This talk is about a one-to-one relationship between acoustics and articulation. I will present a descriptive approach to this relationship, where de/acceleration peaks divide the movements of the articulators into steady states and fast intervals. The steady states of the crucial articulators form constrictions, represented in speech as acoustic segments. Before and after the constrictions we find rapid movement changes of the articulators, which can be measured using EMA methodology. The results show how the deceleration and acceleration of the segmental articulators coincide with the acoustic segment boundaries.
As we speak, we use prosody, for rhythm and to express meaning, attitude etc. This makes for a systematic intricate articulatory system, one that we practice our whole life to master. One of the main contributors of these systematic dynamics is the jaw, which can be referred to as the syllabic or prosodic articulator. In this talk I will present recent work on segmental articulations, and how the jaw holds it all together.
References
Svensson Lundmark, M. (2023). Rapid movements at segment boundaries. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 153 (3).
Svensson Lundmark, M., & Erickson, D. (submitted to ICPhS). Comparing apples to oranges – asynchrony in jaw & lip articulation of syllables.
Alors que les phonéticiens et les phonologues continuaient à étudier séparément leur sujet, les neuroscientifiques ont commencé à explorer les points de vue phonétique et phonologique dans une perspective neurobiologique. En effet, la question générale de la représentation neuronale d’informations complexes multidimensionnelles est commune à toutes les neurosciences et a été étudiée dans de nombreuses modalités sensorielles. En fait, si les propriétés spectrotemporelles de la parole sont réellement converties en représentations discrètes (phonologiques) et ces représentations en commandes motrices appropriées pour produire des séquences de sons, le cerveau est le seul responsable des processus de calcul impliqués. Toutefois, les données disponibles dans la littérature en neurosciences cognitives du langage ne nous permettent pas encore de distinguer clairement les preuves neurales suggérant des modèles acoustiques purs de celles indiquant des caractéristiques phonologiques abstraites.
Dans ma présentation, j’aborderai cette question du lien entre la structure phonétique et les représentations phonologiques d’un point de vue neurobiologique. Cette question sera discutée à la lumière de données neurophysiologiques récentes qui, grâce à des mesures directes de l’activation cérébrale temporelle et spatiale, offrent de nouvelles possibilités d’étudier le substrat biologique du langage humain. Après avoir rapidement décrit la technique électroencéphalographique (EEG) de mesure de potentiels évoqués et de rythmes oscillatoires qui permet d’étudier le traitement de la parole, je présenterai les résultats de quelques-uns de mes travaux EEG récents dont l’objectif est de mieux comprendre les capacités de traitement de la parole dans des tâches de compréhension de mots et de phrases à l’écoute d’une langue seconde.
Je terminerai ma présentation en montrant un aperçu des travaux collaboratifs entrepris au cours des derniers mois avec certains membres du Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie ainsi que ceux envisagés dans un futur proche.
This paper explores how Yorùbá gamers map lexical meaning to videogame music in their native language by focusing on an aspect of gaming culture in Yorùbá. Gaming culture among Yoruba millennials involves vocal imitating the music of the video game, Super Mario Bros. The themes of the linguistic interpretations are comparable to those of music texts at traditional Yoruba competitions. Drawing on the Yoruba music tradition, the account in this work is that, to the gamers, the background music of the video game performs a similar function as the music at traditional Yoruba competitions. The choice of words in the linguistic interpretation is conditioned by the situational contexts or scenes where the music is heard in the video game. The results of an acoustic analysis show that the choice of words in the linguistic interpretations is also determined by mapping the pitch trajectories of the music melodies to the tones of the gamers’ native language. This study suggests that the linguistic processing of music may not only involve phonetic iconicity but contextual inference and social expectation.
Temporal aspects of speech such as the duration of vowels and consonants provides a window into the cognitive system underlying human language. A major question concerns the universality of temporal aspects, given that speech production is tightly linked to the biological and physical capacities of humans. The actual durational properties of phones is the result of a complex interplay between biological characteristics, melodic and prosodic features, linguistic context, speaker-dependent variables, among others.
This talk will provide an overview of temporal patterns in a cross-linguistic sample using data from DoReCo, a corpus containing time-aligned speech data from 51 languages. Special attention will be given to the duration of segments at the edge of prosodic boundaries, in particular final lengthening. The motivation for focussing on final lengthening is that while this process is commonly considered to be a universal feature of spoken language, languages are known to place very specific constraints on the extent of variation of segmental duration , most notably when a language maintains a phonological length contrast, or has phonotactic restrictions on the distribution of long segments. A recent study reveals several significant interactions between phonological length and final lengthening, suggesting that final lengthening is contingent on the phonology of individual languages.
L’expression de la structure informationnelle représente un problème pour les apprenants d’une L2, d’autant que celle-ci a des interactions complexes avec plusieurs niveaux de structurations de l’énoncé à la fois: prosodie, syntaxe, lexique, etc. En effet, les stratégies exploitées pour organiser l’information dans la phrase ne sont pas identiques dans toutes les langues, et les apprenants sont confrontés à une modulation complexe de cette interaction lors du passage d’une langue à l’autre. Dans cet exposé, nous allons analyser un échantillon de parole élicitée, afin de répertorier les moyens linguistiques employés dans l’expression de la focalisation étroite chez des locuteurs natifs (10 francophones et 10 italophones) et non-natifs (10 apprenants italophones de français L2). Nous examinons si les apprenants utilisent des moyens linguistiques similaires à ceux employés en français L1, et dans quelle mesure l’influence de la L1 se manifeste dans leurs productions. Les résultats montrent que les locuteurs francophones et italophones natifs emploient des structures syntaxiques similaires pour exprimer la focalisation étroite, et des patrons prosodiques qui se rapprochent du point de vue phonologique, mais avec des différences dans l’implémentation phonétique. De manière conséquente, donc, les apprenants se rapprochent de la langue cible en ce qui concerne l’emploi des marqueurs syntaxiques, mais produisent des patrons prosodiques différents de ceux observés dans la langue cible. Certains traits prosodiques et segmentaux (intonations montantes, coups de glotte) pourraient constituer une caractéristique typique de l’interlangue des apprenants, indépendamment de leur L1; les résultats d’une étude pilote sur un échantillon d’apprenants francophones d’italien L2 semble aller dans cette direction.
Among the many terms that describe phonation type, [constricted glottis] presents an inconsistency for Laryngeal Articulator theory to address. In this talk, I will begin with some background on constriction in the larynx in general, especially for those of you who are not as familiar with our work. Then I will share with you some contradictions of laryngeal phonetic production revealed in recent analyses and explore how these contradictions might be resolved. My intention is to examine lower-vocal-tract behaviour from the perspectives of both the Glottal Continuum Model and the Laryngeal Articulator Model and to solicit your opinions to try and disentangle the way such behaviours are described phonetically. The result will be no less than a revision (and amplification) of Laryngeal Articulator theory.
What are the linguistic uses of sound? Lindblom (1990) proposed that the response to this question is linked to the total sound-producing potential of the human vocal tract. A consequence of this is that phonetics must broaden the scope of its inquiry to evaluate the human sound producing potential. Two important questions are associated to this claim. The first amounts to the finiteness of the sound inventories found in language. If finite, this would reflect a close system. The finiteness of phonetic alphabets is a working assumption but what is the theoretical justification for this? The second question is about the possible open character of sound systems. If true, what is the theoretical consequence of this claim? One consequence is that open systems can evolve towards a complexification of their structures. Both issues also raise the question of what is a relevant speech sound in languages? What are the limits of the sound producing system of human languages? A way to address these fundamental issues in speech is to evaluate what we know about the origin and evolution of sound source in primates; the complexification of sound system structures through the example of labial consonants and some vowel systems; the possible reuse of physiological mechanism for speech such as for clicks and ejectives. What is a relevant speech sound in languages must also account for the relevance of speech sounds in oral tradition languages that represent about 90% of the world’s languages. An example from Maasai interjections and ideophones will illustrate this point.
Prosodically prominent positions within the word are privileged, manifesting the positional maintenance of contrasts otherwise neutralized and the resistance to processes applying elsewhere (Beckman 1998). For instance, consonantal contrasts are preferentially realized in stressed position, but they may be reduced in unstressed position (González 2013). Contrastively, these positions are also the preferred target for a small class of frequent processes, e.g., consonants are often lengthened in pre-tonic and post-tonic position (Lavoie 2001, Smith 2002). These two prima facie contradictory behaviors can be captured by a unified phonetically grounded account of stress conditioning (Giavazzi 2010). In this talk I will focus on the case study of velar palatalization in Italian. First, I will present results regarding the diachronic development of this process in Old Italian. Second I will present results from two experiments investigating prominence enhancement at the phonetic level, looking at the acoustic effects of enhancement and its perceptual consequences on the discrimination of consonantal contrast.
Selected references:
Beckman, J. 1998 Positional faithfulness. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Giavazzi M. The phonetics of metrical prominence and its consequences for segmental phonology: Masachusetts Institute of Technology; 2010.
González C. A typology of stress-and foot-sensitive consonantal phenomena. Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca » Julio de Urquijo » 2013; 47(2): 87-210.
Lavoie LM. Consonant strength: Phonological patterns and phonetic manifestations: Psychology Press; 2001.
Smith J. Phonological Augmentation in Prominent Positions. Amherst: University of Massachusetts 2002.
Speakers vary the degree of vocal effort in speech production to successfully convey a message to listeners. Vocal effort can be globally increased over entire utterances, as in loud speech (Lindblom, 1990; Mefferd & Green, 2010). Furthermore, it can vary within an utterance to locally highlight important information, which is then referred to as prosodic prominence (Cho, 2004; Roessig & Mücke, 2019). This study investigates the interaction of the two levels of vocal effort: If individuals speak loudly with a globally high effort, can they still encode
prominence relations as local effort variations? In this talk, I will present a study on articulatory correlates of prosodic prominence (different focus structures) in habitual and loud speech. 20 German speakers were recorded using 3D Electromagnetic Articulography to capture lip and tongue kinematics. Speakers were engaged in an interactive question-answer task, which elicited two focus conditions (related to local variation of vocal effort) and two speaking styles (related to global variation of vocal effort). The study shows that focus is systematically encoded in supra-laryngeal articulation as a function of local vocal effort variation. Crucially, this can not only be observed in habitual but also in loud speech, a speaking style in which vocal effort is globally increased. The results can be interpreted as underlining the flexibility of the prosodic system in adapting to communicative demands.
References
Cho, T. (2004). Prosodically conditioned strengthening and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English. Journal of Phonetics, 32, 141–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(03)00043-3.
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining Phonetic Variation: A Sketch of the H&H Theory. In W. J. Hardcastle & A. Marchal (Eds.), Speech Production and Speech Modelling (pp. 403–439). Kluwer Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2037-8_16.
Mefferd, A. S., & Green, J. R. (2010). Articulatory-to-acoustic relations in response to speaking rate and loudness manipulations. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53(5). https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2010/09-0083).
Roessig, S., & Mücke, D. (2019). Modeling Dimensions of Prosodic Prominence. Frontiers in Communication, 4, art. 4: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00044.
