F0 declination in English and Mandarin Broadcast News Speech

Yuan, Jiahong; Liberman, Mark

doi:10.1016/j.specom.2014.06.001

Cited by 48 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Mandarin learners may have difficulties expressing affective states due to first language effects such as incorrect tonal or sandhi production, where tone sandhi refers to rules that dictate that certain tones change into other tones with certain sequences; for example, the sandhi rule that LOW-LOW syllable pairs change into RISE-LOW. Comparatively, Mandarin is found to exhibit a larger pitch range than English for single word utterances (Keating & Kuo, 2010) and for news broadcasts (Yuan & Liberman, 2010). This is in conflict with the results of Eady (1982) which found no difference in F0 standard deviations between the tone language Mandarin and stress language English (Eady, 1982).…”

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confidence: 65%

On English Speakers’ Ability to Communicate Emotion in Mandarin

Jian¹

2015

Canadian Modern Language Review

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The ability of Mandarin learners to express emotion in Mandarin speech has received little attention. This study examines how English L1 users express emotions in Mandarin and how these differ from those of Mandarin L1 users. Scenarios were adopted to elicit joy, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality. Both groups articulated anger, joy, and fear with a high pitch.Both groups also employed high intensity for anger and joy, while low intensity for sadness and fear. Learners generally employed larger F0 ranges than natives, particularly for anger and fear. Learners articulated level tones with lengthened duration and contour tones with shortened duration, affecting the correct emotional portrayal. Learners used similar intensity range for all emotions, whereas natives tended to vary the intensity with different emotions.The results have implications for teaching Mandarin as a second language with special reference to prosodic naturalness in expressing emotions.

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confidence: 65%

On English Speakers’ Ability to Communicate Emotion in Mandarin

Jian¹

2015

Canadian Modern Language Review

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“…A potential cause for a flatter contour -or less declination -is an increase in utterance length (e.g., Ohala, Dunn, and Strouse, 2004;Yuan and Liberman, 2014). To check this, Mann-Whitney U tests were performed on the means of word count per utterance between flatter and normal contours.…”

Section: Flatter Contoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Sadat‐Tehrani

2017

Questions and Answers in Linguistics

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This paper is an introductory investigation, comparing the intonation of Persian declaratives in read and spontaneous speech styles. The results indicate that 32% of the 254 spontaneous declaratives studied show one or more of the following intonational differences: a high or downstepped high tone at Intonational Phrase end, marking the incompleteness of the message; the existence of more pauses leading to a greater number of Intonational Phrases, pre-pause vowel lengthening, and pitch reset; a flatter contour and less pitch variation caused by a speaker's boredom or givenness of the information content; an initial high boundary tone resulted from a low degree of assertiveness.Keywords: intonation, prosody, Persian, read speech, spontaneous speech, pitch track IntroductionThis research reports some preliminary observations regarding the differences between the intonational properties of read and spontaneous speech in Persian. In studies that make use of read speech (also known as lab speech), the speaker is provided with the written version of the test materials and is possibly given some instructions as to how to read them. This type of speech is usually elicited in a laboratory setting and done for a specific linguistic purpose. Spontaneous speech refers to utterances produced without any external stimulus, e.g., a natural conversation carried out between two interlocutors. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the intonational differences between the two styles. The research on Persian intonation done in the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonation (Bruce, 1977;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Ladd, 2008) has so far implemented controlled speech (Mahjani, 2003;Jun, et al., 2003;Sadat-Tehrani, 2007;Taheri and Xu, 2012;Hosseini, 2014;and Rahmani, Rietveld, and Gussenhoven, 2016), and to the best of my knowledge, there has not been any documentation on the distinguishing characteristics of read and spontaneous speech. This paper is an initial investigation of this issue.The present paper does not intend to argue for the use of spontaneous over read data; although the use of read speech has been criticized as unnatural and unrepresentative of real speech, it has its own merit. For instance, in a laboratory setting, the researcher has full control over many variables and determines their effect on intonation patterns, which is not the case when studying unscripted speech. Also, spontaneous data may not always contain all the structures that the researcher plans to investigate -for more arguments in favour of lab speech see Xu (2010). The view here, in line with that in Wagner, Trouvain, and Zimmerer (2015), is that making use of Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 2:06 PM

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“…Much previous work has demonstrated declination of this type for English intonation (Lieberman et al, 1985; Ladd et al, 1986; Yuan and Liberman, 2014). The exception in our dataset was the yes–no interrogative, which instead ended at a comparable number of semitones above the habitual pitch.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

Chow

Brown

2018

Front. Psychol.

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We present here a musical approach to speech melody, one that takes advantage of the intervallic precision made possible with musical notation. Current phonetic and phonological approaches to speech melody either assign localized pitch targets that impoverish the acoustic details of the pitch contours and/or merely highlight a few salient points of pitch change, ignoring all the rest of the syllables. We present here an alternative model using musical notation, which has the advantage of representing the pitch of all syllables in a sentence as well as permitting a specification of the intervallic excursions among syllables and the potential for group averaging of pitch use across speakers. We tested the validity of this approach by recording native speakers of Canadian English reading unfamiliar test items aloud, spanning from single words to full sentences containing multiple intonational phrases. The fundamental-frequency trajectories of the recorded items were converted from hertz into semitones, averaged across speakers, and transcribed into musical scores of relative pitch. Doing so allowed us to quantify local and global pitch-changes associated with declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences, and to explore the melodic dynamics of these sentence types. Our basic observation is that speech is atonal. The use of a musical score ultimately has the potential to combine speech rhythm and melody into a unified representation of speech prosody, an important analytical feature that is not found in any current linguistic approach to prosody.

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F0 declination in English and Mandarin Broadcast News Speech

Cited by 48 publications

References 33 publications

On English Speakers’ Ability to Communicate Emotion in Mandarin

On English Speakers’ Ability to Communicate Emotion in Mandarin

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

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