The Effect of Focus on Creaky Phonation in Mandarin Chinese Tones

Previous studies of the prosodic realization of focus in Mandarin Chinese show an expansion of the pitch range of lexical tones. It is less clear, however, whether focus affects the Creaky Phonation (CP) that often co-occurs with the Dipping third tone (T3), and to some extent, also with the Falling fourth tone (T4). This study investigates the effect of focus on the acoustic properties of the four Mandarin tones, and while it confirms the expansion of the pitch range under focus, it does not find that focus affects CP in T3; it only finds an effect of focus on CP in T4. Both the F0 and CP patterns are also considered in relation to the Functional Load Hypothesis, specifically, the relationship between the contrastive properties of a language and the manifestation of prominence

The phonetics of metrical prominence and its consequences on segmental phonology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-199).Only very few phonological processes are reported to be conditioned by stress. There are two major patterns of stress-sensitive processes: segments are lengthened under stress, and vowels become louder. Two other phonological patterns are reported in the presence of stress, although they don't seem to enhance prominence of the stressed position: the preservation of segmental contrast and the enhancement of acoustic properties of the releases in stress-adjacent consonants. The main question of this dissertation is why there are so few segmental processes that show sensitivity to stress. Why are the major segmental processes affecting consonants (e.g. place assimilation, nasalization and voice neutralization) not sensitive about whether their trigger or target is in a stressed position? The analysis of prosodic conditioning presented here has three components: First every stress-conditioned process is enforced by a markedness constraint requiring the perceptual prominence of a metrically strong position. Languages use two strategies to implement this prominence: increasing the duration of the stressed position, or increasing the perceptual energy of the stressed vowel. Second, increasing the loudness of the stressed vowel has side-effects on the realization of stress adjacent stop releases, which result from the subglottal mechanisms used to produce the increase in loudness. These side-effects constitute the small class of stress-conditioned segmental alternations which are not directly enhancing the prominence of the stressed position. Third, both the effects of prominence requirements and the side-effects of prominence enhancement on the phonetic realization of segments in stressed positions may affect the perceptual distinctiveness between contrasting sounds in stressed positions: if the perceptual distinctiveness between contrasting sounds is decreased in a stressed position, contrast neutralization might arise. If the perceptual distinctiveness between contrasting sounds is increased in a stressed position, stress-conditioned contrast preservation might arise. Contrast preservation in stressed positions is therefore not an effect of Positional faithfulness; it emerges as the indirect consequence of prominence enhancement. The set of segmental features which may be targeted by stress-sensitive processes is extremely limited since it is restricted to those features which can be affected by one of three processes: duration, loudness and effects of raised subglottal pressure on stop releases.by Maria Giavazzi.Ph.D

In Search of Phonetic Evidence for Prosodically-Motivated Aspiration

This thesis examines the production and perception of aspiration in all possible levels of stress and word positions attested under the left-edge prosodic description theorized by Kiparsky (1979), Withgott (1982), and Jensen (2000), as well as in all attested environments for unaspirated voiceless stops. Through the metric of voice onset time (VOT), I phonetically test the realization of aspiration and examine its perception as categorical in several environments that are not acoustically salient. Through a production study and two linked perception studies I provide acoustic evidence in support of the phonological definition of categorical aspiration as prosodically-motivated in English, and clarify the behavior of aspiration in two related stress lapse environments

Lexical and postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic

Tashlhiyt Berber (Afro-Asiatic, Berber) and Moroccan Arabic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic), two languages spoken in Morocco, have been in contact for over 1200 years. The influence of Berber languages on the lexicon and the segmental-phonological structure of Moroccan Arabic is well-documented, whereas possible similarities in the prosodic-phonological domain have not yet been addressed in detail. This thesis brings together evidence from production and perception to bear on the question whether Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic also exhibit convergence in the domain of phonological prominence. Experimental results are interpreted as showing that neither language has lexical prominence asymmetries in the form of lexical stress. This lack of stress in Moroccan Arabic is unlike the undisputed presence of lexical stress in most other varieties of Arabic, which in turn suggests that this aspect of the phonology of Moroccan Arabic has resulted from contact with (Tashlhiyt) Berber. A further, theoretical contribution is made with respect to the possible correspondence between lexical and postlexical prominence structure from a typological point of view. One of the tenets of the Autosegmental Metrical approach to intonation analysis holds that prominence-marking intonational events (pitch accents) associate with lexically stressed syllables. Exactly how prominence marking is achieved in languages that lack lexical stress is little-understood, and this thesis' discussion of postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic provides new insights that bear on this topic. A first set of production experiments investigates, for both languages, if there are acoustic correlates to what some researchers have considered to be lexically stressed syllables. It is shown that neither language exhibits consistent acoustic enhancement of presumed stressed syllables relative to unstressed syllables. The second set of production experiments reports on the prosodic characteristics of question word interrogatives in both languages. It is shown that question words are the locus of postlexical prominence-marking events that however do not exhibit association to a sub-lexical phonological unit. A final perception experiment serves the goal of showing how native speakers of Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic deal with the encoding of a postlexical prominence contrast that is parasitic on a lexical prominence contrast. This is achieved by means of a 'stress deafness' experiment, the results of which show that speakers of neither language can reliably encode a lexically-specified prominence difference. Results from all three types of experiment thus converge in suggesting that lexical prominence asymmetries are not specified in the phonology of either language

Phrase-level and edge marking in Drehu

This study investigates prosodic correlates of phrasing in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. The analysis is concerned with the demarcation of prosodic levels in the language, namely the Accentual Phrase and the Intonation Phrase. First impressionistic descriptions of Drehu state there is fixed word initial stress, however recent experimental evidence does not support this claim. Instead, it has been suggested that Drehu could be an edge-marking language which relies on right boundary marking. To determine whether the patterns recorded in the literature are borne out, the phonological and phonetic realisation of post-lexical word level prosody is investigated. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which fundamental frequency (F0) and duration contribute to boundary marking in Drehu. The results show that F0 cues mark the right boundary of two prosodic levels, the AP and IP, and that the strength of the boundary is related to its level in the prosodic hierarchy. Preboundary lengthening also cues IP boundaries but not AP boundaries

Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Moroccan Arabic

Presently there is no consensus regarding the interpretation and analysis of the stress system of Moroccan Arabic. This paper tests whether the acoustic realisation of syllables support one widely adopted interpretation of lexical stress, according to which stress is either penultimate or final depending on syllable weight. The experiment reports on word-initial syllables that differ in presumed stress status. Target words were embedded in a carrier sentence within a scripted mock dialogue to ensure that the measurements reflect lexical stress rather than phrase-level prominence. Results from all four acoustic parameters tested (f0, duration, Centre of Gravity and vowel quality) showed that there were no differences as a function of presumed stress status, thus failing to support an interpretation according to which stressed syllables are acoustically differentiated. We consider the results in relation to previous claims and observations, and conclude that the absence of acoustic correlates of presumed stress is compatible with the view that Moroccan Arabic lacks lexical stress

Surface processes, word minimality and stress assignment in Blanga

Considering word minimality and assuming prosodic structure maximalisation, Hayes’ (1995) metrical stress theory predicts that if a syllabic trochee language that does not necessarily distinguish segmental length phonologically shows some evidence of heavy syllables, then a heavy syllable at one edge of the parse constitutes a proper syllabic trochee. At the same time, the author points out that the prediction is difficult to check due to lack of available data. This paper provides supporting evidence from Blanga, a recently documented Austronesian language of the Solomon Islands with no contrastive segmental length and no underlying heavy syllables, in which underlying stress is always penultimate and thus uses the syllabic trochee, a non-quantity-sensitive type of foot, as the minimal metric constituent. However, surface processes generate heavy syllables in all positions and stress on the last syllable if heavy, suggesting that the language counts moras, rather than syllables, for purposes of stress assignment. Applying the principles and constraints postulated by Hayes, and thus confirming their validity, I will reject the moraic trochee hypothesis and show that the underlying stress pattern is preserved at the surface by allowing a heavy syllable to form a trochee by its own as long as it occurs either in parse-final or parse-initial position and it is the only heavy syllable available at the word level

Isomorphy and Syntax-Prosody Relations in English

abstract: This dissertation investigates the precise degree to which prosody and syntax are related. One possibility is that the syntax-prosody mapping is one-to-one (“isomorphic”) at an underlying level (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Selkirk 1996, 2011, Ito & Mester 2009). This predicts that prosodic units should preferably match up with syntactic units. It is also possible that the mapping between these systems is entirely non-isomorphic, with prosody being influenced by factors from language perception and production (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, Lahiri & Plank 2010). In this work, I argue that both perspectives are needed in order to address the full range of phonological phenomena that have been identified in English and related languages, including word-initial lenition/flapping, word-initial segment-deletion, and vowel reduction in function words, as well as patterns of pitch accent assignment, final-pronoun constructions, and the distribution of null complementizer allomorphs. In the process, I develop models for both isomorphic and non-isomorphic phrasing. The former is cast within a Minimalist syntactic framework of Merge/Label and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), while the latter is characterized by a stress-based algorithm for the formation of phonological domains, following Lahiri & Plank (2010).Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

Změna slovního přízvuku v české angličtině

Účelem této bakalářské práce je zjistit, jak jsou čeští mluvčí anglického jazyka schopni předvídat a používat změnu slovního přízvuku v jejich řeči. Teoretická část ve stručnosti popisuje systém slovního přízvuku a zaměřuje se především na detailný průzkum fenoménu změny slovního přízvuku a její funkci v návaznosti na rytmickou strukturu jazyka. Praktická část poté zkoumá schopnost českých mluvčí produkovat tuto změnu ve vybraném kontektu. Respondenti byli nahráni při čtení textu obsahující charakteristické příklady slov, jejichž přízvuk se vlivem kontextu mění. Data získaná na základě těchto nahrávek byla poslechově analyzována a následně posloužita k potvrzení či vyvrácení hypotéz stanovených na začátku výzkumu. Klíčová slova slovní přízvuk, větný přízvuk, rytmus, změna slovního přízvuku, česká angličtinaThe purpose of the bachelor thesis is to explore how Czech speakers of English are able to predict and apply stress shift in their speech. The theoretical part gives a brief description of the English stress system and focuses primarily on a detailed exploration of the stress shift phenomenon and its function in relation to the rhythmic structure of English. The practical part aims at examining the ability of Czech speakers to produce stress shift in selected contexts. The respondents were recorded reading a text with items that typically undergo stress shift. The data obtained from these recordings were perceptually analysed and subsequently used to either prove or disprove the hypotheses formulated at the beginning of the research. Key Words lexical stress, sentence stress, rhythm, stress shift, Czech EnglishKatedra anglického jazyka a literaturyPedagogická fakultaFaculty of Educatio