Quantitative Analysis of Māori Prosody from Three Generations

Abstract

This study is a preliminary quantitative analysis of prosodic features of Māori from three groups of male speakers from different generations. It has been argued that under the influence of English the prosody of Māori has undergone drastic changes over the last century which in earlier studies have been studied impressionistically and also perceptually. In the current study we first determined the most frequent syllabic structures of words of Māori, extracted phrases that embed frequent words from the MAONZE corpus and then applied the quantitative Fujisaki model to the decomposition of F0 contours. This allows a comparison of the three subcorpora on the global level, but also with respect to the F0 contours of individual target words. Our findings indicate a significant difference between young speakers on one side and present-day and historic elders on the other. Older speaker seem to form larger intonational units than the younger ones in terms of the duration of accent commands. Their F0 range is also significantly larger. In contrast, syllabic durations are quite similar. Altogether our results show, that intonational gestures are decoupled from lexical word stress and rather serve a segmenting purpose on the phrase level. This is supported by our analysis of individual words whose F0 contours are usually flat and only affected by phrase stress.

The internal structure of the syllable in Russian and in Hebrew: Evidence from monolingual kindergarteners

“…As a result, stress may be placed on any syllable within the word and may be used contrastively (e.g., /′muka/- “pain” vs. /mu′ka/- “flour”; /′par’it’/- “to stew” vs. /pa′r’it’/ - “to hover”) (Halle, 1971; Ward, 1965; Vinarskaya et al, 1977). In contrast, stress assignment in Hebrew is both lexically and phonologically determined (Graf, 2000; Mixdorff & Ami, 2002). Nonetheless, in both languages, stress is closely associated with allophonic vowel lengthening (Bat-El, 1993; Becker, 2003).…”

Acoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsan

“…There is increasing interest in developing instrumentallybased descriptions of word-, phrase-, and utterance-level prosodic patterns in Oceanic languages, as can be seen in recent research on Central Pacific languages of Polynesia such as Samoan (Calhoun, 2015(Calhoun, , 2017Yu and Stabler, 2017;Zuraw et al, 2014), M aori (Mixdorff et al, 2018;Thompson et al, 2011), Tongan (Garellek and White, 2015;Kuo and Vicenik, 2012), and Niuean (Clemens, 2014(Clemens, , 2019. There are also some prosodic analyses of languages from other Oceanic groups, such as the Northwest Solomonic language Torau, of Papua New Guinea (Jepson, 2014), the Southeast Solomonic language Gela (Simard and Wegener, 2017), from the Solomon Islands, and the Southern Oceanic language Drehu, of New Caledonia (Torres et al, 2018).…”

Superposition of Functional Contours Based Prosodic Feature Extraction for Speech Processing

“…Mixdroff [26] investigated different fundamental quantitative prosodic highlights, i.e., the prosodic information extracted from male speakers. They employed the Fujisaki model for the implementation of syllabic feature extraction.…”