Chapter 9 Flashcards
(30 cards)
What are the two broad levels in which the meaning of an utterance can be communicated?
The segmental and suprasegmental levels
What is the suprasegmental level (prosody)?
The ensemble of phonetic properties that do not enter into the definition of individual speech sounds
How are prosodic features defined?
By their relative values to one another
What does prosody include?
Patterns of intonation, timing, and loudness
The acoustic correlates of these features are f0 contour, duration and jucture, and intensity contour
What are the building blocks of prosody combined to form?
Syllabic stress, prominence, and rhythm
What is the perceptual correlate of frequency?
Pitch
What is tone?
Pitch as a distinctive feature at the word level
What is intonation?
Pitch contour at the utterance level
What contributes to our perception of the emotional intent of a speaker?
The f0 contour
What is f0 declination?
The tendency of f0 to decrease gradually over the course of an utterance
- Overall, pitch declines from the start to the end of an utterance
- Declination becomes less steep as the overall length of the utterance increases
- In short utterances, f0 and cricothyroid activity are strongly correlated, but not so much in longer utterances
- Most common explanation has been that lung pressure slowly decreases over the length of the utterance (although many say that the lung pressure shift is not significant enough to account for the declination of f0)
- Some evidence suggests that a decline in muscular activity affects f0
What features of timing at the segmental level can be important perceptual cues?
- Duration of silence in VOT
- Duration of vowel (voice or voiceless plosives)
- Duration of formant transitions (diphthongs and semivowels adjacent to vowels)
What is duration at the segmental level a perceptual cue to?
Place and manner of articulation
How can duration at the prosodic level by manipulated to provide additional linguistic information?
Used to signal semantic boundaries (preboundary lengthening)
Increased duration of one or more syllables in utterance-final position can signal the end of words or utterances
What is juncture?
The pause time or separation of syllables
- Influences the meaning of an utterance
- Helps to identify distinct words from within the continuous flow of speech
What is the major regulator of intensity?
Lung pressure
What is sonority?
The loudness level of a sound relative to other sounds of similar length, pitch, and stress
How does the openness of the vocal tract affect intensity?
Vowels and consonants have different intensity levels depending on the openness of the vocal tract (with greater opening generally correlating with greater intensity)
How does place of articulation affect intensity?
Nasals have less intensity than orally produced consonants
Fricatives have variable intensity depending on the location of the oral constriction
What is syllabic stress?
The use of f0, intensity, and/or duration to place emphasis on one or more syllables of a word
- Often used together as a stress cue
- The stressed unit is often higher in pitch, louder, and of longer duration
- Language defined
Generally, in stressed vowels…?
The steady state of stressed vowels is longer than that of unstressed vowels
Formant frequencies are less centralized
F0 is higher
When do American English vowels become centralized/reduced?
When they occur in unstressed syllables
What is prominence?
The amount of emphasis placed upon a syllable of group of syllables to convey meaning
- Speaker defined
- Defined by the communicative intent of the speaker
- Generally, one syllable in the utterance will receive major prominence
- Traditionally, f0 has been considered the most important acoustic cue in signifying syllabic stress, but most studies suggest that a combination of cues is used
What is speech rhythm?
A language-dependent phenomenon that encompasses both the temporal and spectral patterned recurrence of strong and weak prosodic elements, including pitch, stress, loudness, and rate
(language-dependent because rhythm is perceived to differ depending upon the language spoken)
What are the three ways to categorize language based on perception alone?
Syllable timed (Spanish, French) or stress timed (English, Dutch)
- Syllable timed languages contain syllables of equal duration
- Stress timed languages produce stressed units at equal intervals
- Mora timed languages (syllable weight) has been proposed to accommodate languages such as Japanese
