Strong Syllables Research Articles

Metrical segmentation across dialects

Norris, McQueen & Cutler (1995) tested the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS; Cutler & Norris, 1988) as part of the spoken-word recognition model Shortlist, using British English stimuli and listeners. We replicate their study using American English listeners, who we exposed to one of two sets of stimuli. One group heard a new set of stimuli recorded in American English, while the other was exposed to the original British English recordings. Norris et al. used a word-spotting task: listeners had to spot words within speech (e.g. “stamp” in [stæmpɪdʒ]). Target words were CVCC (like “champ") or CVC (like “done"), and were followed by a full vowel (e.g. /tʃæmpoʊʃ/) or a reduced vowel (e.g. /tʃæmpəʃ/). The original study found different behavior for CVCC versus CVC targets, with the results suggesting that listeners hypothesize a word onset at the start of a full-vowel strong syllable (the MSS). The results for the current study with American stimuli partially replicate the original findings, showing even more consistent support for the MSS. The results with British stimuli also support the MSS, but with higher error rates. The results indicate that the MSS has a very strong effect even in the difficult setting of cross-dialectal perception.

Stopy metryczne jako jednostki kształtujące przebieg utworu fortepianowego

Metric Feet as Units Shaping the Course of a Piano Piece: In this paper, I make an attempt to present the analytical possibilities offered by using metric feet as units that shape the course of a (piano) piece. This approach results from cognitive studies that clearly show that the perception of auditory events is based on grouping them into larger units on the basic strong–weak axis. In this approach, the foot is a scheme of one strong sound and one or two weak sounds (in different combinations) that repeats regularly in the course of the work. In this article, I present the most common ways of distinguishing strong sounds: using duration, dynamics, and pitch (features derived analogously from language, distinguishing strong syllables from the speech stream) and characterising the most common feet.

The Salient Pronunciation Errors and Intelligibility of Turkish Speakers in English

Intelligibility is a critically important aspect for effective oral communication. This study explored salient (important) pronunciation errors and their relative roles in the intelligibility of nonnative speech based on listener judgments. Speech samples, collected from speakers with a Turkish as a native language (L1) background, were presented to listener groups in two consecutive sub-studies. In expert listening sessions, listeners with an academic background in pronunciation research and teaching (N=3) detected salient pronunciation errors via a thinking aloud protocol. During the intelligibility research, native listeners (N=33) transcribed the target words with salient pronunciation errors presented either as individual words isolated from their contexts or in longer utterances. The intelligibility scores were calculated and analyzed to investigate the role of salient pronunciation errors on speakers’ intelligibility in English. The findings indicated that mispronunciations of segmentals and incorrect stress placement were the most common error types as detected by expert listeners. Negative transfer was found to be an important factor in such salient errors. According to the results of the intelligibility research, pronunciation errors affected speakers’ intelligibility to a certain extent. Segmental errors were the main causes of reduced intelligibility. Moreover, mispronunciations of two sounds that were seen in most error sites, /ə/ and /θ/, seemed to make speech more accented while not seriously affecting intelligibility. Also, errors in strong syllables had a more detrimental effect on intelligibility compared to those in weak syllables.

Vowel Quality and Direction of Stress Shift in a Predictive Model Explaining the Varying Impact of Misplaced Word Stress: Evidence From English

The use of suprasegmental cues to word stress occurs across many languages. Nevertheless, L1 English listeners' pay little attention to suprasegmental word stress cues and evidence shows that segmental cues are more important to L1 English listeners in how words are identified in speech. L1 English listeners assume strong syllables with full vowels mark the beginning of a new word, attempting alternative resegmentations only when this heuristic fails to identify a viable word string. English word stress errors have been shown to severely disrupt processing for both L1 and L2 listeners, but not all word stress errors are equally damaging. Vowel quality and direction of stress shift are thought to be predictors of the intelligibility of non-standard stress pronunciations—but most research so far on this topic has been limited to two-syllable words. The current study uses auditory lexical decision and delayed word identification tasks to test a hypothesized English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy for words of two to five syllables. Results indicate that English word stress errors affect intelligibility most when they introduce concomitant vowel errors, an effect that is somewhat mediated by the direction of stress shift. As a consequence, the relative intelligibility impact of any particular lexical stress error can be predicted by the Hierarchy for both L1 and L2 English listeners. These findings have implications for L1 and L2 English pronunciation research and teaching. For research, our results demonstrate that varied findings about loss of intelligibility are connected to vowel quality changes of word stress errors and that these factors must be accounted for in intelligibility research. For teaching, the results indicate that not all word stress errors are equally important, and that only word stress errors that affect vowel quality should be prioritized.

Offline and online processing of acoustic cues to word stress in Papuan Malay.

The present study investigates to what extent acoustic cues to word stress facilitate both offline and online word processing in Papuan Malay. Previous production research has shown acoustic evidence for word-stress patterns in this language, counter to earlier predictions. A discussion of the literature on word stress perception and word stress in Papuan Malay is provided and complemented with reports of three word recognition tasks. The first two presented sequences of acoustically manipulated syllable dyads to native listeners in an offline word recognition task. This was done in order to investigate the individual contribution of each of the acoustic cues (F0, duration, intensity, spectral tilt) to the perception of word stress. F0 appeared a relevant cue when stimuli were embedded in a phrase, not in isolation. A follow-up reaction time experiment (online processing) investigated to what extent word recognition was facilitated when either an acoustically weak or an acoustically strong syllable was the cue to identify a word. Reaction times were shorter for strong syllables than for weak syllables. The outcomes suggest that Papuan Malay has a form of perceptually relevant word stress, which is particularly salient for irregular (ultimate) stress rather than for regular (penultimate) stress.

A replication of a test of the metrical segmentation strategy in spoken word recognition

Norris et al. (1995) tested the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS; Cutler and Norris, 1988) as part of the spoken-word recognition model Shortlist. We replicate their study in a different dialect of English, with a different population and items. Norris et al. used a word-spotting task, in which listeners had to spot words within speech (e.g., "stamp" in [stæmpɪdʒ]). Target words were CVCC like "champ" or CVC like "done," and were followed by a full vowel ("champ" in/tʃæmpoʊʃ/, "done" in /dʌnʤeɪb/) or a reduced vowel ("champ" in /tʃæmpəʃ/, "done" in /dʌnʤəb/). The original study found different behavior for CVCC versus CVC targets, with the results suggesting that listeners hypothesize a word onset at the start of a full-vowel strong syllable (the MSS). Doing so makes it harder to detect "champ" when it is followed by a full vowel than a weak vowel because the full vowel leads the listener to think the /p/ is the onset of the following word, while the following vowel has little influence for "done," where the equivalent consonant is not part of the word. The results for the current study (underway) will show whether these effects generalize across English dialects, listener populations, and words.

Stress in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

This study is descriptive which describes and compares stress in English and Arabic in order to arrive at the points of similarity and difference. This is primarily achieved by showing its degrees, types, and functions, by surveying the literature available and by contrasting it in the two compared languages, conducting a contrastive study. The study hypothesizes that there is no difference between English and Arabic in terms of degrees, types and functions of stress. The study finds out that stress as a phenomenon exists in both languages and it is not phonemic. In addition, in both languages, it is connected with strong syllables, and its primary functions of stress are emphasis and contrast.

Secondary Types of Pitch Accents of the Northern Aukštaitian Dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language

Abstract The Baltic languages remain of special interest for linguists because they contain many archaic features essential for the comparative research of Indo-European languages and reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European (Mikić 2014: 39). The Lithuanian prosodic system is characterized by free accent and two types of syllable accents (or tones) in the long stressed syllables. The stress is inherited from Indo-European and can fall on any syllable of a word, i. e. last, penultimate, antepenultimate etc. (Stundžia 2014: 12). In the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language, four types of syllable accents are possible in the long stressed syllables (more clearly heard in the diphthongs, less in the monophthongs): acute, circumflex, neoacute, neocircumflex (Garšva 1982: 65 ff.). These accents are positional allotones of two types of syllable accents: acute and circumflex. Two more types of accents are possible in strong syllables consisting of two central sounds: typical and atypical. Typical acute and circumflex accents are characteristic of verbs of non-iterative action and of “barytone” denominative words, atypical accents, with an emphasis on the second part of the stressed component, are characteristic of verbs of iterative action and of “oxytonic” denominative words (Kačiuškienė 2009: 34). The article focuses on results of the auditory and instrumental experiment and demonstrates different auditory and acoustic properties of the secondary types of pitch accents of the Northern Aukštaitian Dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language.

The phonological preparation unit in the production of English words by Korean learners

This study investigated how speakers of two languages differing in phonological preparation unit in planning spoken words encode a functional unit of their second language (L2). It was shown that the first phoneme of a word is a functional unit in English, whereas Korean has a strong syllable but not onset phoneme effects. Two groups of native Korean speakers depending on their length of residence in English-speaking countries were asked to name pictures in English, and the names shared the same onsets, rhymes, or had nothing systematically in common. The results showed that 1) no onset effect was shown regardless of length of residence, suggesting that L2 learners’ phonological preparation unit is influenced by their native language functional unit; and 2) there was a rhyme interference effect regardless of length of residence, probably due to lexical competition. However, upon close inspection of the results of individual speakers, L2 learners are able to attend to the target language unit if they are extensively exposed to L2 phonology.

Overriding the Metrical Bias with Lexical Information: English-Learning 7.5-Month-Olds Use Mommy to Segment Iambic Words

ABSTRACTPrevious research shows that English-learning 7.5-month-olds are biased to segment speech at strong syllables consistent with the predominant trochaic (strong-weak) pattern of words in their language (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999). The present study asked whether 7.5-month-olds can use a familiar name to override their metrical bias and segment iambic (weak-strong) words from natural speech. Infants were familiarized to passages containing weak-strong-weak sequences (guiTAR is) preceded by Mama/Mommy or an unfamiliar name. Infants were tested on iambic words (guiTAR in Experiments 1–2) or trochaic nonwords (TARis in Experiment 3). Segmentation occurred only for iambic words that were preceded by Mama/Mommy during familiarization. The presence of Mama/Mommy attenuated infants’ bias to treat strong-syllables as word onsets. We suggest that young infants weight highly familiar words more strongly than metrical information and discuss the implications of this finding for a hierarchical model of segmentation that connects infant and adult segmentation systems.

The strong, the weak, and the first: The impact of phonological stress on processing of orthographic errors in silent reading

In auditory speech processing, phonological stress functions as an attention holding cue, which facilitates detection of mispronunciations and phonetic deviants in strong syllables as compared to weak ones. Whereas silent reading involves activation of phonological information including word stress, it is not clear whether it has any functional relevance for visual language processing. We investigated whether phonological stress impacts orthographic processing such as detection of misspellings in silent reading. In an ERP experiment, participants silently read intact and misspelled German words. We manipulated the strength of the misspelled syllable (strong vs. weak) as well as its position (word-initial vs. word-middle). No effect of stress was observed for misspellings occurring in a word-initial position suggesting that misspellings in word-initial position disrupt visual word processing regardless of the phonological strength of the first syllable. In contrast, phonological strength modulated the ERPs when misspellings occurred in the middle of the word: misspellings embedded in strong syllables enhanced the P600 and the N400-like component compared to misspellings in weak syllables. In this case, i.e., when misspellings occur in the middle of a letter string, lexical access may be hindered more when errors occur in strong syllables, as reflected in the enhanced N400 in strong compared to weak syllables. This in turn may facilitate active reanalysis as mirrored in the increased P600 in the strong condition. The findings are discussed in the context of the relatively late activation of phonological form in visual word recognition and its interaction with other perceptual visual information. Overall, the results demonstrate the functional significance of phonological stress in visual word processing.

Prosody, phonological domains and the structure of roots, stems and words in the Munda languages in a comparative/historical light

Abstract Munda languages reveal competing word-level vs. phrase-level domains with respect to prosody, with weak-strong vs. strong-weak patterns, respectively. The prosodically strong syllable at the word-level is a root element that reflects cognacy across the family, while the word-frames they are embedded in frequently do not. Such a pattern of cognate roots and non-cognate word-frames is attested across the Austroasiatic phylum. The types of word-frames that such roots are embedded in reflect traces of a once-active system of semantically transparent prefixation or noun class marking, in addition to now mainly frozen systems of noun-verb stem compounding or noun incorporation. Word-level prosody in Munda is archaic, while phrase-level prosodic features are secondary and reflect local South Asian norms.

Charts, Graphs, and Meaning: Kiril Taranovsky and the Study of Russian Versification

The present paper reviews a classic work of scholarship on Russian verse, Kiril Taranovsky’s Russian Binary Meters. The analysis demonstrates that the two sections of the book are tacitly at odds with each other, and that the more famous second part (on “regressive accentual dissimilation,” and more generally the evolution of rhythmic patterning in various meters) does not fully take into account the observations of the first part (on accentuation in Russian verse). In particular, two elements are missing from the second part: the role of hypermetrical stress and the relative strength of stresses on strong syllables. Taranovsky recognized these phenomena, but they are nowhere reflected in his statistical data and conclusions, presumably because to take them into account would require an element of subjectivity. Taranovsky and his followers were proud that they could produce verifiable (repeatable) results. However, these results can only be repeated by scholars who agree on the same strict set of rhythmic conventions. The author of this essay argues that these conventions are oversimplifications. By omitting the question of hypermetrical stress, Taranovsky ignores some of the most important and memorable lines of Russian poetry. And by disregarding the question of relative stress, he creates an “acoustical” model of poetry that in no way corresponds to how it is actually recited. The paper ultimately suggests that scholars of verse should be more concerned with poetry as performance and less with the attempts to turn verse rhythm into an exact science.

A word to the eyes: Visual cues benefit lexical segmentation in noise

In English, most word-initial syllables are stressed. Listeners use these syllable strength cues to identify word boundaries in degraded acoustic conditions. This is evident in the types of lexical boundary errors they make when tasked with parsing a continuous stream of degraded speech: word boundaries are more often inserted before strong syllables than before weak syllables. Listeners also use visual cues from the talker's face to glean both phonemic and prosodic speech information in degraded listening conditions. While the benefits of lipreading have received much attention, the role of visual cues in lexical segmentation remains largely unexplored. The present study examined the effect of auditory-visual cues on lexical boundary decisions. Normal-hearing listeners identified target phrases degraded by multi-talker babble. Responses in auditory-only and auditory-visual conditions were analyzed for percent words correct and lexical boundary error type. Results indicate large inter-individual variability, but overall an increase in word identification accuracy and a decrease in lexical boundary errors in the auditory-visual condition. Further, some listeners made a greater proportion of lexical boundary insertions before strong syllables, suggesting that the addition of visual cues increased their use of syllable strength to identify word boundaries. Implications for clinical populations will be discussed.

What you see is what you hear: How visual prosody affects artificial language learning in adults and children

Speech perception is a multimodal phenomenon, with what we see impacting what we hear. In this study, we examine how visual information impacts English listeners’ segmentation of words from an artificial language containing no cues to word boundaries other than the transitional probabilities (TPs) between syllables. Participants (N = 60) were assigned to one of three conditions: Still (still image), trochaic (image loomed toward the listener at syllable onsets), or Iambic (image loomed toward the listener at syllable offsets). Participants also heard either an easy or difficult variant of the language. Importantly, both languages lacked auditory prosody. Overall performance in a 2AFC test was better in the easy (67%) than difficult language (57%). In addition, across languages, listeners performed best in the trochaic condition (67%) and worst in the Iambic condition (56%). Performance in the still condition fell in between (61%). We know English listeners perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Thus, participants likely found the Trochaic Condition easiest because the moving image led them to perceive temporally co-occurring syllables as strong. We are currently testing 6-year-olds (N = 25) with these materials. Thus far, children’s performance collapsed across conditions is similar to adults (60%). However, visual information may impact children's performance less.

Review of Yonatan Malin,Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied(Oxford University Press, 2010)

[1] Art song involves an oftentimes uneasy marriage between poetry and music, and nowhere is this more apparent than in their respective rhythms. In Songs in Motion Yonatan Malin wades into sometimes fractious relationship between rhythms and musical rhythm and in nineteenth-century German Lied. Malin serves not as a marriage counselor, but more like a sociologist (or sociobiologist) of marriage, a neutral observer, but one with a deep knowledge of and love for institution.[2] Malin approaches and musical rhythm and in Lied taxonomically, looking at most common musical renderings for feet along with their settings in lines of different length (iambic trimeter, trochaic tetrameter, and so forth). He also develops a straightforward schema for representing rhythms and their (musical) metrical setting: accented syllables are indexed relative to their metric position; beats that carry weak or empty syllables are marked with a dash. So, for example, a trimeter (three-stress) line in simple duple might be set [1, 2 / 1 - ], that is, with strong syllables on beats 1, 2, and following 1, and a weak or empty syllable on next beat 2 (16-17). With this elegantly simple premise and methodology, Malin first shows range of possibilities for putting particular rhythms into various musical settings, and then-and this is book's key contribution-he is able to show what possibilities were actually used and are most prevalent. Malin is thus able to talk about these songs in terms of compositional choices made under a complex set of constraints, both musical and lyrical. He is also well positioned to trace rhythmic evolution of genre over course of nineteenth century, from a poetically dominated volkstumlich approach, preferred by composers and poets (especially Goethe) at beginning of nineteenth century to settings with far greater rhythmic variety and complexity at century's end.[3] In his opening chapter Malin lays out his basic poetic/musical taxonomy, with an ear sensitive to nuances of both and musical rhythm. The feet of German lyric poetry involve two or three syllables, typically arranged with three or four stresses per line (trimeter and tetrameter), though dimeter and pentameter (and longer) lines do occur. As Malin notes, however, the recurring patterns of stress and line that define get us only so far to a full understanding of motion...The relationship between rhythm and [poetic] is analogous to relationship between musical rhythm and meter (9). That is, like patterns of duration in music, words can appear in different meters, and have different senses of accentuation, depending upon their setting and placement. In taking account of nuances of accentuation, Malin takes special note of substitutions (e.g., replacing a strong-weak trochee with a weak-strong iamb), degrees of accentuation in longer and more complex lines, and caesuras within and enjambments between lines. He then rings changes for trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter line types, illustrating each with numerous musical examples. Malin shows how increasing poetic cardinality (moving up from 3 to 4 to 5+ stresses per line) leads to increasing complexity and variety of musical settings and textual-musical rhythmic interactions. A structural Rubicon is crossed in case of pentameter, as five-stress line naturally supports a trimeter subcomponent-indeed, such subdivision of pentameter line is not only possible, but likely.[4] In laying out interactions between and musical rhythm and meter, Malin also resuscitates work of Hans Georg Nageli (1817). Nageli spoke of polyrhythm, that arises from interaction between rhythm, melodic rhythm, and accompaniment rhythm (and metrical aspects of all three). Nageli's approach marks a shift in Lied aesthetics at start of nineteenth century, moving from a preference for volkstumlich tunes to a more ambitious artform of higher status (32). …

EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm

Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners’ attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech.

Explaining how learners extract ‘formulae’ from L2 input

Studies of L2 production have shown that both children and adult learners make use of ‘formulae’, putatively ‘unanalysed’ sequences of words. In this paper I discuss how formulae may arise in L2 acquisition by processes of segmentation. Carroll and MacDonald (Ms. 2009), Carroll et al. (2009) show that even ab initio learners can rapidly segment sound forms from continuous strings. The data are consistent with two approaches to the segmentation of words: words are segmented by tracking co-occurrence statistics over adjacent syllables (transitional probabilities or TPs); the left edges of words are placed just before a strong syllable (a Metrical Segmentation Strategy). In my contribution to this special issue, I address the question of how strings of syllables can be re-analysed as morpho-syntactic categories, their phrasal projections and dependencies. I do this in terms of the Autonomous Induction Theory (Carroll 2001) discussing formulae in particular in terms of correspondences across autonomous and modular representational systems: prosodic, morpho-syntactic, and conceptual.

The effects of prosodic prominence and serial position on duration perception

This study addresses how prosodic expectations affect perceptual discrimination. Prosodic expectations were created using natural recordings of six-syllable sentences in dactylic, iambic, and trochaic metrical patterns at two speech rates, slow and quick. PSOLA resynthesis was used to lengthen target syllables located in three different serial positions in each of the three patterns. Subjects made forced-choice comparisons of durational structure in an AX task. Lengthening was detected significantly better for strong syllables than for weak ones in all metrical patterns, serial positions, and at speech rates. The result obtains even when absolute duration is eliminated as a potential confound. Results are interpreted in the light of prior research showing that prosodically strong syllables offer perceptual advantages in recognition and identification tasks, even when prosodic strength is cued only by the prior context (and not by any acoustic phonetic properties of the target syllables). In conclusion, metrical expectations cause listeners to focus their attention on metrically prominent syllables, with attentional focus leading to better performance in tasks tapping multiple levels of processing.

Prosodic Structure in Early Word Segmentation: ERP Evidence From Dutch Ten‐Month‐Olds

Recognizing word boundaries in continuous speech requires detailed knowledge of the native language. In the first year of life, infants acquire considerable word segmentation abilities. Infants at this early stage in word segmentation rely to a large extent on the metrical pattern of their native language, at least in stress-based languages. In Dutch and English (both languages with a preferred trochaic stress pattern), segmentation of strong-weak words develops rapidly between 7 and 10 months of age. Nevertheless, trochaic languages contain not only strong-weak words but also words with a weak-strong stress pattern. In this article, we present electrophysiological evidence of the beginnings of weak-strong word segmentation in Dutch 10-month-olds. At this age, the ability to combine different cues for efficient word segmentation does not yet seem to be completely developed. We provide evidence that Dutch infants still largely rely on strong syllables, even for the segmentation of weak-strong words.