Syllable Nuclei Research Articles

Phase-locking of oscillatory acoustic signals reflects syllable progression and variation

While a common linguistic view of the cognitive representation of speech is that it is composed of sequenced syllable units, how exactly syllables as abstract cognitive compositional structure relate to quantifiable patterns in the observable signals of articulation and acoustics remains opaque. Previous work has suggested that oscillatory acoustic properties can serve to link linguistic representations and physical events (Tilsen & Arvaniti 2013). We further probe this relationship by testing the temporal coordination between oscillatory signal measures—changes in spectral energy and in amplitude—and syllable boundary locations through the use of phase-locking analyses (Lancia et al. 2023). Results in both English and Tashlhiyt for vocalic and consonantal syllabic nuclei show significant phase-locking values (PLVs) and demonstrate that these signal measures track syllable progression across typologically different languages. Furthermore, the cross-language preferences in syllable nucleus types are reflected in their respective PLVs. Specifically, vocalic nuclei exhibit the highest PLVs, followed by wide aperture consonantal nuclei (sonorants), and lastly by consonantal nuclei with narrow-to-closed constrictions (obstruents). Overall, the findings demonstrate a tight coordination between abstract syllable units and quantifiable signal properties and additionally provide novel dynamical grounding for cross-linguistic nucleus preferences.

Conspiring simplification strategies of [Obstruent+Liquid] clusters in a case study of child Greek: emergence of the marked

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the idiosyncratic cluster simplification patterns observed in a child with disordered phonological development, who is acquiring Greek. The child has mastered word-internal and word-final codas and clusters of reversed sonority. However, the child does not realise the target well-formed tautosyllabic [Obstruent+Liquid] clusters with rising sonority. The child’s system requires a single onset with maximum sonority dispersion between the onset and the syllable nucleus. As a result, cluster simplification occurs, via reduction to the less sonorous Obstruent – the most prevalent reduction pattern cross-linguistically. However, at the same time, the grammar requires faithful realisation of the target segment number. This requirement is fulfiled through two distinct conspiring metathesis patterns, distributed complementarily, resulting in the realisation of marked structures. The patterns depend on the position of the cluster within the target word. In word internal position, a compensatory metathesis of the Liquid takes place in the preceding syllable coda. In word initial position, the Manner of Articulation of the metathesised Liquid is delinked, while its Coronal Place of Articulation is faithfully preserved, and is realised by default as a Coronal Sibilant [s]. The latter Sibilant is attached as an appendix to the syllable node at the word left-edge. We argue that, in the grammar of this child, there is a-synchronisation between the development of the prosodic word layer and the development of syllable layer. Specifically, a-synchronisation is evident in the development of the (branching) onset syllabic subconstituent.

Comparison of automated and manual measures of speaking rate in individuals with dysarthria

Speech patterns in speakers with dysarthria exhibit a broad range of prosodic and articulatory variations, potentially posing a significant challenge for automated speech recognition systems. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature by exploring a fully automated approach to determine speaking rates in English-speaking individuals with dysarthria. This research aims to elucidate whether a syllable-based automated method yields results akin to manual processes when calculating speaking rates across diverse groups [i.e., individuals with dysarthria secondary to multiple sclerosis (MS) or Parkinson’s disease (PD), and healthy controls]. Moreover, this study examines the performance of an automated method across three distinct speech tasks: isolated sentences, paragraph reading, and spontaneous speech. The methodology involves adjusting parameters within a version of a published script specifically designed for calculating speaking rate through syllable detection (Praat Script Syllable Nuclei; de Jong et al., 2021). Using a sample of 60 speakers (20 MS, 20 PD, and 20 healthy controls), this study aims to evaluate the accuracy and validity of an automated script in calculating speaking rate. Ultimately, these findings are intended to guide speaking rate measurement of dysarthria in research and clinical practice.

The role of vowel and consonant onsets in neural tracking of natural speech

Objective. To investigate how the auditory system processes natural speech, models have been created to relate the electroencephalography (EEG) signal of a person listening to speech to various representations of the speech. Mainly the speech envelope has been used, but also phonetic representations. We investigated to which degree of granularity phonetic representations can be related to the EEG signal. Approach. We used recorded EEG signals from 105 subjects while they listened to fairy tale stories. We utilized speech representations, including onset of any phone, vowel–consonant onsets, broad phonetic class (BPC) onsets, and narrow phonetic class onsets, and related them to EEG using forward modeling and match–mismatch tasks. In forward modeling, we used a linear model to predict EEG from speech representations. In the match–mismatch task, we trained a long short term memory based model to determine which of two candidate speech segments matches with a given EEG segment. Main results. Our results show that vowel–consonant onsets outperform onsets of any phone in both tasks, which suggests that neural tracking of the vowel vs. consonant exists in the EEG to some degree. We also observed that vowel (syllable nucleus) onsets exhibit a more consistent representation in EEG compared to syllable onsets. Significance. Finally, our findings suggest that neural tracking previously thought to be associated with BPCs might actually originate from vowel–consonant onsets rather than the differentiation between different phonetic classes.

Acoustic Correlates of Subtypes of Irony in Chilean Spanish

Utterances containing verbal irony display prosodic particularities that distinguish them from non-ironic speech. While some prosodic features of irony have been identified in Spanish, previous studies have not accounted for different subtypes, nor have they examined this phenomenon in Chilean Spanish despite the unique intonation patterns in this dialect. This study examined the acoustic and prosodic correlates of five subtypes of irony (jocularity, rhetorical questions, understatements, hyperbole, and sarcasm) spontaneously occurring in the casual speech of sociolinguistic interviews with fifteen Chilean women. We segmented 3907 syllable nuclei from 197 spontaneously occurring instances of irony and compared the syllables within the ironic utterances to those in the pre-ironic utterances, along seven acoustic and prosodic variables: pitch range, duration, F0, F1, F2, H1*–H2*, and HNR. The results showed that the speakers favored jocularity and did not produce sarcasm or understatements, and that jocularity, hyperbole, and rhetorical questions significantly differed from the baseline utterances along a variety of acoustic and prosodic measures. We argue that these cues contributed to marking the ironic utterances as salient, allowing these women to talk about difficult real-life events with a touch of humor. Our study provides additional evidence for the connection between prosody and pragmatics in Chilean Spanish and lays the groundwork for further examination of irony and prosody in this and other Spanish dialects.

An acoustic study of rhythmic synchronization with natural English speech

Sensorimotor synchronization as a means of studying rhythmic perception-action coupling has been extensively researched across a large number of temporally regular structures including music while little is known about synchronization with speech. The present study fills this gap by applying a sensorimotor synchronization paradigm to natural speech and studying acoustic landmarks that may serve as perceptual anchors of rhythmic movement in spoken sentences. Five rhythmically relevant types of acoustic landmarks were identified in twenty sentences of English containing syllables with vocalic and non-vocalic nuclei. The landmarks were either manually defined or algorithm-generated and included nucleus onsets, peaks and onsets of inter-syllabic and inter-stress timescales, moments of the fastest energy change (approximating the P-center location), and timepoints of combined pitch and periodic power. Sensorimotor synchronization data from 32 native English participants were examined with regards to the location of an increased synchronization activity in the proximity of the predefined landmarks. The results demonstrated that participants synchronized with syllable-size units regardless of the type of syllable nucleus (vowel or consonant) and that their taps were consistently timed close to nucleus onsets. Hereby, the manually defined nucleus onsets predicted synchronization peaks as well as the algorithm-generated moments of the fastest energy change around nucleus onsets (i.e., a model of the P-center location) did. In contrast, other landmarks did not constitute a stable acoustic anchor of sensorimotor synchronization with English speech. The synchronization performance was not influenced by either acoustic F0-information or by phonological tune specifications. These findings provide new evidence for the proposals that rhythmic attention in natural speech may be locked on to fast spectral changes within a syllable as the smallest structuring unit of prosodic hierarchy.

Comparison of intensity-based methods for automatic speech rate computation

Automatic computation of speech rate is a necessary task in a wide range of applications that require this prosodic feature, in which a manual transcription and time alignments are not available. Several tools have been developed to this end, but not enough research has been conducted yet to see to what extent they are scalable to other languages.
 In the present work, we take two off-the- shelf tools designed for automatic speech rate computation and already tested for Dutch and English (v1, which relies on intensity peaks preceded by an intensity dip to find syllable nuclei and v3, which relies on intensity peaks surrounded by dips) and we apply them to read and spontaneous Spanish speech. Then, we test which of them offers the best performance. The results obtained with precision and normalized mean squared error metrics showed that v3 performs better than v1. However, recall measurement shows a better performance of v1, which suggests that a more fine-grained analysis on sensitivity and specificity is needed to select the best option depending on the application we are dealing with.

Evidence for prosodic correspondence in the vowel alternations of Tgdaya Seediq

This paper brings new evidence for PROSODIC CORRESPONDENCE, where prosodic units (e.g. main-stressed nuclei and prominent syllables) of morphologically related forms are compared. Since prosodic correspondence was formalized in Crosswhite’s (1998) analysis of Chamorro, it has received almost no empirical discussion. I argue that Tgdaya Seediq (Austronesian, Atayalic) has vowel alternations that should be analyzed using prosodic correspondence. In Seediq, unsuffixed and suffixed forms tend to share the same stressed syllable nucleus. This VOWEL MATCHING pattern cannot be explained as surface harmony, but it can be explained as the result of a constraint enforcing vowel identity of main-stressed nuclei in morphologically related forms. Unlike the categorical alternations analyzed by Crosswhite (1998), Seediq vowel matching is gradient and only emerges on a statistical level. Nevertheless, prosodic correspondence appears to be active in the synchronic grammar of Seediq; in a production experiment, speakers applied vowel matching to novel forms and even over-generalized it to environments not predicted by lexical statistics. Vowel matching is modeled in Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003), a stochastic variant of OT. I use prosodic correspondence to enforce vowel matching, and Zuraw’s (2000, 2010) dual listing approach to capture the discrepancy between lexical and experimental results.

On the nature of apical vowel in Jixi-Hui Chinese: Acoustic and articulatory data

Chinese languages have a set of segments known as apical vowels, which have been analysed in previous studies as either genuine vowels, fricative vowels, fricative consonants, or approximants. This study is concerned with the apical vowel attested in Jixi-Hui Chinese. We examine this segment from acoustic and articulatory perspectives and argue that it is best defined as a fricative /z/. Phonologically, Jixi-Hui Chinese /z/ is a distinct phoneme that is exclusively attested in syllable nucleus position where it constitutes a tone-bearing unit and which can undergo tonal sandhi processes. It can appear not only after coronal sibilants /s ts tsʰ/, but also after bilabials /p pʰ/ and nasals /m n/. Acoustically, we show that this segment contains frication noise in its initial phase in the majority of cases, with a formant structure towards its end. The analysis of the zero-crossing rate confirms this significant presence of noise, clearly distinguishing this segment from genuine vowels. Furthermore, articulatory analyses of ultrasound data show that /z/ has a near-identical tongue shape to fricative /s/ on both mid-sagittal and coronal planes, in both sibilant and non-sibilant contexts. These findings are viewed in light of the variability in the way /z/ is phonetically implemented in Jixi-Hui Chinese.

Speakers monitor auditory feedback for temporal alignment and linguistically relevant duration.

Recent altered auditory feedback studies suggest that speakers adapt to external perturbations to the duration of syllable nuclei and codas, but there is mixed evidence for adaptation of onsets. This study investigates this asymmetry, testing three hypotheses: (1) onsets adapt only if the perturbation produces a categorical error; (2) previously observed increases in vowel duration stem from feedback delays, rather than adaptation to durational perturbations; (3) gestural coordination between onsets and nuclei prevents independent adaptation of each segment. Word-initial consonant targets received shortening perturbations to approximate a different phoneme (cross-category; VOT of /t/ > /d/; duration of /s/ > /z/) or lengthening perturbations to generate a long version of the same phoneme (within-category; /k/ > [khh]; /ʃ/ > [ʃː]). Speakers adapted the duration of both consonants in the cross-category condition; in the within-category condition, only /k/ showed adaptive shortening. Speakers also lengthened all delayed segments while perturbation was active, even when segment duration was not perturbed. Finally, durational changes in syllable onsets and nuclei were not correlated, indicating that speakers can adjust each segment independently. The data suggest that speakers mainly attend to deviations from the predicted timing of motor states but do adjust for durational errors when linguistically relevant.

The Sonority Dispersion Principle in Albanian

An important pattern that is based on the sonority relationship is the Sonority Dispersion Principle (SDP) formulated by Clements (1990). This principle can serve as the basis for classifying syllable types in terms of relative complexity. The notion “dispersion in sonority” clearly defined within a demisyllable. According to this principle, the sonority slop from the onset to the syllable nucleus is maximized and from the nucleus to the coda is minimized. The purpose of this paper is to provide some data on the Albanian language by dividing the sounds within the demisyllable, by analyzing the combinations of sounds in the onset and in the coda. According to SDP, in Albanian the optimal syllable structure with 2 elements is C[stop]V, while among the optimal structures with 3 elements, the types C[stop]VC[glide], C[stop]C[liquid]V, C[stop]C[nasal]V and C[fricative]C[liquid]V predominate. The analyzed data are important and serve to deeply recognize the characteristics of phonological system of Albanian and can also serve for its approach to typological level.

Caracterización de la entonación venezolana a partir de un corpus obtenido con Map task

In the investigation project “Comparative study of intonation and accent in Spanish frontier zones” (FFI2014-52716-P), vinculated to the international project AMPER (Atlas Multimedia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman), a prosodic description of Venezuelan Spanish is made. In this work, we make a phonetic-phonological intonative study of the corpus denominated Map task of Merida’s survey points (Region of Los Andes), Barinas (Region of Los Llanos), Aragua (Central Region) and Bolivar (South-Oriental Region) with the objective of checking whether this type of sponataneous corpus validates the prosodic characteristics of the experimental corpus described in previous works. The analysis was realized with Matlab subroutines and was, later, survised with the Praat software; the absolute values of F0, extracted in the syllable nucleus, were relativized in semitones, determinind their perceptive importance from a differential threshold of 1,5 semitones.

Constraints on speech rate: A heritage-language perspective

Research questions: Polinsky argues that speech rate in heritage languages is highly correlated with proficiency level. In sociolinguistics studies, speech rate in monolingual speakers is found to be conditioned by social factors. What occurs when both proficiency and social factors vary? Is speech rate a valid measure of proficiency? Methodology: We use two automated methods of measuring articulation rate (syllables per second), cross-referenced to improve accuracy: an orthographic vowel count and an acoustic measure of amplitude changes from syllable nucleus to periphery. Data and analysis: Across 51 speakers, each recorded in an hour-long conversation in Heritage Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, or Homeland Italian, we calculate speech rate in more than 10,000 clauses. Findings: Linear regression analyses reveal that articulation rate correlates with generation (since immigration) and age, but, surprisingly, not with ethnic orientation, sex or language. Age and generation are partly collinear in our sample, and models with generation fit better than those with age. We also find that articulation rate does not predict performance on sociolinguistic variables (voice onset time for stops, subject pronoun presence) in heritage varieties. Originality: This study compares two ways of calculating articulation rate automatically, examining whether speech rate is a viable stand-in for proficiency when social factors and proficiency vary independently. We resolve several obstacles to using articulation rate as a stand-in for more labor-intensive proficiency measures in spontaneous speech data. Implications: These findings suggest that speech rate is a valid proxy for heritage language proficiency. The factor with the strongest effect is generation since immigration (indicating the dominant language in the speaker’s childhood community). The effects of the social factors are complex but must be considered in order to interpret the proficiency measure accurately.

Análisis de la contracción en la fonología prosódica del griego ático

Este estudio trata sobre la contracción del griego ático, como fenómeno prosódico del estrato léxico. Se impone como meta primaria la de ofrecer una caracterización que pueda servir como trasfondo para la comparación con la crasis, concebida como proceso del estrato post-léxico. La contracción se analiza con los principios de la fonología métrica en función de la descripción de los valores contrastivos del sistema de vocales de la lengua. En la aproximación elaborada, la coalescencia léxica de vocales obedece a la tendencia a eliminar los núcleos de sílaba contiguos, una condición antihiática relacionada con diversos mecanismos de reajuste cuantitativo, que buscan acomodar las sílabas a la longitud máxima de dos moras. Se arguye que el ligamen de los segmentos se realiza de derecha a izquierda, mientras que la propagación de rasgos melódicos se hace en la dirección opuesta, a consecuencia de la primacía del primer núcleo en el entorno del hiato.

Duration of syllable nuclei in Spanish

Abstract In many languages, vowel duration is modulated by syllable structure — a phenomenon known as vowel compression — so that vowels are shorter in syllables with more segments than in syllables with fewer segments. Most instrumental evidence to date has reported an effect, in many languages, of the presence (and complexity) of a coda, and some studies have also documented effects of the presence (and complexity) of an onset. However, no prior studies on Spanish vowel duration have captured any effects of syllable structure. Using data from nine speakers and controlled speech materials, the present study addresses the following research question: Does syllable structure modulate vowel duration? The findings are as follows: (a) Relative to simplex onsets (those with a singleton consonant), complex onsets (those with a consonant cluster) trigger vowel compression; and (b) neither simplex nor complex codas consistently drive vowel compression — i.e. codas do not systematically affect vowel duration. Together with the facts for other languages, our findings support a view according to which syllable structure — in particular, onset complexity — modulates acoustic vowel duration. The study discusses the theoretical implications of this finding, which are argued to be in line with some of the principles of the Articulatory Phonology framework or, alternatively, suggest that codas should not be considered part of the articulatory syllable.

Noise robust speech rate estimation using signal-to-noise ratio dependent sub-band selection and peak detection strategy.

Speech (syllable) rate estimation typically involves computing a feature contour based on sub-band energies having strong local maxima/peaks at syllable nuclei, which are detected with the help of voicing decisions (VDs). While such a two-stage scheme works well in clean conditions, the estimated speech rate becomes less accurate in noisy condition particularly due to erroneous VDs and non-informative sub-bands mainly at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). This work proposes a technique to use VDs in the peak detection strategy in an SNR dependent manner. It also proposes a data-driven sub-band pruning technique to improve syllabic peaks of the feature contour in the presence of noise. Further, this paper generalizes both the peak detection and the sub-band pruning technique for unknown noise and/or unknown SNR conditions. Experiments are performed in clean and 20, 10, and 0 dB SNR conditions separately using Switchboard, TIMIT, and CTIMIT corpora under five additive noises: white, car, high-frequency-channel, cockpit, and babble. Experiments are also carried out in test conditions at unseen SNRs of -5 and 5 dB with four unseen additive noises: factory, sub-way, street, and exhibition. The proposed method outperforms the best of the existing techniques in clean and noisy conditions for three corpora.

Detection of Nasalized Voiced Stops in Cleft Palate Speech Using Epoch-Synchronous Features

The presence of velopharyngeal dysfunction in individuals with cleft palate CP nasalizes the voiced stops. Due to this, voiced stops /b/, /d/, /g/ tend to be perceive like nasal consonants /m/, /n/, /ng/. In this work, a novel algorithm is proposed for the detection of nasalized voiced stops in CP speech using epoch-synchronous features. Speech regions corresponding to consonant and consonant-vowel transitions are segmented using the knowledge of glottal activity, syllable nucleus, low-frequency spectral dominance, and vowel onset point. The segmented regions are epoch-synchronously processed to analyze the spectral, spectro-temporal, excitation source, and periodicity characteristics of normal and nasalized voiced stops. Spectral and spectro temporal features are computed using single pole filter based time-frequency representation. The amplitude of Hilbert envelope of linear prediction residual, measured around the epoch is used to analyze the effect of nasalization on excitation source. Comparison of speech frames of successive inter-epoch intervals is carried out to analyze the periodicity characteristics. The proposed features are used to develop a support vector machine classifier for the classification of normal and nasalized voiced stops. Segmentation accuracy for the proposed knowledge based method is found to be better than the hidden Markov model based force-alignment approach. The detection rate of nasalized voiced stops is found to be high for the proposed epoch synchronous features than the conventional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients.

Wielowarstwowy model podziału wyrazów ortograficznych języka polskiego na sylaby

This paper presents a model for the syllabification of Polish words written in orthographic form. It raises some significant issues related to syllabification, including the linguistic definition of a syllable and certain phonological principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Maximal Onset Principle. The article describes the steps of a designed syllabification procedure. This procedure provides four layers of syllable boundary placement. The first layer is related to the morphological structure of the word (it concerns mainly boundaries between a prefix and a stem). The structure of the rules in the first layer is based on the initial and final strings in words. The goal of the second layer is to put boundaries between syllable nuclei. The next layer modifies the boundaries that result from the phonological principles. The last layer places boundaries resulting from the phonological principles. Rules applied earlier mask rules on the succeeding layers. The article also presents a structure of rules based on probability. A description of static syllabification systems is also given — these work much faster, but it is not possible to modify the rules associated with them. The last described feature of the presented solution is the ability to create generative systems.

Automatic lexical stress and pitch accent detection for L2 English speech using multi-distribution deep neural networks

This paper investigates the use of multi-distribution deep neural networks (MD-DNNs) for automatic lexical stress detection and pitch accent detection, which are useful for suprasegmental mispronunciation detection and diagnosis in second-language (L2) English speech. The features used in this paper cover syllable-based prosodic features (including maximum syllable loudness, syllable nucleus duration and a pair of dynamic pitch values) as well as lexical and syntactic features (encoded as binary variables). As stressed/accented syllables are more prominent than their neighbors, the two preceding and two following syllables are also taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the MD-DNN for lexical stress detection achieves an accuracy of 87.9% in syllable classification (primary/secondary/no stress) for words with three or more syllables. This performance is much better than those of our previous work using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and the prominence model (PM), whose accuracies are 72.1% and 76.3% respectively. Approached similarly as the lexical stress detector, the pitch accent detector obtains an accuracy of 90.2%, which is better than the results of using the GMMs and PM by about 9.6% and 6.9% respectively.

On the origin of Gamale Kham labial-palatal approximants

AbstractThe development of the Gamale Kham labial-palatal approximants /ɥ/ and /ɥ̊/ has previously been attributed to the loss of the Proto-Kham initial *p- or the coda *-p. The vowels /i/ and /e/ which occurred in the adjacent syllable nucleus were rounded, resulting in the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/. Following this development, /w/ and /j/ merged to /ɥ/ in Gamale and Eastern Parbate Kham (Watters 2002;2004;2005). This study evaluates this theory and suggests two alternative explanations: that Proto-Kham may have had either two front rounded vowels *y and *ø, or a *ɥ phoneme. In the second case, the work refers to a possible correspondence between a Proto-Kham *ɥ and the Proto-Tibeto-Burman complex *jw.