Amalia Arvaniti

On the Place of "Phrase Accents" in Intonational Phonology

Many theories of intonational phonology have granted some special status to pitch features that occur at the edges of prosodic domains, contrasting them with prominence-lending pitch configurations. The standard American structuralist theory that flourished in the 1950s (Trager & Smith 1951) drew a clear distinction between PITCH PHONEMES and JUNCTURE PHONEMES , the former constituting the body of a contour and the latter describing the movements at the contour’s end. Parallel to this development, a distinction was also drawn within the Prague School between the cumulative and delimitative functions of tonal phenomena (Trubetzkoy 1958), the former including prominence, the latter domainedge marking. Bolinger (especially 1970) distinguished ‘accent’ from ‘intonation’: ACCENT referred to the distinctive pitch shapes that accompany prominent stressed syllables (now generally known, following Bolinger, as pitch accents), while INTONATION included, among other things, distinctive pitch movements at the ends of contours. A distinction very similar, but not identical, to Bolinger’s is made in the theory of intonation developed at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in the Netherlands (Cohen & ’t Hart 1967, ’t Hart et al. 1990), namely between PROMINENCE-LENDING and NON-PROMINENCE-LENDING pitch movements.

Rhythm, Timing and the Timing of Rhythm

This article reviews the evidence for rhythmic categorization that has emerged on the basis of rhythm metrics, and argues that the metrics are unreliable predictors of rhythm which provide no more than a crude measure of timing. It is further argued that timing is distinct from rhythm and that equating them has led to circularity and a psychologically questionable conceptualization of rhythm in speech. It is thus proposed that research on rhythm be based on the same principles for all languages, something that does not apply to the widely accepted division of languages into stress- and syllable-timed. The hypothesis is advanced that these universal principles are grouping and prominence and evidence to support it is provided.

The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm

Abstract The performance of the rhythm metrics Δ C , % V , PVIs and Varcos, said to quantify rhythm class distinctions, was tested using English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean and Spanish. Eight participants per language produced speech using three elicitation methods, spontaneous speech, story reading and reading a set of sentences divided into “uncontrolled” sentences from original works of each language, and sentences devised to maximize or minimize syllable structure complexity (“stress-timed” and “syllable-timed” sets respectively). Rhythm classifications based on pooled data were inconsistent across metrics, while cross-linguistic differences in scores were often statistically non-significant even for comparisons between prototypical languages like English and Spanish. Metrics showed substantial inter-speaker variation and proved very sensitive to elicitation method and syllable complexity, so that the size of both effects was large and often comparable to that of language. These results suggest that any cross-linguistic differences captured by metrics are not robust; metric scores range substantially within a language and are readily affected by a variety of methodological decisions, making cross-linguistic comparisons and rhythmic classifications based on metrics unsafe at best.

Phonetic effects of focus and “tonal crowding” in intonation: Evidence from Greek polar questions

This paper deals with the intonation of polar (yes/no) questions in Greek. An experiment was devised which systematically manipulated the position of the focused word in the question (and therefore of the intonation nucleus) and the position of the last stressed syllable. Our results showed that all questions had a low level stretch associated with the focused word and a final rise–fall movement, the peak of which aligned in two different ways depending on the position of the nucleus: when the nucleus was on the final word, the peak of the rise fall co-occurred with the utterance-final vowel, irrespective of whether this vowel was stressed or not; when the nucleus was on an earlier word, the peak co-occurred with the stressed vowel of the last word. In addition, our results showed finely-tuned adjustments of tonal alignment and scaling that depended on the extent to which tones were “crowded” by surrounding tones in the various conditions we set up. These results can best be explained within a model of intonational phonology in which a tune consists of a string of sparse tones and their association to specific elements of the segmental string.

Greek wh-questions and the phonology of intonation

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. Using acoustic data, we show (i) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (ii) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment, depending on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets. Models that specify the F0 of all syllables, or models that specify F0 by superposing contour shapes for shorter and longer domains, cannot account for such fine-grained lawful variation except by using ad hoc tonal specifications, which, in turn, do not allow for phonological generalisations about contours applying to utterances of greatly different lengths. In contrast, our findings follow easily from an autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology, according to which melodies may contain long F0 stretches derived by interpolation between specified targets associated with metrically strong syllables and prosodic boundaries.

Speech rhythm analysis with decomposition of the amplitude envelope: Characterizing rhythmic patterns within and across languages

This study presents a method for analyzing speech rhythm using empirical mode decomposition of the speech amplitude envelope, which allows for extraction and quantification of syllabic- and supra-syllabic time-scale components of the envelope. The method of empirical mode decomposition of a vocalic energy amplitude envelope is illustrated in detail, and several types of rhythm metrics derived from this method are presented. Spontaneous speech extracted from the Buckeye Corpus is used to assess the effect of utterance length on metrics, and it is shown how metrics representing variability in the supra-syllabic time-scale components of the envelope can be used to identify stretches of speech with targeted rhythmic characteristics. Furthermore, the envelope-based metrics are used to characterize cross-linguistic differences in speech rhythm in the UC San Diego Speech Lab corpus of English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Spanish speech elicited in read sentences, read passages, and spontaneous speech. The envelope-based metrics exhibit significant effects of language and elicitation method that argue for a nuanced view of cross-linguistic rhythm patterns.

Tonal Association and Tonal Alignment: Evidence from Greek Polar Questions and Contrastive Statements

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be used by native speakers under experimental conditions to identify the two contour types. It is further shown here that the observed differences in alignment are best attributed to differences in the overall tonal composition of these contours, which results in different degrees of crowding for the targets involved. This analysis accounts for the differences in phonetic detail between the two contours, while obviating the need to posit distinct secondary associations for the peak of the rise-fall. It is suggested that differences in phonetic alignment should be formalized by means of the secondary association mechanism only if simpler analyses and explanations have been considered and shown not to account effectively for the data. Finally, the perceptual results suggest that even small alignment differences like those observed here have a role in perception and should therefore be specified in a full description of the phonetic implementation of tunes.

Standard Modern Greek

Modem Greek is a descendant of Classical Greek and is spoken today by approximately 11,000,000 people living in Greece. In addition, it is spoken (with various modifications) in large Greek immigrant communities in North America, Australia and elsewhere. Although the Modern Greek dialects had largely been shaped by the 10th c. A.D. (Browning 1983), the linguistic situation in Greece has been one of diglossia from the middle 19th c. (the early beginnings of the independent Greek state) and until 1976. The High and Low varieties of Greek diglossia are known as Katharevousa and Dhimotiki respectively. Katharevousa was a purist, partly invented, variety that was heavily influenced by Classical Greek; the term Dhimotiki, on the other hand, loosely describes the mother tongue of the Greeks, which was confined to oral communication. In 1976 the use of Katharevousa was officially abolished and gradually a new standard based on Dhimotiki as spoken in Athens has emerged. This variety is adopted by an increasingly large number of educated speakers all over Greece, who choose it over regional varieties (Mackridge 1985). In spelling, Modern Greek has kept many of the conventions of Ancient Greek, although several simplifications have taken place since 1976. Perhaps the most dramatic of these has been the decision to stop using accent and breath marks (which have not had phonetic correspondents in the language for nearly 2,000 years); these marks were replaced by one accent on the stressed vowel of each word with two or more syllables. The variety described here is Standard Modern Greek as spoken by Athenians. The sample text in particular is based on recordings of two Athenian speakers, a male in his mid-twenties and a female in her mid-thirties. Both speakers read the passage twice in relatively informal style.

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 code-switching 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.

Rhythm Classes and Speech Perception

This study indirectly tests whether American, Greek and Korean listeners can classify low-pass filtered utterances of English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean and Spanish into rhythm classes, by examining how they rate each utterance’s rhythm in comparison to a series of non-speech trochees. Such classification was difficult for all groups of listeners and did not support the rhythmic classification of the languages of the stimuli, casting doubt on the impressionistic basis of the rhythm class hypothesis.