The notion of abstract F-marks linking pitch accents of English sentences directly to the discourse status of syntactic constituents, as proposed by Elizabeth O. Selkirk (1995) & Roger Schwarzschild ...(1999), is shown to be untenable in light of data of nested foci, right-node-raising sentences, & sentences in which an accented word cannot be F-marked & vice versa. All the adduced counterexamples are explained In the framework of optimality theory by an analysis in which pitch accents express prosodic heads & their distribution is determined entirely by a hierarchy composed of prosodic structure constraints of right head alignment & stress on lexical phrase heads, dominated by three constraints governing the prosodic expression of discourse status: (1) assignment of prosodic prominence to a contrastively focused phrase, outranking (2) assignment of prominence to new-information focus, which in turn dominates (3) nonprominence of given information. References. J. Hitchcock
Purpose: This study aimed to advance our understanding of how children with dysarthria and cerebral palsy (CP) realise sentence stress acoustically, and how well listeners could identify the position ...of the stressed word within these utterances.
Method: Seven children with CP and eight typically developing children participated in the experiment. Stress on target words in two sentence positions was elicited through a picture-based question-answer paradigm. Acoustic parameters of stress duration, intensity and fundamental frequency (F0) were measured and compared between stressed and unstressed target words. For the perception experiment, ten listeners were asked to determine the position of the stressed word in the children's productions.
Result: Acoustic measures showed that at group level the typically developing children used all three acoustic parameters to mark sentence stress, whereas the children with CP showed changes in duration only. Individual performance variations were evident in both groups. Perceptually, listeners were significantly better at identifying the stressed words in the utterances produced by the typically developing children than those of the children with CP.
Conclusion: The results suggest that children with CP can manipulate temporal speech properties to mark stress. This ability to modulate acoustic-prosodic features could be harnessed in intervention to enhance children's functional communication.
Evidence for the status of transitive light verb phrases (VPs) as phases, as claimed in the minimalist program of Noam Chomsky (2000), is adduced from four syntactic phenomena, all of which are ...argued to provide equal support for the phasehood of passive & unaccusative VP constituents, contrary to Chomsky: (1) reconstruction effects revealing intermediate wh-movement traces at a phase edge, (2) quantifier raising in antecedent-contained deletion, (3) wh-movement to the phase edge required for the interpretability of parasitic gaps according to Jon Nissenbaum (1998), & (4) evidence that movement within vs across phases accounts for the distribution of nuclear stress in English sentences. 29 References. J. Hitchcock
This paper analyzes a few significant differences between Spanish and English in relation to phonological patterns. First, a short introduction is given about these two languages, and it is briefly ...explained in what linguistic aspects they are similar or different. Then, each of these linguistic features is analyzed in detail, clearly establishing the differences existing between Spanish and English. The specific phonological features that are addressed on this academic paper are vowel and consonant phonemes, diphthongs and triphthongs, as well as word and sentence stress. Furthermore, several pronunciation difficulties for Spanish speakers are discussed. Finally, some didactic implications are considered so that teachers can help their students of either language learn the second one considering important linguistic features.
The starting point of this article is the question "How to retrieve fingerprints of rhythm in written texts?" We address this problem in the case of Brazilian and European Portuguese. These two ...dialects of Modern Portuguese share the same lexicon and most of the sentences they produce are superficially identical. Yet they are conjectured, on linguistic grounds, to implement different rhythms. We show that this linguistic question can be formulated as a problem of model selection in the class of variable length Markov chains. To carry on this approach, we compare texts from European and Brazilian Portuguese. These texts are previously encoded according to some basic rhythmic features of the sentences which can be automatically retrieved. This is an entirely new approach from the linguistic point of view. Our statistical contribution is the introduction of the smallest maximizer criterion which is a constant free procedure for model selection. As a by-product, this provides a solution for the problem of optimal choice of the penalty constant when using the BIC to select a variable length Markov chain. Besides proving the consistency of the smallest maximizer criterion when the sample size diverges, we also make a simulation study comparing our approach with both the standard BIC selection and the Peres-Shields order estimation. Applied to the linguistic sample constituted for our case study, the smallest maximizer criterion assigns different context-tree models to the two dialects of Portuguese. The features of the selected models are compatible with current conjectures discussed in the linguistic literature.
This paper looks at the concept of authenticity in oral discourse, and at English language models used in the classroom. These increasingly feature spontaneous speech rather than "careful speech", a ...difference largely reflected in stress placement and syllable reduction in English speech rhythm: the suprasegmental structure that has its basis in the acoustic prominence and non-prominence of syllables. The notion of authentic acoustic materials for L2 language models figures officially in the French secondary school syllabus, as reported in a publication by the French Inspection générale (2000). The report calls for a systematic effort to dispel opaqueness in the stream of speech. In order to characterize "authentic speech material", we have briefly examined listening strategies in two popular English language workbooks, Bridges 2e and New Missions 2de. We conclude that effective listening involves gradually presenting authentic discourse as a perception model, leading to better assimilation of native or fluent speech.
This study evaluated the validity of a new scale for assessing children's reading fluency skill called the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale (CORFS). The CORFS consists of two subscales that ...capture key elements of the Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, and Meisinger (2010) definition of reading fluency: reading expression, reading rate, and accuracy. In study 1, the reading expression subscale was developed by examining spectrographically measured prosodie differences in the oral readings of children with varying fluency skill. Three experts independently rated the oral readings of 59 second-grade children using the CORFS. Intraclass correlations among raters were strong for both reading expression, and reading rate and accuracy. Expression ratings correlated with all but one spectrographic indicator of reading prosody and highly with standardized assessments of reading fluency and comprehension. In study 2, the structure of the scale was replicated using spectrographic measures of the oral readings of 60 third-grade children reading two new texts. Two experts independently rated these oral readings using a final version of the scale. Results were comparable to those of study 1. Together, these results support the validity of the CORFS as an assessment of reading fluency.
This paper presents the word-prosodic system of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language that displays both stress-accent and tone with complex morphological conditioning. While closely related ...languages have been documented to possess culminative word prominence involving both stress and contrastive tone (Demers, Escalante, and Jelinek 1999 and Hagberg 1989), no variety of Rarámuri had been described as featuring lexical tone. On the basis of phonological evidence and a detailed acoustic investigation, we propose that (i) stress-accent and tone are phonologically distinct systems in Choguita Rarámuri; (ii) stress-accent and tone are independent in terms of their acoustic encoding; (iii) both stress-accent and tone are governed in their distribution and makeup by lexical and morphological conditions; (iv) the tone system features a three-way contrast between HL, L, and M; and (v) lexical tonal contrasts are exclusively realized in stressed syllables—that is, tonal distribution is dependent on stress-accent.
The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) asserts that listeners associate greater acoustic intensity with group beginnings and greater duration with group endings. Some researchers have assumed a natural ...connection between these perceptual tendencies and universal principles underlying linguistic categories of rhythm. The experimental literature on ITL effects is limited in three ways. Few studies of listeners' perceptions of alternating sound sequences have used speech-like stimuli, cross-linguistic testing has been inadequate and existing studies have manipulated intensity and duration singly, whereas these features vary together in natural speech. This paper reports the results of three experiments conducted with native Zapotec speakers and one with native English speakers. We tested listeners' grouping biases using streams of alternating syllables in which intensity and duration were varied separately, and sequences in which they were covaried. The findings suggest that care should be taken in assuming a natural connection between the ITL and universal principles of prosodic organisation.
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