Universal and language-specific processing : the case of prosody

A key question in the science of language is how speech processing can be influenced by both language-universal and language-specific mechanisms (Cutler, Klein, & Levinson, 2005). My graduate research aimed to address this question by adopting a crosslanguage approach to compare languages with different phonological systems. Of all components of linguistic structure, prosody is often considered to be one of the most language-specific dimensions of speech. This can have significant implications for our understanding of language use, because much of speech processing is specifically tailored to the structure and requirements of the native language. However, it is still unclear whether prosody may also play a universal role across languages, and very little comparative attempts have been made to explore this possibility. In this thesis, I examined both the production and perception of prosodic cues to prominence and phrasing in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese. In focus production, our research revealed that English and Mandarin speakers were alike in how they used prosody to encode prominence, but there were also systematic language-specific differences in the exact degree to which they enhanced the different prosodic cues (Chapter 2). This, however, was not the case in focus perception, where English and Mandarin listeners were alike in the degree to which they used prosody to predict upcoming prominence, even though the precise cues in the preceding prosody could differ (Chapter 3). Further experiments examining prosodic focus prediction in the speech of different talkers have demonstrated functional cue equivalence in prosodic focus detection (Chapter 4). Likewise, our experiments have also revealed both crosslanguage similarities and differences in the production and perception of juncture cues (Chapter 5). Overall, prosodic processing is the result of a complex but subtle interplay of universal and language-specific structure

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

LANGUAGE CONTACT AND COVERT PROMINENCE IN THE SḤERĒT-JIBBĀLI LANGUAGE OF OMAN

This thesis reports on a phonetic production study, the results of which support the existence of a complex word-prosodic system for the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli language of Dhofar, Oman. In the language, stress seems to co-occur in some lexical items with a high tone. In the discussion, a mechanism for the emergence of this system is proposed as the reflex of a typological feature held in common with the related language, Soqotri, and as justification for an Eastern Modern South Arabian subgroup consisting of Sḥerēt-Jibbāli and Soqotri

'What does the cow say?' An exploratory analysis of onomatopoeia in early phonological development

This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia – an area of phonological development that until now has been largely overlooked. Infants produce many onomatopoeia in their earliest words, which are often disregarded in phonological analyses owing to their marginal status in adult languages. It is often suggested that onomatopoeia may be easier for infants to learn because of the iconicity that is present in these forms; this corresponds to Imai and Kita’s (2014) ‘sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis’, as well as Werner and Kaplan’s theoretical work Symbol Formation (1963). However, neither of these accounts considers the role of phonological development in infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia. This thesis presents a series of six studies with a range of perspectives on our central research question: is there a role for onomatopoeia in phonological development? Two analyses of longitudinal diary data address the nature of onomatopoeia in early production, while two eye-tracking studies consider the nature of iconicity in onomatopoeia and whether or not this has a perceptual advantage in early development. The role of the caregiver is then considered, with a prosodic analysis of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech and a longitudinal perspective of the role of onomatopoeia in infant-caregiver interactions. The contributions from thesis are threefold. First, we offer empirical evidence towards an understanding of how onomatopoeia fit within an infant’s wider phonological development, by showing how onomatopoeia facilitate early perception, production and interactions. Second, our results illustrate how these forms are an important aspect of phonological development and should not be overlooked in infant language research, as has often been the case in the development literature. Finally, these findings expand the iconicity research by showing that onomatopoeia do not present an iconic advantage in language learning, as has so often been assumed by theorists in the field

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

The production and perception of peripheral geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Arabic

Gemination is typologically common word-medially but is rare at the periphery of the word (word-initially and -finally). In line with this observation, prior research on production and perception of gemination has focused primarily on medial gemination. Much less is known about the production and perception of peripheral gemination. This PhD thesis reports on comprehensive articulatory, acoustic and perceptual investigations of geminate-singleton contrasts according to the position of the contrast in the word and in the utterance. The production component of the project investigated the articulatory and acoustic features of medial and peripheral gemination of voiced and voiceless coronal stops in Modern standard Arabic and regional Arabic vernacular dialects, as produced by speakers from two disparate and geographically distant countries, Morocco and Lebanon. The perceptual experiment investigated how standard and dialectal Arabic gemination contrasts in each word position were categorised and discriminated by three groups of non-native listeners, each differing in their native language experience with gemination at different word positions. The first experiment used ultrasound and acoustic recordings to address the extent to which word-initial gemination in Moroccan and Lebanese dialectal Arabic is maintained, as well as the articulatory and acoustic variability of the contrast according to the position of the gemination contrast in the utterance (initial vs. medial) and between the two dialects. The second experiment compared the production of word-medial and -final gemination in Modern Standard Arabic as produced by Moroccan and Lebanese speakers. The aim of the perceptual experiment was to disentangle the contribution of phonological and phonetic effects of the listeners’ native languages on the categorisation and discrimination of non-lexical Moroccan gemination by three groups of non-native listeners varying in their phonological (native Lebanese group and heritage Lebanese group, for whom Moroccan is unintelligible, i.e., non-native language) and phonetic-only (native English group) experience with gemination across the three word positions. The findings in this thesis constitute important contributions about positional and dialectal effects on the production and perception of gemination contrasts, going beyond medial gemination (which was mainly included as control) and illuminating in particular the typologically rare peripheral gemination

Intonation in Luo

This thesis investigates the intonation of Luo. It shows how intonation distinguishes sentences. It also investigates how information structure (i.e. focus, dislocations and topics) is intonationally cued in a sentence. The aim is to establish the phonological and phonetic representation of Luo intonation by examining the factors that contribute to the observed F0 contours. Data were collected in Rorya and Tarime districts in Tanzania, where Luo is predominantly spoken. The materials designed comprise of scripted Luo sentences, Swahili sentences to be translated into Luo and picture-based tasks. The analysis is based on the Auto-segmental metrical theory which maps phonological elements to continuous acoustic parameters (Ladd, 1996, 2008). It is found that Luo is a tone-terracing language with four lexical tones: High, Low, Falling and Rising. The observed downtrends are downstep, declination and final lowering. Downstep is the most significant process, contrasting automatic and non-automatic downstep. The latter has no evidence of floating L and thus attributed to right edge boundary effect. Declination is observed in all-High and all-Low tone sequences, as a phonetic effect. Final lowering is also observed as a final effect in both declaratives and questions. Downstep is also a final effect triggered by a boundary L%. Questions are produced with Pitch Range Expansion triggered by a left edge -H intonational tone. There is no prominence on focused constituents but focus constructions are produced with a higher register. Luo dislocations are asymmetrical, with right dislocations phrased with the main clause while left dislocations are phrased separately from the main clause. Complex clauses, except complementizer clauses, are recursive

Chinese Tones: Can You Listen With Your Eyes?:The Influence of Visual Information on Auditory Perception of Chinese Tones

CHINESE TONES: CAN YOU LISTEN WITH YOUR EYES? The Influence of Visual Information on Auditory Perception of Chinese Tones YUEQIAO HAN Summary Considering the fact that more than half of the languages spoken in the world (60%-70%) are so-called tone languages (Yip, 2002), and tone is notoriously difficult to learn for westerners, this dissertation focused on tone perception in Mandarin Chinese by tone-naïve speakers. Moreover, it has been shown that speech perception is more than just an auditory phenomenon, especially in situations when the speaker’s face is visible. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to also study the value of visual information (over and above that of acoustic information) in Mandarin tone perception for tone-naïve perceivers, in combination with other contextual (such as speaking style) and individual factors (such as musical background). Consequently, this dissertation assesses the relative strength of acoustic and visual information in tone perception and tone classification. In the first two empirical and exploratory studies in Chapter 2 and 3 , we set out to investigate to what extent tone-naïve perceivers are able to identify Mandarin Chinese tones in isolated words, and whether or not they can benefit from (seeing) the speakers’ face, and what the contribution is of a hyperarticulated speaking style, and/or their own musical experience. Respectively, in Chapter 2 we investigated the effect of visual cues (comparing audio-only with audio-visual presentations) and speaking style (comparing a natural speaking style with a teaching speaking style) on the perception of Mandarin tones by tone-naïve listeners, looking both at the relative strength of these two factors and their possible interactions; Chapter 3 was concerned with the effects of musicality of the participants (combined with modality) on Mandarin tone perception. In both of these studies, a Mandarin Chinese tone identification experiment was conducted: native speakers of a non-tonal language were asked to distinguish Mandarin Chinese tones based on audio (-only) or video (audio-visual) materials. In order to include variations, the experimental stimuli were recorded using four different speakers in imagined natural and teaching speaking scenarios. The proportion of correct responses (and average reaction times) of the participants were reported. The tone identification experiment presented in Chapter 2 showed that the video conditions (audio-visual natural and audio-visual teaching) resulted in an overall higher accuracy in tone perception than the auditory-only conditions (audio-only natural and audio-only teaching), but no better performance was observed in the audio-visual conditions in terms of reaction time, compared to the auditory-only conditions. Teaching style turned out to make no difference on the speed or accuracy of Mandarin tone perception (as compared to a natural speaking style). Further on, we presented the same experimental materials and procedure in Chapter 3 , but now with musicians and non-musicians as participants. The Goldsmith Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) was used to assess the musical aptitude of the participants. The data showed that overall, musicians outperformed non-musicians in the tone identification task in both auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. Both groups identified tones more accurately in the auditory-visual conditions than in the auditory-only conditions. These results provided further evidence for the view that the availability of visual cues along with auditory information is useful for people who have no knowledge of Mandarin Chinese tones when they need to learn to identify these tones. Out of all the musical skills measured by Gold-MSI, the amount of musical training was the only predictor that had an impact on the accuracy of Mandarin tone perception. These findings suggest that learning to perceive Mandarin tones benefits from musical expertise, and visual information can facilitate Mandarin tone identification, but mainly for tone-naïve non-musicians. In addition, performance differed by tone: musicality improves accuracy for every tone; some tones are easier to identify than others: in particular, the identification of tone 3 (a low-falling-rising) proved to be the easiest, while tone 4 (a high-falling tone) was the most difficult to identify for all participants. The results of the first two experiments presented in chapters 2 and 3 showed that adding visual cues to clear auditory information facilitated the tone identification for tone-naïve perceivers (there is a significantly higher accuracy in audio-visual condition(s) than in auditory-only condition(s)). This visual facilitation was unaffected by the presence of (hyperarticulated) speaking style or the musical skill of the participants. Moreover, variations in speakers and tones had effects on the accurate identification of Mandarin tones by tone-naïve perceivers. In Chapter 4 , we compared the relative contribution of auditory and visual information during Mandarin Chinese tone perception. More specifically, we aimed to answer two questions: firstly, whether or not there is audio-visual integration at the tone level (i.e., we explored perceptual fusion between auditory and visual information). Secondly, we studied how visual information affects tone perception for native speakers and non-native (tone-naïve) speakers. To do this, we constructed various tone combinations of congruent (e.g., an auditory tone 1 paired with a visual tone 1, written as AxVx) and incongruent (e.g., an auditory tone 1 paired with a visual tone 2, written as AxVy) auditory-visual materials and presented them to native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and speakers of tone-naïve languages. Accuracy, defined as the percentage correct identification of a tone based on its auditory realization, was reported. When comparing the relative contribution of auditory and visual information during Mandarin Chinese tone perception with congruent and incongruent auditory and visual Chinese material for native speakers of Chinese and non-tonal languages, we found that visual information did not significantly contribute to the tone identification for native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. When there is a discrepancy between visual cues and acoustic information, (native and tone-naïve) participants tend to rely more on the auditory input than on the visual cues. Unlike the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, tone-naïve participants were significantly influenced by the visual information during their auditory-visual integration, and they identified tones more accurately in congruent stimuli than in incongruent stimuli. In line with our previous work, the tone confusion matrix showed that tone identification varies with individual tones, with tone 3 (the low-dipping tone) being the easiest one to identify, whereas tone 4 (the high-falling tone) was the most difficult one. The results did not show evidence for auditory-visual integration among native participants, while visual information was helpful for tone-naïve participants. However, even for this group, visual information only marginally increased the accuracy in the tone identification task, and this increase depended on the tone in question. Chapter 5 is another chapter that zooms in on the relative strength of auditory and visual information for tone-naïve perceivers, but from the aspect of tone classification. In this chapter, we studied the acoustic and visual features of the tones produced by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Computational models based on acoustic features, visual features and acoustic-visual features were constructed to automatically classify Mandarin tones. Moreover, this study examined what perceivers pick up (perception) from what a speaker does (production, facial expression) by studying both production and perception. To be more specific, this chapter set out to answer: (1) which acoustic and visual features of tones produced by native speakers could be used to automatically classify Mandarin tones. Furthermore, (2) whether or not the features used in tone production are similar to or different from the ones that have cue value for tone-naïve perceivers when they categorize tones; and (3) whether and how visual information (i.e., facial expression and facial pose) contributes to the classification of Mandarin tones over and above the information provided by the acoustic signal. To address these questions, the stimuli that had been recorded (and described in chapter 2) and the response data that had been collected (and reported on in chapter 3) were used. Basic acoustic and visual features were extracted. Based on them, we used Random Forest classification to identify the most important acoustic and visual features for classifying the tones. The classifiers were trained on produced tone classification (given a set of auditory and visual features, predict the produced tone) and on perceived/responded tone classification (given a set of features, predict the corresponding tone as identified by the participant). The results showed that acoustic features outperformed visual features for tone classification, both for the classification of the produced and the perceived tone. However, tone-naïve perceivers did revert to the use of visual information in certain cases (when they gave wrong responses). So, visual information does not seem to play a significant role in native speakers’ tone production, but tone-naïve perceivers do sometimes consider visual information in their tone identification. These findings provided additional evidence that auditory information is more important than visual information in Mandarin tone perception and tone classification. Notably, visual features contributed to the participants’ erroneous performance. This suggests that visual information actually misled tone-naïve perceivers in their task of tone identification. To some extent, this is consistent with our claim that visual cues do influence tone perception. In addition, the ranking of the auditory features and visual features in tone perception showed that the factor perceiver (i.e., the participant) was responsible for the largest amount of variance explained in the responses by our tone-naïve participants, indicating the importance of individual differences in tone perception. To sum up, perceivers who do not have tone in their language background tend to make use of visual cues from the speakers’ faces for their perception of unknown tones (Mandarin Chinese in this dissertation), in addition to the auditory information they clearly also use. However, auditory cues are still the primary source they rely on. There is a consistent finding across the studies that the variations between tones, speakers and participants have an effect on the accuracy of tone identification for tone-naïve speaker

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)