Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Fuchs, Robert

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-47818-9

Cited by 39 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Correlations are listed in Table 5, and relationships between all six variables are displayed in scatterplots in Figure 4. False Discovery Rate (Benjamini & Hochberg (1995) procedure) was used to correct for multiple comparisons. Correlations between all conditions were significant, but varied in strength.…”

Section: Relationships Between Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Jasmin¹,

Dick²,

Tierney³

2020

Wellcome Open Res

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Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects, or failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Time) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 57 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

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Section: Relationships Between Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Jasmin¹,

Dick²,

Tierney³

2020

Wellcome Open Res

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“…What these acoustic correlates are is an important question for an empirically grounded description of the prosody of English. Moreover, it is also of significance for research on the second language acquisition of stress and accent [2][3][4], and for research on speech rhythm, which some recent approaches conceptualise as being based on an alternation of prominent and non-prominent syllables [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Gussenhoven (2004) [1] characterises the acoustic correlates of stress as duration, spectral balance and centralisation (of vowels), which all depend on the greater articulatory effort involved in the production of stress.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acoustic correlates of stress and accent in English content and function words

Fuchs¹

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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This paper has two aims: (1) To contribute to the discussion on what the acoustic correlates of stress and accent in English are, a question on which there is currently no universal agreement;(2) To determine whether vowels in function words receive less stress than similarly unstressed vowels in content words. To this purpose, the study analyses 614 occurrences of the lax high front vowel /I/ in read speech produced by 10 male speakers of Standard Southern British English. 14 different acoustic features are investigated.Results indicate that (1) there are two acoustic correlates of accent (duration and f0 slope), four acoustic correlates of stress (spectral balance/tilt, intensity/loudness, amplitude of voicing (H1), amplitude of the first harmonic (A1), H1*-A2 and H1*-A3*), one potential acoustic correlate of prominence in general (F1), and four acoustic features that appear to be unrelated to the expression of accent, stress or prominence (F2, HNR, glottal leakage (B1) and the open quotient (H1*-H2*)).Regarding question (2), there is also limited evidence that British English function words might be less prominent than unstressed syllables in content words.

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“…For some tasks this may be possible. In order to compute, for example, duration-based metrics of speech rhythm (Fuchs 2014(Fuchs , 2016, forced phonemic alignment can reach the range of human inter-annotator agreement (Wiget et al 2010). On the other hand, for the fluency analysis presented in the second half of this article, we felt it necessary to manually correct the automatic annotation because it is not known how accurate forced phonemic alignment is for these purposes.…”

Section: A New Generation Of Ice Corporamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rate of speech has been measured in many different ways, for example as the number of words per minute (Lennon 1990), the number of syllables per minute (Towell 2002;Gut 2009;Shrosbree 2015) or the number of phonemes per time unit (Cucchiarini et al 2000(Cucchiarini et al , 2002Fuchs 2016). Some researchers distinguish between speech rate, which relates the production of words, syllables and phonemes to the amount of speech produced by the speaker including pauses, and articulation rate, which measures the rate of words/syllables/phonemes in relation to the articulation time, thus excluding pauses of any kind (Gut 2009).…”

Section: Measuring Speaker Fluency In Ice Nigeria and Ice Scotlandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring speaker fluency with phonologically annotated ICE corpora

Gut

Fuchs

2017

World Englishes

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This study demonstrates how quantitative characteristics of speaker fluency can be measured in the phonologically annotated and time‐aligned corpora ICE‐Nigeria and ICE‐Scotland, which belong to the ‘new generation’ of ICE corpora. Some files from the categories broadcast talk and unscripted speeches in ICE Nigeria and ICE Scotland were phonemically annotated and analysed, and for each speaker the mean length of run ( = average number of words per utterance) and articulation rate ( = mean number of phonemes per total articulation time) were calculated. These results show how phonological and time‐aligned annotations can enrich ICE corpora, and how they allow comparisons of varieties of English that go beyond studies of syntactic and lexical variation.

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Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Cited by 39 publications

References 67 publications

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

The acoustic correlates of stress and accent in English content and function words

Exploring speaker fluency with phonologically annotated ICE corpora

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