Durational cues to word boundaries in spontaneous speech

Tao, Jiaer; Torreira, Francisco; Clayards, Meghan

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2018-49

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similar results for differences in duration between derived onsets and canonical onsets have also been reported for other languages, e.g. for English (Lehiste, 1960;Smith and Hawkins, 2012;Tao et al, 2018;Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2000), for French (Fougeron et al, 2003;Shoemaker, 2009Shoemaker, , 2014Spinelli et al, 2003), and for Dutch (Quené, 1992;Shatzman and McQueen, 2006). In English, for example, the classical study conducted by Lehiste (1960) addressed the perceptual exploitation of temporal (among other) cues signaling the misalignment of word and syllable boundaries.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Durational cues to resyllabification in Spanish

Jiménez-Bravo,

Lahoz-Bengoechea

2023

loquens

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Word-final consonants in Spanish are post-lexically resyllabified when followed by an onsetless syllable, e.g. venden aves (‘they sell birds’) is traditionally syllabified as ven.de.na.ves and is considered homophonous with vende naves (‘he sells ships’). This study analyzes such two-word minimal pairs inserted in prosodically equivalent sentences read from a list and provides measurements of the acoustic duration of resyllabified /s/, /n/, and /l/, and of their flanking vowels. A mixed-model analysis showed that, when resyllabified as derived onsets, all three consonants pattern together and show a shorter duration (venden aves) in comparison with canonical onsets (vende naves). This is consistent with the coda position that they occupy in the lexical representation, given the weak nature of codas. However, vowel duration varies according to consonant identity. These results are discussed in terms of the articulatory gestures making up the target consonants and allow to interpret that the resyllabified consonant actually becomes the onset of the following syllable. Therefore, we offer converging evidence of resyllabified consonants acting both as codas and onsets, and consequently we propose they can be analyzed as ambisyllabic.

show abstract

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Durational cues to resyllabification in Spanish

Jiménez-Bravo,

Lahoz-Bengoechea

2023

loquens

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Here, we will use Random Forests (Breiman, 2001;Strobl et al, 2009). Random forests have been used insightfully in earlier work in linguistics (Tagliamonte and Baayen, 2012;Tao et al, 2018;Baumann and Winter, 2018), including in this special issue (Wagner et al, this special issue).…”

Section: How Well Is Phrasing Cued Post-focally?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Wagner

McAuliffe

2019

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of intonational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative prosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which extent their prosodic correlates are remains controversial. This paper reports on a production experiment that crosses these three dimensions to look for interactions, concentrating on interactions between focus prominence and phrasing. The results provide evidence that interactions are more limited than many current theories of sentence prosody would predict, and support a theory that keeps different prosodic dimensions representationally separate.

show abstract

“…In American English spontaneous speech, intervocalic consonants are acoustically shorter word-finally than word-initially, e.g. beef eater vs. bee feeder (Tao et al, 2018).…”

Section: Incomplete Resyllabificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incomplete Resyllabification and Ambisyllabic Gestural Coupling in Spanish

Bradley¹,

Morris²,

Jones³

2023

loquens

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the generative literature, the pattern of coronal fricative lenition found in the traditional Chinato Spanish dialect is commonly cited as a phonological argument that the resyllabification of word-final prevocalic consonants is complete, in the sense that onsets derived by resyllabification are structurally identical to canonical (word-level) onsets. However, recent acoustic studies of Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish have problematized the completeness of resyllabification with experimental evidence that /s̺/ is shorter and more voiced as a derived onset than as a canonical onset. Using a split-gesture, competitive, coupled oscillator model of the syllable in Articulatory Phonology, which divides consonants into a separate constriction and release gesture, we propose a novel representation of ambisyllabicity that predicts the phonetic behavior of derived onset /s̺/ in Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish. We then show that ambisyllabic coupling permits a simpler phonological analysis of coronal fricative lenition in Chinato Spanish as compared to alternative accounts. Our analysis makes typological predictions that are confirmed by patterns from other contemporary Spanish varieties. Lastly, we examine the consequences of ambisyllabicity for the analysis of Spanish rhotic consonants, which have also been argued to support complete resyllabification. We offer an analysis of rhotics that is entirely compatible with an ambisyllabic representation of incomplete resyllabification.

show abstract

Durational cues to word boundaries in spontaneous speech

Cited by 3 publications

References 19 publications

Durational cues to resyllabification in Spanish

Durational cues to resyllabification in Spanish

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Incomplete Resyllabification and Ambisyllabic Gestural Coupling in Spanish

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About