Word-final Syllables Research Articles

Strong Finals: A prosodic feature projecting ‘more to come’ in a Danish urban dialect

Abstract This article presents structural and interactional aspects of Strong Finals, a prosodic feature characterised by lengthening, increased volume, and non-falling intonation on word-final syllables. Interactionally, Strong Finals support five types of action: listing, projecting a description, stating conditions, asking questions, and announcing reported speech. In general, Strong Finals project that there is more to come, and this ‘more’ may in some cases be provided by either participant. Strong Finals are often found in multi-speaker settings, where they assist speakers in taking the floor or changing the topic. The article’s descriptions are based on recordings of natural spoken interaction in linguistically diverse areas in Aarhus, Denmark. Here, a new urban dialect has developed like other urban dialects that have been described in Copenhagen and other North Germanic cities. Strong Finals are a local phenomenon, however, and are not found in the Copenhagen studies.

Hebbian learning can explain rhythmic neural entrainment to statistical regularities.

In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how predictive syllables (or other items) are of one another. Syllables within the same word predict each other better than syllables straddling word boundaries. But does statistical learning lead to memories of the underlying words-or just to pairwise associations among syllables? Electrophysiological results provide the strongest evidence for the memory view. Electrophysiological responses can be time-locked to statistical word boundaries (e.g., N400s) and show rhythmic activity with a periodicity of word durations. Here, I reproduce such results with a simple Hebbian network. When exposed to statistically structured syllable sequences (and when the underlying words are not excessively long), the network activation is rhythmic with the periodicity of a word duration and activation maxima on word-final syllables. This is because word-final syllables receive more excitation from earlier syllables with which they are associated than less predictable syllables that occur earlier in words. The network is also sensitive to information whose electrophysiological correlates were used to support the encoding of ordinal positions within words. Hebbian learning can thus explain rhythmic neural activity in statistical learning tasks without any memory representations of words. Learners might thus need to rely on cues beyond statistical associations to learn the words of their nativelanguage. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Statistical learning may be utilized to identify recurring units in continuous sequences (e.g., words in fluent speech) but may not generate explicit memory forwords. Exposure to statistically structured sequences leads to rhythmic activity with a period of the duration of the underlying units (e.g., words). I show that a memory-less Hebbian network model can reproduce this rhythmic neural activity as well as putative encodings of ordinal positions observed in earlier research. Direct tests are needed to establish whether statistical learning leads to declarative memories for words.

Word-final strength and weakness

Word-final syllables are known to show phonological strength, presumably due to final lengthening (Steriade 1994; Barnes 2002), but also phonological weakness. We propose that final weakening effects are also due to final lengthening under the assumption that duration due a phonetic source (i.e. final lengthening) is not on linguistic par with duration from a phonological source. We show further support for our proposal through the results of perception studies with adults that show less sensitivity to word-final duration differences. We note that child language phonology often shows unexpected final syllable strength and include two such diary studies with English-learning children. We propose that this difference between child and adult phonology is due to children not yet having learned to differentiate the import of duration based on its source.

Mandarin lexical tone duration: Impact of speech style, word length, syllable position and prosodic position

This study aims to increase our knowledge of Mandarin lexical tone duration in continuous Mandarin speech. Related variation factors such as the number of syllable(s) in word, the position of syllable in word, its prosodic position and speech style were also explored. Large corpora of casual and journalistic speech (total ∼1000 hours) were used. More than 90% of the words (tokens) used in spoken Mandarin are monosyllabic and disyllabic words. In casual speech, 67% of the wordtokens are monosyllabic and 30% of the word-tokens are disyllabic. In journalistic speech, however, disyllabic words (49%) are more frequently used than monosyllabic words (45%). Tone 4 is the most frequently used tone among the four lexical tones in both casual (34%) and journalistic (36%) speech. Tone 1, Tone 2 and Tone 3 have similar occurrence frequencies in causal speech. Tone 3 appears to be the least frequently used tone in journalistic speech. With regard to tone duration, the results show that Tone 2 tends to have the shortest duration in causal speech and Tone 3 appears to have the longest duration in journalistic speech. Nonetheless, the studied variation factors (number of syllable(s) in word, position of syllable in word and prosodic position) are all found to influence the duration of Mandarin lexical tones, for both causal speech and journalistic speech. Tone durations in monosyllabic words appear to be closer to those of word-final syllables than to other syllable positions in multi-syllabic words. In terms of prosodic position, tone duration tends to increase with higher prosodic level in both casual and journalistic speech. Regardless of tone nature and speech style, the longest tone duration is in phrase-final position, followed by word-final and then word-medial position. Regional variety for tone duration is explored using casual speech productions from speakers of five major cities of North and South-East China, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi, Suzhou and Nanjing.

The Syllabification of High Vowels in the Kerinci Language: An Autosegmental Phonological Analysis

The aim of this article is to explain the syllabification of high vowels /i/ and /u/ at the nucleus position in the Kerinci language. In this language, the high vowels /i/ and /u/ at the nucleus position will undergo changes - for example, /i/, /u/, /is/ and /us/ will be realized as [aj], [aw], [ajh] and [awh]. In order to explain the phonological processes, each problem was analyzed using the theory of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976, 1990). There are three processes involved in the theory, namely linking, delinking and features spreading. The phonological modifications involving the high vowels can be adequately explained based on the process of syllabification that is couched in the CV skeletal model of McCarthy (1981). The data for this study were obtained through three different methods, namely library research, observation and interviews. The instruments used in this study were a recorder, questionnaires and notebooks. The informants selected for this study comprised five men and women who are aged 50 years and above, who are native speakers of Kerinci Semerap dialect, and were born in Kabupaten Kerinci, West Sumatera, Indonesia. However, they have been living in Kampung Batu 21 Sungai Lui, Hulu Langat, Selangor, for more than 30 years. The finding showed that the high vowels /i/ and /u/ at the nucleus of word final syllable are linked to the coda nodes and surfaces as the glides [j] and [w]. Thus, the analysis of the syllabification of high vowels at the coda position explains the application of vowel [a] in the output of words such as [mã.taj] “dead”, [sa.taw] “one”, [tu.lajh] “write” and [lu.rawh] “straight” based on the CV skeletal model of McCarthy (1981).

The effect of lengthening aspiration on speech segmentation.

Listeners tend to perceive longer vowels as word-final and include the aspiration of a syllable-onset consonant in metalinguistically judging the duration of the following vowel. It may be hypothesized that longer aspiration is interpreted as extra vowel duration and hence, a word-finality cue. Alternatively, if aspiration is perceived as part of the onset, longer aspiration should be interpreted as word-initial, consistent with previous findings on consonant lengthening [White, Mattys, Stefansdottir, and Jones (2015). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 138(2), 1214-1220]. An artificial language learning experiment with Taiwanese Southern Min listeners showed that lengthening aspiration in word-initial but not word-final syllables improved speech segmentation, supporting the second but not the first hypothesis.

The Influence of Different Prosodic Cues on Word Segmentation.

A prerequisite for spoken language learning is segmenting continuous speech into words. Amongst many possible cues to identify word boundaries, listeners can use both transitional probabilities between syllables and various prosodic cues. However, the relative importance of these cues remains unclear, and previous experiments have not directly compared the effects of contrasting multiple prosodic cues. We used artificial language learning experiments, where native German speaking participants extracted meaningless trisyllabic “words” from a continuous speech stream, to evaluate these factors. We compared a baseline condition (statistical cues only) to five test conditions, in which word-final syllables were either (a) followed by a pause, (b) lengthened, (c) shortened, (d) changed to a lower pitch, or (e) changed to a higher pitch. To evaluate robustness and generality we used three tasks varying in difficulty. Overall, pauses and final lengthening were perceived as converging with the statistical cues and facilitated speech segmentation, with pauses helping most. Final-syllable shortening hindered baseline speech segmentation, indicating that when cues conflict, prosodic cues can override statistical cues. Surprisingly, pitch cues had little effect, suggesting that duration may be more relevant for speech segmentation than pitch in our study context. We discuss our findings with regard to the contribution to speech segmentation of language-universal boundary cues vs. language-specific stress patterns.

F0 timing in Luganda: Effects of phrase position and gone category

In Luganda (Bantu, Uganda), there is a contrast between early and late high tone, differing in the timing of the f0 peak relative to the consonant and vowel intervals of the associated syllable. According to the extensive transcription-based literature on the language, this contrast is limited to “long” syllables (those with a long vowel or coda), and to short word-final syllables. In this study, these claims are tested in two production studies. As in other languages, the timing of f0 peaks was found to be sensitive to the duration of the onset-vowel interval in the high-toned syllable, with longer onset-vowel duration associated with a later f0 peak. The late high tones were found to have a significantly greater peak delay than early high tone, but only in long syllables with a long vowel or diphthong. Short syllables had early high tone (shorter peak delay) in sentence-final words, but word position had no effect. The results suggest that the phenomenon that previous studies have described in terms of the distribution of falling tones is better seen as a phonetic effect of phrasal position on f0 peak timing, as has been observed in languages such as English, Spanish, and Serbian.

АНГЛИЙСКОЕ СЛОВЕСНОЕ УДАРЕНИЕ В УСЛОВИЯХ ДЛИТЕЛЬНОГО ЯЗЫКОВОГО КОНТАКТА

The paper summarizes the results of recent studies concerned with English accentual patterns dynamics in polysyllabic words, based on English and French language contact. Canadian English reflects the present-day situation of language contact. Intersection of a variety of tendencies is observed which are due to accentual assimilation in lexicon of Romance origin borrowed from French. The recessive and the rhythmical are the major ones in the historical perspective. The data collected in dictionaries are further supplied with sociocultural comments based on corpus and opinion survey cognitive analyses. The presence of rhythmical stress was discovered in British, American and Canadian Englishes with the growing tendency in compound words due to disappearing of the pattern with two equal stresses. The tendency is most vivid in bilingual speakers from the Province of Quebec who accentuate word-final syllable.

Cayuga word melodies—A corpus phonetic study

This work investigates the intonation of Cayuga, an endangered language of North America, now spoken by some 50 speakers in upstate New York and southern Ontario. Word prominence in Cayuga has been described as sensitive to both word shape and utterance position (Foster, 1982; Michelson, 1988). Non-utterance-final words in Cayuga are known to exhibit f0 prominence on the word-final syllable, although prominence occurs on earlier syllables in utterance-final contexts. This work constitutes an initial corpus phonetic investigation into the interaction of word-shape and utterance position on f0 realization in Cayuga. This study's corpus consisted of approximately 52 min of spoken Cayuga narratives by two L1 speakers (2736 hand-segmented word tokens). The results of the study corroborated some of the earlier descriptions. Words for both speakers exhibited prominence on word-finally in utterance non-final contexts. In utterance final contexts, however, sensitivity to word shape, differed between speakers. By comparing the two locations of prominence, we note small differences both in the alignment and scaling of peaks. Word-final prominence is, on average, scaled higher than utterance-final prominence (210 versus 204 Hz). Finally, utterance-final prominence is aligned earlier in the syllable than word-final prominence (33% vs 49% of vowel duration respectively).

The alignment of F0 tonal targets under changes in speech rate in Drehu

This study investigates fundamental frequency alignment to segmental landmarks in Drehu, an Oceanic language. The authors present a production experiment that aimed to evaluate the marking of prosodic prominence, and in particular, the tonal marking of prominence, within the autosegmental-metrical phonology, since stress and prominence system of the language has not been phonetically investigated. A rate manipulation paradigm was chosen to test the segmental anchoring hypothesis, namely, to see whether prominence lending tonal movements exhibit a constant slope due to rate manipulation and whether tonal targets can be associated to segmental anchoring points in the speech stream. The authors find that a rising tonal movement, between a word initial low (L), and a word final high (H) tone, is the most frequent tonal pattern. The word initial L tone seeks to align with the left edge whereas the H tone, at the right edge, seeks to anchor to the last full syllable. In fast speech, tonal targets are produced closer together but the slope remains constant in both speech rates. High tones seek to anchor to the word-final syllable, yet not to any specific segment which suggests a weak version of the segmental anchoring hypothesis applies.

The interaction between lexical prominence and pre-boundary lengthening in Japanese

Pre-boundary lengthening, also known as phrase-final lengthening, is a well-established phenomenon. In stress languages, pre-boundary lengthening has been shown to interact with lexical prominence (i.e., stress), affecting the boundary-adjacent constriction gestures in stress-final words, but being attracted towards the stressed syllable when stress is non-final. However, the interaction between pre-boundary lengthening and lexical prominence in a language with lexical pitch accent, like Japanese, is not well understood. The current study uses kinematic data collected with Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) to investigate this interaction in Japanese. We examine pre-boundary lengthening in trisyllabic phrase-final words as a factor of pitch accent position (initial-accented, medial-accented, final-accented, and no accent). Preliminary results based on duration measurements of the consonant constriction gestures comprising the phrase-final words show that in words with no pitch accent, pre-boundary lengthening has a progressive effect extending two syllables away from the right edge of the phrase, being strongest in the word-final syllable. If pitch accent is present, pre-boundary lengthening is affected by the former’s position. The lengthening effect is limited to the final syllable in initial- and medial-accented words, and disappears in final-accented words. Typological dimensions of the interaction between prominence and boundaries are discussed. [Work supported by NSF.]

Harmony Rules and the Suffix Domain: A Study of Maya Scribal Conventions

In 2004, Lacadena and Wichmann proposed a set of orthographic rules for the Maya script. The choice of using one of three different patterns of syn- or disharmonic spellings allowed Maya scribes to signal whether word-final syllables contained a short vowel, a long vowel or a glottal stop. In our earlier paper we focused on the lexical evidence for these orthographic «harmony rules». Although it was stated that the rules apply equally well when a suffix is involved and when no suffix is involved, the data relating to the former situation were not discussed in detail. This is the aim of the present paper.

Apparent exceptions to final devoicing in High Prussian: A metrical analysis

High Prussian, a variety of East Central German, has a segmentally opaque process of final devoicing: Only some forms with underlyingly voiced obstruents devoice at the end of a word. This phenomenon can also be observed in some morphological alternations where simplex forms show final devoicing but complex ones do not. This paper provides a metrical analysis of final devoicing and two related phenomena: spirantization, and an interaction of vowel length in high vowels and obstruent voicing. It is claimed that nondevoicing items contain disyllabic foot templates and that word-final consonants are then syllabified as onsets of empty-headed word-final syllables. The analysis demonstrates how evidence from West Germanic dialects can contribute to our understanding of the phonology of laryngeal features and to the role that metrical structure can play in shaping phonological alternations.*

Acoustic analysis of Korean trisyllabic words produced by English and Korean speakers

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers’ productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">Rhee <italic>et al</italic>., 2005</xref>). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers’ pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers’ learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.

Acoustic analysis of Korean trisyllabic words produced by English and Korean speakers

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers’ productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">Rhee <italic>et al</italic>., 2005</xref>). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers’ pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers’ learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language.

It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener's linguistic background, e.g., on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians. These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.

Syllabic encoding during overt speech production in Cantonese: Evidence from temporal brain responses

The time course of phonological encoding in overt Cantonese disyllabic word production was investigated using a picture-word interference task with concurrent recording of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to name aloud individually presented pictures and ignore a distracting Chinese character. Participants' naming responses were faster, relative to an unrelated control, when the distractor overlapped with the target's word-initial or word-final syllables. Furthermore, ERP waves in the syllable-related conditions were more positive-going than those in the unrelated control conditions from 500ms to 650ms post target onset (i.e., a late positivity). The mean and peak amplitudes of this late positivity correlated with the size of phonological facilitation. More importantly, the onset of the late positivity associated with word-initial syllable priming was 44ms earlier than that associated with word-final syllable priming, suggesting that phonological encoding in overt speech runs incrementally and the encoding duration for one syllable unit is approximately 44ms. Although the size of effective phonological units might vary across languages, as suggested by previous speech production studies, the present data indicate that the incremental nature of phonological encoding is a universal mechanism.

The Ergative System in Balochi from a Typological Perspective

For the Western Iranian languages the transition from the Old Iranian to the Middle-Iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. This loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. The consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. Although descriptions of the ergative construction in Balochi do exist, there is no treatment yet which takes into account the material of the different dialects. Furthermore, the ergative construction in Balochi has been compared with data from Old Iranian, but not with data from Middle Iranian languages, and the development from the Middle Iranian stage to the different types found in present-day Balochi has also not yet been studied. The aim of this paper is therefore to present the data from the Balochi dialects as far as they are known today and to update, complete (and in some points, correct) previous descriptions of the matter.

New Rule in Vedic Metrics

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In this paper I propose a new rule of Vedic meter. The glides *v and *y are regularly lost before the corresponding high vowels ū̆ and ̆ī in Vedic. I argue that the word-initial glides *v and *y before the short vowels ŭ and ĭ still “make position” and that they should be restored for metrical purposes. This means that word-final syllables of the shape -V̆ C should be scanned long if the following syllable begins with a u- or i- that goes back to *vu- or *yi-. This new rule has consequences for the general metrical shape of the Rigveda, as cadences previously scanned as irregular will be repaired to their canonical shape. The rule can also be employed as etymologically decisive for words that can potentially go back to forms with or without an initial glide.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;