In the borderland between song and speech

This book focuses on vocal expressions in the borderland between song and speech. It spans across several linguistic and musical milieus in societies where oral transmission of culture dominates. ‘Vocal expression’ is an alternative word for ‘song’ which is free from bias based on cultural and research-related traditions. The borderland between song and speech is a segment of the larger continuum that extends from speech to song. These vocal expressions are endangered to the same degree as the languages they represent. Perspectives derived from ethnomusicology, prosody, syntax, and semantics are combined in the research, in which performance templates serve as an analytical tool. The focus is on the techniques that make performance possible and on the transmission of these techniques. The performance templates serve to organize the vocal expression of words by combining musical and linguistic conventions. It is shown that all the cultures studied have principles for organizing these parameters; but each does this in its own unique way while meeting a number of basic needs on the part of human society, particularly communal interaction and interaction with the spirit world. A working method is developed that makes it possible to gain qualitative knowledge from a large body of material within a comparatively limited period of time

The Prosodic System of Southern Bobo Madare

This dissertation describes the word-level and phrase-level prosodic system of Southern Bobo Madare (Bobo), a Mande language of Burkina Faso. I examine tonal aspects of Bobo’s prosodic system and provide an extensive phonetic description of the use of non-modal phonation and final lengthening to mark utterance type. The data examined include both elicitation tasks and spontaneous speech tasks. The work is conducted within the framework of autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert 1980). Several aspects of the word-level prosodic system are discussed. Previous work on Bobo (Morse, 1976; Le Bris & Prost, 1981; Sanou, 1993) disagree on the inventory of contour tones and the existence of word stress. I present an analysis in support of three contour tones: High-Low, Low-High, and Low-Mid. I do not find clear phonetic evidence of word stress. Phonological analysis supports the existence of stress however: The distribution of reduced vowels supports the existence of iambic prosodic feet, which is common in Mande languages. Furthermore, the distribution of tone melodies is best explained by assuming that tone melodies are assigned to the foot rather than to the word or morpheme, similar to Leben’s (2001) proposal for tonal feet in Bamana. While both word-level and phrase-level prosody are discussed, most attention is given to phrase-level prosodic phenomena. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the phrase-level prosody of African tone languages (Downing & Rialland, 2016). However, detailed descriptions of the phrase-level prosody of Mande languages still remain extremely rare. This is the first such description of a Mande language with three tone levels. Bobo makes relatively little use of intonational tones. Declarative statements are marked only through final lengthening and in some cases non-modal vowel phonation. Polar questions show some characteristics of the areal “lax question prosody” described by Rialland (2009): L% boundary tone, which is concatenated onto the string of lexical tones, extreme lengthening of the phrase-final segment (always a vowel in Bobo), and breathy utterance termination. This L% boundary tone is the only clear case of an intonational tone in Bobo. Wh-questions can (but typically do not) have an L% boundary tone and have a lesser degree of phrase-final lengthening than polar questions. Negated statements do not have special prosodic characteristics. The phrase-level prosodic hierarchy of Bobo is relatively flat, consisting of only the intonational phrase. In addition to investigating the prosodic marking of utterance type, I present an investigation into focus marking in Bobo. I examine the responses to wh-questions and corrections, two contexts in which focus-marking is typically found cross-linguistically. I find no evidence of morphosyntactic or prosodic focus marking in these contexts. Bobo is therefore an additional example of an African tone language without obligatory focus marking in these contexts. The relevance of these results to our current understanding of prosodic typology is discussed throughout.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163107/1/ksher_1.pd

Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish

One of the most important functions of prosody is to divide the flow of speech into chunks. The chunking, or prosodic phrasing, of speech plays an important role in both the production and perception of speech. This study represents a move away from the laboratory speech examined in previous, related studies on prosodic phrasing in Swedish, since a spontaneous, Southern Swedish speech material is investigated. The study is, however, not primarily intended as a study of the Southern Swedish dialect; rather Southern Swedish is used as a convenient object on which to test various hypotheses about the phrasing function of prosody in spontaneous speech. The study comprises both analyses of production data and perception experiments, and both the phonetics and phonology of prosodic phrasing is dealt with. First, the distribution of prosodic phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech is examined by considering it as a reflection of optimality theoretic constraints that restrain the production and perception of speech. Secondly, the phonetic realization of prosodic phrase boundaries is investigated in a study on articulation rate changes within the prosodic phrase. Evidence of phrase-final lengthening, a reduction of the articulation rate in the final part of the prosodic phrase, is found. The tonal means used to signal coherence within the prosodic phrase is subsequently investigated. An attempt is made to test the two Lund intonation models’ capacities for describing spontaneous speech. The two approaches have different implications for the amount of preplanning needed, which makes them particularly interesting to compare by testing spontaneous data. The results indicate that no or little preplanning is needed to produce tonally coherent phrases. No evidence is found to suggest e.g. that speakers accommodate for the length of the upcoming phrase by starting longer phrases with a higher F0 than short phrases. An explanation is sought for variation in F0 starting points found in the data despite F0’s insensitivity to phrase length. It is concluded that F0 is used to signal coherence even across prosodic phrase boundaries. It is furthermore found that tonal coherence signals are used to override strong boundary signals in spontaneous speech, thereby making initially unplanned additions possible. Finally, the perception of boundary strength is examined in two perception experiments. Listeners are found to agree well in their perceptual judgments of boundary strength, and it is shown that the main correlate to perceived boundary strength in spontaneous speech is pause length. The useful distinction between weak, prosodic phrase boundaries and strong, prosodic utterance boundaries in descriptions of read speech is found to be inappropriate for descriptions of spontaneous speech. It fails to capture the conflicting local and global signals of boundary strength and coherence that arise when strong boundary signals are overriden by coherence signals. The possibility to use conflicting signals in this way is seen as an important asset to the speaker as it makes changes in the speech plan possible, and it is regarded to be a characteristic of prosodic phrasing in spontaneous speech

The study of tone in languages with a quantity contrast

This paper deals with the study of tone in languages that additionally have a phonological contrastive of quantity, such as vowel length or stress. In such complex word-prosodic systems, tone and the quantity contrast(s) can be fully independent of one another, or they may interact. Both of these configurations are illustrated in this paper, and the phonetic pressures underlying the development of interactions are laid out. The paper pays particular attention to the challenge of investigating complex word-prosodic systems. Central to the approach advocated here is the combination of qualitative fieldwork data collection methods with instrumental analysis. *This paper is in the series How to Study a Tone Language, edited by Steven Bird and Larry HymanNational Foreign Language Resource Cente

On the natural history of preaspirated stops

This dissertation makes two contributions, one empirical, the other theoretical. Empirically, the dissertation deepens our understanding of the lifecycle and behavior of the preaspirated stop, an extremely rare phonological feature. I show that in most confirmed cases, preaspirated stops develop from earlier voiceless geminate stops, less commonly from nasal-voiceless stop clusters. When decaying, preaspirated stops typically develop into unaspirated voiceless stops, or undergo buccalization to become preaffricated. More rarely, decaying preaspirated stops may trigger tonogenesis, or undergo spirantization or nasalization. Phonologically, preaspirated stops usually function as positionally conditioned allophones of underlying aspirated voiceless stops contrasting with voiceless unaspirated stops. The dissertation tests three theoretical frameworks. First, the State-Process model claims that the synchronic distribution of linguistic features offers insight into their rates of innovation and transmission. Conventionally, the rarity of preaspirated stops is attributed to a presumed low rate of transmission: they are rare because they are hard to hear. However, the geographic and genetic distribution of preaspirated stops fit the State-Process model's prototype of an infrequently innovated but robustly transmitted linguistic feature. Further, I show experimentally that preaspirated stops are no more difficult to distinguish from unaspirated stops than are much more abundant postaspirated stops. Second, the dissertation tests the success of two models, one cognitive, the other phonetic/diachronic, at accounting for two place-based asymmetries in Scottish Gaelic preaspiration. Whereas a conventional Optimality-Theoretic analysis of these asymmetries overgenerates, an analysis modified via Steriade's P-map Hypothesis resolves this overgeneration. The P-map analysis depends on congruent perceptual scales, which the perception experiment (above) confirms: participants' confusion rates closely match the place-based asymmetries observed in Gaelic. The competing innocent misperception model depends on the presence of phonetic precursors to produce an ambiguous phonological signal, which listeners may interpret differently than intended by the speaker, leading to an alteration in a segment's underlying form. A series of production experiments identifies potential precursors, but also reveals between-speaker variation more compatible with the P-map account than innocent misperception, again lending support to Steriade's hypothesis

Universal and language-specific processing : the case of prosody

A key question in the science of language is how speech processing can be influenced by both language-universal and language-specific mechanisms (Cutler, Klein, & Levinson, 2005). My graduate research aimed to address this question by adopting a crosslanguage approach to compare languages with different phonological systems. Of all components of linguistic structure, prosody is often considered to be one of the most language-specific dimensions of speech. This can have significant implications for our understanding of language use, because much of speech processing is specifically tailored to the structure and requirements of the native language. However, it is still unclear whether prosody may also play a universal role across languages, and very little comparative attempts have been made to explore this possibility. In this thesis, I examined both the production and perception of prosodic cues to prominence and phrasing in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese. In focus production, our research revealed that English and Mandarin speakers were alike in how they used prosody to encode prominence, but there were also systematic language-specific differences in the exact degree to which they enhanced the different prosodic cues (Chapter 2). This, however, was not the case in focus perception, where English and Mandarin listeners were alike in the degree to which they used prosody to predict upcoming prominence, even though the precise cues in the preceding prosody could differ (Chapter 3). Further experiments examining prosodic focus prediction in the speech of different talkers have demonstrated functional cue equivalence in prosodic focus detection (Chapter 4). Likewise, our experiments have also revealed both crosslanguage similarities and differences in the production and perception of juncture cues (Chapter 5). Overall, prosodic processing is the result of a complex but subtle interplay of universal and language-specific structure

Nuclear Intonation in Swedish : Evidence from Experimental-Phonetic Studies and a Comparison with German

This thesis investigates Swedish intonation patterns and their interaction with word accent realisation in various pragmatic conditions, using German as a reference language. The point of departure is the wide-spread assumption that Swedish, as a language with a tonal word accent distinction, has a considerably smaller repertoire of nuclear intonation contours than German and other so-called intonation languages. In particular, whereas only one sentence accent has been modelled for Swedish so far (a high focal accent H-), a multiple paradigmatic contrast of sentence accents (e.g. H*, L*+H, H+L*) has been assumed for German. It is hypothesised, however, that the contemporary models of German and Swedish intonation are based on different research traditions, and hence, that the intonation of the two languages might be more similar than commonly assumed. Three production studies, based on recordings from 21 speakers, and one perception (reaction time) experiment involving 20 listeners are reported. In the first two production studies, the intonation of test phrases elicited in German and Swedish speakers in a variety of pragmatic conditions is compared by analysing F0 and to some degree duration patterns. The most central pragmatic distinction treated in this thesis involves the focussing of new vs. given information, the latter case occurring in confirmations. The main result of these studies is that Swedish and German seem to have a similar inventory of nuclear intonation patterns, which have basically the same pragmatic functions in the two languages. For instance, an "early fall", a pattern involving a fall onto a low-pitched stressed vowel, can signal a confirmation in both German and Swedish. This result suggests that, in addition to the well-established high accent (H-), Swedish also has a paradigmatic choice of sentence accents, involving a falling accent (H+L-). The third production study and the reaction time experiment concentrate on the "early fall" found in confirmations and investigate the interaction of word accent and intonation. The results show that the Swedish word accent distinction can be neutralised in connection with the "early fall", a situation which may be related to the perceptual enhancement of the intonational contrast between a high (H-) and a falling (H+L-) sentence accent

The Pitch Range of Italians and Americans. A Comparative Study

Linguistic experiments have investigated the nature of F0 span and level in cross-linguistic comparisons. However, only few studies have focused on the elaboration of a general-agreed methodology that may provide a unifying approach to the analysis of pitch range (Ladd, 1996; Patterson and Ladd, 1999; Daly and Warren, 2001; Bishop and Keating, 2010; Mennen et al. 2012). Pitch variation is used in different languages to convey different linguistic and paralinguistic meanings that may range from the expression of sentence modality to the marking of emotional and attitudinal nuances (Grice and Baumann, 2007). A number of factors have to be taken into consideration when determining the existence of measurable and reliable differences in pitch values. Daly and Warren (2001) demonstrated the importance of some independent variables such as language, age, body size, speaker sex (female vs. male), socio-cultural background, regional accents, speech task (read sentences vs. spontaneous dialogues), sentence type (questions vs. statements) and measure scales (Hertz, semitones, ERB etc.). Coherently with the model proposed by Mennen et al. (2012), my analysis of pitch range is based on the investigation of LTD (long-term distributional) and linguistic measures. LTD measures deal with the F0 distribution within a speaker’s contour (e.g. F0 minimum, F0 maximum, F0 mean, F0 median, standard deviation, F0 span) while linguistic measures are linked to specific targets within the contour, such as peaks and valleys (e.g. high and low landmarks) and preserve the temporal sequences of pitch contours. This investigation analyzed the characteristics of pitch range production and perception in English sentences uttered by Americans and Italians. Four experiments were conducted to examine different phenomena: i) the contrast between measures of F0 level and span in utterances produced by Americans and Italians (experiments 1-2); ii) the contrast between the pitch range produced by males and females in L1 and L2 (experiment 1); iii) the F0 patterns in different sentence types, that is, yes-no questions, wh-questions, and exclamations (experiment 2); iv) listeners’ evaluations of pitch span in terms of ±interesting, ±excited, ±credible, ±friendly ratings of different sentence types (experiments 3-4); v) the correlation between pitch span of the sentences and the evaluations given by American and Italian listeners (experiment 3); vi) the listeners’ evaluations of pitch span values in manipulated stimuli, whose F0 span was re-synthesized under three conditions: narrow span, original span, and wide span (experiment 4); vii) the different evaluations given to the sentences by male and female listeners. The results of this investigation supported the following generalizations. First, pitch span more than level was found to be a cue for non-nativeness, because L2 speakers of English used a narrower span, compared to the native norm. What is more, the experimental data in the production studies indicated that the mode of sentences was better captured by F0 span than level. Second, the Italian learners of English were influenced by their L1 and transferred L1 pitch range variation into their L2. The English sentences produced by the Italians had overall higher pitch levels and narrower pitch span than those produced by the Americans. In addition, the Italians used overall higher pitch levels when speaking Italian and lower levels when speaking English. Conversely, their pitch span was generally higher in English and lower in Italian. When comparing productions in English, the Italian females used higher F0 levels than the American females; vice versa, the Italian males showed slightly lower F0 levels than the American males. Third, there was a systematic relation between pitch span values and the listeners’ evaluations of the sentences. The two groups of listeners (the Americans and the Italians) rated the stimuli with larger pitch span as more interesting, exciting and credible than the stimuli with narrower pitch span. Thus, the listeners relied on the perceived pitch span to differentiate among the stimuli. Fourth, both the American and the Italian speakers were considered more friendly when the pitch span of their sentences was widened (wide span manipulation) and less friendly when the pitch span was narrowed (narrow span manipulation). This happened in all the stimuli regardless of the native language of the speakers (American vs. Italian)

Cue Integration and Contrast Shifts: Experimental and Typological Studies

Auditory Enhancement has been put forth as an explanation for why certain acoustic phonetic cues co-vary to signal phonological contrasts more often than others. Under this account, listeners more readily associate two cues if they produce the same auditory effect, making the cues perceptually inseparable. Traditionally, evidence for enhancement has come from studies showing perceptual integration between enhancing cues, but even cues that do not share the same auditory effect have been shown to perceptually integrate. Further, language experience with co-variation between cues is often a confound in these studies.In this dissertation, I present new evidence in favour of auditory enhancement from four experiments and one typological study.In the first set of experiments, I use a modified cue weighting paradigm that mimics diachronic contrast shifts. Listeners categorizing synthesized speech stimuli were forced to shift their attention between a pair of acoustic cues based on how informative each cue was to the contrast. This was done for a pair of enhancing cues, pitch and breathiness, and a pair of non-enhancing cues, pitch and vowel duration, both of which have been shown to perceptually integrate. For each pair of cues, I tested two groups of listeners – English listeners, who had no phonemic experience with either cue pair, and Hani (Tibeto-Burman) listeners who had experience with both pairs of cues co-varying in the same contrast. The extent to which listeners were able to shift attention between non-enhancing cues was predicted to reflect their language experience. For enhancing cues, attentional shift was predicted to also be conditioned by whether the cues were in an enhancing relationship. These predictions were borne out, but there was an unpredicted finding that shifting between the enhancing cues was asymmetric.This asymmetry was further explored in two experiments. The first of these investigated whether the asymmetry could be caused by both listener groups having more linguistic experience with pitch than with breathiness. Two additional groups of listeners were thus tested using the same paradigm: Tone listeners, who used pitch phonemically, and Phonation listeners, who used breathiness phonemically. Both of these groups also exhibited the same asymmetry, showing that the phenomenon is language-general.In the final experiment, I tested the hypothesis that the asymmetry in attentional shift was caused by an asymmetric perceptual dependency between pitch and breathiness. Listeners categorized stimuli for which one cue was informative but the other was completely neutralized. The amount of attention listeners paid to the uninformative cue was predicted to differ if the percept of one cue was dependent on the other but not vice versa. Results from this experiment provided weak evidence in favour of the hypothesis. Finally, I conducted a cross-linguistic typological survey of the synchronic co-variation and diachronic contrast transfer between the cue pairs I tested experimentally. While the cues in both pairs co-vary synchronically, only the enhancing cues participate in contrast transfer. Furthermore, the transfer of phonological contrast between the enhancing cues occurs overwhelmingly in the direction that matches the asymmetry in attentional shift observed in the lab. The experimental and typological studies in this dissertation provide support for Auditory Enhancement, demonstrating that cues that converge on the same auditory effect are treated differently by listeners compared to cues that do not. Based on the results, I argue that i) auditory enhancement and perceptual integration should remain separate notions, and ii) perceptual associations that are not learned through experience may be asymmetric, but learned associations are necessarily symmetric

Lexical tones and morphotonology

Yongning Na, also known as Mosuo, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Southwest China. This book provides a description and analysis of its tone system, progressing from lexical tones towards morphotonology. Tonal changes permeate numerous aspects of the morphosyntax of Yongning Na. They are not the product of a small set of phonological rules, but of a host of rules that are restricted to specific morphosyntactic contexts. Rich morphotonological systems have been reported in this area of Sino-Tibetan, but book-length descriptions remain few. This study of an endangered language contributes to a better understanding of the diversity of prosodic systems in East Asia. The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006