Eva Liina Asu - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Eva Liina Asu
Nordic Prosody
This study, addressing the analysis of pitch patterns in Estonian Swedish compounds, enables us t... more This study, addressing the analysis of pitch patterns in Estonian Swedish compounds, enables us to draw some preliminary conclusions about the characteristics of accentuation in this little studied regional variety of Swedish. The analysis in the first part of the paper was inspired by the classification of Edvin Lagman (1979) who on the basis of auditory analysis distinguished between four accent types for Estonian Swedish compounds. Using the same materials, the present acoustic study broadly confirms his classification. In the second part of the paper, a small set of Estonian Swedish compound contours is compared to those of other regional varieties of Swedish. The results show that the contours of Estonian Swedish resemble most those found in Finland Swedish.
Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, 2019
This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duratio... more This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duration, presence of pitch accent and intonation boundary) and non-prosodic variables (e.g., type of verbal argument, presence of clause boundary, part-of-speech and number of syllables) on the perception of prominence in spontaneous Estonian. Following the methodology of Rapid Prosody Transcription, 396 randomly selected speech fragments from ten speakers were presented over the internet to 51 prosodically untrained listeners, whose task was to highlight the words they heard as prominent. The same dataset was annotated for intonational pitch accents and boundary tones by two experts. The results demonstrate that the strongest predictors of prominence perception are the pitch and duration of stressed syllables together with the presence of a pitch accent while the non-prosodic variables are somewhat weaker. The study corroborates earlier findings in that the perceptual salience in spoken langu...
Trames. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2010
The variety of Estonian normally singled out as differing from the standard in its intonation is ... more The variety of Estonian normally singled out as differing from the standard in its intonation is that of the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in the Baltic Sea. Its characteristic melody has been attributed to direct contacts with Swedish and claimed phonetically to be manifested in a higher post-stressed syllable as compared to the stressed syllable. In the present paper, a direct comparison is made on the basis of read speech between the intonation of Saaremaa and Standard Estonian. Contrary to the hypothesis of peak delay in the Saaremaa variety no significant difference is found in peak alignment between the varieties. The data show, however, that there is a significant difference in the height of initial pitch both at the beginning of an utterance and at the beginning of the second accent unit.
This paper investigates low level nuclei in Estonian statements. The intonational phonology of su... more This paper investigates low level nuclei in Estonian statements. The intonational phonology of such nuclei is discussed on the basis of tightly controlled data where it appears that similar low level accents occur also in prenuclear position. This leads to the conclusion that the most appropriate analysis is to treat such nuclei as low targets (L*) preceded by a high unstressed syllable (H).
The present paper investigates the issue of downtrends in different types of yes/no question in E... more The present paper investigates the issue of downtrends in different types of yes/no question in Estonian. The types that are compared comprise those beginning with an interrogative particle kas (whether), tag questions ending with the particle või (or), and morphosyntactically unmarked questions. It appears that these differ with respect to the slope of the fall in prenuclear accents and the
Lund Working Papers in Linguistics, 2009
Musicae Scientiae, 2010
This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) values comp... more This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) values computed on the basis of recorded performances may be higher than the nPVI values computed for the same works as musical scores, and (2) the musical nPVI values for different composers may vary substantially within one culture even within a short time-span. In Study 1, samples from the vocal works of four Estonian composers, Artur Kapp (1878–1952), Mart Saar (1882–1963), Eduard Oja (1905–1950) and Eduard Tubin (1905–1982) were used for calculation of nPVI on the basis of both scores and performances. nPVI values for performed music were higher than those for scores but the differences were rarely statistically significant. In Study 2, larger corpora of scores by three Estonian composers: Saar, Tubin, and Veljo Tormis (born 1930) were analyzed. Songs by Tormis had significantly lower nPVI values than those by Saar and Tubin. Our results imply that calculation of nPVI values in music may rely ...
Mäetagused, 2017
Eestirootsi ehk rannarootsi keelt räägiti Eesti läänepoolsetel rannikualadel ja saartel laialdase... more Eestirootsi ehk rannarootsi keelt räägiti Eesti läänepoolsetel rannikualadel ja saartel laialdaselt kuni Teise maailmasõjani, mil enamik eestirootslastest emigreerus Rootsi. Praeguseks on see rootsi keele murre säilinud ainult umbes paarisaja eaka Rootsis elava kõneleja omavahelises keelekasutuses. Artiklis vaadeldakse lähemalt eestirootsi keele prosoodia tunnusjooni, keskendudes sõnatoonidele ja rütmile. Sõnatoonide realiseerumise võrdlus kahesilbilistes sõnades näitab, et eestirootsi (nagu ka soomerootsi) keeles ei esine riigirootsi keelele nii iseloomulikku sõnatoonide vastandust. Eestirootsi, riigirootsi ja eesti keele rütmi võrdlusest selgub aga, et erinevalt püstitatud hüpoteesist, mille järgi eestirootsi võiks rütmiliste näitajate poolest paigutuda riigirootsi ja eesti keele vahele, on eestirootsi rütm oma kestusnäitajate poolest siiski väga sarnane riigirootsi rütmile.
Paper presented at FONETIK 2019, 10-12 June 2019, Stockholm
Speech Prosody 2018, 2018
The present study aims to add to the growing body of recent work addressing the acoustic correlat... more The present study aims to add to the growing body of recent work addressing the acoustic correlates of secondary stress. Here the focus is on Estonian, a quantity language where the primary stress is fixed on the first syllable of the word and the placement of secondary stresses is determined by morphological constraints but typically coincides with oddnumbered syllables. Words consisting of five and six CV syllables were analysed with respect to various acoustic measures relating to duration, pitch, and spectral characteristics. The results show that in Estonian secondary stress does not acoustically differ from unstress, calling into question the usefulness of the concept. This finding supports earlier results for several other languages (e.g. Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese) where phonological secondary stress has been postulated but is not realised phonetically. It also underlines the crucial role of the primary stressed foot in the prosodic system of Estonian.
Neis eesti murretes, kus on vokaalharmoonia , esinevad järgsilpides ka sekundaar vokaalid. Võru v... more Neis eesti murretes, kus on vokaalharmoonia , esinevad järgsilpides ka sekundaar vokaalid. Võru vokaalharmoonia kohta vt nt Rist 1997. 11 IPAs tähistab [ ̝ ] vokaali all kõrgenemist, [ ̞ ] aga madaldumist. 12 Konsonandi all olev [ ̬ ] märgib IPAs helitu konsonandi heliliseks muutumist. 13 IPAs tähistab [ ̟ ] vokaali all vokaali eespoolsemaks muutumist.
This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swed... more This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swedish–Estonian Swedish. The variety has been described as not making the tonal distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 words, but no systematic acoustic phonetic investigation has been carried out previously to confirm these descriptions. As materials, disyllabic words from read sentences, spontaneous dialogues and elicited speech produced by nine elderly Estonian Swedish speakers were used. The comparison of tonal patterns of Words with Accent 1 and Accent 2 showed that there is no consistent word accent opposition in this variety. However, some variation was found in the realisation of pitch contours in different speech styles, which might refer to possible traces of an earlier accent distinction. (Less)
Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this ques... more Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this question by means of acoustic analysis of voiceless laterals in Icelandic, Welsh, and the endangered variety Estonian Swedish. All three have a voiceless lateral functioning in contrast to a voiced lateral approximant. The analysis focused on duration – including any period of voicing (‘pre-voicing’) just before the release of the lateral – and the intensity of the voiceless lateral relative to the following vowel. Welsh showed no pre-voicing in the lateral, whilst Icelandic and Estonian Swedish did, though the latter less consistently. The Welsh voiceless lateral was also greater in relative intensity. This could be taken as a difference of phonetic category between a fricative [ɬ] in Welsh as against a voiceless approximant [l ] in the other two languages, but we argue that the complexity of the data from Estonian Swedish excludes a categorical interpretation. (Less)
This pilot study investigates the Estonian Swedish (ES) voiceless lateral [ɬ], which is rare amon... more This pilot study investigates the Estonian Swedish (ES) voiceless lateral [ɬ], which is rare among the Scandinavian dialects and is a development mainly of historic /sl/ clusters. Six elderly ES speakers were recorded, and the phonological and phonetic (duration, relative intensity) properties of [ɬ] studied and compared to other ES consonants and [ɬ] in Icelandic. The results suggest that ES [ɬ] is a single consonant rather than a consonant cluster. It behaves much like initial [s] in duration, although a tendency to anticipatory voicing in its latter part may point to its ‘approximant’ status. Furthermore, ES [ɬ] is similar in intensity to the Icelandic [ɬ]. It has a phonemic status and it can be both short and long. Laterals as well as other phonetic aspects of ES are in urgent need of further research.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a ... more The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is roote...
Scientific Reports, 2021
Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how do... more Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation...
Nordic Prosody
This study, addressing the analysis of pitch patterns in Estonian Swedish compounds, enables us t... more This study, addressing the analysis of pitch patterns in Estonian Swedish compounds, enables us to draw some preliminary conclusions about the characteristics of accentuation in this little studied regional variety of Swedish. The analysis in the first part of the paper was inspired by the classification of Edvin Lagman (1979) who on the basis of auditory analysis distinguished between four accent types for Estonian Swedish compounds. Using the same materials, the present acoustic study broadly confirms his classification. In the second part of the paper, a small set of Estonian Swedish compound contours is compared to those of other regional varieties of Swedish. The results show that the contours of Estonian Swedish resemble most those found in Finland Swedish.
Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, 2019
This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duratio... more This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duration, presence of pitch accent and intonation boundary) and non-prosodic variables (e.g., type of verbal argument, presence of clause boundary, part-of-speech and number of syllables) on the perception of prominence in spontaneous Estonian. Following the methodology of Rapid Prosody Transcription, 396 randomly selected speech fragments from ten speakers were presented over the internet to 51 prosodically untrained listeners, whose task was to highlight the words they heard as prominent. The same dataset was annotated for intonational pitch accents and boundary tones by two experts. The results demonstrate that the strongest predictors of prominence perception are the pitch and duration of stressed syllables together with the presence of a pitch accent while the non-prosodic variables are somewhat weaker. The study corroborates earlier findings in that the perceptual salience in spoken langu...
Trames. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2010
The variety of Estonian normally singled out as differing from the standard in its intonation is ... more The variety of Estonian normally singled out as differing from the standard in its intonation is that of the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in the Baltic Sea. Its characteristic melody has been attributed to direct contacts with Swedish and claimed phonetically to be manifested in a higher post-stressed syllable as compared to the stressed syllable. In the present paper, a direct comparison is made on the basis of read speech between the intonation of Saaremaa and Standard Estonian. Contrary to the hypothesis of peak delay in the Saaremaa variety no significant difference is found in peak alignment between the varieties. The data show, however, that there is a significant difference in the height of initial pitch both at the beginning of an utterance and at the beginning of the second accent unit.
This paper investigates low level nuclei in Estonian statements. The intonational phonology of su... more This paper investigates low level nuclei in Estonian statements. The intonational phonology of such nuclei is discussed on the basis of tightly controlled data where it appears that similar low level accents occur also in prenuclear position. This leads to the conclusion that the most appropriate analysis is to treat such nuclei as low targets (L*) preceded by a high unstressed syllable (H).
The present paper investigates the issue of downtrends in different types of yes/no question in E... more The present paper investigates the issue of downtrends in different types of yes/no question in Estonian. The types that are compared comprise those beginning with an interrogative particle kas (whether), tag questions ending with the particle või (or), and morphosyntactically unmarked questions. It appears that these differ with respect to the slope of the fall in prenuclear accents and the
Lund Working Papers in Linguistics, 2009
Musicae Scientiae, 2010
This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) values comp... more This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) values computed on the basis of recorded performances may be higher than the nPVI values computed for the same works as musical scores, and (2) the musical nPVI values for different composers may vary substantially within one culture even within a short time-span. In Study 1, samples from the vocal works of four Estonian composers, Artur Kapp (1878–1952), Mart Saar (1882–1963), Eduard Oja (1905–1950) and Eduard Tubin (1905–1982) were used for calculation of nPVI on the basis of both scores and performances. nPVI values for performed music were higher than those for scores but the differences were rarely statistically significant. In Study 2, larger corpora of scores by three Estonian composers: Saar, Tubin, and Veljo Tormis (born 1930) were analyzed. Songs by Tormis had significantly lower nPVI values than those by Saar and Tubin. Our results imply that calculation of nPVI values in music may rely ...
Mäetagused, 2017
Eestirootsi ehk rannarootsi keelt räägiti Eesti läänepoolsetel rannikualadel ja saartel laialdase... more Eestirootsi ehk rannarootsi keelt räägiti Eesti läänepoolsetel rannikualadel ja saartel laialdaselt kuni Teise maailmasõjani, mil enamik eestirootslastest emigreerus Rootsi. Praeguseks on see rootsi keele murre säilinud ainult umbes paarisaja eaka Rootsis elava kõneleja omavahelises keelekasutuses. Artiklis vaadeldakse lähemalt eestirootsi keele prosoodia tunnusjooni, keskendudes sõnatoonidele ja rütmile. Sõnatoonide realiseerumise võrdlus kahesilbilistes sõnades näitab, et eestirootsi (nagu ka soomerootsi) keeles ei esine riigirootsi keelele nii iseloomulikku sõnatoonide vastandust. Eestirootsi, riigirootsi ja eesti keele rütmi võrdlusest selgub aga, et erinevalt püstitatud hüpoteesist, mille järgi eestirootsi võiks rütmiliste näitajate poolest paigutuda riigirootsi ja eesti keele vahele, on eestirootsi rütm oma kestusnäitajate poolest siiski väga sarnane riigirootsi rütmile.
Paper presented at FONETIK 2019, 10-12 June 2019, Stockholm
Speech Prosody 2018, 2018
The present study aims to add to the growing body of recent work addressing the acoustic correlat... more The present study aims to add to the growing body of recent work addressing the acoustic correlates of secondary stress. Here the focus is on Estonian, a quantity language where the primary stress is fixed on the first syllable of the word and the placement of secondary stresses is determined by morphological constraints but typically coincides with oddnumbered syllables. Words consisting of five and six CV syllables were analysed with respect to various acoustic measures relating to duration, pitch, and spectral characteristics. The results show that in Estonian secondary stress does not acoustically differ from unstress, calling into question the usefulness of the concept. This finding supports earlier results for several other languages (e.g. Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese) where phonological secondary stress has been postulated but is not realised phonetically. It also underlines the crucial role of the primary stressed foot in the prosodic system of Estonian.
Neis eesti murretes, kus on vokaalharmoonia , esinevad järgsilpides ka sekundaar vokaalid. Võru v... more Neis eesti murretes, kus on vokaalharmoonia , esinevad järgsilpides ka sekundaar vokaalid. Võru vokaalharmoonia kohta vt nt Rist 1997. 11 IPAs tähistab [ ̝ ] vokaali all kõrgenemist, [ ̞ ] aga madaldumist. 12 Konsonandi all olev [ ̬ ] märgib IPAs helitu konsonandi heliliseks muutumist. 13 IPAs tähistab [ ̟ ] vokaali all vokaali eespoolsemaks muutumist.
This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swed... more This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swedish–Estonian Swedish. The variety has been described as not making the tonal distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 words, but no systematic acoustic phonetic investigation has been carried out previously to confirm these descriptions. As materials, disyllabic words from read sentences, spontaneous dialogues and elicited speech produced by nine elderly Estonian Swedish speakers were used. The comparison of tonal patterns of Words with Accent 1 and Accent 2 showed that there is no consistent word accent opposition in this variety. However, some variation was found in the realisation of pitch contours in different speech styles, which might refer to possible traces of an earlier accent distinction. (Less)
Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this ques... more Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this question by means of acoustic analysis of voiceless laterals in Icelandic, Welsh, and the endangered variety Estonian Swedish. All three have a voiceless lateral functioning in contrast to a voiced lateral approximant. The analysis focused on duration – including any period of voicing (‘pre-voicing’) just before the release of the lateral – and the intensity of the voiceless lateral relative to the following vowel. Welsh showed no pre-voicing in the lateral, whilst Icelandic and Estonian Swedish did, though the latter less consistently. The Welsh voiceless lateral was also greater in relative intensity. This could be taken as a difference of phonetic category between a fricative [ɬ] in Welsh as against a voiceless approximant [l ] in the other two languages, but we argue that the complexity of the data from Estonian Swedish excludes a categorical interpretation. (Less)
This pilot study investigates the Estonian Swedish (ES) voiceless lateral [ɬ], which is rare amon... more This pilot study investigates the Estonian Swedish (ES) voiceless lateral [ɬ], which is rare among the Scandinavian dialects and is a development mainly of historic /sl/ clusters. Six elderly ES speakers were recorded, and the phonological and phonetic (duration, relative intensity) properties of [ɬ] studied and compared to other ES consonants and [ɬ] in Icelandic. The results suggest that ES [ɬ] is a single consonant rather than a consonant cluster. It behaves much like initial [s] in duration, although a tendency to anticipatory voicing in its latter part may point to its ‘approximant’ status. Furthermore, ES [ɬ] is similar in intensity to the Icelandic [ɬ]. It has a phonemic status and it can be both short and long. Laterals as well as other phonetic aspects of ES are in urgent need of further research.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a ... more The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is roote...
Scientific Reports, 2021
Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how do... more Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation...
Serien Svenska språkets historia höll 13-15 juni 2018 sin femtonde sammankomst vid Tartu universi... more Serien Svenska språkets historia höll 13-15 juni 2018 sin femtonde sammankomst vid Tartu universitet, grundat 1632 av Gustav II Adolf som Sveriges andra universitet. Arrangör var Institutionen för skandinavistik. Ca 90 personer deltog i konferensen. Vid konferensen framfördes 49 vetenskapliga presentationer: tre plenarföreläsningar, 39 övriga föredrag och 7 posterpresentationer. Det stora intresset är glädjande och arrangörerna noterar att den påtagliga ökning av antalet bidrag som märktes redan vid den föregående konferensen i Vasa 2016 har fortsatt. Här presenteras ett urval av 21 bidrag från konferensen. Artiklarna har genomgått dubbelblind referentgranskning.