Utterance-final Position Research Articles

Relative influences of information structure and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of nuclear pitch accents

The phonological and phonetic realization of a nuclear pitch accent has been claimed to reflect aspects of its information structure (IS). As the rightmost accented word in an intonational phrase, the nuclear pitch accent often co-occurs with utterance-final position, which in American English, is often cued by prosodic means such as creaky voice and domain-final lengthening. The present study investigated the relative influence of IS and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of words in nuclear position. The IS of an object noun phrase occurring in nuclear position was manipulated to be given, accessible, new, or contrastive relative to a parallel object noun in the preceding sentence. The critical object noun occurred in utterance-final position in experiment 1 and in non-final position and preceding a semantically vacuous syntactic phrase in experiment 2 (e.g., “that was there,” “for it). Given that contrastive information significantly influenced the prosodic implementation of the object noun in both experiments with respective reduction and enhancement effects, but utterance-final position nevertheless regulated the particular phonetic instantiation. While IS modulated the degree of creakiness, duration, and intensity in final position, IS conditions in non-final nuclear position modulated the type of f0 contour and duration.

모음 상승 현상의 음성적 고찰 : 어미 {-고}의 실현을 중심으로

Vowel raising in Korean has been primarily treated as a phonological, categorical change. This study aims to show how the Korean connective suffix {-go} is realized in various environments, and propose a principle of vowel raising based on both acoustic and perceptual data. To that end, we used a corpus of spoken Korean to analyze the types of syntactic constructions, the realization of prosodic boundaries (IP and PP), and the types of boundary tone associated with {-go}. It was found that the vowel tends to be raised most frequently in utterance-final position, while in utterance-medial position the vowel was raised more when the syntactic and prosodic distance between {-go} and the following constituent was smaller. The results for boundary tone also showed a correlation between vowel raising and the discourse function of the boundary tone. In conclusion, we propose that vowel raising is not simply an optional phenomenon, but rather a type of phonetic reduction related to the comprehension of the following constituent.

On the non-universality of intonation: Evidence from Triqui

Languages with large lexical tone inventories typically involve less freedom for suprasegmental properties to be manipulated for pragmatic meaning or phrasal constituency (Connell 2017). However, such languages may still use F0 to a limited degree for marking information structure or utterance finality (DiCanio et al. 2018, Xu 1999). We present results from three field experiments with 11 speakers where we investigated information structure and prosody in Itunyoso Triqui, an Otomanguean language (Mexico). Itunyoso Triqui possesses nine lexical tones (/4, 3, 2, 1, 43, 32, 31, 13, 45/), fixed final stress, and contrastive phonation type. In experiment 1, we examined tone production in words in broad and narrow focus contexts. Words under narrow focus were lengthened slightly (13-14%) but no general effect of focus on F0 levels or contours was found. In experiment 2, we examined tones in utterance non-final and final contexts. Words were lengthened in utterance-final position relative to non-final position, but no F0 differences were found. In experiment 3, we investigated F0 declination in sentences consisting of only level tones and found no F0 change across utterances. The results from these experiments suggest that Itunyoso Triqui does not use F0 to encode information structure or prosodic boundaries.

Testing the Hyperarticulation and Prosodic Hypotheses of Child-Directed Speech: Insights From the Perceptual and Acoustic Characteristics of Child-Directed Cantonese Tones

The function of child-directed speech has been debated for decades. This study examined the perceptual and acoustic characteristics of child- and adult-directed Cantonese tones to test the hyperarticulation and prosodic hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the acoustic modifications in child-directed speech. Sixty-two mother-child dyads participated in the study. The mothers verbally labeled 30 pictures in monosyllabic isolated words and in the final position of a carrier sentence to the experimenter and their 1- to 5-year-old children. The 8,634 adult- and child-directed productions were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information and presented to 5 judges for tone identification. Acoustic analysis was performed on the productions. Acoustically, child-directed tones were produced with an elevated pitch, and the pitch level decreased as the child's age increased. Acoustic contrasts between phonetically similar and more confusing tones were not enhanced in child-directed speech, and unexpectedly, child-directed tones were identified with a lower accuracy than adult-directed tones. The perceptual errors of child-directed tones mirrored the errors found in identifying tones excised from sentence-final position, which had a pitch-lowering effect on the tones. The lower perceptual accuracy, the lack of enhanced acoustic contrasts in confusing tone pairs, and the similarities in the error patterns in identifying tones in child-directed speech and tones in utterance-final position suggest that the acoustic modifications in child-directed tones are prosodic effects serving pragmatic purposes. The findings reject the hyperarticulation hypothesis and support the prosodic hypothesis of child-directed speech.

Perceptual salience and the processing of subject-verb agreement in 9–11-year-old English-speaking children: Evidence from ERPs

ABSTRACTRecent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants’ sensitivity to grammatical violations (Sundara, Demuth & Kuhl 2011). This raises the possibility that similar effects may manifest in school-aged children. To investigate this possibility, we recorded ERPs while 9–11-year-old English-speaking children (n = 24) listened to sentences with grammatical versus ungrammatical subject-verb agreement (i.e., third-person singular). Ungrammatical verbs differed in their relative perceptual salience due to the overtness of the error—errors of commission (i.e., superfluous -s) versus errors of omission (i.e., absent -s), and the position of the violation—utterance-medial versus utterance-final. Overall, the violations elicited an N400 effect, indicating that children were sensitive to the grammaticality differences. However, this effect was only significant for errors of commission, and utterance-position did not play a role. These results differ from those of adults, where both errors of omission and commission elicited a P600 effect, which was larger in utterance final position. These findings suggest that the relative perceptual salience of the grammatical violation influences the processing of S-V agreement in both children and adults, but the processing strategies differ, with children relying more on local, shallow processing rather than global, deep processing.

Utterance-final position and pitch marking aid word learning in school-age children.

We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances containing a target word. In the control condition, all words had the same pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance. The only cue to word–meaning mapping was the co-occurrence of target words and referents. This cue was present in all conditions. In the Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and at the same fundamental frequency as all the other words of the utterance. In the Pitch peak condition, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance across trials, and produced with pitch contrasts typical of infant-directed speech (IDS). In the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and was marked with a pitch contrast typical of IDS. Word learning occurred in all conditions except the control condition. Moreover, learning performance was significantly higher than that observed with simple co-occurrence (control condition) only for the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition. We conclude that, for school-age children, the combination of words' utterance-final alignment and pitch enhancement boosts word learning.

A perceptual study of how rapidly and accurately audiovisual cues to utterance-final boundaries can be interpreted in Chinese and English

Speakers and their addressees make use of both auditory and visual features as cues to the end of a speaking turn. Prior work, mostly based on analyses of languages like Dutch and English, has shown that intonational markers such as melodic boundary tones as well as variation in eye gaze behaviour are often exploited to pre-signal the terminal edge of an utterance. However, we still lack knowledge on how such auditory and visual cues relate to each other, and whether the results for Dutch and English also generalize to other languages. This article compares possible audiovisual cues to prosodic boundaries in two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Chinese. A specific paradigm was used to elicit natural stimuli from 16 speakers, evenly distributed over both languages, which were then presented to L1 and L2 observers. They were asked to judge whether a spoken fragment had occurred in utterance-final position or not, measuring both the participants’ reaction time and accuracy. Participants were exposed to stimuli in three different formats: audio-only, vision-only or audiovisual. Our most important results are that (1) visual cues were important for boundary perception in both languages; (2) judges from either language group identified boundaries faster and more accurately in English than in Chinese; (3) there is no in-group advantage as observers were equally good in judging finality in their L1 and L2; (4) there are consistent correlations between the measures of reaction time and accuracy (shorter responses correlate with higher accuracy).

Relationships between structural and acoustic properties of maternal talk and children’s early word recognition

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children’s word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was recorded during a mother–child interaction session and analyzed in terms of amount of speech, lexical and syntactic complexity, positional salience of nouns and verbs, high pitch and variation, and temporal characteristics. The analyses revealed that final syllable length positively predicts children’s accuracy in word recognition whereas the use of verbs in the utterance-final position has an adverse effect on children’s performance. Several of the expected associations between ID speech features and children’s word recognition skills, however, were not significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that only specific structural and acoustic properties of ID speech can facilitate word recognition in children, thereby fostering their ability to extrapolate sound patterns from the stream and map them with their referents.

Changing word usage predicts changing word durations in New Zealand English

This paper investigates the emergence of lexicalized effects of word usage on word duration by looking at parallel changes in usage and duration over 130years in New Zealand English. Previous research has found that frequent words are shorter, informative words are longer, and words in utterance-final position are also longer. It has also been argued that some of these patterns are not simply online adjustments, but are incorporated into lexical representations. While these studies tend to focus on the synchronic aspects of such patterns, our corpus shows that word-usage patterns and word durations are not static over time. Many words change in duration and also change with respect to frequency, informativity and likelihood of occurring utterance-finally. Analysis of changing word durations over this time period shows substantial patterns of co-adaptation between word usage and word durations. Words that are increasing in frequency are becoming shorter. Words that are increasing/decreasing in informativity show a change in the same direction in duration (e.g. increasing informativity is associated with increasing duration). And words that are increasingly appearing utterance-finally are lengthening. These effects exist independently of the local effects of the predictors. For example, words that are increasing utterance-finally lengthen in all positions, including utterance-medially. We show that these results are compatible with a number of different views about lexical representations, but they cannot be explained without reference to a production-perception loop that allows speakers to update their representations dynamically on the basis of their experience.

On establishing I think as a final particle in interactions: Some comparisons with sentence-final particles in Japanese

This paper explores the function of I think in utterance-final position and attempts to establish its status as a final particle (FP). The pragmatic functions of I think are compared to those of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Japanese, and the final particle-ness of I think is examined in terms of its placement in the so-called ‘right periphery.’ The findings suggest that the basic function of I think is to present an appraisal indicating interpersonal concern and attentiveness to the interactional context. In essence, I think presents the utterance as part of a set of reciprocal actions and implicitly solicits a responsive action by the recipient. Despite differences in intensity, these intrinsic functions of I think are comparable to those suggested for the Japanese SFPs yo and ne. The study concludes that final I think has specific functions as a FP distinct from those of its initial counterpart, indicating different types and/or levels of (inter)subjectivity.

Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study.

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components—LAN and P600—in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys *runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

Discourse Markers as Turn-Transition Devices: Evidence From Speech and Instant Messaging

In this article we investigate the relation between discourse markers and turn-transition strategies in face-to-face conversations and Instant Messaging (IM), that is, unplanned, real-time, text-based, computer-mediated communication. By means of a quantitative corpus study of utterances containing a discourse marker, we show that utterance-final discourse markers are used more often in IM than in face-to-face conversations. Moreover, utterance-final discourse markers are shown to occur more often at points of turn-transition compared with points of turn-maintenance in both types of conversation. From our results we conclude that the discourse markers in utterance-final position can function as a turn-transition mechanism, signaling that the turn is over and the floor is open to the hearer. We argue that this linguistic turn-taking strategy is essentially similar in face-to-face and IM communication. Our results add to the evidence that communication in IM is more like speech than like writing.

Word duration and grammatical and pragmatic function – the case of egentlig

The article investigates variation in the duration of the pronunciation of the Danish adverb egentlig in a large corpus of spoken modern Danish. The article shows that there is considerable variation in the duration of egentlig, and that this variation only to some extent can be explained by speech rate (or ‘articulation rate’). It is shown that the individual speaker has a significant impact on the variation. By the useof a mixed-model multiple linear regression analysis that incorporates the effect on duration that the individual speaker has, the investigation reveals that linguistic factors such as topology and utterance-final position together with factors relating to linguistic processing such as articulation rate and the position near a hesitation marker as well as nonlinguistic factors such as age and gender all contribute signifi cantly to the variation in the duration of egentlig. The results are discussed in relation to similar findings in the literature and the article proposes potential future topics of investigation in relation to phonetic reduction in spoken Danish in the basis of the results.

Mothers' talk to children with Down Syndrome, language impairment, or typical development about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs.

This study investigated how forty-six mothers modified their talk about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs when interacting with their children with Down Syndrome (DS), language impairment (LI), or typical development (TD). Children (MLUs < 2·7) were group-matched on expressive vocabulary size. Mother-child dyads were recorded playing with toy animals (noun task) and action boxes (verb task). Mothers of children with DS used shorter utterances and more verb labels in salient positions than the other two groups. All mothers produced unfamiliar target nouns in short utterances, in utterance-final position, and with the referent perceptually available. Mothers also talked more about familiar nouns and verbs and labelled them more often and more consistently. These findings suggest that mothers of children in the early period of language development fine-tune their input in ways that reflect their children's vocabulary knowledge, but do so differently for nouns and verbs.

Examination of the Locus of Positional Effects on Children's Production of Plural -s: Considerations From Local and Global Speech Planning.

Prosodic and articulatory factors influence children's production of inflectional morphemes. For example, plural -s is produced more reliably in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position (i.e., the positional effect), which has been attributed to the increased planning time in utterance-final position. In previous investigations of plural -s, utterance-medial plurals were followed by a stop consonant (e.g., dogsbark), inducing high articulatory complexity. We examined whether the positional effect would be observed if the utterance-medial context were simplified to a following vowel. An elicited imitation task was used to collect productions of plural nouns from 2-year-old children. Nouns were elicited utterance-medially and utterance-finally, with the medial plural followed by either a stressed or an unstressed vowel. Acoustic analysis was used to identify evidence of morpheme production. The positional effect was absent when the morpheme was followed by a vowel (e.g., dogseat). However, it returned when the vowel-initial word contained 2 syllables (e.g., dogsarrive), suggesting that the increased processing load in the latter condition negated the facilitative effect of the easy articulatory context. Children's productions of grammatical morphemes reflect a rich interaction between emerging levels of linguistic competence, raising considerations for diagnosis and rehabilitation of language disorders.

Ultrasound evidence for place of articulation of the mora nasal /ɴ/ in Japanese

The Japanese mora nasal /ɴ/, which occurs in syllable-final position, takes its place of articulation from the following segment if there is one. However, the mora nasal in utterance-final position is often transcribed as velar, uvular, or even placeless. The present study examines the tongue shapes in Japanese using ultrasound imaging to investigate whether Japanese mora nasal /ɴ/ is placeless and to assess whether assimilation to following segments is gradient or categorical. Preliminary results from ultrasound imaging from one native speaker of Tokyo dialect showed three shapes for final /ɴ/, even though the researchers could not distinguish them perceptually. Results from assimilation contexts showed that the velar gesture for /ɴ/ was not deleted. All gestures remained and assimilation was not categorical, even though perceptually, it was. The velar gesture for /ɴ/ might be expected to be deleted before an alveolar /n/ because they are both lingual, but a blending of the two tongue gestures occurred instead. Variability in place of articulation in final position occurred even within one speaker. Categorical assimilation was not observed in any phonological environments studied. The mora nasal may vary across speakers, so further research is needed to determine whether it behaves similarly for more speakers.

Acquisition of variable rules: /s/-lenition in the speech of Chilean Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers

AbstractThis paper examines the acquisition of the variable rules constraining Spanish syllable-final /s/-lenition in Chilean Spanish–speaking children, and whether adult-to-adult speech differs from child-directed speech in the production of s-lenition. The data of 10 children (ages 2;04–5;09) and their caregivers is presented. Tokens of syllable final /s/ were coded for pronunciation and a variable-rule analysis examining the effect of various linguistic and extralinguistic constraints was carried out. The results show that child and caregiver use of s-lenition is similar to that found in adult-to-adult speech; however, two of the youngest children showed near-categorical behavior. This paper highlights the important role of caregiver input on acquisition of s-lenition and proposes that production of s-lenition in utterance-final position in the input (caregiver's speech) is linked to young children's acquisition of s-lenition; young children exposed to an input with high rates of [s] in utterance-final position acquire s-lenition earlier.

Acoustic Investigations Into the Later Acquisition of Syllabic -esPlurals

Children acquire /-z/ syllabic plurals (e.g., bus es) later than /-s, -z/ segmental plurals (e.g., cat s, dog s). In this study, the authors explored whether increased syllable number or segmental factors best explains poorer performance with syllabic plurals. An elicited imitation experiment was conducted with 14 two-year-olds involving 8 familiar disyllabic target plural nouns, half with syllabic plurals (e.g., bus → bus es) and half with segmental plurals (e.g., letter → letter s). Children saw pictures of the target items on a computer and repeated prerecorded 3-word-utterances with the target word in utterance-medial position (e.g., "The buses come") and utterance-final position (e.g., "Hear the buses"). Acoustic analysis determined the presence or absence of the plural morpheme and its duration. Children had more trouble producing syllabic plurals compared with segmental plurals. Errors were especially evident in the utterance-medial position, where there was less time for the child to perceive/produce the word in the absence of phrase-final lengthening and where planning for the following word was still required. The results suggested that articulatory difficulties-rather than a word length effect-explain later acquisition of syllabic plurals relative to segmental plurals. These findings have implications for the nature of syllabic plural acquisition in children with hearing impairments and specific language impairment.

Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds' American English: voicing and morphemic factors.

In the process of phonological development, fricatives are generally assumed to be later acquired than stops. However, most of the observational work on which this claim is based has concerned itself with word-initial onset consonants; little is known about how and when fricatives are mastered in word-final coda position (e.g., nose). This is all the more critical in a language like English, where word-final fricatives often carry important morphological information (e.g., toes, goes). This study examines the development of duration cues to the voicing feature contrast in coda fricatives, using longitudinal spontaneous speech data from CVC words (e.g., noise vs face) produced by three children (1;6-2;6 years) and six mothers. Results show that the children were remarkably adult-like in the use of duration cues to voicing contrasts in fricatives even in this early age range. Furthermore the children, like the mothers, had longer frication noise durations for morphemic compared to non-morphemic fricatives (e.g., toes vs nose) when these segments occurred in utterance-final position. These results suggest that although children's fricatives tend to be overall longer and more voiced compared to those of adults, the voicing and morphological contrasts for fricative codas are acquired early in production.

Effects of articulatory planning factors on children's production of plural -s

Children’s early use of grammatical morphemes is notoriously variable. Recent findings indicate that some variability in early productions is systematically related to speech planning factors, suggesting that variability in morpheme production is not solely the consequence of impoverished syntactic representations. For example, research has shown that plural -s is produced more reliably in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position. Here we examined the locus of the positional effect for plural -s . Productions of eight plural nouns in utterance-medial and utterance-final position were elicited from three groups of 2-year-olds. Across the groups, we manipulated articulatory difficulty of the medial context such that it consisted of a stop consonant (e.g., dogs bark), a stressed vowel (e.g., dogs eat), or an unstressed vowel (e.g., dogs arrive). Results showed a robust positional effect for the difficult context created by the stop consonant. The positional effect was not observed for the simple articulatory context created by the stressed vowel. However, planning difficulty for the unstressed vowel was sufficiently increased such that the positional effect again emerged in this context. These results suggest that production of grammatical morphemes is influenced by articulatory planning factors, which points to specific constraints for theoretical accounts of language acquisition.