Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the Nucleus Attraction Principle

Abstract

Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and evidently useful as a predictor of phonotactics (i.e., the propensity of different consonants and vowels to combine via concatenation). Although widely-accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, and traditional sonority principles exhibit gaps in empirical coverage, while they are also not designed to be compatible with general cognitive capacities. Against the backdrop of traditional sonority accounts, which have been exclusively based on discrete and symbolic machinery to model sonority, we propose an incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority with two complementary models. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to the strength and quality of pitch perception, postulating a universal drive to optimize syllables as pitch-bearing units. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness based on principles of competition in real-time; the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). We present two perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare the different sonority models. We show that our two NAP models retain the highest degree of complementarity while one of them is clearly superior to all the other models we tested. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as sonority's correlate; (ii) the incorporation of continuity in phonological models, and; (iii) the dual-model strategy that separates and integrates symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes.

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects of information status on prosodic prominence – evidence from an interactive web-based production experiment in German

“…In addition, phrase-final target words were not considered because of the potential effect of final lengthening. Furthermore, we included two measures from the ProPer toolbox (Albert et al, 2018;Albert, 2023), periodic energy mass and Delta F0. Both of these measures are based on periodic energy, which acoustically combines fundamental frequency and intensity by capturing the power of the periodic parts of the signal.…”

“…We first present our findings on the paradigmatic effects of information status on the prosodic realization of referents. Target Schematic depiction of Delta F0 and Periodic Energy Mass measures from the ProPer toolbox (Albert, 2023). utterances were always produced in broad focus with prenuclear or nuclear pitch accents on the target words.…”

Phonaesthetics and personality—Why we do not only prefer Romance languages

“…Overall, the concept of sonority is a debatable question with conflicting evidence of its acoustic correlates. Previous research described sonority as loudness (Ladefoged, 2010), intensity (Parker, 2011), and periodic energy (Albert and Nicenboim, 2020;Albert et al, 2022). With the lack of unanimity on the nature of the phenomenon it is also challenging to measure it accurately.…”