Sónia Frota

Comments on Intonational Phrasing in English

The Intonational Phrase organization of a sentence is a hybrid beast. It sometimes shows a tight correlation with the semantic properties of the sentence, namely what the sentence means in standard truth conditional terms. It sometimes appears to be a reflex of the Focus structure of the sentence. Sometimes it appears to be correlated with the length of the constituents of a sentence. And sometimes it seems merely to reflect a stylistic option in the utterance of a sentence. This paper centers on the ways in which intonational phrasing in phonological representation is dependent on the properties of the interface syntactic representation, giving but a nod to other factors. It assumes a grammatical architecture in which syntax mediates between phonology and semantics and where the syntax-phonology interface is characterized in terms of a set of optimality theoretic interface constraints (cf. Selkirk 1995, Truckenbrodt 1999).

Grammar and frequency effects in the acquisition of prosodic words in European portuguese

This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child speech shows that EP children are aware of these cues. It is thus hypothesized that grammatical properties could play a role in the development of the PW by promoting the early production of the different word shapes found in the language. The analysis of statistical properties of the input, namely word shape frequencies in adult speech and child-directed speech, shows that they constrain early word shapes in child speech in ways similar to recent reports on other languages: a fairly high frequency of monosyllabic shapes, and especially of monosyllabic CV shapes, in the input agrees with the production of subminimal words in child speech; a fairly high frequency of trisyllabic and larger shapes in the input (adult speech in particular) matches the early development of words larger than a binary foot. These patterns, together with the co-occurrence of truncation to subminimal shapes in the initial and later stages, as well as the presence of prosodic fillers regardless of word size, support the claim that early words in EP are not constrained by minimality or maximality requirements. The potential interaction of grammar and frequency effects in PW acquisition is discussed in the light of the present findings and comparable data available in the literature for English, French, Spanish and Catalan.

Prosodies : with special reference to Iberian languages

Prosodies is a collection of recent papers in phonetics and phonology. It deals with a wide range of subjects like intonation, prosodic phrasing, rhythm, word stress, phrasal prominence, syllable structure, segmental variation and change, and the perception of segments, features, and their acoustic properties. The book is particularly valuable because it focuses on languages largely underrepresented in the literature, e.g., Cairene and Lebanese Arabic, Central Catalan and insular dialects of Catalan, Galician, Italian, Standard and Northern European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish and different varieties of Argentine Spanish.

Phonetics and Phonology: Interactions and Interrelations

1. Introduction 2. Part I. Between phonetics and phonology 3. Schwa in American English V+/r/ sequences (by Riera, Maria) 4. Perception of word stress in Castilian Spanish: The effects of sentence intonation and vowel type (by Ortega-Llebaria, Marta) 5. Do complex pitch gestures induce syllable lengthening in Catalan and Spanish? (by Prieto, Pilar) 6. Cues to contrastive focus in Romanian (by Manolescu, Alis) 7. The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch (by Chen, Aoju) 8. Part II. Segmental and prosodic interactions 9. Prosodic structure and consonant development across languages (by Arbisi-Kelm, Timothy) 10. Rhythmic and prosodic contrast in Venetan and Sicilian Italian (by White, Laurence) 11. Stem boundary and stress effects on syllabification in Spanish (by Cabre, Teresa) 12. Prosodic and segmental effects on vowel intrusion duration in Spanish /rC/ clusters (by Schmeiser, Benjamin) 13. Part III. Interactions between segments and features 14. Acoustic and aerodynamic factors in the interaction of features: The case of nasality and voicing (by Sole, Maria-Josep) 15. Fixed and variable properties of the palatalization of dental stops in Brazilian Portuguese: In an Italian immigrant community (by Battisti, Elisa) 16. Post-tonic vowel harmony in some dialects of Central Italy: The role of prosodic structure, contrast and consonants (by Canalis, Stefano) 17. Vowel reduction and vowel harmony in Eastern Catalan loanword phonology (by Cabre, Teresa) 18. Index of Subjects and Languages

A focus intonational morpheme in European Portuguese: Production and Perception

Production studies of the intonational signalling of focus in European Portuguese (EP) have shown that focus is expressed by a specific pitch accent type, thus revealing a systematic contrast between nuclear accents associated with different meanings . In declarative utterances, the contrast between the neutral/ broad focus reading and the narrow/contrastive focus reading is essentially realized as an alignment difference: H+L* (neutral accent) and H*+L (focus accent) . A pilot perceptual study using natural stimuli has shown that subjects are able to distinguish between members of neutral/focus minimal pairs and to match them to the appropriate production context . However, the perception of the contrast found in production has not yet been investigated in detail . The present paper revisits the production contrast and investigates its categorical nature using a multiple methodology approach that resorts to semantically motivated tasks . Several experiments tested whether differences in F0 peak and valley alignment would trigger a perceptual change from one meaning to the other, and whether the alignment differences pattern alike in stimuli based on a neutral and a focus sentence . In Experiment 1, stimuli were classified in a context-matching identification task . In Experiment 2, participants rated appropriateness of stimulus to context in a semantic scaling task . Finally, in Experiment 3, pairs of stimuli were discriminated in a context-matching discrimination task . The results of the three experiments provide converging evidence for the distinction between H+L* and H*+L . Moreover, they support the claim that the neutral/focus accent distinction is primarily an alignment contrast phonologically encoded at the pitch accent level . These findings have implications for the understanding of the nature of intonational contrasts, and the discussion about the approaches and methods to define prosodic categories .

Infants' Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus.

ABSTRACT Infants perceive intonation contrasts early in development in contrast to lexical stress but similarly to lexical pitch accent. Previous studies have mostly focused on pitch height/direction contrasts; however, languages use a variety of pitch features to signal meaning, including differences in pitch timing. In this study, we investigate infants’ perception of the prosodic contrast that cues the difference between all-new information (broad focus) and the highlighting of a particular word (narrow/contrastive focus) in European Portuguese (EP), and which has been described as having pitch timing as its key feature. Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP learning infants discriminated this contrast at 12 months but not at 7 months, deviating from previous findings of a precocious ability to perceive pitch distinctions. These results suggest different developmental trajectories of the perception of different prosodic contrasts, underlining the importance of the nature of the cues signalling a given contrast in a given language.

Dysarthria in individuals with Parkinson's disease: a protocol for a binational, cross-sectional, case-controlled study in French and European Portuguese (FraLusoPark)

Introduction Individuals with Parkinsons disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, 3 major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the neurodegenerative processes; (2) effects of the pharmacological treatment, which vary according to the disease stage; and (3) particular speech modifications that may be language-specific, that is, dependent on the language spoken by the patients. The main objective of the FraLusoPark project is to provide a thorough evaluation of changes in PD speech as a result of pharmacological treatment and disease duration in 2 different languages (French vs European Portuguese). Methods and analysis Individuals with PD are enrolled in the study in France (N=60) and Portugal (N=60). Their global motor disability and orofacial motor functions is assessed with specific clinical rating scales, without (OFF) and with (ON) pharmacological treatment. 2 groups of 60 healthy age-matched volunteers provide the reference for between-group comparisons. Along with the clinical examinations, several speech tasks are recorded to obtain acoustic and perceptual measures. Patient-reported outcome measures are used to assess the psychosocial impact of dysarthria on quality of life. Ethics and dissemination The study has been approved by the local responsible committees on human experimentation and is conducted in accordance with the ethical standards. A valuable large-scale database of speech recordings and metadata from patients with PD in France and Portugal will be constructed. Results will be disseminated in several articles in peer-reviewed journals and in conference presentations. Recommendations on how to assess speech and voice disorders in individuals with PD to monitor the progression and management of symptoms will be provided. Trial registration number NCT02753192, Pre-results.

A Stress "Deafness" Effect in European Portuguese

Research on the perception of word stress suggests that speakers of languages with non-predictable or variable stress (e.g., English and Spanish) are more efficient than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French and Finnish) at distinguishing nonsense words contrasting in stress location. In addition, segmental and suprasegmental cues to word stress may also impact on the ability of speakers to perceive stress. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress and vowel reduction. Previous studies on EP have identified duration as the main cue for stress. In the present study, we investigated the perception of word stress in EP, both in nuclear (NP) and post-nuclear (PN) positions, by means of three experiments. Experiment 1 was an ABX discrimination task with stress and phoneme contrasts, without vowel reduction. Experiments 2 and 3 were sequence recall tasks with stress and phoneme contrasts, vowel reduction being added to the stress contrast only in experiment 3. Results showed significantly higher error rates in the stress contrast condition than in the phoneme contrast condition, when duration alone (PN), or duration and pitch accents (NP), are present in the stimuli (experiments 1 and 2). When vowel reduction is added, EP speakers are able to perceive stress contrasts (experiment 3). The results show that vowel reduction appears to be the most robust cue for stress in EP. In the absence of vowel quality cues, a stress “deafness” effect may emerge in a language with non-predictable stress that combines both suprasegmental and segmental information to signal word stress. These findings have implications for claims of a prosodic-based cross-linguistic perception of word stress in the absence of vowel quality, and for stress “deafness” as a consequence of a predictable stress grammar.

Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood

We describe the European Portuguese version of a test of prosodic abilities originally developed for English: the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (Peppe & McCann, 2003). Using this test, we examined the development of several components of European Portuguese prosody between 5 and 20 years of age (N = 131). Results showed prosodic performance improving with age: 5-year-olds reach adultlike performance in the affective prosodic tasks; 7-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate and produce short prosodic items, as well as the ability to understand question versus declarative intonation; 8-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate long prosodic items; 9-year-olds mastered the ability to produce question versus declarative intonation, as well as the ability to identify focus; 10- to 11-year-olds mastered the ability to produce long prosodic items; 14- to 15-year-olds mastered the ability to comprehend and produce syntactically ambiguous utterances disambiguated by prosody; and 18- to 20-year-olds mastered the ability to produce focus. Cross-linguistic comparisons showed that linguistic form–meaning relations do not necessarily develop at the same pace across languages. Some prosodic contrasts are hard to achieve for younger Portuguese-speaking children, namely, the production of chunking and focus.

Affective prosody in European Portuguese: Perceptual and acoustic characterization of one-word utterances

Abstract A perceptual and acoustic characterization was provided on the expression of liking and disliking in the European Portuguese language. Thirty participants identified vocal patterns and judged the intensity of expressed affect in one-word items recorded by six untrained speakers. Listeners consistently associated vocal profiles with the two emotional patterns of liking and disliking. However, liking intonation was easier to recognize than disliking intonation. The feature most commonly associated with liking intonation was a wider and higher F0 pattern and a rising-falling contour. For disliking, the results revealed a flatter melodic pattern with a fall into the stressed syllable yielding a low plateau. In sum, both prosodic patterns showed different and consistent correlates.