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"syllable"
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Syllable weight and natural duration in textsetting popular music in English
Hayes & Kaun (1996) argue that the mapping of syllables onto a metrical grid in textsetting is sensitive to natural duration, not just categorical weight (heavy or light). Most of their evidence, however, derives the final lengthening effects, which admit of another possible analysis (Halle 2004). Drawing on a corpus of 2,371 popular songs in English, I confirm that even when one controls for final lengthening and other factors, the setting of syllables to a discrete grid is sensitive to natural duration. Moreover, onset effects reveal that the domain of weight for textsetting is not the syllable, rime, or vowel-to-vowel interval, but rather the interval between p-centers (perceptual centers). Finally, I argue that the textsetting grammar invokes both natural duration and categorical weight; weight mapping cannot be reduced to one or the other.
Journal Article
Codas are universally moraic
Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.
Journal Article
Facilitation effect of token syllable frequency in Chinese spoken word production
Syllable frequency effects in spoken word production have been interpreted as evidence that speakers store syllable-sized motor programmes for phonetic encoding in alphabetic languages such as English or Dutch. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying the syllable frequency effect in Chinese spoken word production remains unknown. To investigate the locus of the syllable frequency effect in spoken Chinese, this study used a picture–word interference (PWI) task in which participants were asked to name the picture while ignoring the distractor word. The design included two variables: the syllable frequency of the target words (high vs. low) and the phonological relationships between distractor and target words (shared atonic syllable or not; related vs. unrelated). We manipulated mixed token and type syllable frequency in Experiment 1, and token syllable frequency but controlled type syllable frequency in Experiment 2. The results showed a facilitation effect of mixed syllable frequency and a similar facilitation effect of token syllable frequency. Importantly, the syllable frequency effect was found to be independent of the phonological facilitation effect. These results suggest that token syllable frequency played a dominant role in the observed facilitation effect, providing evidence that the syllable frequency effect arises in the phonetic encoding of Chinese spoken word production.
Journal Article
An Optimality-Theoretic Account of Superheavy Syllables in Urban Irbid Dialect
This study investigates the distribution of superheavy syllables in Urban Irbid dialect (UID), revealing their occurrence in both non-final and final word positions. We argue that word-final superheavy syllables are characterized by an extrametrical or weightless final consonant. This extrametricality is proposed as a mechanism to satisfy constraints against trimoraic syllables (·3µ) and final consonants bearing weight (·FINAL- µ-C), albeit at the cost of violating the Weight-to-Stress Principle (WBP). Drawing on Broselow's (1992) analysis, we suggest that the extrametrical final consonant can alternatively satisfy WBP by violating a constraint against non-syllabic segments (NSµ). Furthermore, the analysis highlights that the absence of final CVCC syllables in UID stems from a violation of the Sonority Sequencing Principle. Finally, the paper notes the non-occurrence of certain non-final CVCC and CVCCC syllable types within the system, suggesting further constraints on syllable structure beyond those discussed.
Journal Article
The Role of the Syllable in the Segmentation of Cairene Spoken Arabic
The syllable as a perceptual unit has been investigated cross linguistically. In Cairene Arabic syllables fall into three categories, light CV, heavy CVC/CVV and superheavy CVCC/CVVC. However, heavy syllables in Cariene Arabic have varied weight depending on their position in a word, whether internal or final. The present paper investigates the role of the syllable in the segmentation of Cariene Arabic. It reports a psycholinguistic study; syllable monitoring that was conducted on 32 Egyptian Arabic native speakers to examine the perceptual role of the syllable in spoken connected language. Theoretical phonological studies have identified Cairene Arabic as a stress-timed language; however, psycholinguistic studies providing evidence for this theoretical finding are scarce. The present study which is a cross modal (visual and auditory) counterbalanced design, gives evidence for the role of the (CVC) syllable in the segmentation of Cairene spoken language.
Journal Article
Relative salience of syllable structure and syllable order in zebra finch song
There is a rich history of behavioral and neurobiological research focused on the ‘syntax’ of birdsong as a model for human language and complex auditory perception. Zebra finches are one of the most widely studied songbird species in this area of investigation. As they produce song syllables in a fixed sequence, it is reasonable to assume that adult zebra finches are also sensitive to the order of syllables within their song; however, results from electrophysiological and behavioral studies provide somewhat mixed evidence on exactly how sensitive zebra finches are to syllable order as compared, say, to syllable structure. Here, we investigate how well adult zebra finches can discriminate changes in syllable order relative to changes in syllable structure in their natural song motifs. In addition, we identify a possible role for experience in enhancing sensitivity to syllable order. We found that both male and female adult zebra finches are surprisingly poor at discriminating changes to the order of syllables within their species-specific song motifs, but are extraordinarily good at discriminating changes to syllable structure (i.e., reversals) in specific syllables. Direct experience or familiarity with a song, either using the bird’s own song (BOS) or the song of a flock mate as the test stimulus, improved both male and female zebra finches’ sensitivity to syllable order. However, even with experience, birds remained much more sensitive to structural changes in syllables. These results help to clarify some of the ambiguities from the literature on the discriminability of changes in syllable order in zebra finches, provide potential insight on the ethological significance of zebra finch song features, and suggest new avenues of investigation in using zebra finches as animal models for sequential sound processing.
Journal Article
Is rate-dependent perception affected by linguistic information about the intended syllable rate?
Speech is highly variable in rate, challenging the perception of sound contrasts that are dependent on duration. Listeners deal with such variability by perceiving incoming speech relative to the rate in the surrounding context. For instance, the same ambiguous vowel is more likely to be perceived as being long when embedded in a fast sentence, but as short when embedded in a slow sentence. However, it is still debated to what extent domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms (i.e., language- or speech-specific mechanisms) contribute to rate-dependent perception. Here we examined the role of domain-specific mechanisms in an implicit rate-normalization task in which we manipulated linguistic knowledge about how many syllables words have. Dutch participants were presented with lists of Dutch words that were acoustically ambiguous with regard to having one or two syllables (e.g., /k?ˈlɔm/ can be monosyllabic
klom,
/klɔm/, or bisyllabic
kolom,
/ko.ˈlɔm/). While being presented with these ambiguous word lists, they saw monosyllabic or bisyllabic transcriptions of the lists on the screen. We predicted that the same acoustic stimulus would be perceived as faster (more syllables per second) when combined with bisyllabic orthography compared to monosyllabic orthography. In turn, this would lead to downstream influences on vowel length perception in target words embedded within the word lists (rate-dependent perception of Dutch /ɑ/ vs./ /aː/). Despite evidence of successful orthographic disambiguation of the ambiguous word lists, we did not find evidence that linguistic knowledge influenced participants’ rate-dependent perception. Our results are best accounted for by a domain-general account of rate-dependent perception.
Journal Article
Praat script to detect syllable nuclei and measure speech rate automatically
In this article, we describe a method for automatically detecting syllable nuclei in order to measure speech rate without the need for a transcription. A script written in the software program Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2007) detects syllables in running speech. Peaks in intensity (dB) that are preceded and followed by dips in intensity are considered to be potential syllable nuclei. The script subsequently discards peaks that are not voiced. Testing the resulting syllable counts of this script on two corpora of spoken Dutch, we obtained high correlations between speech rate calculated from human syllable counts and speech rate calculated from automatically determined syllable counts. We conclude that a syllable count measured in this automatic fashion suffices to reliably assess and compare speech rates between participants and tasks.
Journal Article