A comparison of lexeme and speech syllables in Dutch

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1993

Three experiments are reported concerning the role of the syllable in the perception of spoken Dutch. Ss monitored spoken words for the presence of target strings that did or did not correspond to the words' first syllable. Effects of syllabic match were obtained for spoken words with unambiguous syllabic structure, as well as for words containing ambisyllabic consonants, which are shared by 2 syllables. For both types of words, monitoring latencies were shorter if the target matched the first syllable of the spoken word. Syllable effects were independent of the relation between targets and stem morphemes of the spoken words. Commonalities and differences between these results and those obtained in other languages such as English and French are discussed.

Language and Speech, 1997

1999

A production experiment with reiterant speech aimed at assessing the relation between prosodic structure of words and vowel duration in Dutch. The vowels used in this experiment were [a] and [i], which are traditionally distinguished on the basis of quantity in the conditions discussed here. It was found that the duration of a vowel in the strong syllable of a foot exceeds that of the weak syllable(s) in the same foot. Besides, in only three conditions are consistent differences found between [a] and [i]: in strong syllables of strong and weak feet, and in strong monosyllabic feet. The results challenge the traditional division of Dutch vowels into 'long' and 'short'. A common intrinsic duration assigned to all vowels in a Text-to-Speech System for Dutch, only modulated by prosodic position, yields a good temporal quality of the generated speech.

Linguistics in the Netherlands, 1992

Dutch word stress has been the subject of extensive investigation during the last ten years, cf. , van der Hulst (1984), , and . 1 The various authors describe Dutch stress in terms of a few main rules, supplemented by subrules and exception lists. The exact choice of the main rules has been subject to debate. Evidence for the main rules has been sought in various domains: stress shifts in loan words, stress patterns in newly-formed words, brand names, acronyms, child language, or speech errors, but the most common criterion in the references above has been lexical frequency of stress patterns. In this paper we shall confront three closely related accounts of Dutch word stress with lexical data in order to evaluate their predictions. The three turn out to be descriptively equivalent, but the survey of data suggests that a more restrictive theory is possible, in which phonological and morphological subregularities are accounted for outside of the general framework. The following characteristics of Dutch stress seem to be generally agreed upon (for a detailed survey and references cf. Kager 1989): (1) Generally assumed characteristics of Dutch word stress: a quantity sensitive foot structure, e.g. no heavy (h) or superheavy (sh) syllables as weak nodes of feet; b syllables form bounded feet; c direction: from right to left; d left dominant foot structure (in metrical trees: strong-weak assignment); e right dominant word structure (in metrical trees: weak-strong assignment, and right branching structures). Foot structure (la) depends on segmental distinctions of syllable rimes. The relevant types of syllables are the following: This paper could not have been written without the help of Maarten Hijzelendoorn, who wrote the software to run the searches on the RUL-corpus. We have profited from comments by Harry van der Hulst, René Kager, Jacques Koreman and Anneke Nunn.

2011

A psycholinguistic model of speech production 7 The role of the syllable in speech production 3 References 8 CHAPTER 2 A comparison of lexeme and speech syllables in Dutch 11 Abstract 7 7 Introduction 12 The syllable in Dutch 16 The Dutch syllable inventory in CELEX 18 Phonetic transcription 18 Application of phonological rules 19 Preparation of the corpus 21 Phonemic transcription 22 Application of phonological rules 23 Syllabification 25 Evaluation of the lexeme syllables from TROUW 26 Speech syllables in TROUW 33 Application of sentence-level rules 33 Comparison of lexeme and speech syllables 36 Conclusions 42 References 44 CHAPTER 3 The syllabic structure of spoken words: Evidence from the syllabification of intervocalic consonants 51 Abstract 51 Introduction 52 Experimental investigation of syllable structure 53 Method 59 Experiment 1 : Syllabification of syllables with short vs. long vowels 61 Method 61 Results and discussion 62 Experiment 2: Orthographic effects on syllabification 65 Method 65 Results and discussion 66 Experiment 3a: Vowel quality effects in words 68 Method 68 Results and discussion 69 Experiment 3b: Vowel quality effects in pseudowords 70 Method 70 Results and discussion 71 Experiment 4: Syllabification of schwa syllables 72 Method 73 Results and discussion 74 Experiment 5: Item set effects on syllabification 75 Method 76 Results and discussion 76 Experiment 6: Task-specific effects on syllabification 78 Method 79 Results and discussion 79 General discussion 80 References 87 Appendices 93 CHAPTER 4 The effect of visually masked syllable primes on the naming latencies of words and pictures

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2005

Pluymaekers, M., M. Ernestus, and R. H. Baayen This study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morphologically complex words in spoken Dutch. The hypothesis that high-frequency words are more reduced than low-frequency words was tested by comparing the durations of affixes occurring in different carrier words. Four Dutch affixes were investigated, each occurring in a large number of words with different frequencies. The materials came from a large database of face-to-face conversations. For each word containing a target affix, one token was randomly selected for acoustic analysis. Measurements were made of the duration of the affix as a whole and the durations of the individual segments in the affix. For three of the four affixes, a higher frequency of the carrier word led to shorter realizations of the affix as a whole, individual segments in the affix, or both. Other relevant factors were the sex and age of the speaker, segmental context, and speech rate. To accommodate for these findings, models of speech production should allow word frequency to affect the acoustic realizations of lower-level units, such as individual speech sounds occurring in affixes.

Journal of Phonetics, 1998

Journal of Phonetics, 2004

This paper focuses on the relation between word prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch, to the exclusion of phrase-final lengthening and accentual lengthening. Measurements of vowel durations in reiterant speech showed that main stress, secondary stress, and right/left-edge position determine vowel duration. In addition, the experiments made it clear that the durational differences between long and short vowels only surface in syllables with (main or secondary) stress. The observations were summarized in rules which were implemented in a diphone-based Text-To-Speech system (KUN-TTS). The resulting durations showed high correlations with vowel durations measured both in reiterant and lexical words.

2000

Recent studies of spoken Standard Dutch support an ongoing change in the phonetic quality of the diphthong /EI/ (1, 2). How- ever, there is a need for broader analyses and larger data set s. Here, we took Dutch vowel variants of 44 speakers from a spoken Dutch speech corpus, the CGN (3). The vowels were measured and com- pared on

The Nature of the Word, 2008