Questioning and responding in Italian

Questions are design problems for both the questioner and the addressee. They must be produced as recognizable objects and must be comprehended by taking into account the context in which they occur and the local situated interests of the participants. This paper investigates how people do ‘questioning’ and ‘responding’ in Italian ordinary conversations. I focus on the features of both questions and responses. I first discuss formal linguistic features that are peculiar to questions in terms of intonation contours (e.g. final rise), morphology (e.g. tags and question words) and syntax (e.g. inversion). I then show additional features that characterize their actual implementation in conversation such as their minimality (often the subject or the verb is only implied) and the usual occurrence of speaker gaze towards the recipient during questions. I then look at which social actions (e.g. requests for information, requests for confirmation) the different question types implement and which responses are regularly produced in return. The data shows that previous descriptions of “interrogative markings” are neither adequate nor sufficient to comprehend the actual use of questions in natural conversation

ACOUSTIC CORRELATES OF LEXICAL STRESS IN NATIVE SPEAKERS OF UYGHUR AND L2 LEARNERS

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed syllables from unstressed syllables; however, a language like Japanese only uses fundamental frequency to distinguish the stressed syllables from unstressed syllables. This study investigates the stress pattern of Uyghur, a Turkic language, as produced by native and non-native speakers. The first three experiments provide a detailed phonetic analysis in order to determine the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur. In Experiment 1, six disyllabic minimal pairs (e.g., A-cha, a-CHA), contrasting in location of stress, were produced by five native Uyghur speakers with three repetitions in a fixed sentence context. In order to generalize the results from the small set of minimal pairs in the first experiment, Experiment 2 examined the initial syllable of disyllabic nouns that contrasted in first-syllable stress (e.g., DA-ka, da-LA) while syllabic structure (CV versus CVC) was also manipulated. In both experiments, average fundamental frequency, syllable duration, and average intensity were collected in accented and unaccented syllables. The results from both experiments showed that there were significant differences in duration and intensity between stressed and unstressed syllables, with the intensity differences moderated by syllable structure. No difference was found in fundamental frequency. Experiment 3 investigated the role of F0 in lexical stress. Experiment 3 focused on the interaction between sentential intonation and lexical stress in which the declarative assertion sentence (falling F0) and the declarative question sentence (rising F0) were used. The results confirmed the previous experiments. No interaction between sentential intonation and lexical stress indicated that the obtained duration effect was due to lexical stress. There were no effects of fundamental frequency or intensity in terms of stress. While previous studies have classified Uyghur as a pitch-accent and a stress-accent language, the present acoustic data suggest that native speakers make no use of pitch cues to signal stress in Uyghur. Previous research has focused on the acquisition of lexical stress by non-native speakers of English. This study also examined the acquisition of lexical stress by English learners of Uyghur. Five highly advanced English learners of Uyghur produced the six minimal pairs and disyllabic nouns contrasting in the first syllables. The stimuli that were produced by L2 learners were the same as in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Highly advanced Uyghur learners used duration as a cue and did not use fundamental frequency and intensity as stress cues. The results indicated that native-like lexical stress can be acquired at the high advanced level

There is no Post-focal De-phrasing in English

This paper studies the relationship between prosodic phrasing and prominence by addressing the questions of whether every prosodic phrase must have a head (a most prominent sub-constituent), and if so, how the head is marked. I study these questions by examining the intermediate phrase (iP) in English. If every iP must have a head, and this head must be marked by a pitch accent, then in an environment without any pitch accent, there should be no head/non-head distinction. And if there is no head, there should be no iP in this context either. I conducted a production study in English, and found durational evidence suggesting the presence of iP boundaries in an accent-less context. I also searched for durational evidence for iP-level prominence distinctions in this context, but here my results are mixed. One theoretical possibility that is compatible with my findings is that every phrase must have a head, but the head of an iP can be marked by something other than pitch accent, for example by phrasal stress

Differences in acoustically determined sentence stress between native and L2 speakers of Finland Swedish

This study describes a pilot attempt to use acoustically determined sentence stress in distinguishing native and L2 speakers of Finland Swedish at different proficiency levels. The study is part of the DigiTala project that examines and develops automatic tools for spoken L2 assessment. Stressed syllables were detected in 235 L2 and 30 L1 speech samples using combinations of f0, intensity, and duration. Differences were found in the relative number of stressed syllables between native and L2 speakers using f0 and duration or all three features. Further research with more consistent speech data is needed to establish reliable automatic measures of sentence stress.nonPeerReviewe

Individual differences in the discrimination of novel speech sounds: effects of sex, temporal processing, musical and cognitive abilities

This study examined whether rapid temporal auditory processing, verbal working memory capacity, non-verbal intelligence, executive functioning, musical ability and prior foreign language experience predicted how well native English speakers (N = 120) discriminated Norwegian tonal and vowel contrasts as well as a non-speech analogue of the tonal contrast and a native vowel contrast presented over noise. Results confirmed a male advantage for temporal and tonal processing, and also revealed that temporal processing was associated with both non-verbal intelligence and speech processing. In contrast, effects of musical ability on non-native speech-sound processing and of inhibitory control on vowel discrimination were not mediated by temporal processing. These results suggest that individual differences in non-native speech-sound processing are to some extent determined by temporal auditory processing ability, in which males perform better, but are also determined by a host of other abilities that are deployed flexibly depending on the characteristics of the target sounds

Cross-linguistic perception of pitch of Chinese dyslexic children

This study examined the relationship between perception of basic auditory processing measures, detection of suprasegmental features and bilingual literacy among Hong Kong children with and without reading difficulties. Sixty native Cantonese speakers with the average age of 7; 11 participated in the study. Forty-four children were age-matched controls and 16 of them were diagnosed to have dyslexia. A series of tasks assessing auditory processing ability, detection of suprasegmental features of both Chinese and English and literacy were given all participants. Tone detection was the strongest predictor to all the scores of Chinese literacy task. There was no significant difference in sensitivity to English prosody task between groups. For auditory processing measures, significant differences between groups were only found in 1 rise and intensity task. Regression analysis showed that auditory threshold of rise time discrimination predicted 20% unique variance of sensitivity to tone detection. We concluded that detection of lexical tone in Chinese was an important linguistic marker that may help diagnose children with reading difficulties in Chinese. Normal children made use of intensity cues to detect rise time. Suggestions were also made to improve the validity of English prosody sensitivity task.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science