Angeliki Athanasopoulou

Compounds in Modern Greek

In the present study, the acoustic properties associated with stress in compounds in Modern Greek are investigated. Specifically, the claim that Greek compounds consist of a single Phonological Word is tested since it has been argued, based on impressionistic observations, that compounds only contain a single stressed syllable. This claim about Greek is in contrast with the pattern observed in many other languages, including English, where compounds consist of multiple Phonological Words each of which retains its own word stress. Data from 6 native speakers producing 10 adjective-noun phrases and corresponding novel compounds are examined. The analysis focuses on F0 properties given that a recent study of prominence patterns in Greek has demonstrated that F0 is the main property of stress; however, data on duration, intensity and vowel centralization, the other properties commonly associated with stress are also presented. The results provide systematic confirmation of the impressionistic claims about Greek compounds having only a single stress in that the acoustic properties of the stressed vowel of the first word of compounds found to be reduced compared to the corresponding word of phrases. The second word in both constructions was similar in all measurements.

Shape up: An eye-tracking study of preschoolers’ shape name processing and spatial development.

Learning the names of geometric shapes is at the intersection of early spatial, mathematical, and language skills, all important for school-readiness and predictors of later abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children’s processing of shape names and whether differences in processing were predictive of later spatial skills. Three-year-olds (N = 79) with mothers of varying education levels participated in an eye-tracking task that required them to look at named shapes. Lower SES children took longer to fixate target shapes and spent less time looking at them than higher SES children. Gaze variables measured at age 3 were predictive of spatial skills measured at age 5 even though the spatial measures did not require shape-related vocabulary. Early efficiency in the processing of shape names may contribute to the development of a foundation for spatial learning in the preschool years.

The classification of Greek fricatives with cepstral coefficients.

This study examines the classification of Greek fricatives based on place and manner of articulation. Greek is particularly rich in fricatives, so a total of 10 segment types are considered: voiced and voiceless segments at five places (labial, dental, alveolar, palatal, and velar). For each segment the first five bark‐cepstral coefficients were extracted and the values were used in a linear discriminant analysis to separate the different place categories in a statistically optimal way. Data from ten native Greek speakers are currently being analyzed, and preliminary results indicate that the classification of Greek fricatives is generally comparable to that of a similar study with Romanian fricatives [Spinu, L. (2010); Palatalization in Romanian: Experimental and theoretical approaches, Ph. D. thesis University of Delaware.], where overall accuracy of the classification was 78%. Nevertheless, since the inventory of modern Greek fricatives is rather different from that of Romanian, and it crucially includ...

The roles of pitch and phonation in Vietnamese and Mandarin

200 words) Pitch and phonation may be used individually or together in languages: some languages do not make systematic use of either property, others use one or the other, and others a combination, where different relationships may hold. We investigate this last option in Mandarin and Vietnamese using substantial, systematically collected corpora, first with auditory and visual (spectrogram) assessment of the presence of Creaky Phonation (CP), then with acoustic and statistical (Binary Logistic Regression) Analyses. We focus on the sắc and ngã tones in Vietnamese, claimed to contrast in CP not F0, and all four tones of Mandarin, where CP often arises with Tone 3 (dipping), and possibly others. We propose that despite differences in the distribution of F0 and CP, both languages crucially require underlying tonal contrasts, but differ in the source and role of CP. In Mandarin, CP correlates with low F0, as a type of “artifact”, resulting in gender differences. In Vietnamese, CP cannot be due to F0, as it appears with high tones; instead, it is an additional “gesture” speakers may introduce along with F0 in producing the ngã tone, but need not, as seen in the emergence of two speaker groups based on their use of CP.

Chapter 19. Timing properties of (Brazilian) Portuguese and (European) Spanish

Linguistic rhythmic or timing categories, usually defined in terms of isochrony, remain controversial as a meaningful typology for classifying languages, despite decades of research. Romance languages offer an opportunity to address this question since closely related languages are proposed to be at different ends of the typology. We test two such languages: European Spanish (ES) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Instead of investigating isochrony per se, however, we examine the interface between timing and prominence properties. Since duration is associated with prominence, we test the hypothesis that syllable-timed languages (ES) do not alter duration to express prominence, while non-syllable-timed languages (BP) do. Comparisons of lexical and sentential prominence effects on duration support our hypothesis, confirming the proposed distinction between the rhythmic classes of the two languages.

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages.

Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese, comparing real three-syllable words in non-focused and focused contexts. Despite other prosodic differences, our findings confirm that none of the languages exhibits stress in the absence of focus, and under focus, no syllable shows consistent enhancement that could be indirectly interpreted as a manifestation of focus. Instead, a combination of boundary phenomena consistent with the right edge of a major prosodic constituent (Intonational Phrase) appears in each language: increased duration on the final syllable and in Indonesian and Korean, a decrease in F0. Since these properties are also found in languages with stress, we suggest that boundary phenomena signaling a major prosodic constituent break are used universally to indicate focus, regardless of a language’s word-prosody; stress languages may use the same boundary properties, but these are most likely to be combined with enhancement of the stressed syllable of a word.

Is the input for prosodic bootstrapping of word order reliable? The case of phrasal prominence in Turkish and French.

Prosody is often attributed a fundamental role in the process of language acquisition, allowing infants to use prosodic cues to begin to acquire the syntactic structures of their language. The Prosodic Bootstrapping process may combine a number of phonological phenomena (e.g., stress, rhythmic units, intonation), and recently, it has been proposed that a Rhythmic Activation Principle integrating the Iambic-Trochaic Law also contributes to bootstrapping, with the acoustic characteristics of phrasal prominence cuing a language’s basic word order [1, 2]. That is, association of the different properties of iambic and trochaic stress with phrasal prominence patterns would allow a child to identify whether a language is syntactically VO or OV (see [1, 2] for French and Turkish). We further test this hypothesis by investigating the acoustic manifestations of stress in Turkish and French, specifically by comparing them in non-focus and focus conditions.

Two strategies for distinguishing ngã and sắc tones in Northern Vietnamese

The six tones of Northern Vietnamese involve F0 and phonation properties. We examine the acoustic manifestation of two rising tones usually characterized as having distinct phonation (nga = creaky and sắc = modal) in 1584 vowels produced by 9 Hanoi speakers (88 real three word compounds, 8 target vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ with sắc and nga in first two syllables). Based on measurements of F0, energy, duration, and phonation properties (spectral tilt, CPP, and HNR), we observed two strategies for producing the two tones: (a) both F0 and phonation differences, where creaky voice appeared in >78% of the nga tones (N = 7); (b) only F0 difference, where creaky voice appeared in <6% of the nga tones (N = 2). Classification of the data into the two tones with Binary Logistic Regression Analyses confirmed the distinct behaviors. In the first strategy, the main property distinguishing nga from sắc is HNR (84%), but F0 was also very successful (75%). In the second strategy, F0 was the only significant property (90%). Giv...

Evaluating acoustic measurements of creaky voice: A Vietnamese case study

It has been proposed that there are two broad categories of creaky voice (CV), laryngealized and aperiodic. Moreover, several subdivisions have been proposed for both categories (Keating & Garellek, 2015), and various combinations of acoustic properties have been associated with each. It remains unclear, however, how to determine which type of CV a language has and which acoustic measurements to rely on. We address this problem with two rising tones in Vietnamese differing in phonation. All of the phonation measurements we tested with ANOVA were statistically significant (p < .01) in the distinction between the two tones, and thus inconclusive as to the type of CV. We propose that an additional binary logistic regression analysis be applied to the various measurements to determine the extent to which each one contributes to classifying creaky vs. modal vowels; and this, in turn, can inform us about the nature of the CV in the language. Specifically in Vietnameses, we found that HNR yields the strongest cl...