Maria del Mar Vanrell

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.

Is prosodic development correlated with grammatical and lexical development? Evidence from emerging intonation in Catalan and Spanish

This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and communicative function were also assessed. Three main conclusions arise from the results. First, the study shows that the Autosegmental Metrical model can be successfully used to transcribe early intonation contours. Second, results reveal that childrens emerging intonation is largely independent of grammatical development, and generally it develops well before the appearance of two-word combinations. As for the relationship between lexical and intonational development, the data show that the emergence of intonational grammar is related to the onset of speech and the presence of a small lexicon. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the biological hypothesis of intonational production.

Catalan speakers' perception of word stress in unaccented contexts

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction patterns, words either alternate stressed open vowels with unstressed mid-central vowels as in English or contain no vowel quality cues to stress, as in Spanish. Results show that Catalan listeners perceive stress based mainly on duration cues in both word types. Other cues pattern together with duration to make stress perception more robust. However, no single cue is absolutely necessary and trading effects compensate for a lack of differentiation in one dimension by changes in another dimension. In particular, speakers identify longer mid-central vowels as more stressed than shorter open vowels. These results and those obtained in other stress-accent languages provide cumulative evidence that word stress is perceived independently of pitch accents by relying on a set of cues with trading effects so that no single cue, including formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction, is absolutely necessary for stress perception.

Analysis of inter-transcriber consistency in the Cat_ToBI prosodic labeling system

A set of tools to analyze inconsistencies observed in a Cat_ToBI labeling experiment are presented. We formalize and use the metrics that are commonly used in inconsistency tests. The metrics are systematically applied to analyze the robustness of every symbol and every pair of transcribers. The results reveal agreement rates for this study that are comparable to previous ToBI inter-reliability tests. The inter-transcriber confusion rates are transformed into distance matrices to use multidimensional scaling for visualizing the confusion between the different ToBI symbols and the disagreement between the raters. Potential different labeling criteria are identified and subsets of symbols that are candidates to be fused are proposed.

Intonation as an Encoder of Speaker Certainty: Information and Confirmation Yes-No Questions in Catalan

Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kügler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for European Portuguese; Vanrell, Mascaró, Prieto, & Torres-Tamarit, 2010, for Catalan). However, all these studies have relied on production experiments and little is known about the perceptual relevance of these intonational cues. This paper explores whether Majorcan Catalan listeners distinguish information- and confirmation-seeking questions by means of two distinct nuclear falling pitch accents. Three behavioral tasks were conducted with 20 Majorcan Catalan subjects, namely a semantic congruity test, a rating test, and a classical categorical perception identification/discrimination test. The results show that a difference in pitch scaling on the leading H tone of the H+L* nuclear pitch accent is the main cue used by Majorcan Catalan listeners to distinguish confirmation questions from information-seeking questions. Thus, while a ¡H+L* pitch accent signals an information-seeking question (i.e., the speaker has no expectation about the nature of the answer), the H+L* pitch accent indicates that the speaker is asking about mutually shared information. We argue that these results have implications in representing the distinctions of tonal height in Catalan. The results also support the claim that phonological contrasts in intonation, together with other linguistic strategies, can signal the speakers’ beliefs about the certainty of the proposition expressed.

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.

The role of pitch range in establishing intonational contrasts

In Catalan, the same rising nuclear pitch accent L+H* is used in three different sentence-types, namely statements, contrastive foci, and echo questions. Since the peak height of the rising pitch accent seems to indicate sentence type, we hypothesized that these three pragmatic meanings would be differentiated by pitch accent range. We undertook two identification tasks and analyzed the patterns of responses found as well as reaction times (RTs). The results of the identification tasks show that there is a contrast between the statement interpretation on the one hand (L+H*) and the contrastive foci and echo question interpretation on the other (L+iH*). However, RTs clearly show that while there is a categorical difference between the statement interpretation (L+H*) and the echo question interpretation (L+iH*), the difference between a statement interpretation and a contrastive focus interpretation is gradient. This represents further evidence that pitch range can be used to make phonological distinctions between a variety of pragmatic meanings, and strengthens the argument that this needs to be represented descriptively at the phonological level.

The relevance of prosodic structure in tonal articulation Edge effects at the prosodic word level in Catalan and Spanish

Abstract We conducted a production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mi ra batalles ‘(s)he looked at battles’ vs. mi ra va talle s ‘I/(s)he used to look at carvings’; Span. da balazos ‘(s)he fires shots’ vs. da ba lazos ‘I/(s)he gave ribbons’; stressed syllables are underlined). Results revealed strong effects of within-word position on H location. Peaks tended to be timed earlier with respect to the end of the syllable when their associated syllables occurred later in the word than when they occurred earlier in the word. These results confirmed previous findings for other languages ( Silverman & Pierrehumbert, 1990 for English; Arvaniti, Ladd, & Mennen, 1998 for Greek; and Ishihara, 2006 for Japanese; and Godjevac, 2000 for Serbo-Croatian) and for Spanish and Catalan ( Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995 for Spanish; de la Mota, 2005 ; Simonet, 2006 , Simonet & Torreira, 2005 for Catalan). A set of perception experiments suggested that tonal alignment patterns influence listeners’ judgments of word boundary location both in Catalan and in Spanish. Listeners were able to employ fine allophonic details of H tonal alignment due to within-word position to identify lexical items that are ambiguous for word-boundary position. The data is consistent with the view that prosodic structure plays an essential part in determining the temporal coordination of f 0 contours with segmental material.

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

Abstract This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011; Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan- and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development.