On the role of articulatory prosodies in German message decoding

A theoretical framework for speech reduction is outlined in which 'coarticulation' and 'articulatory control' operate on sequences of 'opening-closing gestures' in linguistic and communicative settings, leading to suprasegmental properties - 'articulatory prosodies' - in the acoustic output. In linking this gestalt perspective in speech production to the role of phonetic detail in speech understanding, this paper reports on perception experiments that test listeners' reactions to varying extension of an 'articulatory prosody of palatality' in message identification. The point of departure for the experimental design was the German utterance ich kann Ihnen das ja mal sagen 'I can mention this to you' from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech, which contains the palatalized stretch [k̟(h)ε̈n(j)n(j)əs] for the sequence of function words /kan i.n(kə)n das/ kann Ihnen das. The utterance also makes sense without the personal pronoun Ihnen. Systematic experimental variation has shown that the extent of palatality has a highly significant influence on the decoding of Ihnen and that the effect of nasal consonant duration depends on the extension of palatality. These results are discussed in a plea to base future speech perception research on a paradigm that makes the traditional segment-prosody divide more permeable, and moves away from the generally practised phoneme orientation

Automatic prosodic analysis for computer aided pronunciation teaching

Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech..

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish

This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are linguistically encoded surprise, or mirativity, and obviousness. An empirical investigation via an audio-enhanced production experiment finds that mirativity and obviousness are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamatives are found not to differ significantly in intonational marking from neutral declaratives, showing that they need not be miratives. Moreover, we find that intonational marking on different discourse particles in natural dialogue correlates with their meaning contribution without being fully determined by it. In part, these findings quantitatively confirm previous qualitative findings on the meaning of intonational configurations in Madrid Spanish. But they also add new insights on the role intonation plays in the negotiation of commitments and expectations between interlocutors

Intonation & Prosodic Structure in Beaver (Athabaskan) - Explorations on the language of the Danezaa

This dissertation reports on qualitative and quantitative investigations on the intonation and the prosodic structure of Beaver, an endangered Athabaskan language of Northwest Canada. The focus of the study is on the Northern Alberta dialect of Beaver, which has lexical tone and is a high marking Athabaskan language. The theoretical framework of the analysis is the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory. Following some background on intonation and prosody as well as the theoretical modelling, we summarize contributions dealing with intonation in languages that share certain features with Beaver, i.e. tone languages, polysynthetic languages and finally the related Athabaskan languages. After a brief introduction to the grammatical structure and the sociolinguistic situation of Northern Alberta Beaver, the database of the present study is introduced. It consists of narratives and task oriented dialogues as well as recordings elicited with stimuli sets. In the domain of intonation and prosody, three topics are investigated in detail. First, domain initial prosodic strengthening is analyzed. We show that a boundary initial position at higher constituents of the prosodic hierarchy has a lengthening effect on VOT of both aspirated and unaspirated plosives, while nasals are shortened in this context. Additionally, effects of morphological category (stem vs. prefix) and intervocalic position � two mechanisms that have been described for other Athabaskan languages � are also attested for Beaver to some degree. Second, the intonational tones that have been found in the corpus are analyzed within the AM theory. In Northern Alberta Beaver, boundary tones and phrase accents make up the intonational inventory. Most notably, an initial phrase accent is used to mark contrast, which is a device that has not been reported for the marking of information structure in other languages. Lastly, the interaction of information structure with pitch range in complex noun phrases is tested in a controlled experiment. Here, we find that pitch range is significantly wider for new information than for given, which is due to a raising of the top line, while the baseline is not affected to the same extend

An acoustic-phonetic descriptive analysis of Kagoshima Japanese tonal phenomena

This thesis presents a linguistic-phonetic description of the acoustic properties of the contrastive accentual patterns in Kagoshima Japanese. Kagoshima Japanese is one of the traditionally so-called two pattern varieties of Japanese. Different phonological analyses of the contrast are described in detail in order to situate the phonetic description. Data from four native speakers—two males and two females—are used, appropriately log z-score normalised to yield mean normalised FO curves necessary for linguistic-phonetic description. Normalisation procedures are discussed, justified and explained. The acoustic realisation of the Kagoshima Japanese contrast is specified on words from one to seven syllables in length, and a surface representation proposed within Autosegmental-Metrical theory. Some microprosodic aspects are also examined, especially in terms of the effect of the syllable-rhyme structure (i.e. vowel length, final nasal) on FO. In addition is examined what happens when accentual units are juxtaposed in three types of syntagms (noun phrase e.g. nagaka tamago; possessive phrase e.g. mago no kimono; simple sentence, e.g. sakana ga nigeru). Where appropriate, comparisons are drawn with Standard Japanese to highlight similarities and differences in tonality. It is shown that, like Standard Japanese, the Kagoshima Japanese accentual contrast is realised as ± falling pitch/FO, and also like SJ, the contrast is manifested globally, throughout the word. Microprosodically, it is shown that syllable-final nasals are associated with higher FO, not necessarily on the nasal itself, and that heavy syllables also evince a higher FO. Finally, two extrinsic allotones—level and falling—are demonstrated for one of the accentual types, depending on its rhyme constituents. As far as the juxtaposed data are concerned, it is shown that, unlike Standard Japanese, no deaccentuation is involved. Moreover, a differential effect is demonstrated, in terms of FO downstep, with respect to syntactic type: noun phrases behave differently from possessive phrases and simple sentences in showing no downstep. It is suggested that the magnitude of downstep in Kagoshima Japanese may be smaller than in Standard Japanese. It is proposed that the linguistic-phonetic representations derived in this thesis can be used not only to investigate within-language linguistic features (e.g. the Kagoshima Japanese accentual contrast), but also to compare Kagoshima with the corresponding linguistic-phonetic representations of other Japanese varieties

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar- based approaches to prosody. Trough four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody. About the Author: Francesco Cangemi Francesco Cangemi (1983) studied Literature and Philology in Naples, completing his undergraduate studies with a published MA dissertation on vowel systems in southern Italian dialects. After receiving his PhD in Linguistics from Aix-Marseille University with a thesis on underspecification in prosodic categories, he is currently working as a post-doc researcher in Cologne, focussing on the encoding and decoding of linguistic prominence, and in Zürich, focussing on morphosyntactic agreement in Italian dialects