Unifying Amplitude and Phase Analysis: A Compositional Data Approach to Functional Multivariate Mixed-Effects Modeling of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is characterized by being a tonal language; the pitch (or $F_0$) of its utterances carries considerable linguistic information. However, speech samples from different individuals are subject to changes in amplitude and phase which must be accounted for in any analysis which attempts to provide a linguistically meaningful description of the language. A joint model for amplitude, phase and duration is presented which combines elements from Functional Data Analysis, Compositional Data Analysis and Linear Mixed Effects Models. By decomposing functions via a functional principal component analysis, and connecting registration functions to compositional data analysis, a joint multivariate mixed effect model can be formulated which gives insights into the relationship between the different modes of variation as well as their dependence on linguistic and non-linguistic covariates. The model is applied to the COSPRO-1 data set, a comprehensive database of spoken Taiwanese Mandarin, containing approximately 50 thousand phonetically diverse sample $F_0$ contours (syllables), and reveals that phonetic information is jointly carried by both amplitude and phase variation.Comment: 49 pages, 13 figures, small changes to discussio

Listeners normalize speech for contextual speech rate even without an explicit recognition task

Speech can be produced at different rates. Listeners take this rate variation into account by normalizing vowel duration for contextual speech rate: An ambiguous Dutch word /m?t/ is perceived as short /mAt/ when embedded in a slow context, but long /ma:t/ in a fast context. Whilst some have argued that this rate normalization involves low-level automatic perceptual processing, there is also evidence that it arises at higher-level cognitive processing stages, such as decision making. Prior research on rate-dependent speech perception has only used explicit recognition tasks to investigate the phenomenon, involving both perceptual processing and decision making. This study tested whether speech rate normalization can be observed without explicit decision making, using a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm. Results show that a fast precursor sentence makes an embedded ambiguous prime (/m?t/) sound (implicitly) more /a:/-like, facilitating lexical access to the long target word "maat" in a (explicit) lexical decision task. This result suggests that rate normalization is automatic, taking place even in the absence of an explicit recognition task. Thus, rate normalization is placed within the realm of everyday spoken conversation, where explicit categorization of ambiguous sounds is rare

Phonological complexity, segment rate and speech tempo perception

Studies of speech tempo commonly use syllable or segment rate as a proxy measure for perceived tempo. In languages whose phonologies allow substantial syllable complexity these measures can produce figures on quite different scales; however, little is known about the correlation between syllable and segment rate measurements on the one hand and naïve listeners’ tempo judgements on the other. We follow up on the findings of one relevant study on German [1], which suggest that listeners attend to both syllable and segment rates in making tempo estimates, through a weighted average of the rates in which syllable rate carries more weight. We report on an experiment in which we manipulate phonological complexity in English utterance pairs that are constant in syllable rate. Listeners decide for each pair which utterance sounds faster. Our results suggest that differences in segment rate that do not correspond to differences in syllable rate have little impact on perceived speech tempo in English

The polylogue project: part 1: shortmind

The aim of this collaborative project [edited by F. Senn, E. Mihalycsa and J. Wawrzycka], the work of ten authors and covering more than ten languages, is to chart the possibilities of translation to recreate in the TL texts, the anomalous, elliptic, pre-grammatical, inchoative forms that became almost a signature mark of the Joycean interior monologue, and which here are called 'shortmind'. It therefore addresses such issues as indeterminacy, (anomalous) word order, punctuation, ellipsis, polysemy, ungrammaticality, linguistic sub-standards etc., and examines the (un)willingness of translation texts to breach ingrained rules and norms of (syntactic, narrative) control, correctness and coherence, in the TL culture