arabic) significantly better than the ends of items in non-Indo-European languages and in syllable-timed languages (Italian, Polish, Turkish, Korean, restrictions apply). We conclude that interlocutors' end-of-utterance anticipation performance is influenced by language inherent universal acoustic features.