Syllabic Duration Research Articles

The Interplay between Syllabic Duration and Melody to Indicate Prosodic Functions in Brazilian Portuguese Story Retelling

The Interplay between Syllabic Duration and Melody to Indicate Prosodic Functions in Brazilian Portuguese Story Retelling

Harriman-Smith, James. Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition

Harriman-Smith, James. <i>Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition</i>

Observations on the Progression of Gestures with L2 Proficiency: A Call for Further Research.

Gestures in learners of second languages (L2) are still an understudied field. Most studies comparing the same individuals gesturing in their L2 and in the mother tongue (L1) report a higher frequency of gestures in the L2, however, the reason for this difference is not yet clear. Aside from idiosyncratic and cultural variations, differences in language type, such as syllabic duration and functional load and syntactical structure, as well as differences in the proficiency of the speaker are likely to affect the production of gestures in terms of their frequency and function. The many variables to be considered obscure the role of proficiency and the integration of gesture-speech-idea in L2 speakers. These variables are only controlled in a handful of longitudinal studies comparing speakers' gestures at two or more points in the proficiency continuum. With this paper, we seek to add our observations to this corpus, using the data collected under the case study of a Cantonese learner of English, to reflect on a number of existing theoretical constructs. We propose a number of ideas that need further research, as well as a number of variables that need to be better understood in order to advance L2 gesture research. As our observations are based on the narrations of one individual, our generalizations are theoretical at this point as our results cannot to be extrapolated to all L2 learners, instead, they are intended to highlight a number of areas related to L2 gesture production and how this might change with proficiency, that require further study.

Geoffrey Hill’s Sapphics: A Translator’s Perspective

The various possibilities of scanning and enacting some Latin metres imply that modern poets or translators trying to reshape them in their own language have first and foremost to choose what to reshape. Though Latin metres govern syllabic duration, verse ictus and word accent, their modern equivalents tend to stick to ictuses or accents alone. The most prominent feature in the few exceptions to this rule is attention to counterpoint. Having translated Odi Barbare into Portuguese, keeping the original metre and style, I argue that Hill is one of these exceptions, study his debts to Carducci, Sidney, and Horace, and show how he deals with counterpoint in one programmatic ode (whose Portuguese translation is given in an appendix).

A musical model of speech rhythm.

. . iambic [is] the verse-form closest to speech. There is evidence of this: we speak iambics in conversation with each other very often. . . .Aristotle in PoeticsMuch work on speech has been driven far more by a desire to classify languages into categories than by the need to elucidate the actual rhythms of spoken utterances. Common approaches to speech focus, for example, on the variability of syllabic durations within utterances (Grabe & Low, 2002) or the proportion of an utterance's duration that is occupied by vowels (Ramus, Nespor, & Mehler, 1999). But these features do not specify actual rhythms-that is, the temporal patterns of syllable onsets within an utterance-and instead reduce whole languages to descriptive statistics. Knowing that English is 40% vocalic (Ramus et al., 1999) indicates little about the timing of syllable onsets within any given English utterance, even though this information may be useful in differentiating English taxonomically from languages having different types of syllable structure.Outside of linguistics, though, representations of sentence rhythms are commonplace, and it is unclear why such representations have not had a larger impact on linguistic theories. Poetic verse, song, Shakespearean dialogue, and rap are all based on musical notions of the periodicity of syllable onsets. Consider the rhythmic transcription of the text of the children's song Twinkle Twinkle shown in Figure 1a. The is organized as a two-beat cycle alternating between strong and weak beats. The relative onset-time and relative duration of every syllable in the sentence is specified, hence making this a true representation of a rhythm. Next, the stressed syllables of the disyllabic words fall on the strong beats of the two-beat cycle (i.e., the downbeats), whereas the unstressed syllables fall on the weak beats. Finally, we see that even silence is specified in this transcription in the form of the rest that sits in between star and How, in this case indicating a sentence break.Regardless of the fact that Twinkle Twinkle is a poetic form of speech, its transcription effectively captures the basic elements of what a model of speech should describe: (a) it specifies a unit of rhythm, in this case the two-beat metrical units that make up each measure of the transcription; (b) it specifies the relative onset-time and relative duration of every syllable in the sentence; and (c) it represents not only the duration but the weight (i.e., stress) of each syllable in the sentence, such that prominent syllables fall on strong beats. Each of these three elements has been analyzed in isolation in various models of speech rhythm, but they have rarely been synthesized into a unified model. These three elements have been analyzed, respectively, in isochrony models, metrics, and metrical phonology. We briefly review these three traditions in phonology before mentioning the only integrated account that we know of, namely Joshua Steele's 1775, treatise An Essay Toward Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols. In our study, we report a test of a critical prediction of a musical model of speech, namely, that the production of time intervals between stressed syllables (here called groups) is based on a music-like representation of metrical structure. In particular, the of speech can serve to stabilize the timing of prominence groups when the timing of individual syllables varies. At the same time, speech (like music) can feature changes in meter that lead to commensurate changes in the timing of prominence groups.Isochrony ModelsThe first issue for speech relates to specifying a unit of rhythm. Lloyd James (1940, quoted in Pike, 1945) contrasted languages having a similar to a machine gun with those having a similar to Morse code. Pike (1945) classified such languages as syllable-timed and stress-timed, respectively, a categorization that is often referred to as the rhythm class hypothesis (Abercrombie, 1967; Grabe & Low, 2002). …

Voice in Friedreich Ataxia

Friedreich Ataxia (FRDA) is the most common hereditary ataxia, with dysarthria as one of its key clinical signs. To describe the voice profile of individuals with FRDA to inform outcome marker development and goals of speech therapy. Thirty-six individuals with FRDA and 30 age-matched controls provided sustained vowel and connected speech samples. Speech and voice samples were analyzed acoustically using the Analysis of Dysphonia in Speech and Voice program and perceptually using the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice form. Correlations between dysphonia and overall dysarthria severity, demographic, clinical, and genetic information were explored. Individuals with FRDA presented with mild dysphonia characterized by hoarseness (combined roughness and breathiness), increased strain, and altered pitch variability (increased in vowel productions; slightly decreased on reading samples). Acoustically, individuals with FRDA had significantly higher scores on the Cepstral Spectral Index of Dysphonia during vowel production. A combination of perceptual and acoustic measures of dysphonia used in this study was quite effective in categorizing the FRDA versus control participants, with >80% overall accuracy. Although dysphonia severity in FRDA did not correlate significantly with overall disease severity, speaking rate and syllabic duration significantly correlated with age at disease onset and disease duration, and also have an effect on listener perception of dysphonia. The relationship between dysphonia and dysarthria in FRDA suggests that reducing overall dysphonia severity via therapeutic techniques that improve phonatory stability and increase speaking rate is a viable target for speech therapy.

Syllable synchronization and the P-center in Cantonese

In speech rhythm analysis, it is important to localize the perceptual center (P-center) of syllables in order to establish a basis for measuring syllabic duration. P-center research has focused primarily on Germanic languages, for which syllables tend to begin with multiple consonants. In Cantonese, the syllable-initial position contains no more than one consonant, making it less prone to durational variation. Studies of various language types using syllables beginning with a singleton indicate that the P-center is generally localized close to vowel onset within the initial consonant–vowel transition. In the present study, Cantonese speakers were found to localize the P-center to the initial consonant–vowel transition when repeating a sequence of identical syllables in a synchronized manner against an audible metronome. However, contrary to previous findings, the metronome beat was aligned close to the onset of the syllable-initial consonant. With increasing repetitions, syllable-initial consonant onset became more closely aligned with the beat while vowel onset became further removed. Similar behavioral patterns are found in sensorimotor synchronization studies (e.g., for finger tapping), suggesting that Cantonese speakers use syllable-initial consonant onset as an articulatory reference point in speech synchronization. Further investigation is needed to elucidate the prosodic and cognitive basis of this behavioral discrepancy.

Twelve Months of Active Musical Training in 8- to 10-Year-Old Children Enhances the Preattentive Processing of Syllabic Duration and Voice Onset Time

Musical training has been shown to positively influence linguistic abilities. To follow the developmental dynamics of this transfer effect at the preattentive level, we conducted a longitudinal study over 2 school years with nonmusician children randomly assigned to music or to painting training. We recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN), a cortical correlate of preattentive mismatch detection, to syllables that differed in vowel frequency, vowel duration, and voice onset time (VOT), using a test-training-retest procedure and 3 times of testing: before training, after 6 months and after 12 months of training. While no between-group differences were found before training, enhanced preattentive processing of syllabic duration and VOT, as reflected by greater MMN amplitude, but not of frequency, was found after 12 months of training in the music group only. These results demonstrate neuroplasticity in the child brain and suggest that active musical training rather than innate predispositions for music yielded the improvements in musically trained children. These results also highlight the influence of musical training for duration perception in speech and for the development of phonological representations in normally developing children. They support the importance of music-based training programs for children's education and open new remediation strategies for children with language-based learning impairments.

Acoustical features in Mandarin emotional speech by native speakers of English

This study examines (1) whether native speakers of English (NS-E) can express emotions successfully in Mandarin speech, and (2) how their emotional expressions differ from native speakers of Mandarin (NS-C) when the emotional portrayals are recognizable. The acoustic features analyzed included F0, duration, and intensity. The scenario approach was adopted to elicit emotions joy, anger, sadness and fear, with neutral as a control. The data gathered (Sixteen NS-E and NS-C) were rated. F0 range at sentential level, mean F0 of each syllable, sentential and syllabic duration, and intensity signal of each segment were contrasted across groups within each emotional expression. The findings indicated that emotions by NS-C were recognized well, but joy, anger and fear by NS-E had low recognition rates because of accents, vocal cues and culture-specific components. Both groups adopted similar F0 range at the sentence level but joy in both and fear by NS-C showed small range. Only NS-C showed fast speech rate in anger. Emotions with high activations by NS-E were shorter. Anger and joy showed high intensity, while sadness and fear low intensity in both groups. NS-C tended to use different intensity range to indicate different emotions, while NS-E used similar range for all emotions.

Deficit in the preattentive processing of syllabic duration and VOT in children with dyslexia

The aim of this experiment was to examine the preattentive processing of syllables in 9–11-year-old children with dyslexia and matched controls using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an auditory Event-Related brain potential (ERP) related to preattentive discrimination. Children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards (the syllable “Ba”) and deviants in vowel frequency, vowel duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT) that were either close to or far from the standard (Small and Large deviants). No between-group differences were found for frequency deviants. However, whilst normal-reading children showed larger MMNs to Large than to Small deviants in vowel duration and VOT, no such deviance size effect was found in children with dyslexia. These results are taken to indicate that the preattentive processing of vowel duration and VOT is impaired in children with dyslexia, with no impairment in the processing of vowel frequency deviants. By revealing processing deficits of both duration and VOT deviants, these results suggest a strong link between acoustical and phonological processing.

Objective measurement of motor speech characteristics in the healthy pediatric population

Objective To obtain objective measurements of motor speech characteristics in normal children, using a computer-based motor speech software program. Methods Cross-sectional, observational design in a university-based ambulatory pediatric otolaryngology clinic. Participants included 112 subjects (54 females and 58 males) aged 4–18 years. Participants with previously diagnosed hearing loss, voice and motor disorders, and children unable to repeat a passage in English were excluded. Voice samples were recorded and analysed using the Motor Speech Profile (MSP) software (KayPENTAX, Lincoln Park, NJ). The MSP produced measures of diadochokinetics, second formant transition, intonation, and syllabic rates. Results Demographic data, including sex, age, and cigarette smoke exposure were obtained. Normative data for several motor speech characteristics were derived for children ranging from age 4 to 18 years. A number of age-dependent changes were indentified, including an increase in average diadochokinetic rate ( p < 0.001) and standard syllabic duration ( p < 0.001) with age. There were no identified differences in motor speech characteristics between males and females across the measured age range. Variations in fundamental frequency (Fo) during speech did not change significantly with age for both males and females. Conclusions To our knowledge, this is the first pediatric normative database for the MSP progam. The MSP is suitable for testing children and can be used to study developmental changes in motor speech. The analysis demonstrated that males and females behave similarly and show the same relationship with age for the motor speech characteristics studied. This normative database will provide essential comparative data for future studies exploring alterations in motor speech that may occur with hearing, voice, and motor disorders and to assess the results of targeted therapies.

The Perception of Prominence Patterns

The term ‘stress’ is used to refer to the perceptual salience at certain places in strings of syllables, but it has several different referents: (a) relative syllable salience in an utterance; this is syllable-, not word-oriented; (b) stress in a word; this is part of the lexical phonology; (c) stressing of words in utterances for various aspects of propositional and expressive meaning, often called ‘accent(uation)’. Referents b and c are word- and meaning-oriented. In this article, the terms are more stringently defined. ‘Stress’ is only used to refer to a lexical stress position (referent b), i.e. a syllable in a word that becomes the docking place for various types of ‘accent’ to weight words in utterances (referent c). ‘Stress’ has no physical attributes by itself. ‘Prominence’ refers to the patterns of salience in syllable strings (referent a). The article reports results of an experiment in prominence perception of the logatome baba, in which the physical parameters F0, syllabic duration, and overall acoustic energy were systematically varied across the bisyllable. Sixteen German subjects had to indicate, by pressing buttons of a computerized reaction time device, whether the first or the second syllable was more prominent. F0 was a more powerful cue than the other two. Equal syllable duration on a monotone resulted in more first-syllable judgements, which could be counteracted by a slightly falling F0 contour on the second syllable to reach equal response frequencies for the two syllables. This ties in with Lehiste’s earlier findings that F0 movement increases the perception of duration. Extrapolating from the results, a research programme for prominence perception is developed that will eventually shed new light on the investigation into the nature and manifestation of speech rhythm.

Prosody conversion from neutral speech to emotional speech

Emotion is an important element in expressive speech synthesis. Unlike traditional discrete emotion simulations, this paper attempts to synthesize emotional speech by using strong, medium, and weak classifications. This paper tests different models, a linear modification model (LMM), a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and a classification and regression tree (CART) model. The linear modification model makes direct modification of sentence F0 contours and syllabic durations from acoustic distributions of emotional speech, such as, F0 topline, F0 baseline, durations, and intensities. Further analysis shows that emotional speech is also related to stress and linguistic information. Unlike the linear modification method, the GMM and CART models try to map the subtle prosody distributions between neutral and emotional speech. While the GMM just uses the features, the CART model integrates linguistic features into the mapping. A pitch target model which is optimized to describe Mandarin F0 contours is also introduced. For all conversion methods, a deviation of perceived expressiveness (DPE) measure is created to evaluate the expressiveness of the output speech. The results show that the LMM gives the worst results among the three methods. The GMM method is more suitable for a small training set, while the CART method gives the better emotional speech output if trained with a large context-balanced corpus. The methods discussed in this paper indicate ways to generate emotional speech in speech synthesis. The objective and subjective evaluation processes are also analyzed. These results support the use of a neutral semantic content text in databases for emotional speech synthesis

Language redundancy predicts syllabic duration and the spectral characteristics of vocalic syllable nuclei

The language redundancy of a syllable, measured by its predictability given its context and inherent frequency, has been shown to have a strong inverse relationship with syllabic duration. This relationship is predicted by the smooth signal redundancy hypothesis, which proposes that robust communication in a noisy environment can be achieved with an inverse relationship between language redundancy and the predictability given acoustic observations (acoustic redundancy). A general version of the hypothesis predicts similar relationships between the spectral characteristics of speech and language redundancy. However, investigating this claim is hampered by difficulties in measuring the spectral characteristics of speech within large conversational corpora, and difficulties in forming models of acoustic redundancy based on these spectral characteristics. This paper addresses these difficulties by testing the smooth signal redundancy hypothesis with a very high-quality corpus collected for speech synthesis, and presents both durational and spectral data from vowel nuclei on a vowel-by-vowel basis. Results confirm the duration/language redundancy results achieved in previous work, and show a significant relationship between language redundancy factors and the first two formants, although these results vary considerably by vowel. In general, however, vowels show increased centralization with increased language redundancy.

Prosody Evaluation as a Diagnostic Process: Subjective vs. Objective Measurements.

A set of perception experiments, using reiterant and lexicalised speech, was designed to perform a diagnostic of the relative implication of prosody in the segmentation and hierarchisation of speech. Both natural and synthetic intonation were evaluated. Then, two distance measures—correlation and root-mean-square distance on the acoustic parameters (F0, syllabic duration and intensity)—were applied to match the perception results. This objective vs. subjective comparison underlines which acoustic cues are used by listeners to judge the adequacy of prosody in performing a given function such as demarcation. Results can be summarized by a scale of the perceptual distance between two demarcation functions. This study also points out the ability of listeners to retrieve pertinent information on the basis of pure prosodic stimuli.

Introduction of the speaking rate in the model of speech recognition

We propose an improvement to the centisecond TLHMM model (Meziane, 1999) applied to the sound duration. Indeed, the distribution of the sound duration depends on the speaking rate. An adaptation in a post‐processing step is needed. This adaptation is studied by proposing a model of the speaking rate based on average syllabic duration. The experiments elaborated on a set of BDSONS show the interest of this approach. This work is a continuation of those by Meziane (1999) and Suaudeau (1994).

A monotongação do ditongo decrescente [eI] no português caxiense

This study approaches the monophthongization of [eI9] fallingdiphthong in the Portuguese spoken in Caxias (Maranhão), in thelight of two recent proposals of phonological interpretation of thephenomenon: Bisol (1989, 1994)’s proposal, based on The Geometryof Phonological Feature (cf. Clements, 1985), and Schane (1995)’sproposal, based on Particle Phonology. The results show that thesubject is controversial; The proposals here treated present someproblems, but they also contribute to its solution. We noticed thatBisol’s interpretation accounts for the reduction of the diphthongin focus before palatals, but the explanation given for the phenomenonbefore tap or simple vibrant is questionable. Regarding themonophthongization of [eI9] falling diphthong before the vowel [a](e.g., [:meI9a] &gt; [:mea] ‘sock’), nothing is mentioned in the proposal.Particle Phonology, according to Schane, doesn’t make clear if thephenomenon is “per se” determined by the syllabic duration or bythe following segment.

Syllable-based speech recognition using auditorylike features

Classical models of speech recognition (both human and machine) assume that a detailed, short-term analysis of the signal is essential for accurate decoding of spoken language via a linear sequence of phonetic segments. This classical framework is incommensurate with quantitative acoustic/phonetic analyses of spontaneous discourse (e.g., the Switchboard corpus for American English). Such analyses indicate that the syllable, rather than the phone, is likely to serve as the representational interface between sound and meaning, providing a relatively stable representation of lexically relevant information across a wide range of speaking and acoustic conditions. The auditory basis of this syllabic representaion appears to be derived from the low-frequency (2–16 Hz) modulation spectrum, whose temporal properties correspond closely to the distribution of syllabic durations observed in spontaneous speech. Perceptual experiments confirm the importance of the modulation spectrum for understanding spoken language and demonstrate that the intelligibility of speech is derived from both the amplitude and phase components of this spectral representation. Syllable-based automatic speech recognition systems, currently under development, have proven useful under various acoustic conditions representative of the real world (such as reverberation and background noise) when used in conjunction with more traditional, phone-based recognition systems.

Issues in modeling of timing for text-to-speech synthesis

Text-to-speech synthesizers commonly have three components: text analysis, prosodic modules (timing, intonation), and synthesis. Here the focus is on research underlying the approach the Bell Labs text-to-speech system uses for the prosodic modules, in particular the timing module. In this approach, greedy algorithms select to-be-recorded text with maximal coverage of a prosodic feature space; segmental durations are measured in the recorded speech; exploratory data analysis and robust statistical estimation are applied to find the best-fitting models in a class of multiple regression-like models (‘‘sums-of-products models’’) and to estimate their parameters. This approach raises several issues. (1) Why not use syllabic (or other larger-unit) durations? (2) Why not use general-purpose learning engines such as classification and regression trees, requiring no human intervention? (3) Should one model subsegmental timing, and how can this be done? (4) How can this approach be used for intonation modeling?

Relationships between speech production and speech perception skills in young cochlear-implant users.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationships between young cochlear-implant users' abilities to produce the speech features of nasality, voicing, duration, frication, and place of articulation and their abilities to utilize the features in three different perceptual conditions: audition-only, vision-only, and audition-plus-vision. Subjects were 23 prelingually deafened children who had at least 2 years of experience with a Cochlear Corporation Nucleus cochlear implant, and an average of 34 months. They completed both the production and perception version of the Children's Audio--visual Feature Test, which is comprised of ten consonant--vowel syllables. An information transmission analysis performed on the confusion matrices revealed that children produced the place of articulation fairly accurately and voicing, duration, and frication less accurately. Acoustic analysis indicated that voiced sounds were not distinguished from unvoiced sounds on the basis of voice onset time or syllabic duration. Subjects who were more likely to produce the place feature correctly were likely to have worn their cochlear implants for a greater length of time. Pearson correlations revealed that subjects who were most likely to hear the place of articulation, nasality, and voicing features in an audition-only condition were also most likely to speak these features correctly. Comparisons of test results collected longitudinally also revealed improvements in production of the features, probably as a result of cochlear-implant experience and/or maturation.