Suprasegmental

12 Key excerpts on "Suprasegmental"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Highly complex syllable structure : A typological and diachronic study

  • Shelece Easterday(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  The term “Suprasegmental” refers to phonological properties of speech which are associated with domains larger than the segment; that is, the syllable, word, or even larger units such as phonological phrases or utterances. In the current study, only two Suprasegmental features are considered: word stress and tone. I describe some basic characteristics of these phenomena here. Not all languages have word stress. In languages in which it occurs, word stress corresponds to the increased perceptual prominence of a syllable with respect to other syllables in a word. This prominence is acoustically salient and may be ac-companied by increased duration, diferences in pitch (the perceptual analog o f 5 Suprasegmental patterns fundamental frequency), higher intensity, and di ferences in spectral tilt (Gordon 2011). Articulatory properties associated with stress include increased duration of gestures, more extreme articulations (i.e. tighter constrictions for consonants and more open articulations for vowels) and less articulatory overlap between consonantal and vocalic gestures (Beckman & Edwards 1994; Fougeron 1999; De Jong et al. 1993). Many of the fndings on acoustic and articulatory correlates o f stress are based on studies of individual languages. Languages vary widely with respect to which phonetic properties cue stress. While English uses a combina-tion of duration, intensity, and pitch to signal stress, it is common for languages to rely on just one or two of these cues, or for one to be stronger or more reliable than the others. To illustrate with a language from the current sample: in Lelepa, duration, pitch, and intensity are all used to signal stress, but do not necessarily co-occur, and length is noted to be a weaker correlate than the others (Lacrampe 2014: 58). Stressed and unstressed syllables may difer in other phonetic and phono-logical properties as well.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Understanding Phonetics

  • Patricia Ashby(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Beyond the segment Over and above the speech sounds themselves, the speech signal includes information transmitted in the form of loudness, timing, pitch changes, etc. Chapter 10 investigates the realms of these Suprasegmentals – features that co-occur with segments but which are separate from them. This chapter will look briefly at stress and rhythm, accent, tone and intonation. 1 10.1 SuprasegmentalS Right at the beginning of this book in Chapter 1, we talked about the concept of stress and we looked at the typical rhythm that is set up by stressed beats in poetic forms like the limerick. All through the accompanying ear-training materials, you have been marking the stress in English dictations and you will have been including this in English transcriptions, too, when working from written sources. Stress, as a glance at the Suprasegmentals section of the IPA chart (page xiv) shows, is a Suprasegmental, likewise tone and intonation (including tonality), duration of speech sounds, and linking. Crystal (1969) takes this further in his description of prosodic systems, adding matters of voice quality, tempo, and continuity (involving the duration, incidence and type of pauses). This is a vast area of study in its own right but it is still part of phonetics and so we will touch on some of these concepts here, in this final chapter. 10.2 STRESS 10.2.1 Physical correlates of stress We often have some sort of feeling for rhythm, intuitions about what is or isn’t a stressed syllable or a rhythmic beat. Curiously, though, there is no single physical correlate for stress. We have examined correlations such as changes in the rate of vocal fold vibration with perceived changes in pitch, formant patterns with vowel qualities, and various other identifiable characteristics correlating with our perception of voice, 10 1 The subject matter of this chapter is such that you will be able to undertake less by way of directly related practical work.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Understanding Phonetics

  • Patricia Ashby(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10

  Beyond the segment Over and above the speech sounds themselves, the speech signal includes information transmitted in the form of loudness, timing, pitch changes, etc. Chapter 10 investigates the realms of these Suprasegmentals – features that co-occur with segments but which are separate from them. This chapter will look briefly at stress and rhythm, accent, tone and intonation.1

  10.1  SuprasegmentalS

  Right at the beginning of this book in Chapter 1 , we talked about the concept of stress and we looked at the typical rhythm that is set up by stressed beats in poetic forms like the limerick. All through the accompanying ear-training materials, you have been marking the stress in English dictations and you will have been including this in English transcriptions, too, when working from written sources.

  Stress, as a glance at the Suprasegmentals section of the IPA chart (page xiv) shows, is a Suprasegmental, likewise tone and intonation (including tonality), duration of speech sounds, and linking. Crystal (1969) takes this further in his description of prosodic systems, adding matters of voice quality, tempo, and continuity (involving the duration, incidence and type of pauses). This is a vast area of study in its own right but it is still part of phonetics and so we will touch on some of these concepts here, in this final chapter.

  10.2  STRESS

  10.2.1  Physical correlates of stress

  We often have some sort of feeling for rhythm, intuitions about what is or isn’t a stressed syllable or a rhythmic beat. Curiously, though, there is no single physical correlate for stress. We have examined correlations such as changes in the rate of vocal fold vibration with perceived changes in pitch, formant patterns with vowel qualities, and various other identifiable characteristics correlating with our perception of voice, place or manner of consonants. But there is no such correlate for stress. Stress is a composite, deriving from measurable intensity (how loud the syllable seems to be, in relation to surrounding syllables), duration (how long the syllable seems to last, in relation to surrounding syllables), and frequency (the impression of pitch conveyed to the listener – the higher, the more prominent, but changing or dynamic pitch is the most noticed of all). These three characteristics can all be seen clearly in Figure 10.1 showing the speech waveform and the Fx showing the speech waveform and the Fx line (the pitch track) for the utterances barber [ bɑ bə] and babaar [bə bɑ ] (a nonsense word, reversing the stress and vowel qualities of barber, giving the vowel and stress pattern of bazaar

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Second Language Pronunciation

  Bridging the Gap Between Research and Teaching

  • John M. Levis, Tracey M. Derwing, Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  A listener may find it harder to process such errors in which the speaker has produced a different word as a result of misassigning stress. 1 Like other Suprasegmentals, lexical stress plays a central role in how listeners understand speech. 5 Making the Teaching of Suprasegmentals Accessible Mary Grantham O’Brien University of Calgary Making the Teaching of Suprasegmentals Accessible 86 Researchers operationalize understanding in two ways: through ratings of comprehensibility (the relative ease or difficulty of understanding a given utterance) and through measures of intelligibility (a demonstration of actual understanding as shown, for example, by listener transcriptions or by answering questions regarding content). Although most second language (L2) learners speak with a foreign accent (pronunciation that differs from an expected variety, often including pronunciation features from an individual’s first language), they can improve the comprehensibility and intelligibility of their speech as a result of Suprasegmental training (e.g., Foote & McDonough, 2017; McGregor et al., 2016; Okuno & Hardison, 2016). This chapter highlights some key issues in the perception and production of L2 Suprasegmentals and includes recommendations for research-based and effective means of training Suprasegmentals. Languages differ in how they use Suprasegmental features to distinguish meaning, and they exploit various cues to express these features. Duration, or the length of time a speaker takes to produce a segment or a syllable, together with amplitude, or relative loudness, plays a central role in distinguishing stressed and unstressed syllables. Duration and amplitude are thus essential for lexical and phrasal stress assignment and rhythm. Pitch, which is the per-ceived rise and fall (i.e., the melody) within a syllable, a word, or an utterance, is essential for distinguishing tone, pitch accent and intonation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Phonetics

  Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception

  • Henning Reetz, Allard Jongman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  11 Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception , Second Edition. Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/reetz/phonetics Our discussion of the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of speech sounds has until now focused on individual vowels and consonants. However, spoken language rarely consists of isolated speech sounds. Instead, vowels and consonants are com-bined to form larger units such as syllables, phrases, and sentences. These larger units can also be described in terms of their articulatory and acoustic properties. The exam-ination of aspects of speech that extend beyond individual vowels and consonants is known as the study of Suprasegmentals or prosody . The term prosody is sometimes used as a synonym only for “intonation.” However, as we discuss in this chapter, intonation is only one instance of a range of phenomena properly known as “pros-ody,” which we use as a synonym for “Suprasegmentals,” intonation being part of it. The principal Suprasegmental features are stress (how “prominent” a syllable is), length (or quantity), tone ( F 0 level or movement in a syllable), and intonation ( F 0 movement during a phrase). These features are independent of those required for the description of segmental properties. While the term Suprasegmental implies a difference between properties of individual segments and properties over longer stretches of speech, it is important to consider prosodic structure as an integral part of the speech signal. Before any introduction of Suprasegmentals, we need to discuss the notion of the syllable since Suprasegmental features such as stress and tone make reference to it. While most people have an intuitive notion of what a syllable is, it is quite difficult to define a syllable using phonetic criteria.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Suprasegmental Phonology and Segmental Form

  Segmental Variation in the English of Dutch speakers

  • Allan R. James(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Suprasegmental features as such in phonological description have been pro-posed by Vanderslice and ladefoged (1972) (cf. also, ladefoged 1971, 1975 and Hirst 1977; the former in association with SPE Stress Cycle phonological rules, the latter within a 'syntactic approach to English intonation 1 consistent with an Aspects-type model of generative grammar). Vanderslice and Ladefoged's 'binary Suprasegmental features' comprising [±heavy 1, [iaccent], [lintonation], 87 [Icadence] and [iendglide] are employed primarily as descriptive phonological features characterizing phonological phrases in the way that the SPE feature [stress] is similarly used by Chomsky and Halle (1968). Syntactically derived phonological strings may be assigned binary values of these features much as they are assigned values of segmental distinctive features, with the difference of course that the Suprasegmental features are in the first place syntaqmatically motivated. However, as Hirst too notes (1977: 53), the features specified are to a certain extent indeterminate in interpretation as to their phonological (i.e. strictly 'classificatory') or phonetic (i.e. strictly 'descriptive') value. In later work (e.g. ladefoged 1975, but also ladefoged 1971), the supra-segmental features thus postulated serve as a potentially theory-neutral expression of possible sentence-level phonological contrasts to be found in the languages of the world. Hirst's (1977) system of 'intonative features', by contrast, represents a set of basic descriptive primes in a generative model of syntax and phonology in which such (distinctive) features 'are assigned from the syntactic surface structure of the sentence', the latter being a representation of strings in their 'non-reduced 1 , i.e. non-ellipted, syntactic form. ΉΙΘ intonative features are properly distinctive in function in that they may serve to disambiguate otherwise identical syntactic strings.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Multiple Perspectives on Learner Interaction

  The Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks

  • William J. Crawford, William J. Crawford, William Crawford(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  ESL Students’ Use of Suprasegmental Features in Informative and Opinion-Based Tasks

  Romy Ghanem

  1  Introduction

  The evaluation of spoken language has undergone a considerable amount of change and development in the field of second language acquisition. Scores assigned to second language (L2) productions were traditionally provided by expert listeners, who most often underwent some form of norming and/or training for consistency purposes. The reliance on the native speaker as the expert in assessing nonnative productions and their deviancy from the norm has been a longstanding tradition in the subfields of second language production, that is, L2 speaking and writing. However, as with other areas in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), recent research has called for a move towards a more ecologically realistic model for second language learners (Murphy 2014 ; Munro and Derwing 2001 ). In other words, a highly intelligible second language speaker has become the more achievable goal for L2 speakers, even with the retention of some L1 influence (also referred to as accentedness). This has led to a push for a less biased form of assessment by including two types of evaluative data: a) quantifiable and measurable data in the form of pronunciation features and b) scores provided by listeners. Researchers (e.g., Kang and Pickering 2013 ) thus advocate for an alternative method by combining objective and systematic measurements of speaking features with rater evaluations, which allows for a more comprehensive depiction of pronunciation constructs and a learner’s proficiency.

  A number of speaking features have been shown to predict second language (L2) speakers’ proficiency level. Earlier studies in pronunciation research highlighted the importance of segmental features (i.e., consonant and vowel production) with a focus on the deviation from a native speaker norm (Flege and Port 1981 ; Macken and Ferguson 1983 ). More recent studies have maintained the importance of Suprasegmental features (i.e., features that go beyond consonants and vowels, such as prosody – intonation, stress, and rhythm) particularly regarding the extent to which prosodic features may contribute to a listener’s perception of a speaker’s intelligibility or comprehensibility (Hahn 2004 ; Kang 2010 ; Kang, Rubin, and Pickering 2010

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Calvert's Descriptive Phonetics

  Introduction and Transcription Workbook

  • Pamela G. Garn-Nunn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Thieme

    (Publisher)

  S UMMARY : I NFLUENCE OF C ONTEXT By now you are very aware of how phonemes can vary in production in connected speech. Phonemes may be omitted, added, or completely/partially change their identity depending on the demands of connected speech. Stops may or may not be audibly released depending on phonetic context. We noted earlier that these adjust-ments make speech production more efficient. They also have another effect: they make a speaker sound more “natural” or “native.” Some speakers of English as a second language tend to produce speech as if they were reading words, slowly and deliberately, giving full pronunciation to each vowel. This decreases coarticulatory 5 CONNECTED SPEECH : SEGMENTAL AND Suprasegmental EFFECTS 99 effects and makes the speaker sound less fluent. In the next section of the chapter, we discuss another important part of the “naturalness” of speaking a language: supra- segmentals. SPEECH RHYTHM AND Suprasegmental FEATURES If you listen to speakers of languages other than English, for example French, Hindi, or Swedish, you will undoubtedly first note that you can’t understand the words! But if you keep listening to these speakers, you may notice that some of their phonemes (also known as segments of speech) don’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard in English.You’ll also notice that, regardless of the phonemes and words, the language doesn’t necessarily sound like English. French has more of a “flow” or a different “melody” than English. For that matter, British English doesn’t sound exactly like mainstream American English. An important part of the way that different languages sound is the result of the Suprasegmental aspects of speech. Other terms that have been applied to this phenomenon include speech melody or prosody . Supra-segmental aspects of speech are most simply defined as features of speech over and above phoneme segments, especially aspects of speech rhythm.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian

  • Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Segmental and Suprasegmental features deals with how context and interlocutors would affect the meaning that is being communicated between speaker and listener. This aspect of language is normally the most challenging part for L2 learners (Taguchi 2011). Knowing the appropriate way of saying things requires an interplay among different levels of linguistic knowledge. The current study aims at exploring the phonetics-pragmatics interface by looking at how L2 learners of Persian have acquired different levels of formality used in formal and informal registers. This research, more specifi-cally, explores the interaction between prosodic measures and the expression of politeness. Despite the fact that research on the interface between prosody and politeness is fast growing, the number of empirical studies investigating this area is still quite limited (Orozco 2008, 2010; Winter and Grawunder 2012). There is an even larger scarcity of studies exploring the contribution of prosodic features to the expression of politeness in an L2 setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the acquisition of prosodic features used in politeness strategies among Persian L2 learners. Because of this, it is necessary to include a review of work conducted outside the field of L2 Persian since certain important issues and topics have not yet been covered in Persian L2 acquisition. In the following, a review of the theory on politeness and then a review of the studies showing the interaction between phonetic parameters and pragmatic strategies for showing politeness are presented. 2.4 Politeness and phonetic features Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory on politeness is certainly the most influential in the field. The primary aim of this model is to account for politeness in face-to-face interaction.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  A Critical Introduction to Phonetics

  • Ken Lodge(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Prosodic Features Chapter outline 6.1 Pitch 112 6.2 Stress 116 6.3 Duration 119 6.4 Syllables 121 6.5 Rhythm 130 6.6 Practice 134 In this chapter we shall look at those features of speech that affect whole utter-ances or large parts of them. In Chapter Five we looked at a number of features that had a considerable duration in the articulation of whole words. These can be referred to as prosodic features; they go syntagmatically through speech and their function often determines the relationships between different parts of an utterance. For instance, when we talk about stressed syllables in English, we are referring to the fact that one syllable (or more) stands out in relation to the surrounding ones, as in comfort, photographer, referee, as we noted in sec-tion 4.1.6. The prosodic features I shall deal with in this chapter are pitch, stress, duration, syllables and rhythm. The aspects of speech listed above are called Suprasegmental features by those phoneticians and phonologists who consider segments to be the basic unit of observation and interpretation. They are seen to be aspects of speech which affect more than one segment in a particular utterance, or deal with the relationship between one segment and another. But such a distinction between what purport to be different characteristics of speech is at best misleading. We looked at a few examples of the difficulties with a segmental approach to 6 Prosodic Features 111 speech in Chapter Five; many more could have been added. To take just two more, we can demonstrate that it is not just pitch, stress and duration that are discerned over considerable stretches of the speech continuum. Kelly and Local (1986) show that the phonetic feature of resonance associated with the phonological elements III and /r/ in various accents of English stretch over several syllables.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Phonological Structure and Language Processing

  Cross-Linguistic Studies

  • Takashi Otake, Anne Cutler, Takashi Otake, Anne Cutler(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The role of Suprasegmentals in speech perception and acquisition Jacques Mehler— Josiane Bertoncini— Emmanuel Dupoux— Christophe Pallier 1. Introduction During the last world war, scientists tried to improve the intelligibility of speech perceived under very noisy conditions. To this end they studied the process of language comprehension (Miller, 1951) and in effect gave birth to the field of psycholinguistics. Later, during the early sixties, this area became an important chapter of the fashionable cognitive revolution. Psychologists became aware of the usefulness of formal linguistic approaches (Miller, 1962). Work in acoustic-phonetics had uncovered some acoustic correlates of putative speech units (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967; Stevens & House, 1972; Stevens & Blumstein, 1981; Klatt, 1979, 1989 etc.). Today, psycholinguists still study speech comprehension, to which they have added the study of speech production (Levelt, Schriefers, Vorberg, Meyer, Pechman, & Havinga, 1991; Dell, 1988). In this paper we review some recent cross-linguistic investigations of speech comprehension. Developmental and neuropsychological considerations complete this research. Traditionally, there has been what we might call a phonemo-centric bias to the study of speech perception. Linguists, phoneticians, psycholinguists and most students of language have assumed that if one understands how phonemes (or the distinctive features that make up phonemes) are perceived, then one understands automatically how speech is perceived. This view may derive from our graphemic-phonemic writing system, in which letters correspond, by and large, to the segments of the speech signal.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Speech Production

  Models, Phonetic Processes, and Techniques

  • Jonathan Harrington, Marija Tabain(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The phonetic dimensions that are most obviously connected with prosody are pitch, duration, and loudness, which are generally thought of as the Suprasegmental dimensions. But the phonetic dimensions that are typically thought of as more segmental than Suprasegmental also serve to realize prosodic distinctions. For example, it is well known that vowel quality varies not only with phonemic vowel identity, but also with traditional Suprasegmental factors such as stress and length (Lehiste, 1970). This classic observation can be generalized to all of prosody as now understood, including its hierarchical structure. Put generally, then, the phonetic realization of phonological properties of an individual speech segment (vowel or consonant) depends in part on that segments position in the entire prosodic structure (Hawkins & Smith, 2001; Pierrehumbert & Talkin, 1992). The exact pronunciation of any one feature will depend on the other features in that segment, features of neighboring segments, and the position of the feature in the overall tree. Thus, segmental phonetic dimensions, though they convey segmental contrasts, are influenced by prosody in much the same way as are the traditional Suprasegmental dimensions (dimensions not involved in conveying segmental contrasts).

  In the Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) important model of planning for speech production, a distinction is made between (1) phonological encoding, or generating a complete phonological representation, including prosody, from lexical entries and syntactic structure; and (2) phonetic encoding, which specifies the surface phonetic shape of the phonological representation. At each of these stages, Levelt et al., relying on the traditional distinction between segmental and Suprasegmental phonological representations and speech parameters, envision segmental and prosodic planning as virtually independent. Phonetic encoding of segments is thought to operate at the level of the word, and it consists largely of retrieval of stored syllable plans. Segmental and prosodic planning interacts in only a minor fashion, at the end of the encoding process, when the results of these two independent processes are brought together.

  As discussed at length in Keating and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2002), the missing ingredient from their model (and similarly, from the model in Levelt, 1989) is the close link between prosodic structure and segmental phonetic properties. We outlined instead an opposing view, according to which segmental and prosodic planning are not independent, since planning segmental articulation depends crucially on prosody. We stressed that even if phonetic encoding relies on stored syllable plans, the work of phonetic encoding has just begun with their retrieval, as adjustments to them are required on the basis of all kinds of prosodic information; and even if phonetic encoding relies on stored exemplars, then that retrieval operation itself must be highly sensitive to prosodic structure and the retrieved exemplar may still require further processing. The present chapter, like Keating and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2002), defends this claim by reviewing a variety of ways in which phonetic encoding must be sensitive to prosodic structure, focusing especially on results from my own laboratory. In particular, I will review results of experiments suggesting a strength relation between prosodic positions and phonetic realizations.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book