Dissecting the consonant duration ratio

Language and Speech, 1997

2019

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2003

It has been widely observed that codas are marked vis-à-vis onsets. In adult languages, coda markedness manifests itself in two ways: some languages do not tolerate codas at all (e.g. Cayuvava (Key 1961), Senufo (Clements and Keyser 1983)), while virtually all languages that do permit codas place restrictions on what this position can license. Coda markedness has consequences for the syllabification of consonants at the right edge of words as well. While one view is that final consonants are always syllabified as codas, there are many languages for which this analysis is not motivated. In the 1980s, final consonants were commonly designated as extraprosodic in these types of languages . More recently, it has been observed that there is a striking parallel between right-edge extraprosodic consonants and onsets in many languages; accordingly, extraprosodic consonants have been interpreted as onsets of empty-headed syllables by a number of scholars (see e.g.

1988

Two tasks were used to study the syllabification of intervocalic consonants like the /V's of melon and collide. In an oral task, subjects reversed the syllables in words; in a written task, they selected between alternative syllabifications. Even in the oral task, subjects' responses were influenced by whether their spellings of the words contained a single letter (r) or a double letter (10. Responses in the two tasks were also affected by the stress pattern of the word, the phonetic category of the intervocalic consonant, and the nature of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed in relation to theories of syllabification. o 1988

2002

The present study is an experimental investigation of the effects of syllable position, stress, focus and tempo on segmental durations in American English, British English, Greek and Swedish. Nonsense disyllabic CVCV words were produced in a carrier sentence under different conditions of stress, focus and tempo. The results indicate that stress and tempo have a major effect on both consonant and vowel across all four languages, whereas the effects of syllable position and focus are hardly evident. Significant interactions were mostly found between syllable position and stress for the vowel.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2001

This study investigated the explicit syllabification of CVCV words in French. In a first syllable-reversal experiment, most responses corresponded to the expected canonical CV.CV segmentation, but a small proportion included the intervocalic consonant in both the first and second syllables, a result previously interpreted for English as indicating ambisyllabicity. Two further partial-repetition experiments showed that listeners systematically include the consonant in the onset of the second syllable, but also often include it in the offset of the first syllable. In addition, the assignment of the intervocalic consonant to the first and second syllables was differentially sensitive to the sonority of the consonant and to its spelling. We argue that the findings are inconsistent with the traditionally held boundary conception and instead support the view that distinct processes are involved in locating the onsets and the offsets of syllables. Onset determination is both more reliable and more dominant. Finally, we propose that syllable onsets serve as alignment points for the lexical search process in continuous spoken word recognition.

the 8th Annual Texas Linguistics Society …, 2004

Speech Communication, 2005

The paper presents a study of syllabic structures and their variation in a large corpus of French radio interview speech. A further aim is to show how automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems can serve as a linguistic tool to consistently explore virtually unlimited speech corpora. Automatically selected subsets can be manually checked to accumulate knowledge on pronunciation variants. Our belief is that better formalised knowledge of variant mechanisms will ultimately contribute to improve pronunciation modelling and ASR systems. This study is meant to be a step in this direction. The linguistic phenomena we are particularly interested in, are sequential variants (i.e. variants with different numbers of phonemes) which may or not entail syllabic restructuring. These variants, frequent in spontaneous speech, are known to be particularly difficult for speech recognizers. To focus on sequential variants, a methodology has been set up using descriptions at the phonemic, syllabic and lexical levels.

Language, 2000

Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Dr. W.A. Wagenaar, hoogleraar in de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 10 september 1998 te klokke 16.15 uur door Robertus Wilhelmus Nicolaas Goedemans geboren te Haarlem in 1967 1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units. Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments. However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. * Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem. This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length. phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts. A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel-velar nasal". Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages. Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature. A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf. Peterson & Lehiste 1960; Chen 1970). The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset. For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf. English bed vs. bet). These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated. Following Lehiste's (1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf. Fudge 1969; Selkirk 1978). This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3). (3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a nd Not only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules. An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984). He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix. Let us look at some of Lass' data. 4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wīf 'women' 1.2.1 Stress: an introduction to the phenomenon Sweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs. He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress. There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate. The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal. 5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener). 1 The experiments reported on in this chapter have been published in Goedemans & van Heuven (1993).