D. Robert Ladd

On the phonetics and phonology of “segmental anchoring” of F0: evidence from German

We measured the alignment of F0 minima and maxima with segmental landmarks, in prenuclear rising accents in Northern and Southern German. As in earlier studies of other languages, we found consistent patterns of alignment. Both Northern and Southern German speakers align rises later than published data for Greek, English, and Dutch; Southern German speakers show later alignment than Northern speakers. The differences are small but significant. Moreover, native patterns of alignment are carried over into the German speakers’ pronunciation of English. These findings argue against interpreting cross-language alignment differences in terms of distinct patterns of phonological association, and in favor of describing them in terms of quantitative phonetic realization rules.

The structure of intonational meaning : evidence from English

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Evidence for the independent function of intonation contour type, voice quality, and F0 range in signaling speaker affect

In three related experiments, listeners judged the affect conveyed by short recorded utterances in which the voice quality, intonation contour type, and fundamental frequency range had been systematically and independently manipulated. (Contour and range were manipulated using digital resynthesis of naturally spoken utterances.) Analyses of variance of the results showed that range and contour, and less clearly range and voice quality, had independent effects on the way the utterances were judged. The results also strongly suggest that these differences are independent of effects due to interspeaker differences and to differences of verbal content. Finally, analysis of the results suggests that differences of F0 range, as is commonly assumed, have continuous rather than categorical effects on affective judgments.

Vocal cues to speaker affect: Testing two models

We identified certain assumptions implicit in two divergent approaches to studying vocal affect signaling. The ‘‘covariance’’ model assumes that nonverbal cues function independently of verbal content, and that relevant acoustic parameters covary with the strength of the affect conveyed. The ‘‘configuration’’ model assumes that both verbal and nonverbal cues exhibit categorical linguistic structure, and that different affective messages are conveyed by different configurations of category variables. We tested these assumptions in a series of two judgment experiments in which subjects rated recorded utterances, written transcripts, and three different acoustically masked versions of the utterances. Comparison of the different conditions showed that voice quality and F0 level can convey affective information independently of the verbal context. However, judgments of the unaltered recordings also showed that intonational categories (contour types) conveyed affective information only in interaction with grammatical features of the text. It appears necessary to distinguish between linguistic features of intonation and other (paralinguistic) nonverbal cues and to design research methods appropriate to the type of cues under study.

Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin

The correlations between interpopulation genetic and linguistic diversities are mostly noncausal (spurious), being due to historical processes and geographical factors that shape them in similar ways. Studies of such correlations usually consider allele frequencies and linguistic groupings (dialects, languages, linguistic families or phyla), sometimes controlling for geographic, topographic, or ecological factors. Here, we consider the relation between allele frequencies and linguistic typological features. Specifically, we focus on the derived haplogroups of the brain growth and development-related genes ASPM and Microcephalin, which show signs of natural selection and a marked geographic structure, and on linguistic tone, the use of voice pitch to convey lexical or grammatical distinctions. We hypothesize that there is a relationship between the population frequency of these two alleles and the presence of linguistic tone and test this hypothesis relative to a large database (983 alleles and 26 linguistic features in 49 populations), showing that it is not due to the usual explanatory factors represented by geography and history. The relationship between genetic and linguistic diversity in this case may be causal: certain alleles can bias language acquisition or processing and thereby influence the trajectory of language change through iterated cultural transmission.

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.

Declination ‘‘reset’’ and the hierarchical organization of utterances

Sequences of accented fundamental frequency (F0) peaks (‘‘toplines’’) were measured for sentences of the form A and B but C and A but B and C, where A, B, and C are separate main clauses with three (four in a replication experiment) accented words each. It was hypothesized that the differences in boundary strength (but‐boundary stronger than and ) would be reflected in the way declination was reset following the boundaries. There were significant differences between the toplines of the two sentence types, the most consistent being that the accent peaks immediately following the two boundaries were higher if they followed but than if they followed and . In other respects the toplines were similar, exhibiting declination within each clause and across the three clauses; corresponding clause toplines that began at different levels following different boundaries nevertheless tended to end at the same level. The fact that hierarchical organization is reflected intonationally in this way makes problems for model...

Declination.: a review and some hypotheses *

One of the most widespread – and widely studied – properties of speech fundamental frequency (Fo) is a tendency to decline gradually during the course of utterances. This tendency has been given a variety of names, of which the best known is probably DECLINATION. This is the term I shall use in this paper. The purpose of the paper is to review past work on declination as it affects the phonological and phonetic modelling of Fo contours, and to outline some ideas for the empirical resolution of the issues that emerge from the discussion.

Aspects of pitch realisation in Yoruba

A great many languages of the world exhibit phenomena of FO DOWNTREND phenomena whereby, other things being equal, the fundamental frequency (Fo) of the speaking voice declines over the course of an utterance. That much is uncontroversial; further details are either simply unknown or the subject of considerable debate. The purpose of the study reported here was to shed light on some of these unknown or uncertain matters by the controlled investigation of pitch realisation in Yoruba. * The main advantage of using a language with lexical tone as the basis of such a study is that it permits more control over the phonological influences on pitch than is the case in languages in which pitch conveys only intonational distinctions. The phonological analysis of intonation is still unclear on a number of fundamental issues, whereas the surface phonology of tone in Yoruba is fairly well established. We assume that conclusions based on our findings here will be useful for clarifying issues in intonational phonology as well. The paper is in three parts. ? I discusses the background to the study and reviews some of the theoretical and empirical issues we wished to address. ? 2 reports on the procedures and results of the study itself. ? 3 summarises the theoretical implications of the study, particularly in the light of some unplanned findings.

Effects of vowel length and “right context” on the alignment of Dutch nuclear accents

We measured the alignment of f0 landmarks with segmental landmarks in nuclear “pointed hat” accents in controlled speech materials in Dutch. We varied the phonological length of the stressed vowel and the “right context” (syllable membership of following consonant, presence/absence of stress clash). The nuclear accented word was always followed by an unaccented content word. Based on previous work we expected that the alignment would be substantially affected by vowel length, stress clash and syllable membership, but the only important effect was that of vowel length. We believe this can be explained by the fact that most previous studies have dealt with prenuclear accents and/or with nuclear accents in utterance-final position, whereas we are dealing with nuclear accents that are not in utterance-final position. We also explored the effects of using different quantitative definitions of our dependent and independent variables, and of using Multiple Regression rather than ANOVA, and conclude that our findings are robust regardless of the variables or analysis technique used. An important methodological conclusion from our comparative analyses is that tonal alignment is best expressed relative to a nearby segmental landmark. Proportional measures may also be useful, but need further investigation.