Persian has sequences of two vowels separated by an intervening glottal consonant (/h/ or //). T... more Persian has sequences of two vowels separated by an intervening glottal consonant (/h/ or //). The VG(lottal)V sequence becomes reduced in certain occurrences, with the perceptual effect of the loss of the glottal consonant. The purpose of this study is to provide an acoustic description of VGV sequences in reduced forms. A production study examined three acoustic measurements of phonation types: H1-H2, H1-F1, and F0. The measurements were made at 15 ms time intervals throughout the second vowel to determine the time course of phonation effect. The issue of interest is what properties of VGV remain where G is lost. It is shown that // will be preserved as vowel laryngealization and /h/ as breathiness.
Persian velar glide [w], unlike the palatal glide [j], does not serve a contrastive function in P... more Persian velar glide [w], unlike the palatal glide [j], does not serve a contrastive function in Persian phonology since it has incomplete distribution, occurring only in few words after the mid back vowel /o/. Thus, [w] is described as an allophone of the phoneme /v/. Furthermore, it has been assumed that [w] in [ow] may be deleted in connected speech giving rise to the compensatory lengthening of the preceding [o] vowel. In the present research, we examined the phonetic realization [w] in Persian words in an experimental study. The results suggested that [w] is acoustically present in the target words but is reduced or weakened to different degrees. As [w] is reduced in [ow], the shape of the vocal tract as well as the phonation type changes, resulting in (1) increase of overall intensity of the spectrum; (2) increase in the formant frequencies; and (3) decrease in bandwidths of the formant frequencies. All these systematic acoustic variations cause the vowel [o] in [ow] to be prod...
The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and co... more The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the rhetorical relations between text segments were identified. The texts were read aloud by 18 high-proficient Persian learners of English. We measured pause durations preceding segments, F0-maxima (as a correlate of pitch range) and speech rates of the segments. Results suggested that speakers give prosodic indications about hierarchical level by means of variations in pause duration but not pitch range or speech rate. Furthermore, it was found that speakers articulate causally related segments with shorter in between pauses and at faster rate than non-causally related segments. However, they di...
1Introduction Jun (2005) classifies Persian with English, German, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Spanish,... more 1Introduction Jun (2005) classifies Persian with English, German, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Lebanese Arabic, and Bininj Gun-wok (a Northern Australian language) as „stress-accent‟ languages. However, recent studies on the phonetic correlates of stress in Persian have shown that pitch is the only reliable acoustic parameter to cue stress in Persian, suggesting that Persian is a „non-stress accent‟ language. In a production study, Abolhasanizadeh, Bijankhan and Gussenhoven (2012) examined the phonetic correlates of the prominence contrast in Persian, and found that prominent syllables are not systematically differentiated by durational or spectral properties from nonprominent syllables, leading them to conclude that word-level prominence in Persian is „non-stress accent‟ in the sense of Beckman (1986), i.e., prominence is not the result of lexical stress, but post-lexical tonal marking (pitch accent). Similarly, in a more recent study, Rahmani, Rietveld and Gussenhov...
This paper reports the results of an experimental s tudy on non-native production of English vowe... more This paper reports the results of an experimental s tudy on non-native production of English vowels. Two groups of Persian EFL learners varying in language proficienc y were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of American English. Vowel production accuracy was ass essed by means of acoustic measurements. Ladefoged and Maddi son’s (1996) F1×F2 measurements for American English vowel space were used as reference values to be compared with t he measurements obtained from the production of Persia n EFL learners. The acoustic measurements revealed that l earners were not able to control acoustic parameters of vow el quality, even for the more similar vowels in the two languag es, in a native-like manner due to interference from their native vowel system. Spectral accuracy measures also did not pro gress toward more native-like values in the productions of the more proficient learners. Interestingly, the positions achieved for the more dissimilar vowels were neither c...
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2017
This paper examines the phonetic realization of rising pre-nuclear pitch accents in Persian. In a... more This paper examines the phonetic realization of rising pre-nuclear pitch accents in Persian. In a first experiment, the alignment of f0 valleys and peaks in pre-nuclear pitch accents was analyzed in controlled speech materials as a function of the syllable structure (open vs. closed) and vowel type (short vs. long) of the accented syllable. The results revealed that in words with antepenultimate stress, both the L and the H tones are anchored to specific segmental landmarks irrespective of syllable structure or vowel type. In particular, the L is consistently aligned with the onset of the accented syllable, and the H is placed with similar consistency in the vicinity of the first post-accentual vowel. In a second experiment, the variability in the timing and scaling of L valleys and H peaks was examined as a function of the proximity of the word boundary and of the following accent. The results revealed that while the alignment of the L was unaffected by changes in stress conditions...
Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency... more Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency is the only reliable acoustic correlate of stress, and that stressed and unstressed syllables are not differentiated from each other in the absence of accentuation. In this study, the effects of lexical stress on duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt were examined in Persian both in the accented and unaccented conditions. Results showed that syllable duration is consistently affected by stress in Persian in both the accented and unaccented conditions across all vowel types. Unlike duration, the results for overall intensity and spectral tilt were significant only in the accented condition, suggesting that measures of intensity are not a correlate of stress in Persian but they are mainly caused by the presence of a pitch movement. The findings are phonologically interpreted as suggesting that word-level prominence in Persian is typologically similar to 'stress accent' languages, in which multiple phonetic cues are used to signal the prominence contrast in the accented condition, and stressed and unstressed syllables are different from each other even when the word is not pitch-accented.
This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian spea... more This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabic stress pairs which differed only in the location of stress, such as contract (noun)/ contract (verb). Results showed that Persian speakers’ use of the prosodic cues to lexical stress, that is fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity was comparable to the use of the same cues by American English speakers for both the stressed and unstressed syllables. There were, however, significant differences in formant frequency patterns (as the phonetic correlates of vowel quality) across the two language groups, such that Persian speakers did not manage to approximate the target native-like produc...
This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in th... more This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in the presence of the intonational prominence contrast and in the abstraction from the compounding accent condition. A production study was conducted in which 10 speakers produced Persian lexical and reiterant disyllabic minimal stress pairs spoken with and without an accent in a fixed carrier sentence. Duration, overall intensity, and spectral levels in four contiguous frequency bands were measured. Results showed a significant difference in overall intensity and spectral tilt between accented and unaccented syllables. However, no significant differences were found for these measures between stressed and unstressed syllables in the absence of the accent contrast. In contrast, duration proved the most reliable correlate of stress, as Persian speakers produced stressed syllables consistently longer than their unstressed counterparts independent of the accompanying intonational prominence cont...
The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradien... more The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradient preferences. An organized survey was conducted to elicit the judgments of 37 native Persian speakers concerning the well-formedness of /?/allophonic behavior in five different phonological positions. The results showed that the differences in judgment between the various categories are not just the result of random variations, but are an authentic reflection of the underlying structural differences. Following Boersma and Hayes (1999) and Hayes (2000), a stochastic model is proposed within optimality theory to account for the gradient judgments involved. The model assumes that constraints are arranged along a continuum of constraint strictness, with a band of strictness value assigned to each. When the strictness bands of two constraints overlap, then both rankings of the two constraints are equally available for the generation of outputs, yielding free variant forms. However, when a p...
Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, ExLing 2008, 25-27 August 2008,... more Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, ExLing 2008, 25-27 August 2008, Athens, Greece. Compensatory lengthening in Persian: the timing of non-modal phonation Vahid Sadeghi Department of English Language, Imam Khomeini International ...
It is commonly held that Persian glottal consonants in syllable coda undergo vowel lengthening [8... more It is commonly held that Persian glottal consonants in syllable coda undergo vowel lengthening [8], [9]. Some questions have arisen, however, concerning the phonological operations involved in CL. One view suggests that glottal allophonic weakening is compensated by vowel lengthening. Another view holds that CL involves the deletion of a coda glottal consonant followed by the lengthening of the adjacent nucleus vowel. There is a third view which suggests that CL is a gradient process in which different magnitude of glottal gesture is realized in speech from a weak through complete deletion of glottals. Using the spectral tilt measurements H1-H2 and H1-F1, I suggest that CL involves allophonic reduction of glottal gesture, which is accompanied by lengthening of the preceding vowel as glottals attain a gesture much similar to a vowel. In one experiment, subjects colloquially uttered twenty sentences of which ten sentences were made by CVC words and the other ten by CVCC words containi...
Persian has sequences of two vowels separated by an intervening glottal consonant (/h/ or //). T... more Persian has sequences of two vowels separated by an intervening glottal consonant (/h/ or //). The VG(lottal)V sequence becomes reduced in certain occurrences, with the perceptual effect of the loss of the glottal consonant. The purpose of this study is to provide an acoustic description of VGV sequences in reduced forms. A production study examined three acoustic measurements of phonation types: H1-H2, H1-F1, and F0. The measurements were made at 15 ms time intervals throughout the second vowel to determine the time course of phonation effect. The issue of interest is what properties of VGV remain where G is lost. It is shown that // will be preserved as vowel laryngealization and /h/ as breathiness.
Persian velar glide [w], unlike the palatal glide [j], does not serve a contrastive function in P... more Persian velar glide [w], unlike the palatal glide [j], does not serve a contrastive function in Persian phonology since it has incomplete distribution, occurring only in few words after the mid back vowel /o/. Thus, [w] is described as an allophone of the phoneme /v/. Furthermore, it has been assumed that [w] in [ow] may be deleted in connected speech giving rise to the compensatory lengthening of the preceding [o] vowel. In the present research, we examined the phonetic realization [w] in Persian words in an experimental study. The results suggested that [w] is acoustically present in the target words but is reduced or weakened to different degrees. As [w] is reduced in [ow], the shape of the vocal tract as well as the phonation type changes, resulting in (1) increase of overall intensity of the spectrum; (2) increase in the formant frequencies; and (3) decrease in bandwidths of the formant frequencies. All these systematic acoustic variations cause the vowel [o] in [ow] to be prod...
The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and co... more The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the rhetorical relations between text segments were identified. The texts were read aloud by 18 high-proficient Persian learners of English. We measured pause durations preceding segments, F0-maxima (as a correlate of pitch range) and speech rates of the segments. Results suggested that speakers give prosodic indications about hierarchical level by means of variations in pause duration but not pitch range or speech rate. Furthermore, it was found that speakers articulate causally related segments with shorter in between pauses and at faster rate than non-causally related segments. However, they di...
1Introduction Jun (2005) classifies Persian with English, German, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Spanish,... more 1Introduction Jun (2005) classifies Persian with English, German, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Lebanese Arabic, and Bininj Gun-wok (a Northern Australian language) as „stress-accent‟ languages. However, recent studies on the phonetic correlates of stress in Persian have shown that pitch is the only reliable acoustic parameter to cue stress in Persian, suggesting that Persian is a „non-stress accent‟ language. In a production study, Abolhasanizadeh, Bijankhan and Gussenhoven (2012) examined the phonetic correlates of the prominence contrast in Persian, and found that prominent syllables are not systematically differentiated by durational or spectral properties from nonprominent syllables, leading them to conclude that word-level prominence in Persian is „non-stress accent‟ in the sense of Beckman (1986), i.e., prominence is not the result of lexical stress, but post-lexical tonal marking (pitch accent). Similarly, in a more recent study, Rahmani, Rietveld and Gussenhov...
This paper reports the results of an experimental s tudy on non-native production of English vowe... more This paper reports the results of an experimental s tudy on non-native production of English vowels. Two groups of Persian EFL learners varying in language proficienc y were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of American English. Vowel production accuracy was ass essed by means of acoustic measurements. Ladefoged and Maddi son’s (1996) F1×F2 measurements for American English vowel space were used as reference values to be compared with t he measurements obtained from the production of Persia n EFL learners. The acoustic measurements revealed that l earners were not able to control acoustic parameters of vow el quality, even for the more similar vowels in the two languag es, in a native-like manner due to interference from their native vowel system. Spectral accuracy measures also did not pro gress toward more native-like values in the productions of the more proficient learners. Interestingly, the positions achieved for the more dissimilar vowels were neither c...
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2017
This paper examines the phonetic realization of rising pre-nuclear pitch accents in Persian. In a... more This paper examines the phonetic realization of rising pre-nuclear pitch accents in Persian. In a first experiment, the alignment of f0 valleys and peaks in pre-nuclear pitch accents was analyzed in controlled speech materials as a function of the syllable structure (open vs. closed) and vowel type (short vs. long) of the accented syllable. The results revealed that in words with antepenultimate stress, both the L and the H tones are anchored to specific segmental landmarks irrespective of syllable structure or vowel type. In particular, the L is consistently aligned with the onset of the accented syllable, and the H is placed with similar consistency in the vicinity of the first post-accentual vowel. In a second experiment, the variability in the timing and scaling of L valleys and H peaks was examined as a function of the proximity of the word boundary and of the following accent. The results revealed that while the alignment of the L was unaffected by changes in stress conditions...
Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency... more Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency is the only reliable acoustic correlate of stress, and that stressed and unstressed syllables are not differentiated from each other in the absence of accentuation. In this study, the effects of lexical stress on duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt were examined in Persian both in the accented and unaccented conditions. Results showed that syllable duration is consistently affected by stress in Persian in both the accented and unaccented conditions across all vowel types. Unlike duration, the results for overall intensity and spectral tilt were significant only in the accented condition, suggesting that measures of intensity are not a correlate of stress in Persian but they are mainly caused by the presence of a pitch movement. The findings are phonologically interpreted as suggesting that word-level prominence in Persian is typologically similar to 'stress accent' languages, in which multiple phonetic cues are used to signal the prominence contrast in the accented condition, and stressed and unstressed syllables are different from each other even when the word is not pitch-accented.
This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian spea... more This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabic stress pairs which differed only in the location of stress, such as contract (noun)/ contract (verb). Results showed that Persian speakers’ use of the prosodic cues to lexical stress, that is fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity was comparable to the use of the same cues by American English speakers for both the stressed and unstressed syllables. There were, however, significant differences in formant frequency patterns (as the phonetic correlates of vowel quality) across the two language groups, such that Persian speakers did not manage to approximate the target native-like produc...
This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in th... more This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in the presence of the intonational prominence contrast and in the abstraction from the compounding accent condition. A production study was conducted in which 10 speakers produced Persian lexical and reiterant disyllabic minimal stress pairs spoken with and without an accent in a fixed carrier sentence. Duration, overall intensity, and spectral levels in four contiguous frequency bands were measured. Results showed a significant difference in overall intensity and spectral tilt between accented and unaccented syllables. However, no significant differences were found for these measures between stressed and unstressed syllables in the absence of the accent contrast. In contrast, duration proved the most reliable correlate of stress, as Persian speakers produced stressed syllables consistently longer than their unstressed counterparts independent of the accompanying intonational prominence cont...
The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradien... more The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradient preferences. An organized survey was conducted to elicit the judgments of 37 native Persian speakers concerning the well-formedness of /?/allophonic behavior in five different phonological positions. The results showed that the differences in judgment between the various categories are not just the result of random variations, but are an authentic reflection of the underlying structural differences. Following Boersma and Hayes (1999) and Hayes (2000), a stochastic model is proposed within optimality theory to account for the gradient judgments involved. The model assumes that constraints are arranged along a continuum of constraint strictness, with a band of strictness value assigned to each. When the strictness bands of two constraints overlap, then both rankings of the two constraints are equally available for the generation of outputs, yielding free variant forms. However, when a p...
Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, ExLing 2008, 25-27 August 2008,... more Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, ExLing 2008, 25-27 August 2008, Athens, Greece. Compensatory lengthening in Persian: the timing of non-modal phonation Vahid Sadeghi Department of English Language, Imam Khomeini International ...
It is commonly held that Persian glottal consonants in syllable coda undergo vowel lengthening [8... more It is commonly held that Persian glottal consonants in syllable coda undergo vowel lengthening [8], [9]. Some questions have arisen, however, concerning the phonological operations involved in CL. One view suggests that glottal allophonic weakening is compensated by vowel lengthening. Another view holds that CL involves the deletion of a coda glottal consonant followed by the lengthening of the adjacent nucleus vowel. There is a third view which suggests that CL is a gradient process in which different magnitude of glottal gesture is realized in speech from a weak through complete deletion of glottals. Using the spectral tilt measurements H1-H2 and H1-F1, I suggest that CL involves allophonic reduction of glottal gesture, which is accompanied by lengthening of the preceding vowel as glottals attain a gesture much similar to a vowel. In one experiment, subjects colloquially uttered twenty sentences of which ten sentences were made by CVC words and the other ten by CVCC words containi...
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