Argyro Katsika

Perceived prosody: Phonetic bases of prominence and boundaries.

In comprehending speech, listeners are sensitive to the prosodic features that signal the phrasing and the discourse salience of words (prominence). Findings from two experiments on prosody perception show that acoustic and articulatory kinematic properties of speech correlate with native listeners’ perception of phrasing and prominence. Subjects in this study were 114 university‐age adults (74 UIUC + 40 Haskins), monolingual speakers of American English who were untrained in prosody transcription. Subjects listened to short recorded excerpts (about 20 s) from two corpora of spontaneous and read speech (Buckeye Corpus and Wisconsin Microbeam Database) and marked prominent words and the location of phrase boundaries on a transcript. Intertranscriber agreement rates across subsets of 17–40 subjects are significantly above chance based on Fleiss’ statistic, indicating that listeners’ perception of prosody is reliable, with higher agreement rates for boundary perception than for prominence. Prosody perception...

Boundary‐ and prominence‐related lengthening and their interaction.

The durational effects of prosodic boundaries and prosodic prominence are well known, but their interaction is less well‐understood. Recent studies in English [Turk and Shattuck‐Hufnagel (2007); Byrd and Riggs (2008)] indicate that the two effects might be interdependent. Two acoustic experiments are presented, examining the role of boundary‐ and prominence‐related lengthening and their interaction in Greek. The first experiment explores the effects of boundary‐adjacent lengthening (conditions: no boundary, intermediate phrase, intonational phrase) and prominence (on the first, second, and third syllable away from the boundary). The second experiment examines these same effects, but post‐boundary. Data from eight speakers were collected. The results from five speakers are presented. Results show that pre‐boundary, both prominence and boundary have an effect on segment duration. Two prosodic levels (the level of word and one higher level) are distinguished. Furthermore, for two speakers, there is an intera...

An electromagnetic articulometer study of tongue and lip troughs

Troughs, which are a discontinuity in anticipatory coarticulation (Perkell 1968), have been shown to occur in the tongue body in /ipi/ and lips in /usu/. An electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) study of a single subject reported previously showed that intraoral pressure during the consonant could not be solely responsible for the downwards tongue body movement observed during the labial consonants (/p, b, m, f, v/); results supported the hypothesis of a secondary tongue gesture during the consonant. Lip troughs during /s/ in rounded contexts were more ambiguous, possibly because of inconsistencies in corpus design. Six new subjects have been recorded using a WAVE EMA system and a revised corpus. Tongue trough magnitudes decreased in the order /f, v/ > /p, b/ > /m/, serving to disprove the aerodynamic hypothesis; they were deeper for long than short consonants (e.g., [iffi] > [ifi]), and converged to the same point in asymmetric vowel contexts. The same type of convergence during the consonant was observed ...

The Phonetics of r-Deletion in Samothraki Greek

Several accounts of the typologically unusual compensatory lengthening through the loss of the onset r in Samothraki Greek exist in the literature. However, none of these accounts take into consideration the precise phonetic detail of r-deletion and vowel lengthening in the language. This paper addresses this shortcoming by providing a phonetic analysis of Samothraki Greek compensatory lengthening through r-deletion. Our data show that vowels resulting from r-deletion are categorically longer than vowels not involving r-deletion. Moreover, there is no trace of r in the formant structure of vowels from compensatory lengthening. Finally, in contexts that do not allow for r-deletion, the majority of r productions are taps, most of which are accompanied by a vocoid. A new account of r-deletion in Samothraki Greek is proposed that takes into consideration the articulatory makeup of the r. The implications of this proposal for existing phonological accounts are discussed.

The scope of boundary lengthening as a function of lexical stress and pitch accent

Although the phenomenon of boundary lengthening is well established, the scope of the effect and its interaction with prominence is not well understood. It is known that phrase-final prominence is a determining factor. However, it is unclear whether it is lexical stress or pitch accent that drives the effect, and whether the affected domain is continuous or discontinuous. An electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) study of five speakers of Greek was conducted to examine the effect of (1) boundary (word and IP), (2) stress (ultima, penult, or antepenult), and (3) prominence (accented and de-accented) on the duration of phrase-final word articulatory events. In both accented and de-accented conditions, lengthening affected events that immediately preceded the boundary in stress-final words, but was initiated earlier in words with non-final stress. The affected domain was continuous. The stress effect could also be observed in pausing behavior: pauses following phrase-final words were realized with specific voca...

Boundary tones as gestures: Coordination relations at boundaries.

While the temporal properties of prosodic boundaries are fairly well understood, tonal events at boundaries (phrase accents and boundary tones) have received less attention. The present study, conducted within the articulatory phonology framework [cf. Browman and Goldstein (1989)], is a first investigation of the coordination of boundary tone gestures to constriction gestures. An articulatory magnetometer study probes this coordination in a variety of constructions in Greek (causatives, yes‐no questions, imperative requests, and wh‐questions). The effects of stress (levels: zero, one or two syllables before the boundary) and accent (levels: accented versus deaccented utterance‐final word) are examined. Results from two speakers analyzed to date indicate that the boundary tone coordinates with the onset’s release gesture or the nucleus’ opening gesture of the utterance‐final syllable. The presence of accent does not affect these coordination relations, while stress does. Specifically, the latter affects th...

Planning time effects of phonological competition: Articulatory and acoustic data.

One major cause for speech production variability and errors is competition between phonologically similar sequences in an utterance. Since one recent model of speech production planning [Nam (2004)] also posits a systematic relation between planning time and kinematic variability, we decided to directly investigate whether competition increases planning time, i.e., whether it takes longer to initiate a sequence such as “tape cape” compared with “tape tape.” Effects of competition in the onset were compared to competition in the coda (e.g., “tape take”). Results from two studies are reported: articulatory latencies from a delayed naming task recorded using EMA (four speakers), and acoustic latencies from a delayed naming task, a simple naming task, and a picture naming task (ten speakers). Latencies were significantly affected by competition, i.e., latencies were longer for items like “tape cape” and “tape take” than for “tape tape.” However, no significant differences were found in competition effects be...