Rhythmic structure effects on glottalisation: A study of different speech styles in Polish and German

Abstract

"But the increasing interest in connected, more specifically spontaneous speech data bases has made it mandatory for researchers to enter into phonetics and phonology above the word in real-life communication, and it is in this domain that glottalisation phenomena abound." (Kohler 2001: 317) Abstract: The present paper examines glottal stops and the glottalisation of word-initial vowels in Polish and German. The presence of glottal marking is studied depending on speech style ('speech' vs. 'dialogue'), prominence, phrasal position, speech rate, word type, preceding segment, and following vowel height. A question is also posed about the extent to which glottal marking might be dependent on the rhythmic structure of a given language or style. We analyzed recordings of 18 Polish and German speakers. The results point to significant differences between the two languages. In German, glottal marking occurs significantly more often (63.4%) than in Polish (45%). Whereas in both languages (and both styles) the majority of prominent vowels are more often glottally marked than non-prominent vowels, in German word-initial non-prominent syllables are also marked relatively often. Regarding phrase position, glottal marking occurs significantly more often at the phrase-initial position compared to phrase-medial position in Polish, while no such difference has been found in German. In addition, it is shown that in both languages glottal marking is strongly dependent on the tongue height of the marked vowel: low vowels are more frequently glottalised than non-low vowels. Finally, glottal marking in Polish is more likely to occur when rhythmic variability shifts towards the 'indeterminate', strengthening the hypothesis that glottal marking facilitates perceptual grouping.

On the evolution of prosodic boundaries – Parameter settings for Polish and English

“…Dilley et al (1996) found a phrase-medial glottalization rate of around 17% in a corpus American English radio speech. By contrast, Malisz et al (2013) found a phrase-medial glottalization rate of just under 35% in Polish, about twice that of what Dilley et al found in American English. In a sentence reading task with 17 speakers, Schwartz (2013b) found a rate of 76% in phrase medial V#V tokens (94% for stressed initial vowels, and 68% for unstressed initial vowels).…”

Perspectives on Speech Timing: Coupled Oscillator Modeling of Polish and Finnish

“…Regarding speech rate, no direct correlations were made in Malisz et al (2013), however, prepared speeches were on average slower than spontaneous dialogues: 4.9 syll/s and 5.8 syll/s, respectively. The dialogue data used in Malisz et al (2013) was expanded in Malisz (2013) to include eight speakers and classified by speech rate. The resulting tempo classes were used as a basis for evaluating a possible correlation between tempo and coupling strength, estimated using linear regression.…”

“…Phonological words in Finnish coincide with the primary stress foot, given that Finnish is assumed to have primary word stress on the initial syllable. Malisz et al (2013), the rhythmic structure of two stylistically diverse datasets in Polish were represented with the COM: spontaneous task-oriented dialogues (30 minutes, 6 speakers), and political addresses and sermons by prominent, historical figures (40 minutes, 4 speakers). The syllabic oscillator was represented by vowel-tovowel onsets, the supra-syllabic oscillator was based on an annotation of realized perceptual prominences.…”

Teaching to Suppress Polglish Processes

“…In Polish word-initial vowels are glottalized (i.e. preceded by a glottal stop) (Dukiewicz & Sawicka, 1995;Malisz et al, 2013;Schwartz, 2013), whereas 'word-final' underlyingly voiced obstruents are realized as voiceless (Keating, 1979;Slowiaczek & Dinnsen, 1985;Jassem & Richter, 1989). In English these processes do not typically apply.…”