46 research outputs found
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
On the phonetic status of syllabic consonants
AbstractThis paper investigates the phonetic correlates of syllable structure, focusing on syllabic consonants. Cross-linguistically, syllables containing consonantal nuclei are often subject to a number of restrictions compared to their vocalic counterparts. However, some languages, like Slovak, allow relatively freely distributed syllabic liquids. Phonetic studies of syllable structure have shown that the vowel provides the basis for the articulatory coordination relationships within a syllable, and consonant–vowel timing patterns have been identified as a primary phonetic correlate of syllable structure. However, how coordination relationships within a syllable are organized when a consonant occupies the nucleus is largely unknown. We investigate whether in Slovak, syllabic consonants change their consonantal kinematics to approach a more vowel-like articulation and whether vowel-less syllables differ in their articulatory timing characteristics from canonical syllables containing vowels. Our results show that a consonant does not change to be more like a vowel in its articulatory dynamics when occupying the nucleus position. However, we find consistent effects in articulatory timing in that consonantal syllables show less overlap on a variety of measures compared to vocalic syllables. We argue that the typological possibility for syllabic consonants may be related to the general consonant timing pattern of a language.</jats:p
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
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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
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