Polysyllabic Shortening and Word-Final Lengthening in English

Windmann A, Simko J, Wagner P. Polysyllabic Shortening and Word-Final Lengthening in English. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2015. 2015: 36-40

Duración del pie y acortamiento polisilábico entre los hablantes árabes de ingles

This study investigates a neglected aspect of second language acquisition. It compares the timing patterns adopted by speakers of English as a foreign language with those of English native speakers. The paper aims to explore the extent to which Arab speakers, whose L1 is not as stress-timed as English is, can acquire the mechanisms of polysyllabic shortening in English. Three groups (English native speakers and two groups of Jordanian speakers of English) were requested to read three sets of monosyllabic, disyllabic and trisyllabic words in a carrier sentence. The total length of the word and the vowel duration in all the words were measured. Clear differences between the native speaker group and the non-native speaker groups were attested. Results show that isochronous foot duration and polysyllabic shortening are a tendency in English speech timing, rather than a fundamental process. Furthermore, acquiring the timing patterns of the stress-timed English rhythm is challenging to Arab speakers.Este estudio investiga un aspecto poco abordado de la adquisición de una segunda lengua. Compara los patrones temporales adoptados por los hablantes de inglés como lengua extranjera con aquellos propios de los anglohablantes nativos. El objetivo del artículo es averiguar la medida en la que los locutores árabes -cuya L1 no es acentualmente acompasada como lo es el inglés- pueden adquirir los mecanismos del acortamiento polisilábico de esta lengua. Se pidió a tres grupos de hablantes (uno de anglohablantes nativos y dos de hablantes jordanos de inglés) que leyeran tres conjuntos de palabras monosílabas, disílabas y trisílabas en una frase portadora. Se midió la longitud total de la palabra y la duración de la vocal en todas esas palabras, y se hallaron claras diferencias entre el grupo de hablantes nativos y los dos de no nativos. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto que en la temporización del habla en inglés la duración isócrona del pie y el acortamiento polisilábico constituyen más una tendencia que un proceso fundamental. Además, se comprueba que la adquisición de los patrones temporales del ritmo acentualmente acompasado del inglés es un desafío para los hablantes árabes

From Serbo-Croatian to Indo-European

The history of Slavic accentuation is complex. As a result, the significance of the Slavic accentual evidence is not immediately obvious to the average Indo-Europeanist. In this contribution I intend to render the material more easily accessible to the non-specialist. I shall focus on the Serbo-Croatian dialectal area, where the Proto-Slavic accentual system is better preserved than elsewhere. The main point of reference will be the neo-Štokavian system which was codified in the 19th century as a basis for the standard languages

Stressed vowel duration and phonemic length contrast

As far as phonemic length contrast is concerned, we observe a high degree of durational overlap between phonemically long and short vowels in monosyllabic CVC words (which is enforced by a greater pitch excursion), whereas in polysyllables the differences seem to be perceptually non-salient (>40 ms, cf. Lehiste 1970). This suggests that the differences in vowel duration are not significant enough to underlie phonological length contrast

On the relative chronology of Slavic accentual developments

Last year Georg Holzer proposed a relative chronology of accentual developments in Slavic (2005). Here I shall compare his chronology with the one I put forward earlier (1975, 1989a, 2003) and discuss the differences. For the sake of convenience, I first reproduce the relevant parts of my chronology, omitting asterisks before pre-historic Slavic forms. 1. Proto-Indo-European. 2. Dialectal Indo-European. 3. Early Balto-Slavic. During this period the characteristic lateral mobility of Balto-Slavic accent patterns came into existence. 4. Late Balto-Slavic. During this period the Balto-Slavic accent patterns obtained their final shape

Rise and development of Slavic accentual paradigms

It appears that the complexity of Slavic historical accentology is prohibitive for most non-specialists in the field. It may therefore be useful to approach the subject from a number of different angles in order to render it more accessible to a wider audience. In the following I shall discuss the separate accent paradigms and their development from the Late Balto-Slavic system, which is structurally similar to that of modern Lithuanian, up to the end of the Proto-Slavic period, when the system resembled what we find in modern Serbo-Croatian. The numbering of the stages 1.0 through 10.12 is the same as in my earlier publications (1989, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2008b). For the rise and development of the accentual system up to the end of the Balto-Slavic period I may refer to my discussion (2006b, 2008a) of Olander’s dissertation (2006). It resulted in a system of four major and two minor accent types

Acoustic correlates of phrase-internal lexical boundaries in Dutch

The aim of this study was to determine if Dutch speakers reliably signal phrase-internal lexical boundaries, and if so, how. Six speakers recorded 4 pairs of phonemically identical strong-weak-strong (SWS) strings with matching syllable boundaries but mismatching intended word boundaries (e.g. reis # pastei versus reispas # tij, or more broadly C1V2(C)#C2V2(C)C3V3(C) vs. C1V2(C)C2V2(C)#C3V3(C)). An Analysis of Variance revealed 3 acoustic parameters that were significantly greater in S#WS items (C2 DURATION, RIME1 DURATION, C3 BURST AMPLITUDE) and 5 parameters that were significantly greater in the SW#S items (C2 VOT, C3 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, RIME3 DURATION, and V2 AMPLITUDE). Additionally, center of gravity measurements suggested that the [s] to [t] coarticulation was greater in reis # pa[st]ei versus reispa[s] # [t]ij. Finally, a Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the 3 parameters (RIME1 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, and C3 DURATION) contributed most reliably to a S#WS versus SW#S classification

Communicative function and prosodic form in speech timing

Listeners can use variation in speech segment duration to interpret the structure of spoken utterances, but there is no systematic description of how speakers manipulate timing for communicative ends. Here I propose a functional approach to prosodic speech timing, with particular reference to English. The disparate findings regarding the production of timing effects are evaluated against the functional requirement that communicative durational variation should be perceivable and interpretable by the listener. In the resulting framework, prosodic structure is held to influence speech timing directly only at the heads and edges of prosodic domains, through large, consistent lengthening effects. As each such effect has a characteristic locus within its domain, speech timing cues are potentially disambiguated for the listener, even in the absence of other information. Diffuse timing effects – in particular, quasi-rhythmical compensatory processes implying a relationship between structure and timing throughout the utterance – are found to be weak and inconsistently observed. Furthermore, it is argued that articulatory and perceptual constraints make shortening processes less useful as structural cues, and they must be regarded as peripheral, at best, in a parsimonious and functionally-informed account