Cues to Contrastive Focus in Romanian

In this study we measured patterns of pitch alignment, pitch range and duration in relation to broad and contrastive focus in Romanian. In declarative sentences with broad focus, speakers place a pitch accent on each lexically stressed syllable with peaks that become progressively lower towards the end of the sentence. In prenuclear accents peaks align with the post-tonic syllable. In declarative sentences with contrastive focus, speakers use strategies based on pitch and duration in order to build a maximum contrast between the word under focus and those in pre- and post-focal contexts: an expanded pitch range under focus and a reduced pitch range and shorter stressed syllables in pre- and post-focal contexts. Thus, the flat F0 and shorter segmental durations in pre- and post-focal contexts constitute a background that by contrast, highlights the segmental durations and expanded pitch ranges found under contrastive focus

Explaining Cross-Language Asymmetries in Prosodic Processing: The Cue-Driven Window Length Hypothesis

Cross-language studies have shown that English speakers use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress less consistently than speakers of Spanish and other Germanic languages ; accordingly, these studies have attributed this asymmetry to a possible trade-off between the use of vowel reduction and suprasegmental cues in lexical access. We put forward the hypothesis that this “cue trade-off” modulates intonation processing as well, so that English speakers make less use of suprasegmental cues in comparison to Spanish speakers when processing intonation in utterances causing processing asymmetries between these two languages. In three cross-language experiments comparing English and Spanish speakers’ prediction of hypo-articulated utterances in focal sentences and reporting speech, we have provided evidence for our hypothesis and proposed a mechanism, the Cue-Driven Window Length model, which accounts for the observed cross-language processing asymmetries between English and Spanish at both lexical and utterance levels. Altogether, results from these experiments illustrated in detail how different types of low-level acoustic information (e.g., vowel reduction versus duration) interacted with higher-level expectations based on the speakers’ knowledge of intonation providing support for our hypothesis. These interactions were coherent with an active model of speech perception that entailed real-time adjusting to feedback and to information from the context, challenging more traditional models that consider speech perception as a passive, bottom-up pattern-matching process

Perceptual Evidence for Direct Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Spanish

ABSTRACT We provide evidence for the perception of the stress contrast in deaccented contexts in Spanish. Twenty participants were asked to identify oxytone words which varied orthogonally in two bidimensional paroxytone-oxytone continua: one of duration and spectral tilt, and the other of duration and overall intensity. Results indicate that duration and overall intensity were cues to stress, while spectral tilt was not. Moreover, stress detection depended on vowel type: the stress contrast was perceived more consistently in [a] than in [i]. Thus, in spite of lacking vowel reduction, stress in Spanish has its own phonetic material in the absence of pitch accents. However, we cannot speak of cues to stress in general since they depend on the characteristics of the vowel

Creating a cross-linguistic database to investigate speech rhythm

Rhythm, which refers to the sensation of isochrony conveyed by repeating patterns in speech, is key to add emotion and pragmatic meanings to the dialogues of, for example, voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Despite its importance, few papers tested new promising rhythm measures due to the technical challenges involved in this research. The present project aims at ameliorating these challenges by creating a database to study prosody cross-linguistically together with a set of scripts that output over 20 rhythm measures. With the help of undergraduate students majoring in different languages, the database will consist of TED talks in 8 languages, their orthographic transcriptions, and annotated speech wave forms (words, syllables, phonemes, and pauses). Speech annotations will be automatically generated by freely available aligners and sound editing programs. This database will be the input to the scripts that output the 20+ rhythm measures. Both tools, the database and scripts, together with a manual will be made available to the research community worldwide in order to promote international dialogue in this field

Emergent Complexity in Speech Acquisition : Applications to Evolution of the Speech Capacity(International & Interdisciplinary Symposium on What is Evolution? Bicentennial of Charles Darwin's Birth)

この論文は国立情報学研究所の電子図書館事業により電子化されました

A Description of Tucumán Spanish Intonation in Argentina

This paper documents for the first time the intonation system of Tucumán Spanish, an understudied variety of Argentinian Spanish. Semi-spontaneous speech illustrating the intonation of main sentence types, i.e. broad focus statements, partial and absolute interrogatives, and imperatives and vocatives, was elicited from 31 native speakers of Tucumán Spanish via an adapted version of the Argentinian Intonation Survey (Prieto and Roseano, 2009-2013). The two authors listened to the recordings and transcribed them using the Tones and Break Indexes conventions (ToBI) (Beckman et al. 2002, Prieto and Roseano 2010, Hualde and Prieto 2015). Transcriptions of prenuclear and nuclear configurations together with their respective frequencies allowed both an appreciation of the most used configurations within each sentence type along with detailed variation at the phonetic level. For example, yes/no questions were consistently realized with a low nuclear pitch accent L* and an ascending boundary tone. However, there was variation in the height of the boundary tones yielding the frequent contour L* ¡H%, and the less frequent L* H%. Altogether, these detailed patterns document the systematic phonetic variation of the intonation system of TS and provide a basis for future research to determine the phonological status of this variation

Acoustic correlates of stress in central Catalan and Castilian Spanish

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress correlates of duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt in Catalan and Spanish in both accented and unaccented contexts while controlling for formant frequency differences between morphologically corresponding vowels in stressed and unstressed environments by comparing vowels that maintain the same quality across stress contexts with those that do not. Duration was a consistent stress correlate in all vowels in both languages, regardless of their formant frequency differences across stress contexts and of the absence of pitch accents. In fact, stressrelated formant frequency differences between corresponding vowels amplify the duration cues to the stress contrast. On the other hand, the use speakers made of intensity was not as pervasive as that of duration. Specifically, changes in spectral tilt were significant only in Catalan and in those vowels that alternate a more open and peripheral realization in stressed syllables with a mid-central realization in unstressed syllables, indicating that spectral tilt is related to the formant frequency differences linked to the centralization processes rather than to the stress contrast.We would like to thank the audience at the 2005 PaPI Conference, and also Barbara Bullock, Megan Crowhurst, Sónia Frota, José Ignacio Hualde, Scott Myers, Jacqueline Toribio, Daniel Recasens, and Marina Vigário for very useful feedback. We are also grateful to the 20 informants who kindly participated in the production experiment. Thanks to Tim Mills who kindly sent us the script that measures spectral tilt. Special thanks to John Coleman and two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments greatly improved the quality of this article. This research has been funded by grant 2005SGR-00753, awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, and by grants HUM2006-01758/FILO “Estructura prosódica y adquisición de la prosodia en catalán y español”, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 “Bilingüismo y Neurociencia Cognitiva CSD2007-00012” awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, and URA Program awarded by the College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas

Catalan speakers’ perception of word stress in unaccented contexts

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction patterns, words either alternate stressed open vowels with unstressed mid-central vowels as in English or contain no vowel quality cues to stress, as in Spanish. Results show that Catalan listeners perceive stress based mainly on duration cues in both word types. Other cues pattern together with duration to make stress perception more robust. However, no single cue is absolutely necessary and trading effects compensate for a lack of differentiation in one dimension by changes in another dimension. In particular, speakers identify longer mid-central vowels as more stressed than shorter open vowels. These results and those obtained in other stress-accent languages provide cumulative evidence that word stress is perceived independently of pitch accents by relying on a set of cues with trading effects so that no single cue, including formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction, is absolutely necessary for stress perception.This research was funded by grants from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia-FEDER HUM2006-01758/PHYLLO and by a URAP grant from the College of Liberal Arts, UT-Austin

Catalan speakers’ perception of word stress in unaccented contexts

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction patterns, words either alternate stressed open vowels with unstressed mid-central vowels as in English or contain no vowel quality cues to stress, as in Spanish. Results show that Catalan listeners perceive stress based mainly on duration cues in both word types. Other cues pattern together with duration to make stress perception more robust. However, no single cue is absolutely necessary and trading effects compensate for a lack of differentiation in one dimension by changes in another dimension. In particular, speakers identify longer mid-central vowels as more stressed than shorter open vowels. These results and those obtained in other stress-accent languages provide cumulative evidence that word stress is perceived independently of pitch accents by relying on a set of cues with trading effects so that no single cue, including formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction, is absolutely necessary for stress perception.This research was funded by grants from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia-FEDER HUM2006-01758/PHYLLO and by a URAP grant from the College of Liberal Arts, UT-Austin