Volume 65, Issue 1-2

Laughing is examined auditorily and acoustico-graphically, on the basis of exemplary speech data from spontaneous German dialogues, as pulmonic air stream modulation for communicative functions, paying attention to fine phonetic detail in interactional context. These phonetic case descriptions of laughing phenomena in speaker interaction in a small corpus have as their goal to create an awareness of the phonetic and functional parameters that need to be considered in the future acquisition, acoustic analysis and statistical evaluation of large spontaneous databases.

The present experiments examine the potential role of auditory spectral integration and spectral center of gravity (COG) effects in the perception of initial formant transitions in the syllables [da]-[ga] and [t^ha]-[k^ha]. Of interest is whether the place distinction for stops in these syllables can be cued by a ‘virtual F3 transition’ in which the percept of a frequency transition is produced by a dynamically changing COG. Listeners perceived the virtual F3 transitions comparably with actual F3 transitions although the former were less salient a cue. However, in a separate experiment, static ‘virtual F3 bursts’ were not as effective as actual F3 bursts in cueing the alveolar-velar place distinction. These results indicate that virtual F3 transitions can provide phonetic information to the perceptual system and that auditory spectral integration (completed by the central auditory system) may play a significant role in speech perception.

This study investigates how prosodic strengthening is kinematically manifested in V-to-V lingual movement in English CV#CV context (where # is a prosodic boundary). Results showed that both boundary and accent gave rise to a kind of prosodic strengthening (showing spatial and temporal expansion), but exact kinematic patterns of prosodic strengthening were different as a function of the type of gesture (tongue lowering versus raising) associated with different vowels (/i/to-/É‘/ vs. /É‘/-to-/i/) and the source of prosodic strengthening (boundary versus accentuation). This implies that speakers must know about prosodic structure and differentiate the two sources of prosodic strengthening in a systematic finegrained fashion. From a theoretical point of view regarding a mass-spring gestural model, results suggested that kinematic patterns of prosodic strengthening could not be fully accounted for by any particular dynamical parameter, presenting a complex nature of prosodic strengthening. The results also implied that the theory of the π-gesture (the prosodic boundary gesture) under the rubric of the massspring gestural model needs to be refined in terms of how the theory defines the exact scope of the π-gesture’s influence in the temporal dimension and how it differentiates boundary-induced articulation from an accent-induced one.

In previous studies of Japanese intonational phonology, levels of prosodic constituents above the Major Phrase have not received much attention. This paper argues that at least two prosodic levels exist above the Major Phrase in Japanese. Through a detailed investigation of the intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese, we argue that each syntactic clause projects its own Intonational Phrase, while an entire sentence constitutes one Utterance. We show that the Intonational Phrase is characterized by tonal lowering, creakiness and a pause in final position, as well as a distinctive large initial rise and pitch reset at its beginning. The Utterance defines a domain of declination, and it is signaled by an even larger initial rise, as well as a phrasal H tone at its right edge. Building on our empirical findings, we discuss several implications for the theory of intonational phonology.

This study reports general and language-specific patterns in phoneme identification. In a series of phoneme monitoring experiments, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, English, and Polish listeners identified vowel, fricative, and stop consonant targets that are phonemic in all these languages, embedded in nonsense words. Fricatives were generally identified more slowly than vowels, while the speed of identification for stop consonants was highly dependent on the onset of the measurements. Moreover, listeners’ response latencies and accuracy in detecting a phoneme correlated with the number of categories within that phoneme’s class in the listener’s native phoneme repertoire: more native categories slowed listeners down and decreased their accuracy. We excluded the possibility that this effect stems from differences in the frequencies of occurrence of the phonemes in the different languages. Rather, the effect of the number of categories can be explained by general properties of the perception system, which cause language-specific patterns in speech processing.