Margaret E. L. Renwick

THE TIMING OF SPEECH-ACCOMPANYING GESTURES WITH RESPECT TO PROSODY

The question of how and whether the body movements that accompany speaking are timed with respect to the speech has often been studied, and investigators have reached different conclusions depending on the types of gestures and aspects of prosody attended to. The ToBI system for labeling pitch accents (phrase‐level prosodic prominences) and intonational phrase boundaries, which provides a well‐defined inventory of prosodic elements, was used to label several sound files from videotaped lectures in English. A particular type of gesture, i.e., discrete sharp rapid movements that reach a perceptually salient end point, was separately labeled for syllable location in the visual display of the same lecture samples. Preliminary analysis showed a strong correlation between this type of ‘‘stroke‐like’’ gesture of the head or hands and pitch accented syllables. For example, for one speaker of Australian English, 168 of 195 strokelike gestures (86%) occurred with a pitch‐accented syllable. If these observations from coarse‐grained temporal labeling are confirmed by the frame‐by‐frame labeling now under way, it will suggest that the study of speech‐accompanying gestures can provide evidence for the prosodic structure of spoken utterances, and raise the possibility that a complete model of speech production planning should include a gestural component.

Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan

Abstract In some Romance languages with two pairs of mid vowel phonemes, it is acknowledged that these contrasts are somewhat unstable. We analyze the distribution and realization of the anterior and posterior mid vowels in Catalan to test claims (mostly based on anecdotal evidence) that these contrasts exhibit inter- and intraspeaker variability. Participants produced target words containing stressed mid vowels and, later, judged vowel height (/e/ vs. /ɛ/; /o/ vs. /ɔ/) in the same words. The results indicate that, even intradialectally, the distribution of mid vowels is somewhat variable, with speakers showing only moderate agreement in the distribution of phonemic vowels. In addition, speakers are not always consistent in their realization of mid vowels when they produce the same word (probably indicating weak phonolexical representations). Interspeaker variation was also observed in the phonetic implementation of the contrasts. The results indicate that the Catalan mid vowel contrasts, like those in other Romance languages, are weaker and less stable than other phonological oppositions.

The phonetics and phonology of contrast : the case of the romanian vowel system

Studies of both synchronic phonetics and morpho-phonological alternations are needed to understand the forces that historically shaped and now maintain the phonemic system of Romanian. Through a series of case studies on the Romanian vowel system, this book proposes that the robustness of a phonemic contrast does not depend solely on the presence of minimal pairs, but is instead affected by a set of phonetic, usage-based, and systemic factors.

Probabilistic underspecification in nasal place assimilation

According to many works on English phonology, word-final alveolar consonants – and only alveolar consonants – assimilate to following word-initial consonants, e.g. ran quickly → ra [ŋ] quickly . Some phonologists explain the readiness of alveolar consonants to assimilate ( vs. the resistance of velar and labial articulations) by proposing that they have underspecified place of articulation (e.g. Avery & Rice 1989). Labial or dorsal nasals do not undergo assimilation because their place nodes are specified. There are reports that velar and labial consonants sometimes assimilate in English, but these are anecdotal observations, with no available audio and no statistics on their occurrence. We find evidence of assimilation of labial and velar nasals in the Audio British National Corpus, motivating a new, quantitative phonological framework: a statistical model of underspecification and variation which captures typical as well as less common but systematic patterns seen in non-coronal assimilation.

Quantifying Rhythm: Interspeaker Variation in %V

The long-standing intuition that languages differ systematically in speech rhythm received support from an acoustic measure, %V (the ratio of vocalic material to the total duration of an utterance), which seemed to separate languages according to their perceived rhythms. Across studies, however, computations of %V values for target languages differ, raising the possibility that %V reflects not language-specific rhythmic habits, but the syllable structure of the particular utterances selected for analysis, and individual speaker differences. This paper replicates the %V methodology (using new recordings), and seeks to explain the high variability in %V by explicitly testing the link between %V, phonotactics, and individual speaker behavior. A high positive correlation is found between %V and an utterances proportion of open syllables, while %V correlates negatively with the number of complex onsets in an utterance; these results support the hypothesis that utterance-level variation in syllable structure c...

Marginal Contrast Among Romanian Vowels: Evidence from ASR and Functional Load.

This work quantifies the phonological contrast between the Romanian central vowels [2] and [1], which are considered separate phonemes, although they are historical allophones with few minimal pairs. We consider the vowels’ functional load within the Romanian inventory and the usefulness of the contrast for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Using a 7 hour corpus of automatically aligned broadcast speech, the relative frequencies of vowels are compared across phonological contexts. Results indicate a near complementary distribution of [2] and [1]: the contrast scores lowest of all pairwise comparisons on measures of functional load, and shows the highest Kullback-Leibler divergence, suggesting that few lexical distinctions depend on the contrast. Thereafter, forced alignment is performed using an existing ASR system. The system selects among [1], [2], ∅ for lexical /1/, testing for its reduction in continuous speech. The same data is transcribed using the ASR system where [2]/[1] are merged, testing the hypothesis that loss of a marginal contrast has little impact on ASR error rates. Both results are consistent with functional load calculations, indicating that the /2/ /1/ contrast is lexically and phonetically weak. These results show how automatic transcription tools can help test phonological predictions using continuous speech.

A Survey of Phonological Mid Vowel Intuitions in Central Catalan

Catalan, like other Romance languages, has two pairs of phonemic mid vowels (/be/ “well” vs. /bɛ/ “lamb”; /os/ “bear” vs. /ɔs/ “bone”). However, these contrasts do not function like others in the language: they are partially phonologically conditioned, and evidence shows that words may be pronounced with different mid vowels by speakers of the same variety or even by the same speaker. Spanish may influence this instability, as first-language Spanish Catalan-Spanish bilinguals struggle to perceive and produce the contrast. This paper investigates the mid vowel contrasts in an Internet survey of vowel height judgments in 220 words by 146 Central Catalan-speaking individuals who also self-reported their language history. Results confirm that certain phonological contexts condition mid vowel height, typically favoring low mid judgments; where phonological conditioning occurs, speakers judge quality with increased consistency and confidence. Many words lacking phonological conditioning environments, however, are variable across speakers. Bilingualism levels and age have an effect: among Catalan-dominant participants, choice of mid vowel is affected by age, while participants with the highest Catalan dominance have greatest confidence in their intuitions. Variably-judged words are also phonetically variable, indicating a word-specific association between strength of phonological representation and realization.

Transcription and forced alignment of the digital archive of southern speech

We describe transcription and forced alignment of the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS), a project that will provide a large corpus of historical, semi-spontaneous Southern speech for acoustic analysis. 372 hours of recordings (64 interviews) comprise a subset of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, an extensive dialect study of 1121 speakers conducted across eight southern U.S. states from 1968 to 1983. Manual orthographic transcription of full DASS interviews is carried out according to in-house guidelines that ensure consistency across files and transcribers. Separate codes are used for the interviewee, interviewer, non-speech, overlapping, and unintelligible speech. Transcriber output is converted to Praat TextGrids using LaBB-CAT, a tool for maintaining large speech corpora. TextGrids containing only the interviewee’s speech are generated, and subjected to forced alignment by DARLA, which accommodates the levels of variation and noise in the DASS files with a high degree of success. Towar...

Vowel mergers in the American South

This study investigates the occurrence of a series of vowel mergers in the English of the Southern United States. Investigated mergers include the pin-pen merger, which may be considered characteristic of Southern English, as well as the cot-caught, pull-pool, fill-feel, and cord-card mergers, which are less strongly identified with the region. First and second formant values of over 300,000 vowel measurements from 41 speakers were automatically extracted from.wav files contained in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS). Vowel distributions were statistically analyzed via Pillai scores, Euclidean distance, and mixed-effects modeling to determine to what degree, if any, the speakers participate in these mergers. Previous studies on vowel merger in the United States have typically classified speakers into discrete “merged” or “unmerged” categories, often relying on speaker or listener judgments to do so. The richness of the acoustic data and high number of tokens available for this study allow speakers to instead be classified along a spectrum, where they are described by “degree of merger” rather than binarily. The results in turn provide new perspective on how Southerners have participated in or resisted dialectal changes that have shaped American English from the late 18th through the mid-20th century.This study investigates the occurrence of a series of vowel mergers in the English of the Southern United States. Investigated mergers include the pin-pen merger, which may be considered characteristic of Southern English, as well as the cot-caught, pull-pool, fill-feel, and cord-card mergers, which are less strongly identified with the region. First and second formant values of over 300,000 vowel measurements from 41 speakers were automatically extracted from.wav files contained in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS). Vowel distributions were statistically analyzed via Pillai scores, Euclidean distance, and mixed-effects modeling to determine to what degree, if any, the speakers participate in these mergers. Previous studies on vowel merger in the United States have typically classified speakers into discrete “merged” or “unmerged” categories, often relying on speaker or listener judgments to do so. The richness of the acoustic data and high number of tokens available for this study allow speak...

Acoustically quantifying /ai/ monophthongization in four southern dialect regions

The Atlas of North American English describes four southern U.S. dialect areas: Inland South (IS; interior Appalachia), Texas South (TS; around Dallas), Florida (FL), and South (S; remainder of Southern US). These areas are distinguished by degree of /ai/ monophthongization, the Southern Vowel Shift’s (SVS) triggering feature (Labov et al., 2006). IS is argued to be most advanced in the SVS, and /ai/ weakens in all phonetic environments. While not as advanced generally, TS also features all-environment weakening. In S, /ai/ weakens only in syllable-final and pre-voiced conditions, and in FL it remains diphthongal. This study uses the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to acoustically measure /ai/ weakening in each region. Speech was force-aligned and F1 and F2 values collected at five time points. Related work on F2 formant angle in DASS speech has suggested /ai/ weakens most in IS (Renwick and Stanley, 2017). Here, trajectory length (TL) measurement (Fox and Jacewicz, 2009) corroborates evidence f...