Acoustic Segment Durations in Prosodic Research: A Practical Guide

Turk, Alice; Nakai, Satsuki; Sugahara, Mariko

doi:10.1515/9783110914641.1

Cited by 147 publications

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“…As these sequences were embedded between neighbouring obstruents in the experimental materials, the segmentation was generally robust. The boundary between the vowel and the following /l/, on the other hand, was difficult to determine reliably, which is expected especially when /l/ becomes vocalized (Turk et al, 2006). Since no reliable segmentation strategy could be established to separate the vowel from the /l/, we proceed in our analysis to approach these sequences as a unit.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Strycharczuk

Scobbie

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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The fronting of the high-back /uː/ and /ʊ/, as currently seen in Southern British English (SBE), is a rare opportunity to study two similar sound changes at different stages of their phonetic development: /uː/-fronting is a more advanced change than /ʊ/-fronting. Since the fronting in both vowels is restricted from applying before a following final /l/ (e.g., in words like fool or pull), we can exploit the difference in the phonetic advancement of /uː/ and /ʊ/-fronting to illuminate the nature of 'fuzzy contrasts' affecting vowel+/l/ sequences in morphologically complex words. As recent results show that /uː/-fronting is partially limited in fool-ing (but not in monomorphemes like hula), we ask whether similar morphological constraints affect /ʊ/ followed by /l/ (e.g., bully vs. pull-ing). Simultaneously, we consider the question of what phonological generalization best captures the interaction between vowel fronting, /l/-darkening, and morphological structure. We present ultrasound data from 20 speakers of SBE representing two age groups. The data show that morphologically conditioned contrasts are consistent for /uː/+/l/, but variable and limited in size for /ʊ/+/l/. We relate these findings to the debate on morphology-phonetics interactions and the emergence of phonological abstraction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Strycharczuk

Scobbie

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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“…Using nonsense test words had an additional advantage of making the subsequent perception study free from lexical frequency effects (e.g., Savin 1963). The consonant /s/ in the nonsense test words was chosen to allow for relatively straightforward acoustic segmentation (Turk, Nakai, and Sugahara 2006). For test vowels, the /a/-/aː/ pair was chosen because /a/ is less likely to be devoiced when flanked by voiceless consonants than other short vowel phonemes (see, e.g., Maekawa 2004).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An explanation for phonological word-final vowel shortening: Evidence from Tokyo Japanese

Nakai

2013

Laboratory Phonology

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This paper offers an account for the cross-linguistic prevalence of phonological word-final vowel shortening, in the face of phonetic final lengthening, also commonly observed across languages. Two contributing factors are hypothesized: (1) an overlap in the durational distributions of short and long vowel phonemes across positions in the utterance can lead to the misidentification of phonemic vowel length and (2) the direction of bias in such misidentification is determined by the distributional properties of the short and long vowel phonemes in the region of the durational overlap. Because short vowel phonemes are typically more frequent in occurrence and less variable in duration than long vowel phonemes, long vowel phonemes are more likely to be misidentified than short vowel phonemes. Results of production and perception studies in Tokyo Japanese support these hypotheses.Satsuki Nakai: Queen Margaret University. E-mail: satsuki@ovod.net IntroductionFinal lengthening, i.e., phonetic lengthening of final elements of prosodic constituents such as the phrase and utterance, is a putative language universal found in many languages, including languages with phonemic vowel length contrasts such as Dinka (Remijsen and Gilley 2008), Estonian (Krull 1997), Finnish (Nakai et al. 2009), and Hungarian (Hockey andFagyal 1999;White and Mády 2008). Curiously, in many languages with a phonemic vowel length contrast, word-final vowel length neutralization is also commonly observed towards the short vowel phoneme (see, e.g., Buckley 1998; Myers and Hansen 2007). Myers and Hansen (2007) ask how such length neutralization often arises in the face of crosslinguistically prevalent phonetic final lengthening. Why do word-final vowels tend to be neutralized towards the short vowel phoneme if they are often in a position to be lengthened phonetically? As a solution to the apparent paradox, Myers and Hansen (2007) propose that utterance-final devoicing, reported for Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 8:46 PM 514 Satsuki Nakai various languages, may be responsible for the cross-linguistic tendency for phonological word-final vowel shortening. Myers and Hansen's (2007) proposal is based on their finding that the devoiced ending of a partially devoiced vowel is disregarded by the listener in phonemic length identification, producing perceptual shortening. This scenario may be a likely one for some languages that exhibit phonological word-final shortening, but not all, e.g., Tokyo Japanese, as we see below.In this paper, I will present an alternative account to Myers and Hansen's (2007) for the apparent paradox between the cross-linguistic tendency for phonetic final lengthening and phonological word-final vowel shortening. I will argue that the paradox is resolved by postulating two hypotheses:H1: Short and long phonemes of similar durations across positions in the utterance can produce perceptual ambiguity for these phonemes. H2: When phonemic length misidentification occurs due to distributional overlap in the durations...

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“…Coders observed each trial's spectrogram in PRAAT, and located word boundaries and silence using the guidelines for segment identification presented in Turk, et al (2006). From the word-and silence-aligned transcripts of the productions the coders extracted (a) the duration of each word that preceded a phonological phrase boundary, and (b) the duration of any silence that followed a phonological phrase boundary.…”

Section: Data Codingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

Breen

Watson

Gibson

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

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This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson & Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries at evenly spaced intervals. In order to evaluate these proposals, we elicited naïve speakers' productions of sentences systematically varying in the length of three post-verbal constituents: a direct object, an indirect object (a prepositional phrase), and a verb phrase modifier, as in the sentence, The teacher assigned the chapter (on local history) to the students (of social science) yesterday / before the first midterm exam.

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Acoustic Segment Durations in Prosodic Research: A Practical Guide

Cited by 147 publications

References 0 publications

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

An explanation for phonological word-final vowel shortening: Evidence from Tokyo Japanese

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

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