Hyperarticulation in Lombard speech: Global coordination of the jaw, lips and the tongue.

Over the last century, researchers have collected a considerable amount of data reflecting the properties of Lombard speech, i.e., speech in a noisy environment. The documented phenomena predominately report effects on the speech signal produced in ambient noise. In comparison, relatively little is known about the underlying articulatory patterns of Lombard speech, in particular for lingual articulation. Here the authors present an analysis of articulatory recordings of speech material in babble noise of different intensity levels and in hypoarticulated speech and report quantitative differences in relative expansion of movement of different articulatory subsystems (the jaw, the lips and the tongue) as well as in relative expansion of utterance duration. The trajectory modifications for one articulator can be relatively reliably predicted by those for another one, but subsystems differ in a degree of continuity in trajectory expansion elicited across different noise levels. Regression analysis of articulatory modifications against durational expansion shows further qualitative differences between the subsystems, namely, the jaw and the tongue. The findings are discussed in terms of possible influences of a combination of prosodic, segmental, and physiological factors. In addition, the Lombard effect is put forward as a viable methodology for eliciting global articulatory variation in a controlled manner.

Stability and Variability in Slovak Prosodic Boundaries.

BACKGROUND/AIM: Encoding intended meanings in the type and strength of prosodic boundaries and strategies for communicating these meanings in ambient noise use similar prosodic cues. We analyze how increasing the level of ambient noise affects the realization of Slovak prosodic boundaries. METHODS: Five native speakers of Slovak read sentences, manipulating the boundary type (weak, rise, fall) and the location of pre-boundary pitch accent. Ambient noise of several levels was administered via headphones. Acoustic and articulatory data (electromagnetometry) were collected. RESULTS: Under normal condition, boundary strength is signaled with longer pre-boundary rhymes, more frequent pauses, greater crossboundary f0 resets and jaw displacement. The strength of falls is realized in crossboundary features (pauses, f0 reset), and rises in pre-boundary features (rhyme duration, f0 range). Pitch-accented rhymes are strengthened in all features, but f0 range. In noise, the increase in boundary strength is weak, and falls strengthen more than rises. F0 targets for falls and rises are adjusted in addition to noiseinduced global f0 scaling and lengthening. CONCLUSION: Hyper-articulation of prosodic boundaries in ambient noise is not robust and uniform; rather, durational, f0 and jaw displacement features co-create complex prosodic patterns in a complementary and synergetic manner based on affordances in normal speech.

Speech Fluency Production and Perception in L1 (Slovak) and L2 (English) Read Speech.

Research on fluency in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speech production and perception helps us understand how individual L1 speaking style might affect perceived L2 fluency and how this relationship might be reflected in L1 versus L2 oral assessment. While the relationship between production and perception of fluency in spontaneous speech has been studied, the information provided by reading has been overlooked. We argue that reading provides a direct and controlled way to assess language proficiency that might complement information gained from spontaneous speaking. This work analyzes the relationship between speech fluency production and perception in passages of L1 (Slovak) and L2 (English) read by 57 undergraduate Slovak students of English and rated for fluency by 15 English teachers who are Slovak natives. We compare acoustic production measures between L1 and L2 and analyze how their effect on perceived fluency differs for the two languages. Our main finding is that the articulation rate, the overall number of pauses, and the number of between-clause and mid-clause pauses predict ratings differently in L1 Slovak versus L2 English. The speech rate and durations of pauses predict ratings similarly in both languages. The contribution of our results to understanding fluency aspects of spontaneous and read speech, the relationship between L1 and L2, the relationship between production and perception, and to the teaching of L2 English are discussed.

Measuring Prosodic Entrainment in Conversation: A Review and Comparison of Different Methods.

PURPOSE: This study aims to further our understanding of prosodic entrainment and its different subtypes by analyzing a single corpus of conversations with 12 different methods and comparing the subsequent results. METHOD: Entrainment on three fundamental frequency features was analyzed in a subset of recordings from the LUCID corpus (Baker & Hazan, 2011) using the following methods: global proximity, global convergence, local proximity, local convergence, local synchrony (Levitan & Hirschberg, 2011), prediction using linear mixed-effects models (Schweitzer & Lewandowski, 2013), geometric approach (Lehnert-LeHouillier, Terrazas, & Sandoval, 2020), time-aligned moving average (Kousidis et al., 2008), HYBRID method (De Looze et al., 2014), cross-recurrence quantification analysis (e.g., Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016), and windowed, lagged cross-correlation (Boker et al., 2002). We employed entrainment measures on a local timescale (i.e., on adjacent utterances), a global timescale (i.e., over larger time frames), and a time series-based timescale that is larger than adjacent utterances but smaller than entire conversations. RESULTS: We observed variance in results of different methods. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that each method may measure a slightly different type of entrainment. The complex implications this has for existing and future research are discussed.

Control of phonemic length contrast and speech rate in vocalic and consonantal syllable nuclei.

This paper investigates the mechanisms controlling the phonemic quantity contrast and speech rate in nonsense p(1)Np(2)a words read by five Slovak speakers in normal and fast speech rate. N represents a syllable nucleus, which in Slovak corresponds to long and short vowels and liquid consonants. The movements of the lips and the tongue were recorded with an electromagnetometry system. Together with the acoustic durations of p(1), N, and p(2), gestural characteristics of three core movements were extracted: p(1) lip opening, tongue movement for (N)ucleus, and p(2) lip closing. The results show that, although consonantal and vocalic nuclei are predictably different on many kinematic measures, their common phonological behavior as syllabic nuclei may be linked to a stable temporal coordination of the consonantal gestures flanking the nucleus. The functional contrast between phonemic duration and speech rate was reflected in the bias in the control mechanisms they employed: the strategies robustly used for signaling phonemic duration, such as the degree of coproduction of the two lip movements, showed a minimal effect of speech rate, while measures greatly affected by speech rate, such as p(2) acoustic duration, or the degree of p(1)-N gestural coproduction, tended to be minimally influenced by phonemic quantity.

Dynamics of phonological cognition.

A fundamental problem in spoken language is the duality between the continuous aspects of phonetic performance and the discrete aspects of phonological competence. We study 2 instances of this problem from the phenomenon of voicing neutralization and vowel harmony. In each case, we present a model where the experimentally observed continuous distinctions are linked to the discreteness of phonological form using the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics.

Prosodic cues for emotion: analysis with discrete characterization of intonation.

In this paper we study the relationship between acted perceptually unambiguous emotion and prosody. Unlike most contemporary approaches which base the analysis of emotion in voice solely on continuous features extracted automatically from the acoustic signal, we analyze the predictive power of discrete characterizations of intonations in the ToBI framework. The goal of our work is to test if particular discrete prosodic events provide significant discriminative power for emotion recognition. Our experiments provide strong evidence that patterns in breaks, boundary tones and type of pitch accent are highly informative of the emotional content of speech. We also present results from automatic prediction of emotion based on ToBI-derived features and compare their prediction power with state-of-the-art bag-of-frame acoustic features. Our results indicate their similar performance in the sentence-dependent emotion prediction tasks, while acoustic features are more robust for the sentence-independent tasks. Finally, we combine ToBI features and acoustic features together and further achieve modest improvements in sentence-independent emotion prediction, particularly in differentiating fear and neutral from other emotion.

Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian 'transparent' vowels.

Using a combination of magnetometry and ultrasound, we examined the articulatory characteristics of the so-called 'transparent' vowels [i], [i], and [e] in Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonologically, transparent vowels are front, but they can be followed by either front or back suffixes. However, a finer look reveals an underlying phonetic coherence in two respects. First, transparent vowels in back harmony contexts show a less advanced (more retracted) tongue body posture than phonemically identical vowels in front harmony contexts: e.g. [i] in buli-val is less advanced than [i] in bili-vel. Second, transparent vowels in monosyllabic stems selecting back suffixes are also less advanced than phonemically identical vowels in stems selecting front suffixes: e.g. [i] in ír, taking back suffixes, compared to [i] of hír, taking front suffixes, is less advanced when these stems are produced in bare form (no suffixes). We thus argue that the phonetic degree of tongue body horizontal position correlates with the phonological alternation in suffixes. A hypothesis that emerges from this work is that a plausible phonetic basis for transparency can be found in quantal characteristics of the relation between articulation and acoustics of transparent vowels. More broadly, the proposal is that the phonology of transparent vowels is better understood when their phonological patterning is studied together with their articulatory and acoustic characteristics.