Volume 65, Issue 4

In 2007 Lindblom et al. introduced a methodological tool to disentangle consonant-vowel (CV) coarticulation attributable to emphatic stress apart from the vowel expansion effects known to accompany the prosodic overlay. After empirically accounting for the altered vowel positions, they reported small but consistent increases in F2 transition onsets in emphatically produced CVs that could not be attributed to vowel context influences, and that differed across stop place. At issue is whether the findings of these authors can be replicated, but in the opposite direction, for CVs produced at fast speaking rates. A modified locus equation regression metric was similarly used to account for rate-induced vowel reduction effects in predicting frequencies of F2 transition onsets in rapid speech. Six American-English speakers produced [V1.CV2] sequences embedded in a carrier sentence, at three speaking tempos: normal, fast, and fastest. Significant differences were found between ‘predicted’ and ‘observed’ F2 onsets across stops, with alveolars and velars showing greater decreases in F2 onsets during more rapid speech than labials. The complementary findings are discussed relative to a unified view of anticipatory coarticulation in CV production across a continuum of hyperarticulated spectral expansion to hypoarticulated spectral reduction.

Our current understanding of how emotions are expressed in speech is still very limited. Part of the difficulty has been the lack of understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Here we report the findings of a somewhat unconventional investigation of emotional speech. Instead of looking for direct acoustic correlates of multiple emotions, we tested a specific theory, the size code hypothesis of emotional speech, about two emotions – anger and happiness. According to the hypothesis, anger and happiness are conveyed in speech by exaggerating or understating the body size of the speaker. In two studies consisting of six experiments, we synthesized vowels with a three-dimensional articulatory synthesizer with parameter manipulations derived from the size code hypothesis, and asked Thai listeners to judge the body size and emotion of the speaker. Vowels synthesized with a longer vocal tract and lower F0 were mostly heard as from a larger person if the length and F0 differences were stationary, but from an angry person if the vocal tract was dynamically lengthened and F0 was dynamically lowered. The opposite was true for the perception of small body size and happiness. These results provide preliminary support for the size code hypothesis. They also point to potential benefits of theory-driven investigations in emotion research.

Tamang (Bodic division of Tibeto-Burman) is spoken at the edge of the East Asian ‘tone-prone’ zone, next to the almost tone-free Indian linguistic area, and is, chronologically, at the late end of the tone multiplication wave which has swept through East Asia in the course of the last two millennia. It can be regarded as a ‘missing link’ in tonogenesis: following the loss of voicing contrasts on syllable-initial consonants, Tamang has four tonal categories instead of its earlier two-tone system; the present state of the prosodic system is typologically transitional, in that these four tonal categories are realised by several cues which include fundamental frequency (F0), phonation type, and allophonic variation in the realisation of consonants. Acoustic and electroglottographic recordings of 131 words in two carrier sentences by 5 speakers were conducted (total number of target syllables analysed: n = 1,651). They allow for a description in terms of F0, glottal open quotient, duration, and realisation of consonants. The results confirm the diversity of cues to the four tonal categories, and show evidence of laxness on tones 3 and 4, i.e. on the two tones which originate diachronically in voiced initials. The discussion hinges on the phonological definition of tone.

The term ‘stress’ is used to refer to the perceptual salience at certain places in strings of syllables, but it has several different referents: (a) relative syllable salience in an utterance; this is syllable-, not word-oriented; (b) stress in a word; this is part of the lexical phonology; (c) stressing of words in utterances for various aspects of propositional and expressive meaning, often called ‘accent(uation)’. Referents b and c are word- and meaning-oriented. In this article, the terms are more stringently defined. ‘Stress’ is only used to refer to a lexical stress position (referent b ), i.e. a syllable in a word that becomes the docking place for various types of ‘accent’ to weight words in utterances (referent c ). ‘Stress’ has no physical attributes by itself. ‘Prominence’ refers to the patterns of salience in syllable strings (referent a ). The article reports results of an experiment in prominence perception of the logatome baba , in which the physical parameters F0, syllabic duration, and overall acoustic energy were systematically varied across the bisyllable. Sixteen German subjects had to indicate, by pressing buttons of a computerized reaction time device, whether the first or the second syllable was more prominent. F0 was a more powerful cue than the other two. Equal syllable duration on a monotone resulted in more first-syllable judgements, which could be counteracted by a slightly falling F0 contour on the second syllable to reach equal response frequencies for the two syllables. This ties in with Lehiste’s earlier findings that F0 movement increases the perception of duration. Extrapolating from the results, a research programme for prominence perception is developed that will eventually shed new light on the investigation into the nature and manifestation of speech rhythm.