Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains

Phrase boundaries lacking word prosody: An articulatory investigation of Seoul Korean

This electromagnetic articulography study explores the kinematic profile of Intonational Phrase boundaries in Seoul Korean. Recent findings suggest that the scope of phrase-final lengthening is conditioned by word- and/or phrase-level prominence. However, evidence comes mainly from head-prominence languages, which conflate positions of word prosody with positions of phrasal prominence. Here, we examine phrase-final lengthening in Seoul Korean, an edge-prominence language with no word prosody, with respect to focus location as an index of phrase-level prominence and Accentual Phrase (AP) length as an index of word demarcation. Results show that phrase-final lengthening extends over the phrase-final syllable. The effect is greater the further away that focus occurs. It also interacts with the domains of AP and prosodic word: lengthening is greater in smaller APs, whereas shortening is observed in the initial gesture of the phrase-final word. Additional analyses of kinematic displacement and peak velocity revealed that Korean phrase-final gestures bear the kinematic profile of IP boundaries concurrently to what is typically considered prominence marking. Based on these results, a gestural coordination account is proposed, in which boundary-related events interact systematically with phrase-level prominence as well as lower prosodic levels, and how this proposal relates to the findings in head-prominence languages is discussed.

Hiatus resolution and linguistic diversity in Australian English

Vowel hiatus is typically resolved in Australian English through complementary strategies of liaison (j-gliding/w-gliding/linking-r) and glottalisation. Previous work suggests a change in progress towards increased use of glottalisation as an optimal hiatus-breaker, which creates syntagmatic contrast between adjacent vowels, particularly when the right-edge vowel is strong (i.e. at the foot boundary). Liaison continues to be used when right-edge vowels are weak, but glottalisation as a hiatus resolution strategy in general appears to be increasing and may be more common in speakers from non-English speaking backgrounds raising the question of whether exposure to linguistic diversity could be driving the change. We examine hiatus resolution in speakers from neighbourhoods that vary according to levels of language diversity. We elicited gliding and linking-r hiatus contexts to determine how prosodic strength of flanking vowels and speakers' exposure to linguistic diversity affect hiatus resolution. Results confirm that glottalisation occurs most frequently with strong right-edge vowels, and gliding/linking-r are more likely with weak right-edge vowels. However, strategies differ between gliding and linking-r contexts, suggesting differing implementation mechanisms. In addition, speakers from ethnolinguistically diverse areas produce increased glottalisation in all contexts supporting the idea that change to the hiatus resolution system may be driven by language contact.

Effects of Deep-Brain Stimulation on Speech: Perceptual and Acoustic Data

PURPOSE

This study examined speech changes induced by deep-brain stimulation (DBS) in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) using a set of auditory-perceptual and acoustic measures.

METHOD

Speech recordings from nine speakers with PD and DBS were compared between DBS-On and DBS-Off conditions using auditory-perceptual and acoustic analyses. Auditory-perceptual ratings included voice quality, articulation precision, prosody, speech intelligibility, and listening effort obtained from 44 listeners. Acoustic measures were made for voicing proportion, second formant frequency slope, vowel dispersion, articulation rate, and range of fundamental frequency and intensity.

RESULTS

No significant changes were found between DBS-On and DBS-Off for the five perceptual ratings. Four of six acoustic measures revealed significant differences between the two conditions. While articulation rate and acoustic vowel dispersion increased, voicing proportion and intensity range decreased from the DBS-Off to DBS-On condition. However, a visual examination of the data indicated that the statistical significance was mostly driven by a small number of participants, while the majority did not show a consistent pattern of such changes.

CONCLUSIONS

Our data, in general, indicate no-to-minimal changes in speech production ensued from DBS stimulation. The findings are discussed with a focus on large interspeaker variability in PD in terms of their speech characteristics and the potential effects of DBS on speech.

A Reanalysis of the Voicing Effect in English: With Implications for Featural Specification

The voicing effect is among the most studied and robust of phonetic phenomena. Yet there remains a lack of consensus on why vowels preceding voiced obstruents should be longer than vowels preceding voiceless obstruents. In this paper we provide an analysis of the voicing effect in a corpus of natural speech, and using production data from a metronome-timed word repetition study. From this evidence, as well as the existing literature, we conclude that vowel duration differences follow from consonant duration differences. The characteristic voicing effect in English is largely limited to words of especially long duration, and preceding vowel duration does not reliably cue obstruent voicing under the following circumstances: when obstruent voicing or duration cues conflict; for lax or unstressed vowels; and for most conversational speech. We show that this behavior can be modeled using a competing-constraints framework, where all segments resist expanding or compressing past a preferred duration. Inherent segment elasticity determines the degree of resistance, but segment duration is ultimately determined by the interaction of these segmental constraints with constraints on the distribution of the lengthening force within the syllable, and how closely target durations are matched. This account of the voicing effect has a number of implications for phonological theory, especially the central role that the concept of prominence plays in the analysis of underlying features.

Prosodic and durational influences on the formant dynamics of Japanese vowels

The relationship between prosodic structure and segmental realisation is a central question within phonetics. For vowels, this has been typically examined in terms of duration, leaving largely unanswered how prosodic boundaries influence spectral realisation. This study examines the influence of prosodic boundary strength-as well as duration and pauses-on vowel dynamics in spontaneous Japanese. While boundary strength has a marginal effect on dynamics, increased duration and pauses result in greater vowel peripherality and spectral change. These findings highlight the complex relationship between prosodic and segmental structure, and illustrate the importance of multifactorial analysis in corpus research.

Edge strengthening and phonetic variability in Spanish /l/: an ultrasound study

Previous research has shown that /l/ in Spanish displays patterns of articulatory variability that are determined by a complex interaction of phonetic, phonological and dialectal factors. In this study, we report the results of an experiment using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) that tests /l/-articulations in a dialectal cross-section of Spanish speakers. We show that lengthening of /l/ in phrase-edge contexts is accompanied by articulatory distinctions (e.g. root/dorsum retraction) for some speakers, whereas others produce lengthened realisations of /l/ in these contexts without observable differences in tongue position. We also find acoustic evidence for reduction in utterance-medial intervocalic and preconsonantal environments (duration, intensity, F1 frequency measures are discussed). However, articulatory correlates of reduction are not consistently observed across speakers in these contexts. As well as relating the results to prosodically-driven strengthening and reduction patterns, our findings are of relevance to debates about resyllabification in Spanish. Specifically, we argue that our results cannot be straightforwardly accommodated under phonological analysis assuming that word-final consonants regularly resyllabify across word boundaries prevocalically.

Word-level prosodic and metrical influences on Hawaiian glottal stop realization

Previous research on the phonetic realization of Hawaiian glottal stops has shown that it can be produced several ways, including with creaky voice, full closure, or modal voice. This study investigates whether the realization is conditioned by word-level prosodic or metrical factors, which would be consistent with research demonstrating that segmental distribution and phonetic realization can be sensitive to word-internal structure. At the same time, it has also been shown that prosodic prominence, such as syllable stress, can affect phonetic realization. Data come from the 1970s-80s radio program Ka Leo Hawai'i. Using Parker Jones' (Parker Jones, Oiwi. 2010. A computational phonology and morphology of Hawaiian. University of Oxford DPhil. thesis) computational prosodic grammar, words were parsed and glottal stops were automatically coded for word position, syllable stress, and prosodic word position. The frequency of the word containing the glottal stop was also calculated. Results show that full glottal closures are more likely at the beginning of a prosodic word, especially in word-medial position. Glottal stops with full closure in lexical word initial position are more likely in lower frequency words. The findings for Hawaiian glottal stop suggest that prosodic prominence does not condition a stronger realization, but rather, the role of the prosodic word is similar to other languages exhibiting phonetic cues to word-level prosodic structure.

Prosodic Structural Effects on Non-Contrastive Coarticulatory Vowel Nasalization in L2 English by Korean Learners

This acoustic study explores how Korean learners produce coarticulatory vowel nasalization in English that varies with prosodic structural factors of focus-induced prominence and boundary. N-duration and A1-P0 (degree of V-nasalization) are measured in consonant-vowel-nasal (CVN) and nasal-vowel-consonant (NVC) words in various prosodic structural conditions (phrase-final vs. phrase-medial; focused vs. unfocused). Korean learners show a systematic fine-tuning of the non-contrastive V-nasalization in second language (L2) English in relation to prosodic structure, although it does not pertain to learning new L2 sound categories (i.e., L2 English nasal consonants are directly mapped onto Korean nasal consonants). The prosodic structurally conditioned phonetic detail in English appears to be accessible in most part to Korean learners and was therefore reflected in their production of L2 English. Their L2 production, however, is also found to be constrained by their first language (L1-Korean) to some extent, resulting in some phonetic effects that deviate from both L1 and L2. The results suggest that the seemingly low-level coarticulatory process is indeed under the speaker's control in L2, which reflects interactions of the specificities of the phonetics-prosody interface in L1 and L2. The results are also discussed in terms of their implications for theories of L2 phonetics.

Interaction between Phrasal Structure and Vowel Tenseness in German: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study

Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the 'uniform lengthening hypothesis' (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs varying in vowel tenseness and boundary type. In line with the ULH, the results show that the acoustic durations of lax vowels are lengthened phrase-finally, similarly to tense vowels. We find that acoustic lengthening is stronger the closer the segments are to the boundary. Articulatory parameters of the closing movements toward the post-vocalic consonants are affected by both phrasal position and identity of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed with regard to the interaction between prosodic structure and vowel tenseness.

Functional timing or rhythmical timing, or both? A corpus study of English and Mandarin duration

It has been long held that languages of the world are divided into rhythm classes so that they are either stress-timed, syllable-timed or mora-timed. It is also known for a long time that duration serves various informational functions in speech. But it is unclear whether these two kinds of uses of duration are complementary to each other, or they are actually one and the same. There has been much empirical research that raises questions about the rhythm class hypothesis due to lack of evidence of the suggested isochrony in any language. Yet the alleged cross-language rhythm classification is still widely taken for granted and continues to be researched. Here we conducted a corpus study of English, an archetype of a stress-timed language, and Mandarin, an alleged syllable-timed language, to look for evidence of at least a tendency toward isochrony when much of the informational use of duration is controlled for. We examined the relationship between segment and syllable duration and the relationship of syllable and phrase duration in the two languages. The results show that in English syllables are largely incompressible to allow stress-timing because segment duration is inflexible to allow variable syllable duration beyond its functional use. Surprisingly, Mandarin does show a small tendency toward both equal syllable duration and equal phrase duration. Additionally, the duration of pre-boundary syllables in English increases linearly with break index, whereas in Mandarin, the duration increase stops after break index 2, which is accompanied by the insertion of silent pauses. We conclude, therefore, timing and duration in speech are predominantly used for encoding information rather being controlled by a rhythmic principle, and the residual equal-duration tendency in the two languages examined here show exactly the opposite patterns from the predictions of the rhythm class hypothesis.

Lessons learned in animal acoustic cognition through comparisons with humans

Humans are an interesting subject of study in comparative cognition. While humans have a lot of anecdotal and subjective knowledge about their own minds and behaviors, researchers tend not to study humans the way they study other species. Instead, comparisons between humans and other animals tend to be based on either assumptions about human behavior and cognition, or very different testing methods. Here we emphasize the importance of using insider knowledge about humans to form interesting research questions about animal cognition while simultaneously stepping back and treating humans like just another species as if one were an alien researcher. This perspective is extremely helpful to identify what aspects of cognitive processes may be interesting and relevant across the animal kingdom. Here we outline some examples of how this objective human-centric approach has helped us to move forward knowledge in several areas of animal acoustic cognition (rhythm, harmonicity, and vocal units). We describe how this approach works, what kind of benefits we obtain, and how it can be applied to other areas of animal cognition. While an objective human-centric approach is not useful when studying traits that do not occur in humans (e.g., magnetic spatial navigation), it can be extremely helpful when studying traits that are relevant to humans (e.g., communication). Overall, we hope to entice more people working in animal cognition to use a similar approach to maximize the benefits of being part of the animal kingdom while maintaining a detached and scientific perspective on the human species.

The interaction between predictability and pre-boundary lengthening on syllable duration in Taiwan Southern Min

This study investigated how predictability and prosodic phrasing interact in accounting for the variability of syllable duration in Taiwan Southern Min. Speech data were extracted from 8 hours of spontaneous speech. Three predictability measurements were examined: bigram surprisal, bigram informativity, and lexical frequency. Results showed that higher informativity and surprisal led to longer syllables. As for the interaction with prosodic positions, there was a general weakening of predictability effects for syllables closer to the boundary, especially in the pre-boundary position, where pre-boundary lengthening was the strongest. However, the effect of word informativity appeared to be least modulated by this effect of boundary marking. These findings are consistent with a hypothesis that prosodic structure modulates the predictability effects on phonetic variability. The robustness of informativity in predicting syllable duration also suggests a possibility of stored phonetic variants associated with a word's usual contextual predictability.

Extreme stop allophony in Mixtec spontaneous speech: data, word prosody, and modelling

Word-level prosody plays an important role in processes of consonant lenition. Typically, consonants in word-initial position are strengthened while those in word-medial position are lenited (Keating et al., 2003). In this paper we examine the relationship between wordprosodic position and obstruent lenition in a spontaneous speech corpus of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered Mixtecan language spoken in Mexico. The language exhibits a surprising amount of lenition in the realization of otherwise voiceless unaspirated stops and voiceless fricatives in careful speech. In Experiment 1, we examine the relationships between word position, consonant duration, and passive voicing and find that word-medial pre-tonic position is the locus of both consonant lengthening and less passive voicing. Non-pre-tonic consonants are produced with more voicing and shorter duration. We also find that the functional status of the morpheme plays a role in voicing lenition. In Experiment 2, we examine manner lenition and find a similar pattern - word-medial pre-tonic stops are more often realized with complete closure relative to non-pre-tonic stops, which are more often realized with incomplete closure. In Experiment 3, we model these lenition patterns using a series of deep neural networks and find that, even with limited training data, we can achieve reasonably high accuracy in the automatic categorization of lenition patterns. The results of this research both complement recent work on the phonetics of lenition in the world's languages (Katz and Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020) and provide computational tools for modeling and predicting patterns of extreme lenition.

Moving Beyond Single Word Acquisition of Speech Sounds to Connected Speech Development With Dynamic Assessment

PURPOSE

The aim of this study was to document speech sound development across early childhood from a dynamic assessment (DA) perspective that captures a breadth of linguistic environments using the Glaspey Dynamic Assessment of Phonology (Glaspey, 2019), as well as to provide normative data for speech-language pathologists to compare speech skills when making clinical decisions and provide historical context. Targets of English were evaluated via DA for the (a) age of acquisition in single words; (b) continued development through connected speech; (c) early, mid, and late sequence; and (d) differences between single word and connected speech productions.

METHOD

Data were extracted from the reported results of the norming study for the Glaspey Dynamic Assessment of Phonology, which included a representative sample of 880 children ages 3 years to 10;11 (years;months). Comparisons were made with 49 items including multisyllabic words, clusters, and phonemes of English across word positions.

RESULTS

Assessment with DA showed that acquisition in single words is nearly complete by age 6 years with a 90% mastery level, and the sequence suggests an Early-13, Mid-16, and Late-14 for items by word position. In connected speech, a wider range of progression is evident from the emergence of sound production at 50%, 75%, and 90% mastery levels with observed changes between ages 3 and 10 years.

CONCLUSIONS

Given a DA approach across connected linguistic environments, children continue to progress in their development of speech sounds from early childhood well into their school-age years and for some sounds beyond the age of 10 years. DA challenges the language system to better reflect children's developmental progression.

Compensation in Time and Space: Prominence Marking in Aging and Disease

This study aims to explore the effects of healthy aging and Parkinson’s disease on speech motor performance. One area of speech production which requires fine speech motor control is prominence marking. Therefore, strategies of prominence marking of three speaker groups with four speakers each were investigated: younger speakers, older speakers, and speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Acoustic and articulatory data were collected. Speech data were analyzed focusing on prominence-related adjustments of vowel production and tongue body movements in the temporal and spatial domain. Longer durations, varying initiation of the tongue movements and smaller vowel sizes in older speakers and in speakers with PD were found compared to younger speakers. The data indicate further that all speaker groups mark prominence by changing relevant parameters in the vowel articulation; however, strategies seem to differ between the groups: (i) in the temporal domain, articulatory movement durations increase with age and are further prolonged in speakers with PD; (ii) in the spatial domain, the articulation space is resized by the older speakers in a non-symmetrical way, while no systematic vocalic modulations were found for speakers with PD. To conclude, the speech system seems to be affected by age and disease, but speakers develop compensatory strategies to counteract influences in the spatial domain.

Disentangling the Effects of Position and Utterance-Level Declination on the Production of Complex Tones in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec

Phrase-final position is cross-linguistically the locus of both processes of phonetic reduction and processes of phonetic enhancement. In tone languages, phrasal position is a conditioning environment for processes of tone sandhi/allotony, though such patterns emerge from local processes of tonal enhancement or reduction. The current article examines the production of tone in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered language of Mexico with nine lexical tones and fixed, stem-final stress, across phrasal and utterance positions via three experiments. In the first two experiments, the findings show that speakers lengthen syllables and expand the tonal F0 range in utterance-final position. The effect of this range expansion is high tone raising, low tone lowering, and falling contour lowering. Rising contour tones undergo substantial leveling when produced in a non-utterance-final context, similar to Taiwanese Mandarin. These findings suggest that postural changes in F0 range are controlled, intonational effects in tonal languages and not paralinguistic. In the third experiment, we examine utterance-level declination and raising within sentences consisting entirely of level tones. We show that utterance-level F0 changes are independent from local tonal hyperarticulation effects in phrase-final position. Together, the experiments largely support prosodically-conditioned phonetic undershoot as a control mechanism in tone production and demonstrate how tonal complexity may constrain universal tendencies in speech production.

Articulatory settings and L2 English coronal consonants

Background/aims: We explore the potential contribution of Articulatory Settings (AS) theory to L2 speech production research, testing the hypothesis that L2 segmental speech learning should involve a gradual, overall shift in both place and constriction degree, simultaneously affecting all consonants of a series as opposed to a set of parallel but unrelated changes in learners' production of individual sounds. Methods: We conducted an electropalatography study of four francophone learners' production of French and English word-initial and -medial /t d s z n l/ via carrier-sentence reading tasks. Results: L1-L2 differences in tongue shape are more common than those in constriction location, first and foremost for sonorants, and, thus, our results are not completely consistent with AS theory's claims. Conclusions: AS theory provides a potentially rich framework for exploring the L2 speech learning of consonantal phenomena including low-level L1-L2 differences in place of articulation. We propose that the observed lack of systematic between-language articulatory differences could be attributed to a number of factors to be explored in future research, such as the targeting of voicing and manner differences before the adjustment of small place differences as well as individual patterns of entrenchment of L1 articulatory routines.

Phylogeny and mechanisms of shared hierarchical patterns in birdsong

Organizational patterns can be shared across biological systems, and revealing the factors shaping common patterns can provide insight into fundamental biological mechanisms. The behavioral pattern that elements with more constituents tend to consist of shorter constituents (Menzerath's law [ML]) was described first in speech and language (e.g., words with more syllables consist of shorter syllables) and subsequently in music and animal communication. Menzerath's law is hypothesized to reflect efficiency in information transfer, but biases and constraints in motor production can also lead to this pattern. We investigated the evolutionary breadth of ML and the contribution of production mechanisms to ML in the songs of 15 songbird species. Negative relationships between the number and duration of constituents (e.g., syllables in phrases) were observed in all 15 species. However, negative relationships were also observed in null models in which constituents were randomly allocated into observed element durations, and the observed negative relationship for numerous species did not differ from the null model; consequently, ML in these species could simply reflect production constraints and not communicative efficiency. By contrast, ML was significantly different from the null model for more than half the cases, suggesting additional organizational rules are imposed onto birdsongs. Production mechanisms are also underscored by the finding that canaries and zebra finches reared without auditory experiences that guide vocal development produced songs with nearly identical ML patterning as typically reared birds. These analyses highlight the breadth with which production mechanisms contribute to this prevalent organizational pattern in behavior.

The differential effects of vowel and onset consonant lengthening on speech segmentation: Evidence from Taiwanese Southern Min

A review of previous speech segmentation research suggests the prediction that listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), a lexical tone language, would exploit vowel lengthening and syllable-onset consonant lengthening to locate word ends and beginnings, respectively. Yet, correlations between segment duration and tone identity in tone languages along with some TSM-specific phonological phenomena may work against such use. Two artificial language learning experiments examined TSM listeners' use of the lengthening cues. The listeners heard the words of an artificial language (e.g., /ba.nu.me/) repeated continuously and identified them in a subsequent two-alternative forced-choice test. Experiment I revealed that their segmentation benefits from and only from word-initial onset lengthening or word-final vowel lengthening, supporting the prediction. Experiment II further demonstrated that these two cues in combination synergistically support segmentation at least when compared to word-initial onset lengthening alone, consistent with previous findings regarding complementary cues. These results furnish additional evidence that vowel and onset consonant lengthening affect segmentation in different ways, possibly reflecting a functional division between vowels and consonants that is supported by some prosody-computing mechanism. Additionally, vowel lengthening seems to affect segmentation to a greater extent than onset consonant lengthening. Possible explanations for this and further issues are discussed.

Universal principles underlying segmental structures in parrot song and human speech

Despite the diversity of human languages, certain linguistic patterns are remarkably consistent across human populations. While syntactic universals receive more attention, there is stronger evidence for universal patterns in the inventory and organization of segments: units that are separated by rapid acoustic transitions which are used to build syllables, words, and phrases. Crucially, if an alien researcher investigated spoken human language how we analyze non-human communication systems, many of the phonological regularities would be overlooked, as the majority of analyses in non-humans treat breath groups, or "syllables" (units divided by silent inhalations), as the smallest unit. Here, we introduce a novel segment-based analysis that reveals patterns in the acoustic output of budgerigars, a vocal learning parrot species, that match universal phonological patterns well-documented in humans. We show that song in four independent budgerigar populations is comprised of consonant- and vowel-like segments. Furthermore, the organization of segments within syllables is not random. As in spoken human language, segments at the start of a vocalization are more likely to be consonant-like and segments at the end are more likely to be longer, quieter, and lower in fundamental frequency. These results provide a new foundation for empirical investigation of language-like abilities in other species.

Talker familiarity and the accommodation of talker variability

A fundamental problem in speech perception is how (or whether) listeners accommodate variability in the way talkers produce speech. One view of the way listeners cope with this variability is that talker differences are normalized - a mapping between talker-specific characteristics and phonetic categories is computed such that speech is recognized in the context of the talker's vocal characteristics. Consistent with this view, listeners process speech more slowly when the talker changes randomly than when the talker remains constant. An alternative view is that speech perception is based on talker-specific auditory exemplars in memory clustered around linguistic categories that allow talker-independent perception. Consistent with this view, listeners become more efficient at talker-specific phonetic processing after voice identification training. We asked whether phonetic efficiency would increase with talker familiarity by testing listeners with extremely familiar talkers (family members), newly familiar talkers (based on laboratory training), and unfamiliar talkers. We also asked whether familiarity would reduce the need for normalization. As predicted, phonetic efficiency (word recognition in noise) increased with familiarity (unfamiliar < trained-on < family). However, we observed a constant processing cost for talker changes even for pairs of family members. We discuss how normalization and exemplar theories might account for these results, and constraints the results impose on theoretical accounts of phonetic constancy.

An apparent-time study of an ongoing sound change in Seoul Korean: A prosodic account

In present-day Seoul Korean, the primary phonetic feature for the lenis–aspirated stop distinction is shifting from VOT to F0. Some previous studies have considered this sound change to be a tonogenesis, whereby the low-level F0 perturbation has developed into tonal features (L for the lenis and H for the aspirated) in the segmental phonology. They, however, have examined the stop distinction only at a phrase- or utterance-initial position. We newly explore the sound change in relation to various prosodic structural factors (position and prominence). Apparent-time production data were recorded from four speaker groups: young female, young male, old female, old male. The way the speakers use VOT versus F0 indeed varies as a function of position and prominence. Crucially, in all groups, VOT is still used for the lenis–aspirated distinction phrase-medially due to the lenis stop voicing. This role of VOT, however, is found only in the non-prominent (unfocused) condition, in which the F0 difference is reduced to a low-level perturbation effect. In the prominent (focused) context in which tones come into play, the role of VOT diminishes, led by young female speakers. These can be interpreted as a prosodically-conditioned, complementary use of the features to maintain sufficient contrast. Importantly, however, the tonal difference under focus is not bidirectionally polarized, so that F0 is not lowered for the lenis stop. A lack of direct enhancement of the distinctive L tone weakens a possibility that F0 is transphonologized to the phonemic feature system of the language. As an alternative to the view that tonal features are newly introduced in the segmental phonology, we propose a prosodic account: the sound change is best characterized as a prosodically-conditioned change in the use of the segmental voicing feature (implemented by VOT) versus already available post-lexical tones in the intonational phonology of Korean.

The versatility of creaky phonation: Segmental, prosodic, and sociolinguistic uses in the world's languages

Creaky phonation (also known as creaky voice, vocal fry, laryngealization, or glottalization) is a voice quality that refers to shortened and thickened vocal folds that vibrate at a low and quasi-regular fundamental frequency with a long period of damping. Cross-linguistically, creaky phonation can span either short or long domains. When implemented on individual vowels or consonants (as in Zapotec or Montana Salish), it can signal phonemic contrast with other voice qualities, or it can be an additional acoustic cue to enhance other contrasts, such as tone (as in Mandarin or Cantonese). Another segmental use of creaky phonation in many languages is as a variant of glottal stop. Creaky phonation can also be implemented as a prosodic element that signals the end of a phrase (as in English or Mandarin), or indicates relinquishing a conversational turn (as in Finnish). It can also express meaning in a social interaction, such as irritation (in Vietnamese). Lastly, creaky phonation can be deployed as a sociolinguistic marker to establish identities, convey affect, or distinguish one speech group from another within the same language. In some social circumstances, such as the perception that young women use creaky phonation at greater rates than men do, it can be evaluated negatively by listeners. As creaky phonation can be combined with linguistic elements at various levels and is easily perceptible, it has taken on a remarkable number of roles in our linguistic repertoires. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain.

The effect of word class on speaker-dependent information in the Standard Dutch vowel /aː/

Linguistic structure co-determines how a speech sound is produced. This study therefore investigated whether the speaker-dependent information in the vowel [aː] varies when uttered in different word classes. From two spontaneous speech corpora, [aː] tokens were sampled and annotated for word class (content, function word). This was done for 50 male adult speakers of Standard Dutch in face-to-face speech (N = 3128 tokens), and another 50 male adult speakers in telephone speech (N = 3136 tokens). First, the effect of word class on various acoustic variables in spontaneous speech was tested. Results showed that [aː]'s were shorter and more centralized in function than content words. Next, tokens were used to assess their speaker-dependent information as a function of word class, by using acoustic-phonetic variables to (a) build speaker classification models and (b) compute the strength-of-evidence, a technique from forensic phonetics. Speaker-classification performance was somewhat better for content than function words, whereas forensic strength-of-evidence was comparable between the word classes. This seems explained by how these methods weigh between- and within-speaker variation. Because these two sources of variation co-varied in size with word class, acoustic word-class variation is not expected to affect the sampling of tokens in forensic speaker comparisons.

Prosodic structurally conditioned variation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Mandarin Chinese: Its language specificity and cross-linguistic generalizability

This study compares prosodic structural effects on nasal (N) duration and coarticulatory vowel (V) nasalization in NV (Nasal-Vowel) and CVN (Consonant-Vowel-Nasal) sequences in Mandarin Chinese with those found in English and Korean. Focus-induced prominence effects show cross-linguistically applicable coarticulatory resistance that enhances the vowel's phonological features. Boundary effects on the initial NV reduced N's nasality without having a robust effect on V-nasalization, whose direction is comparable to that in English and Korean. Boundary effects on the final CVN showed language specificity of V-nasalization, which could be partly attributable to the ongoing sound change of coda nasal lenition in Mandarin.

The role of working memory in children's ability for prosodic discrimination

Previous research established that young children are sensitive to prosodic cues discriminating between syntactic structures of otherwise similarly sounding sentences in a language unknown to them. In this study, we explore the role of working memory that children might deploy for the purpose of the sentence-level prosodic discrimination. Nine-year old Slovenian monolingual and bilingual children (N = 70) were tested on a same-different prosodic discrimination task in a language unknown to them (French) and on the working memory measures in the form of forward and backward digit span and non-word repetition tasks. The results suggest that both the storage and processing components of the working memory are involved in the prosodic discrimination task.

How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech

Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts should maintain mutual predictability between language users, present evidence that the distributions of words in the empirical contexts in which they are learned and used are geometric, and thus support this. Here, we extend this analysis to a corpus of conversational English, showing that the distribution of grammatical regularities and the sub-distributions of tokens discriminated by them are also geometric. Further analyses reveal a range of structural differences in the distribution of types in parts of speech categories that further support the suggestion that linguistic distributions (and codes) are subcategorized by context at multiple levels of abstraction. Finally, a series of analyses of the variation in spoken language reveals that quantifiable differences in the structure of lexical subcategories appears in turn to systematically shape sublexical variation in speech signal.

Do Patients With Neurogenic Speech Sound Impairments Benefit From Auditory Priming With a Regular Metrical Pattern?

Purpose Earlier investigations based on word and sentence repetition tasks had revealed that the most prevalent metrical pattern in German (the trochee)-unlike the iambic pattern-facilitates articulation in patients with apraxia of speech (AOS; e.g., Aichert, Späth, & Ziegler, 2016), confirming that segmental and prosodic aspects of speech production interact. In this study, we investigated if articulation in apraxic speakers also benefits from auditory priming by speech with a regular rhythm. Furthermore, we asked if the advantage of regular speech rhythm, if present, is confined to impairments at the motor planning stage of speech production (i.e., AOS) or if it also applies to phonological encoding impairments. Method Twelve patients with AOS, 12 aphasic patients with postlexical phonological impairment (PI), and 36 neurologically healthy speakers were examined. A sequential synchronization paradigm based on a sentence completion task was conducted in conditions where we independently varied the metrical regularity of the prime sentence (regular vs. irregular prime sentence) and the metrical regularity of the target word (trochaic vs. iambic). Results Our data confirmed the facilitating effect of regular (trochaic) word stress on speech accuracy in patients with AOS (target effect). This effect could, for the first time, also be demonstrated in individuals with PI. Moreover, the study also revealed an influence of the metrical regularity of speech input in both patient groups (prime effect). Conclusions Patients with AOS and patients with PI exploited rhythmic cues in the speech of a model speaker for the initiation and the segmental realization of words. There seems to be a robust metrical influence on speech at both the phonological and the phonetic planning stages of speech production.

Gran Canarian Spanish Non-Continuant Voicing: Gradiency, Sex Differences and Perception

BACKGROUND/AIMS

This paper examines the process of postvocalic voicing in the Spanish of Gran Canaria from the point of view of language change. A perception-production study was designed to measure the extent of variation in speaker productions, explore the degree to which production is affected by perception and identify variables that can be considered markers of sound change in progress.

METHODS

20 native speakers of the dialect were asked to repeat auditory input data containing voiceless non-continuants with and without voicing.

RESULTS

Input voicing has no effect on output pronunciations, but voicing is highly variable, with both phonetic and social factors involved. Most importantly, a clear lenition pattern was identified based on such indicators as consonant duration, intensity ratio, absence of burst and presence of formants, with the velar /k/ as the most affected segment. Furthermore, strong social implications were identified: voicing degrees and rates depend both on the level of education and on the gender of the speaker.

CONCLUSION

The results of the study suggest that the interplay of external and internal factors must be investigated more thoroughly to better address the question of phonetic variation and phonologisation of contrasts in the context of language change.

An Electropalatographic Study of Variability in Arrernte Consonant Production

Arrernte is a language with a relatively large consonant inventory, and a relatively small vowel inventory. In this study, electropalatography is used to examine lingual consonant production according to lexical stress, in the context of the two most common vowels in the language, the central vowels /a/ and /ə/. The consonants examined are /t̪ n̪ l̪ t n l ʈ ɳ ɭ ɻ c ɲ ʎ j k ŋ w/. Data are for two female speakers and are taken from a large database of read texts. Results show very little articulatory variation in consonant production depending on the contexts examined. Although consonants before a stressed vowel have greater duration than consonants before an unstressed vowel, there is no consistent difference in tongue-palate contact patterns between the two prosodic contexts. The main exception to this pattern is the retroflex stop, nasal and lateral, which show a more posterior contact before an unstressed vowel: it is suggested that this is because the preceding stressed vowel contains the primary cues to retroflex place of articulation.

Current models of speech motor control: A control-theoretic overview of architectures and properties

This paper reviews the current state of several formal models of speech motor control, with particular focus on the low-level control of the speech articulators. Further development of speech motor control models may be aided by a comparison of model attributes. The review builds an understanding of existing models from first principles, before moving into a discussion of several models, showing how each is constructed out of the same basic domain-general ideas and components-e.g., generalized feedforward, feedback, and model predictive components. This approach allows for direct comparisons to be made in terms of where the models differ, and their points of agreement. Substantial differences among models can be observed in their use of feedforward control, process of estimating system state, and method of incorporating feedback signals into control. However, many commonalities exist among the models in terms of their reliance on higher-level motor planning, use of feedback signals, lack of time-variant adaptation, and focus on kinematic aspects of control and biomechanics. Ongoing research bridging hybrid feedforward/feedback pathways with forward dynamic control, as well as feedback/internal model-based state estimation, is discussed.

Articulatory, acoustic, and prosodic accommodation in a cooperative maze navigation task

This study uses a maze navigation task in conjunction with a quasi-scripted, prosodically controlled speech task to examine acoustic and articulatory accommodation in pairs of interacting speakers. The experiment uses a dual electromagnetic articulography set-up to collect synchronized acoustic and articulatory kinematic data from two facing speakers simultaneously. We measure the members of a dyad individually before they interact, while they are interacting in a cooperative task, and again individually after they interact. The design is ideally suited to measure speech convergence, divergence, and persistence effects during and after speaker interaction. This study specifically examines how convergence and divergence effects during a dyadic interaction may be related to prosodically salient positions, such as preceding a phrase boundary. The findings of accommodation in fine-grained prosodic measures illuminate our understanding of how the realization of linguistic phrasal structure is coordinated across interacting speakers. Our findings on individual speaker variability and the time course of accommodation provide novel evidence for accommodation at the level of cognitively specified motor control of individual articulatory gestures. Taken together, these results have implications for understanding the cognitive control of interactional behavior in spoken language communication.

Vowel Reduction in Coratino (South Italy): Phonological and Phonetic Perspectives

Vowel reduction may involve phonetic reduction processes, with nonreached targets, and/or phonological processes in which a vowel target is changed for another target, possibly schwa. Coratino, a dialect of southern Italy, displays complex vowel reduction processes assumed to be phonological. We analyzed a corpus representative of vowel reduction in Coratino, based on a set of a hundred pairs of words contrasting a stressed and an unstressed version of a given vowel in a given consonant environment, produced by 10 speakers. We report vowelformants together with consonant-to-vowel formant trajectories and durations, and show that these data are rather in agreement with a change in vowel target from /i e ɛ·ɔ u/ to schwa when the vowel is a non-word-initial unstressed utterance, unless the vowel shares a place-of-articulation feature with the preceding or following consonant. Interestingly, it also appears that there are 2 targets for phonological reduction, differing in F1 values. A "higher schwa" - which could be considered as /ɨ/ - corresponds to reduction for high vowels /i u/ while a "lower schwa" - which could be considered as /ə/ - corresponds to reduction for midhigh.

Focus and boundary effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Korean with implications for cross-linguistic similarities and differences

This study investigates focus and boundary effects on Korean nasal consonants and vowel nasalization. Under focus, nasal consonants lengthen in CVN# but shorten in #NVC, enhancing [nasal] vs [oral]. Vowels resist nasalization under focus, enhancing [oral]. Domain-initial nasal consonants denasalize, exercising no coarticulatory influence. Domain-final nasal consonants shorten counter to expectation, although vowel nasalization increases. Comparison with English data reveals similarities (focus-induced coarticulatory resistance) despite cross-linguistic differences in marking prominence, but it also suggests that prosodic-structural conditioning of non-contrastive vowel nasalization, albeit based on phonetic underpinnings of coarticulatory process, is fine-tuned in language-specific ways, resulting in cross-linguistic variation.

Effects of Word Position on the Acoustic Realization of Vietnamese Final Consonants

A variety of studies have shown differences between phonetic features of consonants according to their prosodic and/or syllable (onset vs. coda) positions. However, differences are not always found, and interactions between the various factors involved are complex and not well understood. Our study compares acoustical characteristics of coda consonants in Vietnamese taking into account their position within words. Traditionally described as monosyllabic, Vietnamese is partially polysyllabic at the lexical level. In this language, tautosyllabic consonant sequences are prohibited, and adjacent consonants are only found at syllable boundaries either within polysyllabic words (CVC.CVC) or across monosyllabic words (CVC#CVC). This study is designed to examine whether or not syllable boundary types (interword vs. intraword) have an effect on the acoustic realization of codas. The results show significant acoustic differences in consonant realizations according to syllable boundary type, suggesting different coarticulation patterns between nuclei and codas. In addition, as Vietnamese voiceless stops are generally unreleased in coda position, with no burst to carry consonantal information, our results show that a vowel's second half contains acoustic cues which are available to aid in the discrimination of place of articulation of the vowel's following consonant.

Why do children pay more attention to grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences?

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for the salience of grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences. We measured 22-month-olds' listening times to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with third person singular -s. Crucially, by cross-splicing the speech stimuli, acoustic enhancement and sensory and recall advantages were fully crossed. Only children presented with the verb in sentence-final position, a position with sensory and recall advantages, distinguished between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Thus, sensory and recall advantages alone were necessary and sufficient to make grammatical morphemes at ends of sentences salient. These general processing constraints privilege ends of sentences over middles, regardless of the acoustic enhancement.

The prosodic domain of phonological encoding: Evidence from speech errors

Phonological encoding of segments is thought to occur within a prosodically-defined frame, but it is not clear which of the constituent/s within the prosodic hierarchy (syllables, phonological words, intonational phrases and utterances) serve/s as the domain of phonological encoding. This experiment investigated whether segmental speech errors elicited in tongue-twisters were influenced by position within prosodic constituents above the level of the phonological word. Forty-four participants produced six repetitions each of 40 two-intonational phrase tongue-twisters with error-prone word-initial "target" segments in phrase-initial and phrase-final words. If the domain of phonological encoding is the intonational phrase, we hypothesised that segments within a current intonational phrase would interact in more errors than would segments across intonational phrase boundaries. Participants made more anticipatory than perseveratory errors on target segments in phrase-initial words as predicted. They also made more perseveratory than anticipatory errors on targets in phrase-final words, but only in utterance-final phrases. These results suggest that the intonational phrase is one domain of phonological encoding, and that segments for upcoming phrases are activated while current phrases are being articulated.

Lexical Segmentation in Artificial Word Learning: The Effects of Converging Sublexical Cues

This study examines how French listeners segment and learn new words of artificial languages varying in the presence of different combinations of sublexical segmentation cues. The first experiment investigated the contribution of three different types of sublexical cues (acoustic-phonetic, phonological and prosodic cues) to word learning. The second experiment explored how participants specifically exploited sublexical prosodic cues. Whereas complementary cues signaling word-initial and word-final boundaries had synergistic effects on word learning in the first experiment, the two manipulated prosodic cues redundantly signaling word-final boundaries in the second experiment were rank-ordered with final pitch variations being more weighted than final lengthening. These results are discussed in light of the notions of cue type, cue position and cue efficiency.

Explaining Coronal Reduction: Prosodic Structure and Articulatory Posture

Consonant reduction is often treated as an allophonic process at the phonological planning level, with one production target (allophone) being substituted for another. We propose that, alternatively, reduction can be the result of an online process driven by prosodically conditioned durational variability and an invariant production target. We show that this approach can account for patterns of coronal stop (/t/, /d/, and /n/) production in both American English and Spanish. Contrary to effort-driven theories of reduction, we show that reduction does notdepend on changes to gestural stiffness. Moreover, we demonstrate how differences between and within a language in the particular articulatory postures used to produce different coronal stops automatically lead to reduction to what have normally been considered distinct allophones - coronal approximants ([ð̞]) and flaps ([ɾ]). In this way, our approach allows us to understand different outcomes of coronal stop reduction as the dynamic interaction of a single process (durationally driven undershoot) and variable spatial targets. We show that these patterns are reflected across a wide variety of languages, and show how alternative outcomes of reduction may fit within the same general framework.

The effects of Thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation on speech dynamics in patients with Essential Tremor: An articulographic study

Acoustic studies have revealed that patients with Essential Tremor treated with thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) may suffer from speech deterioration in terms of imprecise oral articulation and reduced voicing control. Based on the acoustic signal one cannot infer, however, whether this deterioration is due to a general slowing down of the speech motor system (e.g., a target undershoot of a desired articulatory goal resulting from being too slow) or disturbed coordination (e.g., a target undershoot caused by problems with the relative phasing of articulatory movements). To elucidate this issue further, we here investigated both acoustics and articulatory patterns of the labial and lingual system using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) in twelve Essential Tremor patients treated with thalamic DBS and twelve age- and sex-matched controls. By comparing patients with activated (DBS-ON) and inactivated stimulation (DBS-OFF) with control speakers, we show that critical changes in speech dynamics occur on two levels: With inactivated stimulation (DBS-OFF), patients showed coordination problems of the labial and lingual system in terms of articulatory imprecision and slowness. These effects of articulatory discoordination worsened under activated stimulation, accompanied by an additional overall slowing down of the speech motor system. This leads to a poor performance of syllables on the acoustic surface, reflecting an aggravation either of pre-existing cerebellar deficits and/or the affection of the upper motor fibers of the internal capsule.

Children's early bilingualism and musical training influence prosodic discrimination of sentences in an unknown language

This study investigated whether early bilingualism and early musical training positively influence the ability to discriminate between prosodic patterns corresponding to different syntactic structures in otherwise phonetically identical sentences in an unknown language. In a same-different discrimination task, participants (N = 108) divided into four groups (monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, bilingual non-musicians, and bilingual musicians) listened to pairs of short sentences in a language unknown to them (French). In discriminating phonetically identical but prosodically different sentences, musicians, bilinguals, and bilingual musicians outperformed the controls. However, there was no interaction between bilingualism and musical training to suggest an additive effect. These results underscore the significant role of both types of experience in enhancing the listeners' sensitivity to prosodic information.

Learning Biases Underlie "Universals" in Avian Vocal Sequencing

Biological predispositions in vocal learning have been proposed to underlie commonalities in vocal sequences, including for speech and birdsong, but cultural propagation could also account for such commonalities [1-4]. Songbirds such as the zebra finch learn the sequencing of their acoustic elements ("syllables") during development [5-8]. Zebra finches are not constrained to learn a specific sequence of syllables, but significant consistencies in the positioning and sequencing of syllables have been observed between individuals within populations and between populations [8-10]. To reveal biological predispositions in vocal sequence learning, we individually tutored juvenile zebra finches with randomized and unbiased sequences of syllables and analyzed the extent to which birds produced common sequences. In support of biological predispositions, birds tutored with randomized sequences produced songs with striking similarities. Birds preferentially started and ended their song sequence with particular syllables, consistently positioned shorter and higher frequency syllables in the middle of their song, and sequenced their syllables such that pitch alternated across adjacent syllables. These patterns are reminiscent of those observed in normally tutored birds, suggesting that birds "creolize" aberrant sequence inputs to produce normal sequence outputs. Similar patterns were also observed for syllables that were not used for tutoring (i.e., unlearned syllables), suggesting that motor biases could contribute to sequence learning biases. Furthermore, zebra finches spontaneously produced acoustic patterns that are commonly observed in speech and music, suggesting that sensorimotor processes that are shared across a wide range of vertebrates could underlie these patterns in humans.

Initial consonant deletion in bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children with speech sound disorders

The purpose of this study was to utilize a theoretical model of bilingual speech sound production as a framework for analyzing the speech of bilingual children with speech sound disorders. In order to distinguish speech difference from speech disorder, we examined between-language interaction on initial consonant deletion, an error pattern found cross-linguistically in the speech of children with speech sound disorders. Thirteen monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Spanish-and English-speaking preschoolers with speech sound disorders were audio-recorded during a single word picture-naming task and their recordings were phonetically transcribed. Initial consonant deletion errors were examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. An analysis of cross-linguistic effects and an analysis of phonemic complexity were performed. Monolingual English-speaking children exhibited initial consonant deletion at a significantly lower rate than bilingual children in their Spanish productions; however, no other quantitative differences were found across groups or languages. Qualitative differences yielded between-language interaction in the error patterns of bilingual children. Phonemic complexity appeared to play a role in initial consonant deletion. Evidence from the speech of bilingual children with speech sound disorders supports analysing bilingual speech using a cross-linguistic framework. Both theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Inducing speech errors in dysarthria using tongue twisters

Although tongue twisters have been widely use to study speech production in healthy speakers, few studies have employed this methodology for individuals with speech impairment. The present study compared tongue twister errors produced by adults with dysarthria and age-matched healthy controls. Eight speakers (four female, four male; mean age = 54.5 years) with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria of varying aetiology (cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, multiple system atrophy) and eight controls (four female, four male; mean age = 56.9 years) were audio-recorded producing tongue twisters. One word in each tongue twister was marked for prominence. Speakers with dysarthria produced significantly more errors and spoke slower than healthy controls. The effect of prominence was significant for both groups-words spoken with prosodic prominence were significantly less error prone compared with words without prominence. While both groups produced most errors on words in the third position (of four-word utterances), speakers with dysarthria also produced high rates of errors on the first and fourth words. This preliminary investigation demonstrated the promise of applying the tongue twister paradigm to speakers with dysarthria and contributes to the evidence base for the implementation of prosodic strategies in speech intervention.

Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

The current study investigates whether and how focus, phrase boundary and newness can be simultaneously marked in speech prosody in Mandarin Chinese. Homophones were used to construct three syntactic structures that differed only in boundary condition, focus was elicited by preceding questions, while newness of postboundary words was manipulated as whether they had occurred in the previous text. Systematic analysis of F0 and duration showed that (1) duration was a reliable correlate of boundary strength regardless of focus location, while involvement of F0 was only in terms of lowering of phrase-final F0 minima and raising of phrase-initial F0 minima at a relatively strong boundary, (2) postfocus compression (PFC) of F0 was applied across all boundaries, including those with long silent pauses (over 200 ms), and postfocus F0 was lowered to almost the same degree in all boundary conditions, and (3) newness of postfocus words had no systematic effect on F0 or duration. These results indicate that not only functionally focus is independent of prosodic structure and newness, but also phonetically its realization is separate from boundary marking. Focus is signaled mainly through pitch range adjustments, which can occur even across phrase breaks, whereas boundaries are mostly signaled by duration adjustments.

Effects of Word Frequency and Transitional Probability on Word Reading Durations of Younger and Older Speakers

High-frequency units are usually processed faster than low-frequency units in language comprehension and language production. Frequency effects have been shown for words as well as word combinations. Word co-occurrence effects can be operationalized in terms of transitional probability (TP). TPs reflect how probable a word is, conditioned by its right or left neighbouring word. This corpus study investigates whether three different age groups-younger children (8-12 years), adolescents (12-18 years) and older (62-95 years) Dutch speakers-show frequency and TP context effects on spoken word durations in reading aloud, and whether age groups differ in the size of these effects. Results show consistent effects of TP on word durations for all age groups. Thus, TP seems to influence the processing of words in context, beyond the well-established effect of word frequency, across the entire age range. However, the study also indicates that age groups differ in the size of TP effects, with older adults having smaller TP effects than adolescent readers. Our results show that probabilistic reduction effects in reading aloud may at least partly stem from contextual facilitation that leads to faster reading times in skilled readers, as well as in young language learners.

Enhancement effects of clear speech and word-initial position in Korean glides

The current study investigated the enhancement effect in Korean speakers' clear speech and word-initial position, using acoustic analyses of the Korean glides /w/ and /j/. The results showed that the transitions of glides /w/ and /j/ at onset were enhanced in clear speech with an expanded vowel space. An expanded vowel space was also observed in the word-initial position, but the expansion was not statistically significant. However, the significant interaction between speaking style and word position revealed that the articulatory and global modifications in clear speech were noticeably greater at onset in the word-medial compared to the word-initial position. Also, the mid-front vowel /e/ shifted downward and leftward in clear speech, indicating that mid-front vowels are fronted and lowered in clear speech. As a language-specific issue, no phonetic evidence was found supporting the existence of two Korean glides, /wε/ and /we/, even in clear speech and word-initial position, indicating a diachronic sound merger of these two glides. In addition, the glide /je/ after a consonant was neutralized into /e/ in casual speech. These findings suggest a relationship between speaking style effects, word position effects, and changing phonetic targets due to diachronic sound change.

A Kinematic Study of Prosodic Structure in Articulatory and Manual Gestures: Results from a Novel Method of Data Collection

The primary goal of this work is to examine prosodic structure as expressed concurrently through articulatory and manual gestures. Specifically, we investigated the effects of phrase-level prominence (Experiment 1) and of prosodic boundaries (Experiments 2 and 3) on the kinematic properties of oral constriction and manual gestures. The hypothesis guiding this work is that prosodic structure will be similarly expressed in both modalities. To test this, we have developed a novel method of data collection that simultaneously records speech audio, vocal tract gestures (using electromagnetic articulometry) and manual gestures (using motion capture). This method allows us, for the first time, to investigate kinematic properties of body movement and vocal tract gestures simultaneously, which in turn allows us to examine the relationship between speech and body gestures with great precision. A second goal of the paper is thus to establish the validity of this method. Results from two speakers show that manual and oral gestures lengthen under prominence and at prosodic boundaries, indicating that the effects of prosodic structure extend beyond the vocal tract to include body movement.

Stability and Variability in Slovak Prosodic Boundaries

BACKGROUND/AIM

Encoding intended meanings in the type and strength of prosodic boundaries and strategies for communicating these meanings in ambient noise use similar prosodic cues. We analyze how increasing the level of ambient noise affects the realization of Slovak prosodic boundaries.

METHODS

Five native speakers of Slovak read sentences, manipulating the boundary type (weak, rise, fall) and the location of pre-boundary pitch accent. Ambient noise of several levels was administered via headphones. Acoustic and articulatory data (electromagnetometry) were collected.

RESULTS

Under normal condition, boundary strength is signaled with longer pre-boundary rhymes, more frequent pauses, greater crossboundary f0 resets and jaw displacement. The strength of falls is realized in crossboundary features (pauses, f0 reset), and rises in pre-boundary features (rhyme duration, f0 range). Pitch-accented rhymes are strengthened in all features, but f0 range. In noise, the increase in boundary strength is weak, and falls strengthen more than rises. F0 targets for falls and rises are adjusted in addition to noiseinduced global f0 scaling and lengthening.

CONCLUSION

Hyper-articulation of prosodic boundaries in ambient noise is not robust and uniform; rather, durational, f0 and jaw displacement features co-create complex prosodic patterns in a complementary and synergetic manner based on affordances in normal speech.