Brechtje Post

Pitch accent realization in four varieties of British English

In intonation languages, the realization of pitch accents varies with the application of phonetic effects such as “truncation” and “compression”. These effects can change the surface form of accents but do not affect the inventory of phonological contrasts. Cross-linguistic differences in the application of truncation and compression have been attested for the standard varieties of English and German, and cross-varietal differences have been shown to apply within Swedish and Danish. This paper provides evidence for cross-varietal differences in truncation and compression in four varieties of British English. We show that speakers of Cambridge English and Newcastle English compress rising and falling accents, but in Leeds English, in identical contexts, we find truncation. In Belfast English, we find rise-plateau patterns in contexts eliciting rises and falls in Cambridge English, Leeds and Newcastle, and these rise-plateaux are truncated. Our data show firstly that different varieties of one language can share intonological specifications but differ in the way these specifications are realized inF0 . Secondly, they show that the reverse is also possible. Different varieties can share a phonetic realization effect, but apply this effect to different pitch accents.

Phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm. Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish

The goal of this study is twofold: first, to examine in greater depth the claimed contribution of differences in syllable structure to measures of speech rhythm for three languages that are reported to belong to different rhythmic classes, namely, English, Spanish, and Catalan; and second, to investigate differences in the durational marking of prosodic heads and final edges of prosodic constituents between the three languages and test whether this distinction correlates in any way with the rhythmic distinctions. Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from these three languages show that differences in the rhythm metrics emerge even when syllable structure is controlled for in the experimental materials, at least between English on the one hand and Spanish/Catalan on the other, suggesting that important differences in durational patterns exist between these languages that cannot simply be attributed to differences in phonotactic properties. In particular, the vocalic variability measures nPVI-V, @DV, and VarcoV are shown to be robust tools for discrimination above and beyond such phonotactic properties. Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way these languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely, the durational marking of prosodic heads, and pre-final lengthening at prosodic boundaries.

Measuring Child Rhythm

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish 2, 4 and 6 year-olds, and compared with the (adult-directed) speech of their mothers. Results reveal that child speech does not fall into a well-defined rhythmic class: for all three languages, it is more ‘vocalic’ (higher %V) than adult speech and has a tendency towards lower variability (when normalized for speech rate) in vocalic interval duration. Consonantal interval variability, however, is higher in child speech, particularly for younger children. Nevertheless, despite the identification of common, cross-linguistic patterns in child speech, the emergence of language-specific rhythmic indices is also clearly observable, even in the speech of 2 year-olds.

Preaccentual Pitch and Speaker Attitude in Dutch.

Native speaker reactions to high-pitched and low-pitched pronunciations of the unstressed syllables before the first pitch accent in an utterance—or high and low “preheads” respectively—show that their pragmatic effect depends on the initial pitch of the following pitch accent. The results were obtained in one specific conversational context, in which the intonation contours appeared on utterances that offered a solution to some problem, and with the help of a limited set of semantic scales. Listeners gave more favorable judgements to high preheads than to low preheads if the following pitch accent began low, but when the following pitch accent began high, they gave more favorable judgements to low preheads than to high preheads. Current theories of intonational structure do not predict this kind of interaction. In these theories, the preaccentual pitch is interpreted as a separate morpheme from the following pitch accent, which suggests that the semantic contribution of the preaccentual pitch is independent of the various pitch accents with which it combines. However, these theories are not ruled out by the results, which can be accommodated if the theories are interpreted appropriately.

The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill} + {-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem + affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592–594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428–435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form – a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled – will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled–fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild–mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled–nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt–bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties.

Pitch accents, Liaison and the Phonological Phrase in French

Recent treatments of French Intonation claim that the Phonological Phrase accountsfor the distribution ofpitch accents, by which the pitch accent at the right edge ofthe Phonological Phrase is obligatory and other pitch accents are optional The investigation presented here addressed the question whether the prosodic domain that conditions this distribution ofpitch accents can be defined on independent grounds. It has been claimed that the segmental process of Liaison motivates the existence ofthe Phonological Phrase in French, while more recently, the tonal phenomenon of Clash Resolution has also been proposed to be conditioned by the Phonological Phrase. A production experiment was designed to investigate the application of Liaison and Clash Resolution. Thefindings call the claim that Liaison is bounded by the Phonological Phrase into question. A provisional suggestion is that Liaison has a syntactically defined domain of application, and is to be accountedfor with the help ofa lexical insertion process that takes precompiled forms from the lexicon. The domain of application of Clash Resolution, by contrast, is the Phonological Phrase.

Tonal Targets in Early Child English, Spanish, and Catalan.

This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children – nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking – between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to the adult target speech provided by their mothers, and to a dataset of adult-directed speech recorded at a later stage for the purpose of measuring pitch height. A corpus of 624 utterances was elicited using a controlled naming task and analysed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. Measuring the pitch height and pitch timing of nuclear pitch accents, we found that once the effects of syllable duration are accounted for, young children reach tonal targets with remarkable precision. Overall, the results indicate that the phonetic aspects of intonation are acquired from a very early age. Even the youngest children show adult-like alignment of the low target, although mastery of the high target increases with age. Young Spanish-speaking children, however, show a more precise attainment of pitch scaling and alignment of their (high) tonal targets than do Catalan and English children; where the ambient language lies within a general prosodic typology appears to influence the acquisition of tonal targets.

L2 ACQUISITION OF PROSODIC PROPERTIES OF SPEECH RHYTHM

This study examines the development of speech rhythm in second language (L2) learners of typologically different first languages (L1s) at different levels of proficiency. An empirical investigation of durational variation in L2 English productions by L1 Mandarin learners and L1 German learners compared to native control values in English and the learners’ L1s showed that the L1 groups followed comparable developmental paths in their acquisition of vocalic variability and accentual lengthening. However, the two L1 groups diverged in the proportion of vocalic materials in their L2 utterances, exhibiting L2 acquisition patterns that are consistent with direct transfer from the L1. The results support a multisystemic model of L2 rhythm acquisition in which the various linguistic-systemic properties that contribute to speech rhythm are acquired at different proficiency levels and depend on different acquisition processes with respect to L1 influence and universal effects. We conclude that theories of L2 phonology need to be able to accommodate the multisystemic nature of L2 prosodic acquisition. Additionally, L2 phonological acquisition theories, and SLA theories more generally, should take into account the nonuniform manner in which the various prosodic properties of the interlanguage reflect L1 transfer effects as well as universal constraints on acquisition.

The Development of Prosodic Features and their Contribution to Rhythm Production in Simultaneous Bilinguals

This study aims to analyse facilitatory and inhibitory effects of bilingualism on the acquisition of prosodic features, and their contribution to speech rhythm. Here, we concentrate on phrase-final lengthening and accentuation, prosodic features suggested to give rise to different rhythmic percepts even when syllable structure is kept constant across languages. In particular, we investigate whether the development of these two features in Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals correlates with rhythm development. Our results demonstrate that, as is the case for bilingual rhythm development overall the development of prosodic head- and edge-marking suggests that the two languages are rhythmically separable from around the age of 4, with clearly separate rhythms at the age of 6. Additionally, we can confirm that bilinguals also start out with an even-timed bias in the development of final lengthening and accentuation as reflected by fewer durational differentiations between prosodic syllable types. Furthermore, we can observe the same advantages in bilingual prosodic acquisition in the structurally more complex language that were found in rhythm development. These advantages are manifested by the earlier mastery of robust durational differentiations between syllable types to an adult-like extent. Finally, the comparison with monolingual data demonstrates that bilinguals do, in fact, have an advantage in their development in comparison with monolinguals. We hypothesise that this advantage is borne out of more advanced motor control and possibly more stable mental representations as a result of the dual language input, and dual language production experience.

Combining formal and functional approaches to topic structure

Fragmentation between formal and functional approaches to prosodic variation is an ongoing problem in linguistic research. In particular, the frameworks of the Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction (PTI) and Empirical Phonology (EP) take very different theoretical and methodological approaches to this kind of variation. We argue that it is fruitful to adopt the insights of both PTI’s qualitative analysis and EP’s quantitative analysis and combine them into a multiple-methods approach. One realm in which it is possible to combine these frameworks is in the analysis of discourse topic structure and the prosodic cues relevant to it. By combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach to discourse topic structure, it is possible to give a better account of the observed variation in prosody, for example in the case of fundamental frequency (F0) peak timing, which can be explained in terms of pitch accent distribution over different topic structure categories. Similarly, local and global patterns in speech rate variation can be better explained and motivated by adopting insights from both PTI and EP in the study of topic structure. Combining PTI and EP can provide better accounts of speech data as well as opening up new avenues of investigation which would not have been possible in either approach alone.