Then, What is Charisma? The Role of Audio-visual Prosody in L1 and L2 Political Speeches

Charisma plays a significant role in political speeches, and determines the ability of a politician to carry an audience. While acoustic features of charisma have received some empirical attention, the contribution of visual prosody has been mostly neglected in studies focusing on features of a charismatic appearance. Unknown are also the audio-visual cues to charisma in non-native speakers. This small-scale study investigated speeches delivered by Donald Trump (L1 American English) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (L1 Austrian German, L2 American English). Video and audio recordings of their political speeches (around 25 min per speaker) and the transcripts were used. The use of pitch range, speech rate, emphatic stress and hand gestures was analysed. In order to establish the core means of the speakers’ persuasive influence on their audiences, within-speaker comparisons were conducted for phrases with and without cheering from the audiences. The results showed some differences in the use of the audio-visual prosodic features between the L1 and L2 speaker as well as some similarities, and suggest that charisma is not easily attributable to a fixed set of prosodic means but may be best understood as a skillful modulation of audio-visual prosody in social interaction

How Truncating Are ‘Truncating Languages'? Evidence from Russian and German

Russian and German have been previously been described as ‘truncating‘, or cutting off target frequencies of the phrase-final pitch trajectories when the time available for voicing is compromised. However, supporting evidence is rare and limited to only a few pitch categories. This paper reports a production study conducted to document pitch adjustments to linguistic materials, in which the amount of voicing available for the realization of a pitch pattern varies from relatively long to extremely short. Productions of nuclear H+L*, H* and L*+H pitch accents followed by a low boundary tone were investigated in the two languages. The results of the study show that speakers of both ‘truncating languages’‘ do not exclusively utilize truncation exclusively when accommodating to different segmental environments. On the contrary, they employ several strategies – among them is truncation but also compression and temporal re-alignment –to produce the target pitch categories under increasing time pressure. Given that speakers can systematically apply all three adjustment strategies to produce some pitch patterns (H* L% in German and Russian) while not using truncation in others (H+L* L% particularly in Russian), we question the effectiveness of the typological classification of these two languages as ‘truncating’. Moreover, the phonetic detail of truncation varies considerably, both across and within the two languages, indicating that truncation cannot be easily be modeled as a unified phenomenon. The results further suggest that the phrase-final pitch adjustments are crucially sensitive to the phonological composition of the tonal string and the status of a particular tonal event (associated vs. boundary tone), and do not apply to falling vs. rising pitch contours across the board, as previously put forward for German. Implications for the intonational phonology and prosodic typology are addressed in the discussion

What is the fate of Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow?

This paper studies the longitudinal development of a vowel timing alternation known as the “Scottish Vowel Length Rule” in a distinctive variety of Scottish English spoken in Glasgow by working-class men and women. Combining apparent-time and real-time evidence, we show that the implementation of the Rule has changed over time, though unlike in many other varieties of Scottish English, the factors shaping its fate seem to be internal rather than external. Overall, Glaswegian English behaves like a quantity language and controls for prosodic timing effects while preserving the phonological timing alternation; and this is despite a marginal, quasi-phonemic status of the Rule

Glasgow Gloom or Leeds Glue? Dialect-Specific Vowel Duration Constrains Lexical Segmentation and Access

Timing cues are important in many aspects of speech processing, fromidentifying segments to locating word and phrase boundaries. They vary across accents, yet representation and processing of this variation are poorly understood. We investigated whether an accent difference in vowel duration affects lexical segmentation and access. In Glasgow English (GE), /i u e o/ are shorter than in Leeds English (LE), especially for /i u/ before voiced stops and nasals. In a word-spotting experiment, GE and LE participants heard nonsense sequences (e.g. pobegloomezh) containing embedded words (gloom, glue), with segmental qualities intermediate between GE and LE. Critical vowel durations were manipulated according to accent (GE-appropriate vowels shorter than LE-appropriate ones) and phonological context (vowels shortest before voiceless stops < voiced stops/nasals < voiced fricatives). GE participants generally spotted words like gloom more accurately with GE-appropriate than LE-appropriate vowels. LE participants were less accurate than GE participants to spot words like gloom with GE-appropriate vowels, but more likely to spot embeddings like glue. These results were broadly as predicted based on the accent differences, but depended less than expected on the accent-specific phonological constraints. We discuss theoretical implications regarding the representation of duration and the time course of lexical access

Testing an acoustic model of the P-center in English and Japanese

The notion of the “perceptual center” or the “P-center” has been put forward to account for the repeated finding that acoustic and perceived syllable onsets do not necessarily coincide, at least in the perception of simple monosyllables or disyllables. The magnitude of the discrepancy between acoustics and perception—the location of the P-center in the speech signal— has proven difficult to estimate, though acoustic models of the effect do exist. The present study asks if the P-center effect can be documented in natural connected speech of English and Japanese and examines if an acoustic model that defines the P-center as the moment of the fastest energy change in a syllabic amplitude envelope adequately reflects the P-center in the two languages. A sensorimotor synchronization paradigm was deployed to address the research questions. The results provide evidence for the existence of the P-center effect in speech of both languages while the acoustic P-center model is found to be less applicable to Japanese. Sensorimotor synchronization patterns further suggest that the P-center may reflect perceptual anticipation of a vowel onset.</p

Changing sounds in a changing city: an acoustic phonetic investigation of real-time change over a century of Glaswegian.

This paper contributes some new findings towards answering these general theoretical questions about real-time sound change and place. Our study exploits the possibilities offered for a longer-term perspective on real-time change by combining archive recordings from the First World War with those from a real- and apparent-time corpus from the 1970s. We consider three aspects of urban Scots, vowel quality and duration, and the realization of word-initial /l/, using acoustic phonetic measures. The real-time comparisons reveal change in progress in all three features. The direction of the changes is intriguing, since despite the substantial geographical and social changes which have taken place across the UK during especially the second half of the 20th century, and the impact of these in terms of contact-induced changes on urban British accents (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty 1999), it appears that linguistic and social factors to do with the dialect and its location have played a stronger role

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth 20th century

How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ to language change, has been a key focus over 50 years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering ‘structured variability’—how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in non-random ways—as part of the longstanding goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community’s language which illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This paper examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues—VOT and closure voicing—along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, towards a more aspiration-based and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation

Opa vs Oper: Neutralization of /?/ and unstressed /a/ contrast in a perception and production study

The present study examined differences in production and perception of the German vowels /a/ and /?/ in word-final, unstressed position. In the first experiment, 3 male and 3 female speakers produced minimal pairs embedded in meaningful sentences and varied in prosodic environment. In the second experiment, the minimal pairs were extracted from the context and presented to 44 listeners for a forced-choice identification task. Results showed a better-than-chance performance that was, however, mainly driven by one male speaker. Temporal and spectral measures confirmed that only this speaker produced an acoustic difference between /a/ and /?/

On the Tail of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow

One of the most famous sound features of Scottish English is the short/long timing alternation of /i u ai/vowels, which depends on the morpho-phonemic environment, and is known of as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). These alternations make the status of vowel quantity in Scottish English (quasi-)phonemic but are also susceptible to change, particularly in situations of intense sustained dialect contact with Anglo-English. Does the SVLR change in Glasgow where dialect contact at the community level is comparably low? The present study sets out to tackle this question, and tests two hypotheses involving (1) external influences due to dialect-contact and (2) internal, prosodically-induced factors of sound change. Durational analyses of /i u a/ were conducted on a corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian speech from the 1970s and 2000s, and four speaker groups were compared, two of middle-aged men, and two of adolescent boys. Our hypothesis that the development of the SVLR over time may be internally constrained and interact with prosody was largely confirmed. We observed weakening effects in its implementation which were localised in phrase-medial unaccented positions in all speaker groups, and in phrase-final positions in the speakers born after the Second World War. But unlike some other varieties of Scottish or Northern English which show weakening of the Rule under a prolonged contact with Anglo-English, dialect contact seems to be having less impact on the durational patterns in Glaswegian vernacular, probably because of the overall reduced potential for a regular, everyday contact in the West given the different demographies

A perceptual study on Russian questions and statements

This paper presents the results of perception experiments designed to investigate the contribution of f0-peak rise, height and alignment to signaling interrogative vs. declarative sentence mode in Russian. The results of the study show that the major perceptual cues for this category distinction are the f0-peak alignment and the slope of the rise. According to the results, the primary perceptual cues for questions are a steep rise and a late peak alignment at the offset of the accented vowel, whereas the more gradual rise and early f0-peak alignment at the onset of the accented vowel are strong cues for a declarative mode. The height of the f0-peak has no influence on the category distinction. The results are discussed in terms of the phonological modeling of Russian intonation as well as in terms of the frequency code for universal meanings in intonation