Stress and phonemic length in the perception of Slovak vowels

We investigate the perception of phonemic vowel quantity contrast and its relation to word stress and vowel quality in Slovak, and fill the gap of missing experimental perception data for this language. We observe that both prosodically-driven undershoot of unstressed vowels and the functional load affect the perception of quantity contrast. Vowel quality plays some role in quantity identification for high vowels (/u/ and unstressed /i/) but Slovak seems to retain a robust quantity contrast for all examined vowel qualities

Effects of lexical stress and speech rate on the quantity and quality of Slovak vowels

We investigate the relationship between vowel quantity and the utilization of formant space in Slovak, and how prosodic variation in speech rate and lexical stress marking affects this relationship. Slovak presents a common five-vowel system with full phonemic quantity contrast for all vowels in all positions. We found that 1) phonemic quantity contrast in Slovak is salient and minimally affected by lexical stress and speech rate, and 2) shortening due to phonemic contrast and destressing but not due to speech rate, are accompanied by vowel space contraction. We compare the results to the geographically neighboring la nguages Czech and Hungarian that display similar prosodic characteristics to Slovak

Prosodic conditioning of pre-sonorant voicing

The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak. Our results demonstrate that prosodic boundaries as well as accent interact in a meaningful way with voicing assimilation. If a major boundary intervenes, the role of accent is eliminated, while in other contexts the presence of contrastive focus induces less voicing. A novel finding of the study is that sonorant consonants and vowels differ considerably in this assimilation process. It is also demonstrated that pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak is categorical but optional and is close to being completely neutralizing

Turn-taking strategies in cooperative task dialogue

We examine turn-taking in collaborative dyadic conversations in which one player described the position of a target object with respect to other fi xed objects on her laptop screen, while the other tried to move his representation of the target object to the same position on his own screen. We concentrate on two issues: the role of fi lled pauses (FPs) such as /um/ or /uh/ in the system of turn-taking, and the strategies for establishing dominance in the dialogues. A quantitative analysis of FP use supports the descriptive observations in the literature that fi lled pauses mostly function as pre-starts, fl oor-holders, and to some extent also as fl oor-yielders. Turn-taking behavior quantifi ed with turnlatencies and the distribution of turn-types also varies with the gender of the interlocutors and the role they perform in the communicative task, and may signal dominance in the conversations

Kinematic signatures of prosody in Lombard speech

Peer reviewe

Accentual phrase in languages with fixed word stress: a study on Hungarian and Slovak

In languages with fixed stress towards the left or right edge of the word, stress is often used for delimiting one edge of a prosodic phrase, while the other edge is marked by a boundary tone. In languages in which sequences between two accents form an accentual phrase (AP), these APs often have a consistent pattern of their own. Thus, they are supposed to deviate from the overall declination pattern of an IP. This assumption was used to investigate whether Hungarian and Slovak make use of APs