Volume 47, Issue 1-2

This paper presents a detailed acoustic and auditory description of the kind of complex tone sandhi found in the Northern Wu dialects of Chinese. Mean fundamental frequency, amplitude and duration values from many tokens of 1 native speaker of Zhenhai dialect are used to show how the acoustical characteristics of the 6 citation tones can be related to the 20 different forms in disyllabic lexical sandhi. Three phonetically motivated processes are demonstrated in this relationship: stress effects; paradigmatic replacement of pitch and phonation type features on the second syllable, and intrinsic effects associated with the intervocalic consonant, and phonation rate and duration of the first syllable.

The post-stop-release rise or fall of fundamental frequency (F₀) is known to affect voicing judgments of syllables with ambiguous voice onset times (VOTs). In 1986, Silverman claimed that the critical factor was not direction of F₀ change but rather its direction relative to the intonational contour. He further claimed that only F₀s that start above and fall to the contour have an effect proportional to the size of the frequency change; F₀s that rise to the contour by different amounts were claimed to be equivalent. In our first experiment, we examined the effect on voicing judgments of five onset F₀s preceding a single, flat contour. Only falling F₀s were differentiated in the first set of judgments, but after increased exposure to the syllables, even F₀s below the contour differentially affected the voicing judgment. In a second experiment, the contour of the final part of the syllable was flat, rising or falling. F₀ contour affected the judgments, as did onset F₀s, but the two factors did not interact, indicating that the onset values were not being judged by reference to the contours. However, the contour which was predicted to result in more voiceless judgments also ended at a higher F₀ in the vowel, and another effect of voicing is that the F₀ is higher throughout the vowel after voiceless stops. In a third experiment, F₀ contours were created to contrast contour and mean F₀. The effect of the F₀ during the vocalic segment appeared to be attributable to the average F₀ rather than the contour. In all three experiments, the F₀ onset values contributed to the voicing judgment whether they were above or below the putative intonation contour. The contribution of the lower F₀s, while significant, was not as great as that of the higher F₀s, which argues for a noncategorical contribution of intonation.

This study deals with the temporal structure of 4- and 5-syllable noun phrases of one and of two constituents, produced as syntactic objects of Italian VP + NP sentences by 3 subjects. On the basis that vowel durational relations can reflect prominence relations, as previous data on Italian indicate, the study compares the durations of stressed vowels, vowels carrying secondary stress in compound words, and unstressed vowels in order to assess the effects of position within a phrase and to identify the rhythmic principles that regulate prominence relations among both stressed and unstressed vowels. The data indicate that the degree of prominence decreases from stressed vowels in phrase-final words to stressed vowels in non-final words, to rhythmically accented unstressed, to unaccented unstressed vowels. Vowels with secondary stress in compounds do not differ in duration from unstressed vowels. A remarkable finding is the very restricted range of variation of unstressed vowels. The data suggest that, although the rhythmic alternation rule in Italian disfavours adjacency and even proximity of two equally strong syllables, it does not disfavour sequences of two, three, four equally weak syllables. Sequences of unstressed vowels of nearly equal durations are also favoured by the absence of word boundary lengthening observed in the reiterant versions of our corpus. It is argued that the temporal organization of noun phrases that emerged from this investigation contributes to the perception of Italian as a syllable-timed language.

The paper aims at illustrating the phonetic transcription rules implemented in a text-to-speech synthesis system of Italian. The development system employed for rule writing is presented first. The system makes it possible to process linguistic information at various levels, using a conventional context-dependent format. The rule set, made up of graphemic, phonetic and word boundary rules, is then described. Transcription rules furnish a reasonable solution to [s, z], [ts, dz], [‘e, ‘ε], [‘o, ‘o], [i, j, i] and [u, w, i] phone distributions, as used in Northern Italian pronunciation. Statistical evaluation of the transcriber performance was carried out on a significant corpus of words with encouraging results: 93.1 % correct transcriptions.