Acoustic Characteristics of Greek Vowels

Fourakis, Marios; Botinis, Antonis; Katsaiti, Maria

doi:10.1159/000028439

Cited by 62 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In other European languages, such as Spanish (Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto, 2007) and Greek (Arvaniti, 2007;Fourakis, Botinis & Katsaiti, 1999), stress is only weakly associated with segmental quality. This permits manipulation of stress patterns independently of segmental constituency to uncover effects specific to stress, as we attempt to do in this study in the Greek language.…”

Section: Priming Stress Patterns In Word Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stressed vowels stand out phonetically by being longer and louder than unstressed vowels (Arvaniti, 2000(Arvaniti, , 2007. Unstressed vowels exhibit only limited centralization (i.e., tendency to neutral articulation) and, crucially, there is no phonological vowel reduction associated with lack of stress (Arvaniti, 2007;Fourakis, Botinis, & Katsaiti, 1999). The Greek orthography is relatively transparent at the grapheme-phoneme level (estimated consistency 95% for reading and 80% for spelling; Protopapas & Vlahou, 2009 (Protopapas & Gerakaki, 2009).…”

Section: Knaus El Shanawany Wiese Knaus Wiese Janßen Rothermichmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

Protopapas

Panagaki

Andrikopoulou

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study addresses the lexical representation of stress in a series of five intra-modal and cross-modal priming experiments in the Greek language using lexical decision tasks with auditory and visual targets. Three-syllable primes and targets were matched in first syllable segments, length, and other variables, and differed segmentally in the second and third syllable. Primes matched or mismatched targets in stress, which was placed on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable. There was no evidence for stress priming in either accuracy or latency of responses to either words or pseudowords in any of these experiments, either intra-modally or cross-modally. In contrast, a control fragment priming experiment using only the first two syllables of the primes produced a significant effect of stress congruence for words but not for pseudowords. The results are interpreted in the context of previous findings in the literature as arising from lexical activation rather than from matching stress patterns. Overall, findings are consistent with lexical representations including stress information that is inseparable from segmental specification, rather than with abstract representations of metrical templates.

show abstract

Section: Priming Stress Patterns In Word Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Knaus El Shanawany Wiese Knaus Wiese Janßen Rothermichmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

Protopapas

Panagaki

Andrikopoulou

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, it is well established that in equal conditions low vowels have a longer duration than high vowels (cf. Peterson and Lehiste [1960] and Scherba [1912] for Russian; Fourakis, Botinis, and Katsaiti [1999] for Modern Greek). The Highlow TPM and its PVI variant were meant to capture such differences.…”

Section: Text Phonological Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

What determines duration-based rhythm measures: text or speaker?

Loukina

Rosner

Keane

et al. 2013

Laboratory Phonology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Differences in rhythm between languages have been often attributed to differences in phonological properties such as syllable structure. This paper uses quantitative analyses to determine whether and how popular duration-based rhythm measures depend on the phonological structure of a language. Native speakers of five languages read a large corpus of comparable texts (approximately 371,000 syllables in total). Phonological properties of each language were specified as 11 variables, computed from the phonetic transcriptions. These variables were compared against published rhythm measures that captured variation in duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals. While the text-based measures discriminated well between languages, the values of rhythm measures overlapped substantially, showing that the languages are more alike in acoustic implementation than in their phonological description. Multilevel models demonstrated that the mapping between phonological properties and acoustics is much weaker than previously assumed: linear effects of the phonological variables explained less than a quarter of the total variance in rhythm measures. Instead, speaker was the main source of variation in those measures. Rhythm, in the sense of durational variability, depends far more on individual timing strategies than on the phonological structure of a language.

show abstract

“…In (Aulanko, 1985;Whalen and Levitt, 1995;Monaghan, 1992;Vainio, 2001) has been pointed out the role of segmental prosody to the F 0 surface, such as the fundamental frequency difference between open and close vowels. In Greek, F 0 differences caused by the phonemic content do not follow the universal tendencies (Fourakis et al, 1999). In (Arvaniti et al, 1998) it was also shown that the alignment of the H target in the pre-nuclear L * + H accent is also affected by the segment type (stop, fricative, nasal) of the phoneme that precedes the post-accentual vowel.…”

Section: Feature Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tone-Group F0 selection for modeling focus prominence in small-footprint speech synthesis

Xydas

2006

Speech Communication

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This work targets to improve the naturalness of synthetic intonational contours in Text-to-Speech synthesis through the provision of prominence, which is a major expression of human speech. Focusing on the tonal dimension of emphasis, we present a robust unit-selection methodology for generating realistic F 0 curves in cases where focus prominence is required. The proposed approach is based on selecting Tone-Group units from commonly used prosodic corpora that are automatically transcribed as patterns of syllables. In contrast to related approaches, patterns represent only the most perceivable sections of the sampled curves and are encoded to serve morphologically different sequence of syllables. This results in a minimization of the required amount of units so as to achieve sufficient coverage within the database. Nevertheless, this optimization enables the application of high-quality F 0 generation to small-footprint text-to-speech synthesis. For generic F 0 selection we query the database based on sequences of ToBI labels, though other intonational frameworks can be used as well. To realize focus prominence on specific Tone-Groups the selection also incorporates a level indicator of emphasis. We set up a series of listening tests by exploiting a database built from a 482-utterance corpus, which featured partially purpose-uttered emphasis. The results showed a clear subjective preference of the proposed model against a linear regression one in 75% of the cases when used in generic synthesis. Furthermore, this model provided ambiguous percept of emphasis in an experiment featuring major and minor degrees of prominence.

show abstract

Acoustic Characteristics of Greek Vowels

Cited by 62 publications

References 29 publications

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

What determines duration-based rhythm measures: text or speaker?

Tone-Group F0 selection for modeling focus prominence in small-footprint speech synthesis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About