The Phonetics of Stress Clashes in Greek

The present paper examines the phonetic correlates of stress clash resolution in Greek. Two native speakers were recorded producing sentences with and without stress clashes. The data show that stress clashes are more often remedied by lengthening the first vowel in the clash, and less frequently by lengthening the following consonant. Phonological claims that stress clashes can be resolved by pause insertion or by pronouncing the clashing syllables at markedly different pitch levels were not supported by the data. In view of the present results the relation of rhythm and intonation in Greek is briefly examined

The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies

Two calling melodies of Polish were investigated, the routine call, used to call someone for an everyday reason, and the urgent call, which conveys disapproval of the addressee’s actions. A Discourse Completion Task was used to elicit the two melodies from speakers of Polish using twelve names from one to four syllables long; there were three names per syllable count, and speakers produced three tokens of each name with each melody. The results, based on eleven speakers, show that the routine calling melody consists of a low F0 stretch followed by a rise-fall-rise; the urgent calling melody, on the other hand, is a simple rise-fall. Systematic differences were found in the scaling and alignment of tonal targets: the routine call showed late alignment of the accentual pitch peak and in most instances lower scaling of targets. The accented vowel was also affected, being overall louder in the urgent call. Based on the data and comparisons with other Polish melodies, we analyse the routine call as LH* !H-H% and the urgent call as H* L-L%. We discuss the results and our analysis in light of recent findings on calling melodies in other languages, and explore their repercussions for intonational phonology and the modelling of intonation

Comparing acoustic analyses of speech data collected remotely

Face-to-face speech data collection has been next to impossible globally due to COVID-19 restrictions. To address this problem, simultaneous recordings of three repetitions of the cardinal vowels were made using a Zoom H6 Handy Recorder with external microphone (henceforth H6) and compared with two alternatives accessible to potential participants at home: the Zoom meeting application (henceforth Zoom) and two lossless mobile phone applications (Awesome Voice Recorder, and Recorder; henceforth Phone). F0 was tracked accurately by all devices; however, for formant analysis (F1, F2, F3) Phone performed better than Zoom, i.e. more similarly to H6, though data extraction method (VoiceSauce, Praat) also resulted in differences. In addition, Zoom recordings exhibited unexpected drops in intensity. The results suggest that lossless format phone recordings present a viable option for at least some phonetic studies

Dominance, mode, and individual variation in bilingual speech production and perception

Early Spanish-English bilinguals and English controls were tested on the production and perception of negative, short-lag, and long-lag Voice Onset Time (VOT). These VOT types span Spanish and English phonetic categories. Phonologically, negative and short-lag VOT stops are distinct phonemes in Spanish, while both are realizations of voiced stops in English. Dominance was critical: more English-dominant bilinguals produced more short-lag VOT stops in response to negative VOT stimuli, and were less accurate than more balanced bilinguals at discriminating negative from short-lag VOT. Bilinguals performed similarly to monolinguals overall, but they produced more negative VOT tokens and shorter short-lag VOT in response to negative VOT. Their productions were also less well correlated with perception and showed more variation between individuals. These results highlight the variable nature of bilingual production and perception, and demonstrate the need to consider language dominance, individual variation, as well as modalities and tasks when studying bilinguals

Greek Thrace Xoraxane Romane

Romani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in several European countries as well as in the Americas, Asia and Australia, showing substantial dialectal variation. This illustration deals with Xoraxane Romane (Turkish Romani) spoken in Greek Thrace. Xoraxane Romane, which belongs to the Vlax branch of Romani, has been heavily influenced by contact with Turkish and also shows influences from Greek. As a result, Xoraxane Romane exhibits a mixed system that includes phonemes borrowed from both Turkish and Greek but without exhibiting complex phonological phenomena such as Turkish vowel harmony

Priming stress patterns in word recognition

This study addresses the lexical representation of stress in a series of five intra-modal and cross-modal priming experiments in the Greek language using lexical decision tasks with auditory and visual targets. Three-syllable primes and targets were matched in first syllable segments, length, and other variables, and differed segmentally in the second and third syllable. Primes matched or mismatched targets in stress, which was placed on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable. There was no evidence for stress priming in either accuracy or latency of responses to either words or pseudowords in any of these experiments, either intra-modally or cross-modally. In contrast, a control fragment priming experiment using only the first two syllables of the primes produced a significant effect of stress congruence for words but not for pseudowords. The results are interpreted in the context of previous findings in the literature as arising from lexical activation rather than from matching stress patterns. Overall, findings are consistent with lexical representations including stress information that is inseparable from segmental specification, rather than with abstract representations of metrical templates

The role of pragmatics and politeness in explaining prosodic variability

Twenty speakers (10F, 10M) took part in a discourse completion task (DCT) to examine effects of politeness and context on tunes used with wh-questions in Greek: they heard and saw on screen short scenarios ending in a wh-question. DCTs were controlled for power, solidarity, and context (with scenarios leading to the wh-questions being used either to request information or to indirectly make a statement). The results confirmed the role of context: the two context types led to the elicitation of distinct tunes, L*+H L- !H% for information-seeking questions, and L+H* L-L% for indirect statements, with lower scaling and later alignment of the accentual H in the former, and differences in final F0 consistent with a !H% and L% boundary tone respectively. In addition, questions after information contexts were shorter, but with a significantly longer final vowel. Politeness also affected duration, with conditions requiring a greater degree of politeness (the addressee being non-solidary and of different social status than the speaker) leading to lower speaking rate. The results indicate that tunes are associated with different durational profiles, which are also influenced by politeness. These results support recent studies showing that the study of intonation must include parameters beyond F0

Acoustic Cues to Perceived Prominence Levels:Evidence from German Spontaneous Speech

The iambic-trochaic law (ITL) states that a louder sound signals the beginning of a group, while a longer sound signals its end. Although the ITL has been empirically supported in experiments with a variety of stimuli, it is not clear whether it is due to universal cognitive mechanisms or the outcome of language-specific prosodic properties. We tested the law with speakers of English, Greek and Korean who heard sequences of tones varied in duration and/or intensity. The results revealed neither significant differences among languages nor a strong bias shared by speakers of all languages. Significantly, listeners� grouping preferences were influenced by the duration of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI), with longer ISI resulting in stronger trochaic preferences, indicating that specific experimental conditions may be responsible for differences in listener responses across experiments testing the ITL

Effects of rhythm and phrase-final lengthening on word-spotting in Korean

A word-spotting experiment was conducted to investigate whether rhythmic consistency and phrase-final lengthening facilitate performance in Korean. Listeners had to spot disyllabic and trisyllabic words in nonsense strings organized in phrases with either the same or variable syllable count; phrase-final lengthening was absent, or occurring either in all phrases or only in the phrase immediately preceding the target. The results show that, for disyllabic targets, inconsistent syllable count and lengthening before the target led to fewer errors. For trisyllabic targets, accuracy was at ceiling, but final lengthening in all phrases reduced reaction times. The results imply that both rhythmic consistency (i.e. regular syllable count) and phrase-final lengthening play a role in word-spotting and, by extension, in speech processing in Korean, as in other languages. However, the results also reflect the language specific role of prosodic cues. First, the cues here were used primarily with disyllabic targets, which were cognitively more demanding to process partly due to their high phonological neighborhood density. Second, the facilitating effect of rhythmic consistency was weak, possibly because strict consistency is not present in spoken Korean. Overall, rhythmic consistency facilitated spotting when targets mapped onto phrases, confirming the importance of phrasal organization in Korean speech processing

Voice onset time in Spanish-English spontaneous code-switching

Research on the phonetics of code-switching has focused on voice onset time (VOT) and has yielded mixed results regarding cross-language interaction, possibly due to differences in data used (scripted vs. spontaneous speech) and populations examined (L1 vs. L2 dominant, early vs. late bilinguals). Here VOT was measured in a corpus of spontaneous code-switching speech elicited from a homogeneous group of early bilinguals in conversation with and without distraction (completion of jigsaw puzzles). The distraction meant to increase cognitive load, a manipulation that could affect phonetic realization. Both English and Spanish VOT were shorter at codeswitching points than in comparable monolingual utterances. English VOT lengthened overall under increased cognitive load (but remained shorter in code-switching as compared to the monolingual context). These results support previous findings of VOT shortening in code-switching for both English and Spanish, and confirm that the effect applies in the natural speech of early bilinguals