Micro‐prosody

Abstract

This article introduces micro-prosody as the study of the duration and timing of speech events. We present a descriptive framework, formalising micro-prosody in terms of gestural landmarks and coordination relations between them, and we use the framework to illustrate different patterns of micro-prosody across languages.We show that potential ambiguity between coordination relations can be resolved by considering how they structure natural variation in speech. The framework presented here is intended to offer effective tools for phonetic documentation. We end with some considerations for a theory of micro-prosody, including how micro-prosody relates to other levels of phonological structure, and a brief discussion of different data types that can be used to infer aspects of micro-prosody.

Limits on gestural reorganization following vowel deletion: The case of Tokyo Japanese

“…The development of research methods which have allowed us to directly observe articulatory movement with high temporal resolution has made this a tractable problem. Recent work by Shaw and colleagues has demonstrated, through a number of case studies, that coordination relations between gestures can be revealed by studying the structure of temporal variation in articulatory kinematic data (e.g., Gafos et al, 2014;Shaw, 2022;Shaw & Gafos, 2015;Shaw & Kawahara, 2018b;; see also Durvasula et al, 2021;Lialiou et al, 2021;Sotiropoulou & Gafos, 2022). A topic that is nevertheless still under-explored is how consonant clusters created via vowel deletion are coordinated, a gap that the current paper attempts to address.…”

“…Recent studies have demonstrated that language-specific coordination relations between articulatory gestures can be reliably identified in the speech signal because of how they structure temporal variability (e.g. Gafos et al, 2014;Shaw, 2022;Shaw et al, 2011). We illustrate this strategy with a simple model of gestural coordination for CC and CVC sequences.…”

“…Given a [tk] sequence, for example, some languages show a clear audible release for [t] whereas other languages do not. As such, such coordination patterns are a part of what speakers actively control, and hence they constitute an important part of linguistic knowledge (Gafos et al, 2020;Shaw, 2022). However, precisely pinning down the nature of coordination relations has been a difficult issue, partly because it is not always possible to infer coordination relations from impressionistic observations of speech or even from acoustic signals.…”

“…In specifying stochastic models of gestural coordination, we define both inter-and intragestural timing as relationships between gestural landmarks (Shaw, 2022). The temporal precedence of intra-gestural landmarks is fixed: start → target → release → end.…”

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

“…The clusters [ts tʃ] are audibly distinct from the corresponding affricates [$$\stackrel{{\frown}}{\mathrm{ts}}$$ $$\textipa{\t{tS}}$$], possibly due to differences in duration and/or articulatory coordination (e.g. Shaw, 2022).…”