Intonational categories and continua in American English rising nuclear tunes

The present study tests a prediction from the prevalent Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of American English intonation: the existence of distinct phonological contrasts among nuclear tunes composed of a pitch accent (here H*, L+H*, L*+H), phrase accent (H-, L-) and boundary tone (H%, L%), which in combination yield an inventory of 12 tonally distinct nuclear tunes. Using an imitative speech production paradigm and AX discrimination task with L1 speakers of Mainstream American English (MAE)we test the extent to which each of 12 predicted tunes is distinct from the others in the production and perception of intonation . We tackle this question with a series of analytical methods. We use GAMM modeling of time-series F0 trajectories to test for differences among all of the twelve nuclear tunes, and compare these results to a method that does not rely on pre-defined tune categories, k-means clustering for time-series data, to discover emergent classes of tunes in a “bottom-up” fashion. We complement these timeseries analyses with an analysis of the temporal tonal center of gravity (TCoG) over the F0 trajectories of nuclear tunes to assess tonal timing distinctions and their relation to top-down tune classes (defined by the AM model) and bottom-up classes (emergent from clustering). Production results are further compared to perceptual discrimination responses, which together point to a hierarchy of distinctions among nuclear tunes: a set of primary tunedistinctions are emergent in clustering and always distinct in perception. Other tune distinctions, although evident in top-down analyses of (labeled) F0 trajectories, are lost in emergent clusters, limited in magnitude and scope, and often confused in perception. Results are discussed in terms of implications for a theory of intonational phonology

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus

Three factors that have been argued to influence the prosody of an utterance are (i) which constituents encode discourse-salient information; (ii) which constituents are contrastive in that they evoke alternatives; and (iii) which constituents interact with the meaning of focus operators such as only (i.e., they ‘associate’ with focus). One challenge for a better understanding of these factors and their interaction has been the difficulty of finding a way to evaluate hypotheses quantitatively, since individual variation in productions is often large enough to wash out experimental effects. In this paper, we apply a methodology introduced in [1] to control for such variation and present evidence for how the three factors interact to influence prosody in sentences containing single or multiple foci

Three steps forward for predictability : Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory

There is now abundant evidence that phonetic forms are shaped by probabilistic effects reflecting predictability or informativity. We outline a number of challenges for such work, where theoretical claims are often based on small differences in acoustic measurements, or interpretations of small statistical effect sizes. We outline caveats about the methods and assumptions encountered in many studies of predictability effects, particularly regarding corpus-based approaches. We consider the wide range of factors that influence patterns of variability in phonetic forms, taking a broad perspective on what is meant by “the message” in order to show that predictability effects need to be considered alongside many others, including indexical and prosodic factors. We suggest a number of ways forward to extend our understanding of the form-predictability relationship.Full Tex

Speech Communication

Contains reports on five research projects.C.J. LeBel FellowshipKurzweil Applied IntelligenceNational Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32 NS07040)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS04332)National Science Foundation (Grant 1ST 80-17599)Systems Development FoundationU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-82-K-0727

Speech Communication

Contains reports on eight research projects.C.J. LeBel FellowshipSystems Development FoundationNational Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32 NS 07040-08)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS 04332-20)National Science Foundation (Grant 1ST 80-1759)National Science Foundation (Grant 1ST 80-17599 and MCS-8112899)U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-82-K-0727

Speech Communication

Contains reports on eight research projects.C.J. LeBel FellowshipSystems Development FoundationNational Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32 NS07040)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS04332)National Science Foundation (Grant 1ST 80-17599)U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-82-K-0727

Speech Communication

Contains reports on four research projects.C.J. LeBel FellowshipKurzweil Applied IntelligenceNational Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32 NS07040)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS04332)National Science Foundation (Grant BNS84-18733)Systems Development FoundationU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-82-K-0727