The universality of intrinsic F0 of vowels

Whalen, D. H.; Levitt, Andrea G.

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(95)80165-0

Cited by 284 publications

(203 citation statements)

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“…The sound symbolism literature shows an association between sour and back vowels (Simner et al, 2010) and between sour and high pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2009;2010a;2010b;Simner et al, 2010). In line with this literature (and remembering that high pitch is intrinsically linked to vowel height; Whalen & Levitt, 1995) we found a similar relationship between sour and vowel height: intense sour ratings were predicted by inducer words containing a large number of high vowels relative to central and low vowels.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…They are also linked to nonverbal aspects of sound, such as pure pitch. This will be relevant to the present study in as much as we shall be exploring whether tastes associate with vowel quality in synaesthesia, and there is an intrinsic relationship between vowel quality and pitch (i.e., high vowels such as [i] tend to have higher pitch -or higher fundamental frequency (F0) --than low vowels such as [a]; Whalen & Levitt, 1995). Hence, we briefly review part of this literature here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

Bankieris¹,

Simner²

2013

Neurocase

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Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Bankieris, Kaitlyn and Simner, Julia (2013) Sound symbolism in synesthesia: evidence from a lexical-gustatory synesthete. Neurocase, 20 (6). pp. 640-651. ISSN 1355-4794 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/57043/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. AbstractSynaesthesia is a condition in which perceptual or cognitive stimuli (e.g., a written letter) trigger atypical additional percepts (e.g., the colour yellow). Although these cross-modal pairings appear idiosyncratic in that they superficially differ from synaesthete to synaesthete, underlying patterns do exist and these can, in some circumstances, reflect the cross-modal intuitions of nonsynaesthetes (e.g., higher pitch sounds tend to be 'seen' in lighter colours by synaesthetes, and are also paired to lighter colours by nonsynaesthetes in cross-modal matching tasks). We recently showed that grapheme-colour synaesthetes are more sensitive to sound symbolism (i.e., crossmodal sound-meaning correspondences) in natural language compared to nonsynaesthetes (Bankieris & Simner, 2012). Accordingly, we hypothesize that sound symbolism may be a guiding force in synaesthesia, to dictate what types of synaesthetic experiences are triggered by words. We tested this hypothesis by examining the cross-modal mappings of lexical-gustatory synaesthete, JIW, for whom words trigger flavour experiences. We show that certain phonological features (e.g., front vowels) systematically trigger particular categories of taste (e.g., bitter) in his synaesthesia. Some of these associations agree with sound symbolic patterns in natural language.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

Bankieris¹,

Simner²

2013

Neurocase

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“…Second, the current version of PENTAtrainer2 simulates only F 0 variations due to the normal target approximation process. It has not incorporated algorithms for simulating additional articulatory mechanisms, including, in particular, anticipatory raising (Gandour et al, 1994;Potisuk et al, 1997;Xu, 1999), post-low bouncing (Chen and Xu, 2006), consonantal perturbation (Silverman, 1986) and vowel intrinsic pitch (Whalen and Levitt, 1995). Of these, post-low bouncing has already been simulated in a separate study by adding an extra component added to qTA (Prom-on et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

Prom-on

2014

Speech Communication

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Variability has been one of the major challenges for both theoretical understanding and computer synthesis of speech prosody. In this paper we show that economical representation of variability is the key to effective modeling of prosody. Specifically, we report the development of PENTAtrainer -A trainable yet deterministic prosody synthesizer based on an articulatory-functional view of speech. We show with testing results on Thai, Mandarin and English that it is possible to achieve high-accuracy predictive synthesis of fundamental frequency contours with very small sets of parameters obtained through stochastic learning from real speech data. The first key component of this system is syllable-synchronized sequential target approximation -implemented as the qTA model, which is designed to simulate, for each tonal unit, a wide range of contextual variability with a single invariant target. The second key component is the automatic learning of function-specific targets through stochastic global optimization, guided by a layered pseudo-hierarchical functional annotation scheme, which requires the manual labeling of only the temporal domains of the functional units. The results in terms of synthesis accuracy demonstrate that effective modeling of the contextual variability is the key also to effective modeling of function-related variability. Additionally, we show that, being both theory-based and trainable (hence datadriven), computational systems like PENTAtrainer can serve as an effective modeling tool in basic research, with which the level of falsifiability in theory testing can be raised, and also a closer link between basic and applied research in speech science can be developed.3 Graphical Abstract Highlights (maximum 85 characters/bullet)• High synthetic accuracy of prosody achieved for Thai, Mandarin and English • Many-to-one mapping from contextually variable surface F 0 to invariant functional targets • Effectively handling of both contextual and non-contextual variability • Combination of deterministic synthesis and data-driven parameter learning • Large-scale and full-detailed prosody synthesis as tool for theory testing • Freely available as a Praat scripts and plug-ins to the speech science community at large

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“…One systematic exception is [a] in Chinese and Korean, which were judged to be the largest. It may be possible that [a] is considered to be large because [a] generally has a low F0 (Whalen and Levitt 1995) (for the discussion of F1, see subsection 5.6).…”

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confidence: 99%

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

Shinohara¹,

Kawahara²

2010

BLS

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

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The universality of intrinsic F0 of vowels

Cited by 284 publications

References 40 publications

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

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