Search Results (22)

This study builds on a small body of work, all on Japanese, demonstrating how intonational phonology is critical for understanding prosodic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) relative to adult-directed speech. We performed similar analyses on simulated infant-directed speech vs. reading of a story in English and Bengali: two languages that – unlike Japanese – both have stress and do not use fundamental frequency (F0) to signal changes in word-level meaning, but that have two very different intonational grammars. These differences allowed us to disentangle previous hypotheses about intonational exaggeration in IDS being concentrated in a particular part of the melody. We tested hypotheses that state this locus of exaggeration is either at: the final position in the melody (final in the intonational phrase), the most unpredictable part of the melody, or in pragmatically informative tones. Our results support the first hypothesis. We found that the phonological choices of speakers to chunk the story into shorter, larger prosodic constituents drive intonational exaggeration in IDS. This is because the intonational phrase-final position in both languages is the site of greatest pre-boundary lengthening and F0 range expansion. We also demonstrate: (i) quantification of predictability in intonational melodies using probabilistic finite state automaton representations of intonational grammars and (ii) F0 statistical analyses that are robust and scalable to large, naturalistic IDS corpora. Full article

This article presents articulatory–kinematic data on preboundary lengthening (Intonational Phrase-final lengthening) from the productions of ten native speakers of American English—a relatively rare class of phonetic data compared with the more widely available acoustic data. The dataset includes three trisyllabic nonce words (bábaba, babába, bababá), each designed to manipulate the location of lexical stress. These were produced under prosodic conditions that varied in boundary position and focus-induced phrasal prominence, enabling analysis of how preboundary lengthening is distributed across words with different lexical stress locations and how it interacts with prosodic prominence. Articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography (EMA, Carstens AG200), providing kinematic measurements such as movement duration, peak velocity, and displacement of articulatory gestures. The accompanying files allow examination of individual speaker variation in these measures as modulated by prosodic structure, including boundary and prominence effects. While theoretical findings have been reported in a previous study, the full dataset, including detailed descriptions of individual speaker patterns, is made available here. By making these less commonly available articulatory data publicly available, we aim to promote broad reuse and support further research in prosody, articulatory phonetics, and speech production. Full article

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is characterized by atypical timing between segments, leading to prosodic disruption at the lexical level. This study tested whether prosodic impairment in CAS extends to the intonational level by examining declination of fundamental frequency (f0). Eleven children with CAS and ten typically developing (TD) peers aged 5 to 11 years old produced real and nonce multisyllabic words embedded in carrier phrases. Acoustic measures of inter-segment duration (within-word, between-word) and average f0 across segments were extracted. Children with CAS exhibited significantly longer inter-segment durations both within and between words, influenced by lexical stress position (first syllable, second syllable) and word status (real, nonce). They also showed shallower f0 declination slopes than TD peers, indicating reduced overall pitch fall. Segmentation and declination were not significantly correlated, suggesting distinct mechanisms underlying timing and pitch organization. Consistent with prior work, segmentation was greatest for nonce words with non-initial stress. Reduced declination in CAS may reflect limitations in prosodic planning or programming at the intonational level. These findings highlight dissociable disruptions in timing and pitch patterning in CAS, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of prosodic control in motor speech disorders. Full article

Japanese noun phrases typically consist of nouns and particles, but there is an ellipsis phenomenon called Particle Stranding Ellipsis (PSE) where nouns are elided with a particle left. A PF-based deletion analysis of PSE has been proposed, but there are several criticisms against it. Thus, it remains elusive what condition is imposed on the licensing of PSE. In this paper, we will formulate a finer-grained phonological theorization of PSE. Our analysis employs a phonological constraint, StrongStart, and information structural factors like givenness and foci, and characterizes PSE as an edge deletion applying to pragmatically given materials at the left edge of intonation phrases. Under this analysis, information structure plays an important role in ellipsis licensing: givenness feeds and foci bleed PSE. We demonstrate that this analysis can handle data that is problematic for the previous string deletion approach. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study sets out to explore how L1 Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of L2 experience perceived English focus interrogative tune, L*H-H%, within the framework of the autosegmental–metrical model. Methods: Eighteen Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of residence in the United States and eighteen English native speakers were invited to perceive prosodic prominence and judge the naturalness of focus prosody tunes. Results: For the perception of on-focus pitch accent L*, Mandarin speakers performed well in the prominence detection task but not in the focus identification task. For post-focus edge tones, we found that phrase accents were more susceptible to L1 influences than boundary tones due to the varying degrees of cross-linguistic similarity between these intonational categories. The results also show that even listeners with extended L2 experience were not proficient in their perception of L2 interrogative focus tunes. Conclusions: This study reveals the advantage of considering the degree of L1-L2 similarity and the necessity to examine cross-linguistic influences on L2 perception of prosody separately in phonological and phonetic dimensions. Full article

This study investigates whether specific acoustic features can reliably indicate phrase boundaries for automatic detection. It includes (1) an analysis of acoustic markers at the end of prosodic units—intonational phrases, intermediate phrases, and words—and (2) the evaluation of these features in an automatic boundary detection algorithm. Data were drawn from professionally and expressively read speech (893 words), news broadcasts (732 words), and interviews (361 words). Key features analyzed were pause duration, final sound lengthening, intensity, and F0 changes. Findings show that pauses and their duration are the most consistent indicators of phrase boundaries, especially at intonational phrase ends. Final sound lengthening and reductions in intensity and F0 also contribute but are less reliable for intermediate phrases. In automatic detection phonetic cues can be used to predict boundaries assigned by phoneticians 69% of the time. Read speech yielded better results than spontaneous speech. Among the features, pause presence and length were the most reliable, while F0 and intensity changes played a minor role. Full article

This study explores the extent to which Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals, a population that is said to have a residual high tone of African origin, keep their two languages temporally and intonationally distinct across statements. While creole languages that emerged from the contact of African and European languages, such as Palenquero, may develop hybrid prosodic systems with tones from substrate languages, and stress from the majority language, language-specific prosody might be expected to converge or simplify over the course of time. As prosodic convergence seems to be inescapable under Palenquero’s circumstances, which factors could support language-specific prosody in this population, if there are any? Two-hundred and thirty-four five-syllable statements were elicited through a discourse completion task, with the participation of ten Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals, in two unilingual sessions. Both phrase-final lengthening and F0 contours were assessed using linear mixed-effects models testing their association with final stress, language, and generation. F0 contours were dimensionally reduced using functional principal component analysis. Despite the strong similarities between the two languages, results indicate that both groups keep their two languages intonationally distinct using plateau-shaped contours in Palenquero initial rises followed by steeper declinations in Spanish. However, elderly bilinguals implement penultimate lengthening language-specifically, being more pronounced in Palenquero. Adults, in contrast, do not show this distinction. In addition to this, elderly speakers show hyperarticulation in Spanish intonation, increasing the difference between their languages. This leads us to believe that adults exhibit a more simplified prosodic system between their languages, relative to elderly bilinguals. In spite of such differences, both generations seem to have the same underlying process (perhaps a substrate effect) driving plateau-shaped intonation in Palenquero, which enhances language differentiation. Full article

This article presents RuPro, a new corpus resource of prosodically annotated speech by Russian heritage speakers in the U.S. and monolingually raised Russian speakers. The corpus contains data elicited in formal and informal communicative situations, by male/female and adolescent/adult speakers. The resource is presented with its architecture and annotation, and it is shown how it is used for the analysis of intonational features of spontaneous mono- and bilingual Russian speech. The analyses investigate the length of intonation phrases, types and number of pitch accents, and boundary tones. It emerges that the speaker groups do not differ in the inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones or in the relative frequency of these tonal events. However, they do differ in the length of intonation phrases (IPs), with heritage speakers showing shorter IPs also in the informal communicative situation. Both groups also differ concerning the number of pitch accents used on content words, with heritage speakers using more pitch accents than monolingually raised speakers. The results are discussed with respect to register differentiation and differences in prosodic density across both speaker groups. Full article

Motivated by a growing body of research on heritage Spanish prosody, the current study uses the Sp_ToBi framework for the transcription of Spanish intonation to report trends in phonological targets of broad focus declaratives produced by heritage speakers of Chilean Spanish living in Stockholm, Sweden. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews from six participants belonging to the same social network including two Spanish-dominant first-generation immigrants and four Swedish-dominant second-generation speakers who were born and raised in Sweden and are heritage speakers of Spanish. The G1 participants are the primary source of Spanish input for the G2 speakers. Data were analyzed by identifying word- and phrase-level phonological targets and associating them with the appropriate pitch accent and boundary tones. Results show that the heritage Spanish declarative intonation patterns of the G2 speakers closely resemble those of the G1 speakers. These patterns are scrutinized in terms of the potential influence of Swedish and/or other varieties of Spanish. This analysis exhibits evidence of the importance of source input variety and cross-generational transmission of phonological targets in a heritage language as well as the potential contributions of multiple intonational systems in forming the phonological inventory of heritage speakers. Full article

We identify a tonal contour in Turkish that expresses universal quantification. We show that the distribution of this contour is restricted to noun phrases modified by relative clauses and that it expresses universal quantification over situations rather than over individuals. We describe the prosodic structure of the contour, unexpected from the perspective of the phonology of Turkish intonation, and identify it as a tonal morpheme. We define it, and provide a compositional analysis of the sentences that contain it. Full article

This article is devoted to solving the problem of converting sign language into a consistent text with intonation markup for subsequent voice synthesis of sign phrases by speech with intonation. The paper proposes an improved method of continuous recognition of sign language, the results of which are transmitted to a natural language processor based on analyzers of morphology, syntax, and semantics of the Kazakh language, including morphological inflection and the construction of an intonation model of simple sentences. This approach has significant practical and social significance, as it can lead to the development of technologies that will help people with disabilities to communicate and improve their quality of life. As a result of the cross-validation of the model, we obtained an average test accuracy of 0.97 and an average val_accuracy of 0.90 for model evaluation. We also identified 20 sentence structures of the Kazakh language with their intonational model. Full article

It is broadly accepted that the prosody of a sentence can influence sentence processing by providing the listener information about the syntax of the sentence. It is less clear what the mechanism is that underlies the transmission of this information. In this paper, we test whether the influence of the prosodic structure on parsing is a result of perceptual breaks such as pauses or whether it is the result of more abstract prosodic elements, such as intonational phrases. In three experiments, we test whether different types of perceptual breaks, e.g., intonational boundaries (Experiment 1), an artificial buzzing sound (Experiment 2), and an isolated pause (Experiment 3), influence syntactic attachment in ambiguous sentences. We find that although full intonational boundaries influence syntactic disambiguation, the artificial buzz and isolated pause do not. These data rule out theories that argue that perceptual breaks indirectly influence grammatical attachment through memory mechanisms, and instead, show that listeners use prosodic breaks themselves as cues to parsing. Full article

This article discusses what we call the Asymmetry Problem, a theoretical question of how asymmetric properties of prosodic phrasing should generally be accounted for within the framework of Match Theory. Unlike Alignment Theory, in which phrasing asymmetry can be derived by mapping constraints (e.g., Align-XP), Match Theory cannot derive any phrasing asymmetry from mapping (i.e., Match) constraints. Thus, Match Theory may seem to face empirical problems when data appear to call for an asymmetric ranking of mapping constraints. This article starts with the discussion of one such case in Stockholm Swedish, where asymmetric ranking of Alignment constraints has been proposed to account for the data. It will be argued that prosodic asymmetry arises from the directionality of prosodic heads (i.e., right- or left-headedness) rather than asymmetric syntax–prosody mapping, and that asymmetry can be explained through the interaction of Match constraints with markedness constraints that determine the distribution of prosodic heads. Furthermore, it will be proposed that such an analysis reduces the need of Alignment-based mapping constraints and therefore follows the Minimal Interface Hypothesis, which assumes Match constraints as the sole syntax–prosody mapping constraints. To support this line of analysis, it will be shown that the Asymmetry Problem in Japanese, for which it had previously been argued that both Match and Alignment constraints are needed, can also be accounted for under this hypothesis. Full article

Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues—pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries—the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints. Full article

Singing pedagogy has increasingly adopted guide awareness through the use of meaningful real-time visual feedback. Technology typically used to study the voice can also be applied in a singing lesson, aiming at facilitating students’ awareness of the three subsystems involved in voice production—breathing, oscillatory and resonatory—and their underlying physiological, aerodynamical and acoustical mechanisms. Given the variety of real-time visual feedback tools, this article provides a comprehensive overview of such tools and their current and future pedagogical applications in the voice studio. The rationale for using real-time visual feedback is discussed, including both the theoretical and practical applications of visualizing physiological, aerodynamical and acoustical aspects of voice production. The monitorization of breathing patterns is presented, displaying lung volume as the sum of abdominal and ribcage movements signals. In addition, estimates of subglottal pressure are visually displayed using a subglottal pressure meter to assist with the shaping of musical phrases in singing. As to what concerns vibratory patterns of the vocal folds and phonatory airflow, the use of electroglottography and inverse filters is applied to monitor the phonation types, voice breaks, pitch and intensity range of singers of different music genres. These vocal features, together with intentional voice distortions and intonation adjustments, are also displayed using spectrographs. As the voice is invisible to the eye, the use of real-time visual feedback is proposed as a key pedagogical approach in current and future singing lessons. The use of such an approach corroborates the current trend of developing evidence-based practices in voice education. Full article