Sam Hellmuth

The relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution: Evidence from Egyptian Arabic ∗

Abstract This article explores the relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution in the context of empirical evidence from spoken Egyptian Arabic (EA), a language in which every content word routinely bears a pitch accent. In languages with more sparse pitch accent distribution, this has been explained in terms of obligatory accentuation of the heads of prosodic constituents at the phonological phrase level. Evidence from a corpus of EA narrative speech indicates that although the distribution of pitch accents in EA cannot be attributed to the distribution of heads of phonological phrases, it can be analyzed in terms of the distribution of another prosodic constituent, the Prosodic Word. This supports the general claim that there is a link between pitch accent distribution and the distribution of prosodic constituents, but suggests there is cross-linguistic variation in which constituent level of the Prosodic Hierarchy functions as the domain of pitch accent distribution.

Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: phonological-syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects.

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., [see text]/d(a)r(a)b(a)/, hit; [see text]/d(o)r(i)b(a)/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., [see text]/b(i)j(a)d/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritized sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb.

F2 slope as a Perceptual Cue for the Front–Back Contrast in Standard Southern British English

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].

Variation in polar interrogative contours within and between Arabic dialects

Quantitative analysis of fundamental frequency (F0) contours in yes/no-questions and coordinated questions, are compared across eight Arabic dialects, based on scripted role play data from the Intonational Variation in Arabic corpus [1]. Visualisation of the F0 contour of all tokens is used to evaluate how consistently speakers produce a typical contour in each dialect, for each question type. A series of simple Generalised Additive Models (GAM) is used to identify dialects which stand out from others in the realization of one or both question types, as well as groups of dialects which might be further differentiated by more fine-grained analysis.