The Future of Prosody: It's about Time

Abstract

Prosody is usually defined in terms of the three distinct but interacting domains of pitch, intensity and duration patterning, or, more generally, as phonological and phonetic properties of 'suprasegmentals', speech segments which are larger than consonants and vowels. Rather than taking this approach, the concept of multiple time domains for prosody processing is taken up, and methods of time domain analysis are discussed: annotation mining with duration dispersion measures, time tree induction, oscillator models in phonology and phonetics, and finally the use of the Amplitude Envelope Modulation Spectrum (AEMS). While frequency demodulation (in the form of pitch tracking) is a central issue in prosodic analysis, in the present context it is amplitude envelope demodulation and frequency zones in the long time-domain spectra of the demodulated envelope which are focused. A generalised view is taken of oscillation as iteration in abstract prosodic models and as modulation and demodulation of a variety of rhythms in different frequency zones.

Rhythm Comes, Rhythm Goes: Short-Term Periodicity of Prosodic Phrasing

“…To date, the empirical support is limited (Cummins, 2012;Goswami & Leong, 2013;Kelso et al, 1986). The quantification of rhythmicity in speech corpora is an emerging field of linguistic research (Gibbon, 2018;Tilsen & Arvaniti, 2013;Arvaniti, 2012). Initial support suggests that syllable frequency across languages is confined to a narrow band between 4 and 8 Hertz (Ding et al, 2017;Coupé et al, 2019;Tilsen & Arvaniti, 2013), consistent with the previously proposed role of theta-band synchronization in syllable processing (Luo & Poeppel, 2007;Peelle et al, 2013;Doelling et al, 2014;Howard & Poeppel, 2012).…”

“…A periodic electrophysiological mechanism for the processing of prosodic phrases would entail that these are not merely limited in duration, but that their duration is regular in time. Temporal regularity of prosody is a recent hypothesis in linguistics (Gibbon, 2018) as well as a frequent assumption in neuroscience. To date, the empirical support is limited (Cummins, 2012;Goswami & Leong, 2013;Kelso et al, 1986).…”

The rhythms of rhythm

“…Crucially, RFT is concerned not only with the contribution of AM to speech rhythm, but also with the contribution of FM (cf. also Varnet et al 2017;Gibbon 2018Gibbon , 2019Gibbon & Li 2019;Ludusan & Wagner 2020), and not only with identification of a rhythm but with simultaneous rhythms and rhythm variation over time. The RFT frequency domain definition of rhythm as oscillation implies that rhythms, whether AM or FM, have two main properties, SPECTRAL FREQUENCY and SPECTRAL MAGNITUDE, and that isochrony follows a fortiori from the concept of oscillation.…”

“…5. QUANTITATIVE MODULATION-THEORETIC SIGNAL PROCESSING, with production and perception models which represent low frequency components of the speech signal, ranging from the rhythmograms of Todd & Brown (1994) and Ludusan, Origlia & Cutugno (2011) through the coupled oscillators of Cummins & Port (1998), Barbosa (2002), Malisz et al (2016) and the sonority patterns of Galves et al (2002) and Fuchs & Wunder (2015), to the low frequency envelope spectrum of Tilsen & Johnson (2008), the cubic spline approximation approach of Tilsen & Arvaniti (2013), and the long-term LF spectrum approach of Gibbon (2018Gibbon ( , 2019.…”

“…Very early ideas were developed by Dudley (1939) and Potter, Kopp & Green (1947), noted by Liberman (2013), and later by Dogil & Braun (1988). Contributions in a variety of domains were made by Todd & Brown (1994), Cummins et al (1999), Foote & Uchihashi (2001), Galves et al (2002), Lee & Todd (2004), Tilsen & Johnson (2008), Cumming (2010), Heřmanský (2010), Liss et al (2010), Ludusan et al (2011), Tilsen & Arvaniti (2013), Liberman (2013), Leong et al (2014), Fuchs & Wunder (2015) He & Dellwo (2016), Gibbon (2018), Gibbon & Li (2019), Wayland & Nozawa (2020), Ludusan & Wagner (2020).…”