The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages (original) (raw)
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Nakai et al. (2008). Utterance-final lengthening and quantity in Northern Finnish
2008
Utterance-final lengthening in Northern Finnish was investigated using tightly controlled laboratory materials, with particular focus on its interaction with the language's single (short) vs. double (long) vowel distinction. Like many other languages, Finnish exhibited utterance-final lengthening, although the estimates of magnitudes of lengthening on final vowels varied greatly depending on the treatment of the utterance-final breathy/voiceless portion of the vowel. As has been also shown for other languages, the lengthening occurred as early as the stressed, penultimate syllable of disyllabic words and was generally progressive. Crucially, vowel quantity interacted with the lengthening in a manner consistent with a hypothesis that Finnish regulates utterance-final lengthening to preserve its quantity system. Specifically, the voiced portion (the portion that is relevant to the perception of vowel quantity) of the longest single vowel (the half-long vowel) was restricted. Additionally, double vowels were lengthened less when the vowel in an adjacent syllable was also double, suggesting syntagmatic constraints. Our results support the view that utterance-final lengthening is a universal tendency but is implemented in language-specific ways and must be learned.
Word prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch
Journal of Phonetics, 2004
This paper focuses on the relation between word prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch, to the exclusion of phrase-final lengthening and accentual lengthening. Measurements of vowel durations in reiterant speech showed that main stress, secondary stress, and right/left-edge position determine vowel duration. In addition, the experiments made it clear that the durational differences between long and short vowels only surface in syllables with (main or secondary) stress. The observations were summarized in rules which were implemented in a diphone-based Text-To-Speech system (KUN-TTS). The resulting durations showed high correlations with vowel durations measured both in reiterant and lexical words.
The use of increased duration to signal prosodic boundaries has been demonstrated for many languages. However, a number of studies have claimed that languages ,in which length is phonemic do not have pre-boundary lengthening or the amount of lengthening at boundaries is not perceptually relevant. We show that for Hungarian, a language with phonemic length, there is consistent pre-boundary lengthening at three levels: word, syllable and phone. The amount of pre-boundary lengthening observed in our data was well within the limits of perceptible phonemic contrasts shown for short and long vowels and consonants in Hungarian.
The prediction of prosodic timing: Rules for final syllable lengthening in French
1993
Timing is an essential part of prosody, since it contributes to the semantic and syntactic modulations of speech conveyed by accent and intonation. Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that temporal organization takes two main forms. First, it is a necessary corollary of accent placement and intonational modification. Second, it manifests itself in prolongations, pauses and hesitations related to sentence structure. A set of rules for the second set of temporal modulations is presented. In contrast to previous work, such rules depend only minimally on syntactic structures and can be formulated nearly entirely in simple phonological terms.
Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich), 2020
This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural heritage and community work. Here we show the feasibility of studying processes of online acceleration and deceleration of speech across languages using such data, which have not been considered for this purpose before. Our results show that it is possible to detect a consistent effect of higher frequency of words leading to faster articulation even in the relatively small language documentation corpora used here. We also show that nouns tend to be pronounced more slowly than verbs when controlling for other factors. Comparison of the effects of these and other factors shows that some of them are difficult to capture with the current data and methods, including potential effects of cross-linguistic differences in morphological complexity. In general, this paper argues for widening the cross-linguistic scope of phonetic and psycholinguistic research by including the wealth of language documentation data that has recently become available.
Prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch
1999
A production experiment with reiterant speech aimed at assessing the relation between prosodic structure of words and vowel duration in Dutch. The vowels used in this experiment were [a] and [i], which are traditionally distinguished on the basis of quantity in the conditions discussed here. It was found that the duration of a vowel in the strong syllable of a foot exceeds that of the weak syllable(s) in the same foot. Besides, in only three conditions are consistent differences found between [a] and [i]: in strong syllables of strong and weak feet, and in strong monosyllabic feet. The results challenge the traditional division of Dutch vowels into 'long' and 'short'. A common intrinsic duration assigned to all vowels in a Text-to-Speech System for Dutch, only modulated by prosodic position, yields a good temporal quality of the generated speech.
A preliminary investigation of vowel lengthening in non-final position in Friulian
This paper examines one aspect of vowel lengthening in Friulian, a small language spoken in Northwest Italy. Most accounts of Friulian phonology focus on vowel length in word-final position, and in particular, its frequent association with final devoicing, e.g /lat/ [lat] 'milk' v. /lad/ [la:t] 'gone'(m.sg) v. /lade/ [lade] 'gone'(f.sg). These same sources understate or overlook the possibility of long vowels in word-medial position. However, there is evidence that word-medial stressed vowels may be preferentially lengthened before /z/. Here we report on a first experimental investigation of word-medial vowel duration in Friulian. Our results support the notion that stressed vowels are long before /z/ in that language.