Intonation in neurogenic foreign accent syndrome

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a motor speech disorder in which changes to segmental as well as suprasegmental aspects lead to the perception of a foreign accent in speech. This paper focuses on one suprasegmental aspect, namely that of intonation. It provides an in-depth analysis of the intonation system of four speakers with FAS with the aim of establishing the intonational changes that have taken place as well as their underlying origin. Using the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonational analysis, four different levels of intonation, i.e. inventory, distribution, realisation and function, were examined. Results revealed that the speakers with FAS had the same structural inventory at their disposal as the control speakers, but that they differed from the latter in relation to the distribution, implementation and functional use of their inventory. In contrast to previous findings, the current results suggest that these intonational changes cannot be entirely attributed to an underlying intonation deficit but also reflect secondary manifestations of physiological constraints affecting speech support systems and compensatory strategies. These findings have implications for the debate surrounding intonational deficits in FAS, advocating a reconsideration of current assumptions regarding the underlying nature of intonation impairment in FAS

Disentangling accent from comprehensibility

The goal of this study was to determine which linguistic aspects of second language speech are related to accent and which to comprehensibility. To address this goal, 19 different speech measures in the oral productions of 40 native French speakers of English were examined in relation to accent and comprehensibility, as rated by 60 novice raters and three experienced teachers. Results showed that both constructs were associated with many speech measures, but that accent was uniquely related to aspects of phonology, including rhythm and segmental and syllable structure accuracy, while comprehensibility was chiefly linked to grammatical accuracy and lexical richness

Discourse structure and information structure : interfaces and prosodic realization

In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions

Improved status following behavioural intervention in a case of severe dysarthria with stroke aetiology

There is little published intervention outcome literature concerning dysarthria acquired from stroke. Single case studies have the potential to provide more detailed specification and interpretation than is generally possible with larger participant numbers and are thus informative for clinicians who may deal with similar cases. Such research also contributes to the future planning of larger scale investigations. Behavioural intervention is described which was carried out with a man with severe dysarthria following stroke, beginning at seven and ending at nine months after stroke. Pre-intervention stability between five and seven months contrasted with significant improvements post-intervention on listener-rated measures of word and reading intelligibility and communication effectiveness in conversation. A range of speech analyses were undertaken (comprising of rate, pause and intonation characteristics in connected speech and phonetic transcription of single word production), with the aim of identifying components of speech which might explain the listeners’ perceptions of improvement. Pre- and post intervention changes could be detected mainly in parameters related to utterance segmentation and intonation. The basis of improvement in dysarthria following intervention is complex, both in terms of the active therapeutic dimensions and also the specific speech alterations which account for changes to intelligibility and effectiveness. Single case results are not necessarily generalisable to other cases and outcomes may be affected by participant factors and therapeutic variables, which are not readily controllable

The restricted access of information structure to syntax : a minority report

This paper sketches the view that syntax does not directly interact with information structure. Therefore, syntactic data are of little help when one wants to narrow down the interpretation of terms such as “focus”, “topic”, etc

Acoustic emphasis in four year olds

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children’s spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were elicited from 4 year olds who were asked to describe events in a video. Children were found to place more acoustic prominence both on ‘new’ words and on words that were ‘given’ but had shifted to a more accessible position within the discourse. This effect of accessibility concurs with recent studies of adult speech. We conclude that, by age four, children show appropriate, adult-like use of acoustic prominence, suggesting sensitivity to a variety of discourse distinctions

Speech Characteristics of Japanese Speakers Affecting American and Japanese Listener Evaluations

The study examines what pronunciation features (i.e., segmental and suprasegmental features, as well as other acoustic properties such as speech rate, intensity, pitch, and pitch range) affect the intelligibility of Japanese learners of English, when judged by native-speaking (NS; American) and non-native-speaking (NNS; Japanese) listeners. Kashiwagi and Snyder (2008) concluded, based on both statistical and interview data, that intelligibility and accentedness judgments were quasi-independent of each other, and that segmental features in the speech samples of Japanese learners were perceived both by NS (American) and NNS (Japanese) listeners to be more problematic than suprasegmentals. The present study is designed to verify these conclusions by re-examining the data with further statistical procedures. Additional data on speech rate, intensity, pitch, and pitch range were also added to the statistical analyses to explore the issue of intelligibility. The resulting data suggest that non-native pronunciation of segmentals, especially of certain vowels, affect the judgments of intelligibility most strongly, and that intelligibility scores and accentedness ratings are controlled by different sets of factors. Speech rate, intensity, pitch and pitch range are also found to have some effects. The data also suggest that NS (American) and NNS (Japanese) listeners are affected differently by certain pronunciation features

On some factors affecting the choice of tune in Russian wh-questions

The results of a production experiment that investigated prosodic variability in Russian information-seeking wh-questions are reported. Three wh-questions in four focus conditions, with and without initial particle ?, were elicited in a reading task from 20 native speakers of Russian. The data generally corroborate prior descriptions and demonstrate that a large inventory of tunes is used by Russian speakers in wh-questions. Namely, several patterns with one or two “falling” pitch accents (downstepped and non-downstepped) can be recognized in the data, as well as one “rising” pattern containing a high edge tone. Preliminary phonological analysis is proposed for these tunes. The effects of two factors on the choice of the “nuclear pitch accent + edge tone” configuration (“falling” H*+L L-% vs. “rising” L* H-%) were tested statistically. The results demonstrate that contrastive focus condition restricts the use of the “rising” pattern while the presence of phrase-initial particle ? has an opposite, but weaker effect on the choice of tune

THE EMERGENT PROSODIC SYSTEM(S) OF BILBAO-AREA STANDARD BASQUE

The aim of this study is to contribute to the larger body of research concerned with the prosodic systems of the Basque dialects currently spoken in Southern Basque country. More specifically, the author focuses on Standard Basque from the Bilbao area and its potential prosodic system(s). Standard Basque was phonologically codified by the Basque Academy, but there was no prosodic system provided by the Basque Academy. Although initial investigations have been undertaken by Hualde, more current research has shown that the standard spoken outside of the classroom is different from that which is taught (Lantto, 2019; Rodríguez-Ordóñez, 2016). Given that prosody is rarely taught within the classroom, it would not be surprising for differences to be found. The most obvious difference between Standard Basque and some of the traditional dialects is that Standard has no word-level contrastive stress; functions such as singular/plural distinctions and case are marked by postpositions. What has been determined is that the prosodic system of Standard Basque, or Batua, patterns closely to that of Gipuzkoan Basque. However, as noted by Hualde & Elordieta (2014), there is little knowledge regarding the variation of the functioning of Standard Basque’s acoustic correlates. As stated by Elordieta & Hualde (2001), it is only after a comparison of the intonational characteristics of the currently spoken dialects has been conducted that a typological categorization of Basque prosodic systems can be made. As Standard Basque was not codified with a prosodic system, it ultimately comes down to what individual speakers and speaker groups have done to account for this in their standard dialect productions. It cannot be presumed that the prosody of SB (Standard Basque) found in one region will exactly line up with prosody found in other regions; these too would need to be documented and analyzed as prosodic sub-systems. One major gap in current research is the analysis of intonation at the phrasal level; Gaminde et al. (2011) look at acoustic correlates and their respective force, but only at the word level. While Hualde looks at intonation, the study uses Gipuzkoan Basque used as a substratum, which constricts the findings to that particular dialectal region. For this reason, the dialect of Batua spoken in the Bilbao area proves to be worth investigating. The local dialect of the area was long ago lost, such that Batua could be said to be the Bilbao dialect. The revitalization movement of the 1960s brought about a significant number of new speakers, who learned the standard variety in school. To add to this, Bilbao’s presence as a major commercial hub has made it so that there is a vast number of regional vernaculars circulating throughout the area, all in contact with one another. For this study, data was taken from 6 Basque-Spanish bilinguals whose primary dialect of Basque is the standard, that participated in two experimental tasks: eliciting words in isolation in one task and eliciting neutral declaratives and yes-no questions in the other. These tasks were a means of gathering raw data on the intonation of both word and phrasal level productions. Results supports the previous findings of Gaminde et al. (2015) as well as those of Aurrekoetxea et al. (2015), in terms of how stress is realized in Standard Basque when taking into account factors such as syllable weight and syllable count. What’s more, findings also support the proposition of Hualde & Beristain (to appear) that inter-speaker variation will be heavily affected by the contact speakers have with other dialects of Basque