Brechtje Post | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Papers by Brechtje Post
Speech Communication, 2012
The goal of this study is twofold: first, to examine in greater depth the claimed contribution of... more The goal of this study is twofold: first, to examine in greater depth the claimed contribution of differences in syllable structure to measures of speech rhythm for three languages that are reported to belong to different rhythmic classes, namely, English, Spanish, and Catalan; and second, to investigate differences in the durational marking of prosodic heads and final edges of prosodic constituents between the three languages and test whether this distinction correlates in any way with the rhythmic distinctions. Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from these three languages show that differences in the rhythm metrics emerge even when syllable structure is controlled for in the experimental materials, at least between English on the one hand and Spanish/Catalan on the other, suggesting that important differences in durational patterns exist between these languages that cannot simply be attributed to differences in phonotactic properties. In particular, the vocalic variability measures nPVI-V, DV, and VarcoV are shown to be robust tools for discrimination above and beyond such phonotactic properties. Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way these languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely, the durational marking of prosodic heads, and pre-final lengthening at prosodic boundaries.
Interspeech 2010
Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be pr... more Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be prone to bias or error. We apply tools from Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to a set of fundamental frequency (F0) data to demonstrate how these tools can provide a less theory-dependent way of investigating F0 contours by allowing statistical analyses of whole contours rather than depending on theoretically-determined "important" parts of the signal. The results of this analysis support the predictions of current intonational phonology while also providing additional information about phonetic variability in the F0 contours that these theories do not currently model.
ling
In common with English and German and many other languages, French has an accentual configuration... more In common with English and German and many other languages, French has an accentual configuration that arises in clash contexts, here referred to as clash resolution. Experimental research has shown that clash resolution is bounded by the phonological phrase. Moreover, the optional application of clash resolution has provided evidence for the restructured phonological phrase. However, the conditions on restructuring that have been proposed in the literature have been found to make the wrong predictions in a number of cases. In contradiction to earlier claims, perceptual and acoustic evidence shows that lexical heads can also be restructured with their branching complements. In addition, an analysis of the phonetic evidence shows that clash resolution is characterized by the absence of a final pitch accent, while the simultaneous realization of an initial pitch accent on the stress-shift item is optional. In our conclusions, we will discuss the implications of these findings for a ph...
10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020
Journal of Child Language
Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both)... more Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6–6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in ...
Language and Speech
This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent o... more This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent on (relative) similarity between prosodic cues to accent between the non-native and the native language, and whether cross-linguistic differences in the use of local and more widely distributed (i.e., non-local) cues to sentence accent detection lead to differential effects of the presence of background noise on sentence accent detection in a non-native language. We compared Dutch, Finnish, and French non-native listeners of English, whose cueing and use of prosodic prominence is gradually further removed from English, and compared their results on a phoneme monitoring task in different levels of noise and a quiet condition to those of native listeners. Overall phoneme detection performance was high for the native and the non-native listeners, but deteriorated to the same extent in the presence of background noise. Crucially, relative similarity between the prosodic cues to sentence accen...
Speech Prosody 2016, 2016
While the influence of L1 on the perception of segments is well established, the effect of L1 on ... more While the influence of L1 on the perception of segments is well established, the effect of L1 on the perception of suprasegmentals such as intonational contours is less known. Previous studies claim that suprasegmental processing is less sensitive to L1 experience because it is based mostly on general auditory mechanisms. Thus, falls and rises can be universally distinguished regardless of language background while different types of rises are processed similarly between language groups. However, often these studies have not included languages that actually use different types of rises linguistically. In this study we investigated the effects of L1 experience on the perception of rises by Australian-English listeners, for whom different rises signal the difference between interrogatives and declaratives in their L1, and Mandarin learners of English, who should be sensitive to tonal differences but not to the intonational differences tested here. Results demonstrate that the perception of suprasegmentals is indeed shaped by the L1 with a significantly better discrimination of rises by Australian-English listeners. Additionally, it appears that suprasegmental processing at the utterance level occurs independently from the lexical level since Mandarin listeners were not able to draw on tonal sensitivities for discrimination at the utterance (intonational) level.
Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for inte... more Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for inter-or intra-speaker variability. Speech data from the IViE corpus, however, demonstrate considerable variation in English intonation that occurs both across and within dialects (IViE = Intonational Variation in English, UK ESRC award R000237145, http://www.phon.ox.ac.k/~esther/ivyweb). In this paper, we introduce the IViE corpus and present a selection of findings. Concentrating on nuclear accents, we provide evidence for (1) variation in the production of nuclear accent types and (2) variation in the phonetic realisation of nuclear accents. We discuss data from seven dialects. The results show that intonational differences between dialects of one language can be greater than intonational differences between dialects of two different languages. They also show that there is considerable intra-dialectal variation.
The possibility of implicit learning (i.e. learning without intention or awareness) of prosodic f... more The possibility of implicit learning (i.e. learning without intention or awareness) of prosodic features has been little investigated, despite a great deal of studies in other areas of language. We tested whether a lexical stress pattern could be implicitly learned after short exposure. We found that English-speaking subjects showed learning of the Spanish-based lexical stress patterns from the exposure phase. The response patterns support a model in which both abstract rules and probabilistic information were learned.
Langue Francaise, Jun 1, 2011
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2015
Intonation in Romance, 2015
The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system i... more The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system is designed in such a way as to (i) be (surface) transparent and easily learnable by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks; and to (ii) make the exchange of data more feasible. It is couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework and follows the usual ToBI conventions. This is to facilitate research in prosodic typology in particular within Romance, for which ToBI-style systems are often used. F_ToBI is designed to transcribe distinct intonation contours that are generally accepted in the literature on French intonation and which are supported by the analysis of empirical data. While it is inspired by existing theoretical accounts of French phrasing and intonationboth within and outside the Autosegmental Metrical frameworkit does not follow one single precursor, since its primary goal is to allow for an adequate and comprehensive transcription of French prosody in a cross-dialectal perspective.
Le développement récent de l'analyse de grands corpus oraux pose crucialement la question de ... more Le développement récent de l'analyse de grands corpus oraux pose crucialement la question de la transcription/annotation des phénomènes prosodiques. Peut-elle se faire sur des bases semblables à ce qui se fait au niveau segmental ? Suppose-t-elle une connaissance phonologique du fonctionnement prosodique de la langue à transcrire ? Un système de transcription de la variation intonative appelé IVTS et dérivé de IViE a été developpé récemment (mettre références) et offre l'avantage d'encoder la variation, qu'elle soit intra- ou interlangues indépendamment de l'analyse phonologique de la langue ou de la variété étudiée. Selon nous IVTS représente donc l'outil idéal pour étudier les variétés régionales d'une même langue, pour comparer les systèmes intonatifs de deux langues différentes, ou pour établir l'inventaire phonologique d'une langue nouvelle. Ce papier a pour objectif de présenter IVTS et de l'évaluer vis-à-vis d'autres systèmes de tra...
Speech Communication, 2012
The goal of this study is twofold: first, to examine in greater depth the claimed contribution of... more The goal of this study is twofold: first, to examine in greater depth the claimed contribution of differences in syllable structure to measures of speech rhythm for three languages that are reported to belong to different rhythmic classes, namely, English, Spanish, and Catalan; and second, to investigate differences in the durational marking of prosodic heads and final edges of prosodic constituents between the three languages and test whether this distinction correlates in any way with the rhythmic distinctions. Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from these three languages show that differences in the rhythm metrics emerge even when syllable structure is controlled for in the experimental materials, at least between English on the one hand and Spanish/Catalan on the other, suggesting that important differences in durational patterns exist between these languages that cannot simply be attributed to differences in phonotactic properties. In particular, the vocalic variability measures nPVI-V, DV, and VarcoV are shown to be robust tools for discrimination above and beyond such phonotactic properties. Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way these languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely, the durational marking of prosodic heads, and pre-final lengthening at prosodic boundaries.
Interspeech 2010
Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be pr... more Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be prone to bias or error. We apply tools from Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to a set of fundamental frequency (F0) data to demonstrate how these tools can provide a less theory-dependent way of investigating F0 contours by allowing statistical analyses of whole contours rather than depending on theoretically-determined "important" parts of the signal. The results of this analysis support the predictions of current intonational phonology while also providing additional information about phonetic variability in the F0 contours that these theories do not currently model.
ling
In common with English and German and many other languages, French has an accentual configuration... more In common with English and German and many other languages, French has an accentual configuration that arises in clash contexts, here referred to as clash resolution. Experimental research has shown that clash resolution is bounded by the phonological phrase. Moreover, the optional application of clash resolution has provided evidence for the restructured phonological phrase. However, the conditions on restructuring that have been proposed in the literature have been found to make the wrong predictions in a number of cases. In contradiction to earlier claims, perceptual and acoustic evidence shows that lexical heads can also be restructured with their branching complements. In addition, an analysis of the phonetic evidence shows that clash resolution is characterized by the absence of a final pitch accent, while the simultaneous realization of an initial pitch accent on the stress-shift item is optional. In our conclusions, we will discuss the implications of these findings for a ph...
10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020
Journal of Child Language
Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both)... more Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6–6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in ...
Language and Speech
This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent o... more This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent on (relative) similarity between prosodic cues to accent between the non-native and the native language, and whether cross-linguistic differences in the use of local and more widely distributed (i.e., non-local) cues to sentence accent detection lead to differential effects of the presence of background noise on sentence accent detection in a non-native language. We compared Dutch, Finnish, and French non-native listeners of English, whose cueing and use of prosodic prominence is gradually further removed from English, and compared their results on a phoneme monitoring task in different levels of noise and a quiet condition to those of native listeners. Overall phoneme detection performance was high for the native and the non-native listeners, but deteriorated to the same extent in the presence of background noise. Crucially, relative similarity between the prosodic cues to sentence accen...
Speech Prosody 2016, 2016
While the influence of L1 on the perception of segments is well established, the effect of L1 on ... more While the influence of L1 on the perception of segments is well established, the effect of L1 on the perception of suprasegmentals such as intonational contours is less known. Previous studies claim that suprasegmental processing is less sensitive to L1 experience because it is based mostly on general auditory mechanisms. Thus, falls and rises can be universally distinguished regardless of language background while different types of rises are processed similarly between language groups. However, often these studies have not included languages that actually use different types of rises linguistically. In this study we investigated the effects of L1 experience on the perception of rises by Australian-English listeners, for whom different rises signal the difference between interrogatives and declaratives in their L1, and Mandarin learners of English, who should be sensitive to tonal differences but not to the intonational differences tested here. Results demonstrate that the perception of suprasegmentals is indeed shaped by the L1 with a significantly better discrimination of rises by Australian-English listeners. Additionally, it appears that suprasegmental processing at the utterance level occurs independently from the lexical level since Mandarin listeners were not able to draw on tonal sensitivities for discrimination at the utterance (intonational) level.
Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for inte... more Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for inter-or intra-speaker variability. Speech data from the IViE corpus, however, demonstrate considerable variation in English intonation that occurs both across and within dialects (IViE = Intonational Variation in English, UK ESRC award R000237145, http://www.phon.ox.ac.k/~esther/ivyweb). In this paper, we introduce the IViE corpus and present a selection of findings. Concentrating on nuclear accents, we provide evidence for (1) variation in the production of nuclear accent types and (2) variation in the phonetic realisation of nuclear accents. We discuss data from seven dialects. The results show that intonational differences between dialects of one language can be greater than intonational differences between dialects of two different languages. They also show that there is considerable intra-dialectal variation.
The possibility of implicit learning (i.e. learning without intention or awareness) of prosodic f... more The possibility of implicit learning (i.e. learning without intention or awareness) of prosodic features has been little investigated, despite a great deal of studies in other areas of language. We tested whether a lexical stress pattern could be implicitly learned after short exposure. We found that English-speaking subjects showed learning of the Spanish-based lexical stress patterns from the exposure phase. The response patterns support a model in which both abstract rules and probabilistic information were learned.
Langue Francaise, Jun 1, 2011
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2015
Intonation in Romance, 2015
The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system i... more The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system is designed in such a way as to (i) be (surface) transparent and easily learnable by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks; and to (ii) make the exchange of data more feasible. It is couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework and follows the usual ToBI conventions. This is to facilitate research in prosodic typology in particular within Romance, for which ToBI-style systems are often used. F_ToBI is designed to transcribe distinct intonation contours that are generally accepted in the literature on French intonation and which are supported by the analysis of empirical data. While it is inspired by existing theoretical accounts of French phrasing and intonationboth within and outside the Autosegmental Metrical frameworkit does not follow one single precursor, since its primary goal is to allow for an adequate and comprehensive transcription of French prosody in a cross-dialectal perspective.
Le développement récent de l'analyse de grands corpus oraux pose crucialement la question de ... more Le développement récent de l'analyse de grands corpus oraux pose crucialement la question de la transcription/annotation des phénomènes prosodiques. Peut-elle se faire sur des bases semblables à ce qui se fait au niveau segmental ? Suppose-t-elle une connaissance phonologique du fonctionnement prosodique de la langue à transcrire ? Un système de transcription de la variation intonative appelé IVTS et dérivé de IViE a été developpé récemment (mettre références) et offre l'avantage d'encoder la variation, qu'elle soit intra- ou interlangues indépendamment de l'analyse phonologique de la langue ou de la variété étudiée. Selon nous IVTS représente donc l'outil idéal pour étudier les variétés régionales d'une même langue, pour comparer les systèmes intonatifs de deux langues différentes, ou pour établir l'inventaire phonologique d'une langue nouvelle. Ce papier a pour objectif de présenter IVTS et de l'évaluer vis-à-vis d'autres systèmes de tra...
Perception and production studies of speech rhythm development in infants and children paint a co... more Perception and production studies of speech rhythm development in infants and children paint a complex picture of a universal early perceptual sensitivity to-and production mastery of-cues to rhythm, while the rate of acquisition of rhythmic properties across and within languages appears to be typologically and structurally determined. In this chapter we provide a critical and comprehensive review of the literature that has led to these insights. We then explore how child rhythm development can be accommodated in an integrated approach to speech rhythm in which various structural and performance aspects interact to determine developmental trajectories in rhythm acquisition.