The right edge of the word is a known domain for processes like phonological devoicing. This has been argued to be the effect of analogy from higher prosodic domains, rather than an in situ motivated change (Hock 1999, Hualde and Eager 2016). Phonetic word-level phenomena of final lengthening and final devoicing have been found to occur natively word-finally (Lunden 2006, 2017, Nakai et al. 2009) despite claims that they have no natural phonetic pressure originating in this position (Hock 1999). We present the results of artificial language learning studies that seek to answer the question of whether phonetic-level cues to the word-final position can aid in language parsing. If they do, it provides evidence that listeners can make use of word-level phonetic phenomena, which, together with studies that have found them to be present, speaks to their inherent presence at the word level. We find that adult listeners are better able to recognize the words they heard in a speech stream, and better able to reject words that they did not hear, when final lengthening was present at the right edge of the word. Final devoicing was not found to give the same boost to parsing.

This paper explores fronted verb phrases in German, drawing attention to the difference between passive/unaccusative VPs and fronted agentive vPs. While both kinds of verb phrases have been discussed in the literature as being frontable, it has been largely overlooked that fronted vPs typically come with a certain kind of post-fronting context and a rise-fall or bridge-contour intonation, which is characteristic of I-topicalization. We observe that, unlike VPs, agentive vPs essentially need to be I-topics, with a high tone at the right edge of the fronted domain, in order to be frontable. Given the special context required for fronted vPs, the situation described by the vP does not contain new information but must already have been under discussion and is now being commented on. We present the results of two experimental studies and appeal to the thetic/categorical distinction to offer a new angle on the definiteness effect that has been associated with fronted verb phrases. We propose that a subject-containing fronted vP is associated with a thetic rather than the default categorical judgment, which means that the fronted subject and predicate form only one information-structural unit (a topic) rather than two (topic and comment). Contributing to the literature on theticity, we observe that, unlike in non-fronting thetic statements, the subject in fronted vPs cannot be a true definite. We attribute this to clashing intonation restrictions on theticity in non-fronting constructions versus theticity in just the fronted portion of a sentence.

Multiple languages avoid stressing the first of two vowels in hiatus. Evidence that this avoidance has a perceptual basis is shown by the results of a perceptual study. Antepenultimate and penultimate stress versions of 40 three-syllable Norwegian nonce words were played to English listeners, who were asked to identify whether stress was on the first or second syllable. It was found that listeners had significantly more trouble correctly identifying penultimate stress in cases of hiatus (that is, where the penultimate vowel was immediately followed by the vowel of the final syllable). Steriade (2012, 2017) has proposed that Interval Theory accounts for the lack of stress in this position because the weight domain is too small to fulfill the requirement to bear stress. While this account is compatible with the perceptual account proposed here, an examination of the possible weight domains of the stimuli used finds a problem for Interval Theory. The onset of a stressed syllable is found to significantly lengthen, but because Interval Theory takes this consonant to be part of the preceding, unstressed interval, interval durations are out of sync with the relative prominence of the weight domains in a word.

This chapter proposes and examines evidence for a motivation behind the well-known asymmetrical tolerance for stress lapse word-initially versus word-finally across languages. While many binary-stress languages tolerate a stress lapse at the right edge of the word, very few tolerate a stress lapse at the left edge. It is proposed that, in the languages that tolerate a final stress lapse, there is nevertheless a rhythmic alternation present at the right edge of the word, due to the phonetic effect of word-level final lengthening. If final lengthening were able to perceptually contribute to a word’s rhythm in cases of final lapse, we would expect this to only be possible when stress in the language has duration as a stress correlate. Evidence from two different sources is shown to support the connection between languages’ tolerance of final stress lapse and their use of duration in stress. Drawing on a database of stress correlates, it is shown that languages which tolerate a final stress lapse are extremely likely to have duration as a stress correlate, whereas no such correlation exists for final lapse and the stress correlates of pitch or intensity. Several perception experiments also support this connection: final lengthening was found to be confusable with stress, only if stressed syllables included increased duration. An account is sketched of how this could be captured in an Optimality Theoretic analysis.

Objective: Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness. Methods: Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5). We compared groups on variation in pitch (F0), formant F1 and F2, and intensity/loudness. Results: Regarding pitch variation, patients with aprosody differed significantly from controls in Task 5 in both unadjusted tests and those adjusted for sociodemographics. For the standard deviation (SD) of F1, no significant differences were found in adjusted tests. Regarding SD of F2, patients with aprosody had lower values than controls in Task 3, 4, and 5. For variation in intensity/loudness, patients with aprosody had lower values than patients without aprosody and controls across the five tasks. Conclusions: Findings could represent a step toward developing new methods for measuring and tracking the severity of this specific negative symptom using acoustic phonetic parameters; such work is relevant to other psychiatric and neurological disorders. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Binary stress languages have a well-known asymmetry between their tolerance of initial versus final lapse; the former being extremely rare and the latter being quite common. Lunden (to appear) proposes that final lengthening plays a role in this asymmetry, as the additional inherent phonetic duration of the final syllable can contribute to the continuation of a perceived rhythm, even in the absence of actual final stress. She notes this effect of final lengthening should only be available in languages that use duration as a cue to stress. However, some languages are described as having different cues to primary and secondary stress, and it is not clear which is more important for this perceptual effect. The results of four new studies show that final lengthening contributes to the perceptual rhythm of the word even when only one level of stress is cued with duration.

Flemming and Johnson (2007) found a difference in vowel quality between unstressed vowels in non-final and word-final positions in English. The F1, F2 range of less-reduced word-final unstressed syllables is explored by through two production studies of (1) corner vowels in English and (2) /A/ in Norwegian. The word-final high vowels were found be show a small amount of undershoot in English, while the F1 and F2 of word-final unstressed /a/ was found to be in-between that of stressed [a] and [@]. Norwegian showed significant undershoot in unstressed syllables, with word-final unstressed syllables having an F1 in-between that of stressed and other unstressed [a]s. Word-final unstressed vowels in both languages were found to have an F1 that falls in-between that of stressed and non-final unstressed vowels; occurring as levels of phonological reduction in English and as phonetic reduction in Norwegian.

The functional load hypothesis of Berinstein (1979) put forward the idea that languages which use a suprasegmental property (duration, F0) contrastively will not use it to realise stress. The functional load hypothesis is often cited when stress correlates are discussed, both when it is observed that the language under discussion follows the hypothesis and when it fails to follow it. In the absence of a more wide-ranging assessment of how frequently languages do or do not conform to the functional load hypothesis, it is unknown whether it is an absolute, a strong tendency, a weak tendency or unsupported. The results from a database of reported stress correlates and use of contrastive duration for 140 languages are presented and discussed. No support for the functional load hypothesis is found.

Languages with binary stress systems frequently tolerate a stress lapse over the final two syllables, but almost none tolerate a word-initial stress lapse. Lunden (to appear) argues that this lapse asymmetry can be explained by the presence of word-level final lengthening, which can then create the perception of prominence alternation in languages that use duration as stress correlate. The results of a production and a perception study with English speakers are presented which compare /ɑ/s that occur under stress lapse to /ɑ/s in non-stress-lapse positions. While word-final unstressed /ɑ/ is always longer than non-final unstressed /ɑ/, it is significantly longer when immediately following an unstressed syllable. Similarly, unstressed word-final /ɑ/ has a higher F1 and lower F2 than non-final unstressed /ɑ/, but word-finally this less-reduced vowel is closer to a full vowel when the final syllable is part of a stress lapse. The perception study finds that these differences have perceptual consequences that can lead to a perceived continued rhythm in stress lapse. The phonetic differences explain why a word-final unstressed vowel can be perceived as relatively strong when following an unstressed syllable but as relatively weak when following a stressed syllable.

Steriade (2012) proposed intervals as a more appropriate syllable weight domain than rhymes. This study explores how interval weight cashes out as duration across word positions and compares this to a rhyme-based account. The data reported on in Lunden (2013), from native speakers of Norwegian (a language in which (C)VC syllables are heavy only non-finally) is reanalyzed with intervals. Lunden found that syllable rhymes in all three positions, if taken as a percentage of the average V rhyme in that word position, fell into a coherent pattern for weight. It is shown that interval durations allow for a similar, albeit less robust, pattern. The data from Lunden’s (2013) perception experiment that tested the correlation between increased vowel duration and listeners’ classification of syllable weight is also recast with interval durations, and the importance of the proportional increase over the raw increase, originally found for the rhyme data, is found to hold for the interval data. Thus, taking intervals as the weight domain is shown to result in reasonable durational relations between interval weights, although interval durations show less separation between some light and heavy units than the rhyme durations do.

Long-distance consonant metathesis is less common than the metathesis of adjacent segments but is shown to occur in multiple languages (e.g. Maori kaheru similar to karehu 'spade') As words tend to be short, and examples rare, it is difficult to assess the tendencies of long-distance consonant metathesis. This paper gives the results of a production experiment with five-syllable nonce words set up to examine the effect of position within the word and stress-status for long-distance consonant/consonant metathesis. It is found that all positions but the initial one are equally likely to be involved in a metathesis, which is consistent with a previous finding that word-initial onsets resist metathesis in adjacent-segment metathesis. Onsets of stressed syllables are also less likely to participate in metathesis with consonants at greater distances than in an adjacent syllable. The findings suggest that long-distance consonant metathesis is not fundamentally different from adjacent-segment metathesis, although, unlike adjacent segment metathesis, it cannot occur as part of regular process.

This is the first cross-language study of the effect of schizophrenia on speech as measured by analyzing phonetic parameters with sound spectrography. We hypothesized that reduced variability in pitch and formants would be correlated with negative symptom severity in two samples of patients with schizophrenia, one from Italy, and one from the United States. Audio recordings of spontaneous speech were available from 40 patients. From each speech sample, a file of F0 (pitch) and formant values (F1 and F2, resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity), and the portion of the recording in which there was speaking ("fraction voiced," FV), was created. Correlations between variability in the phonetic indices and negative symptom severity were tested and further examined using regression analyses. Meaningful negative correlations between Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) total score and standard deviation (SD) of F2, as well as variability in pitch (SD F0) were observed in the Italian sample. We also found meaningful associations of SANS affective flattening and SANS alogia with SD F0, and of SANS avolition/apathy and SD F2 in the Italian sample. In both samples, FV was meaningfully correlated with SANS total score, avolition/apathy, and anhedonia/asociality.

The Australian language Yidiɲ exhibits an unusual stress pattern: The penultimate syllable and every other syllable to the left bears stress, but penultimate lengthening occurs only in words containing an odd number of syllables. We propose that the lengthening is due to a rhythm-enhancing trade-off: Either the word begins with a stressed syllable or the penultimate syllable is lengthened. This approach is supported by the results of two perception studies. Specifically, it was found that test-strings without initial stress were significantly less likely to be correctly categorized as having rhythmic alternation than test-strings with initial stress. While it has been known that languages prefer words to begin with a stressed syllable these studies provide evidence that starting with a stressed syllable aids listeners in hearing a rhythmic pattern and, further, supports the proposed motivation for the distribution of penultimate lengthening in Yidiɲ.

Many languages, including Norwegian, exhibit CVC weight asymmetry, where CVC is heavy but behaves as light word-finally. This asymmetry is proposed to be motivated by facts of phonetic length and human perception. A production experiment in Norwegian shows a parallel proportional increase for the rimes of heavy syllables across positions. A theory of weight is advanced in which a syllable shape in a given position is only heavy if it is, on average, sufficiently proportionally longer than the rime of a CV syllable in the same position. While a CVC syllable reaches this proportional increase threshold non-finally, it fails to do so word-finally. Final lengthening affects word-final syllables, causing there to be a smaller proportional increase between the rime of a final CV and final CVC. A further study finds perception to behave as predicted; that is, larger raw increases are needed to reach a sufficient length for word final syllables to be categorized as heavy. The proportional increase theory of weight provides a phonetically and perceptually motivated explanation for CVC weight asymmetry.

This study investigates the use of auxiliary contractions compared to the use of the full form in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English to consider comparisons between the linguistic factors of preceding phonological and grammatical environment, the presence of negation, stativity, voice, temporal reference, and clause type, among other parameters. Evidence is presented that contracted forms are predicted by all of the above. The paper considers linguistic features of speech and semantic features of perfect constructions that influence contraction. The preceding word has the strongest affect on contraction, for both semantic and phonological reasons. Evidence of grammaticalization of the perfect is found in the lower rates of reduction among older forms. The study sheds light on the predicament of intermediately contracted forms and how to treat them in the future.

Background: Aprosody, or flattened speech intonation, is a recognized negative symptom of schizophrenia, though it has rarely been studied from a linguistic/phonological perspective. To bring the latest advances in computational linguistics to the phenomenology of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, a clinical first-episode psychosis research team joined with a phonetics/computational linguistics team to conduct a preliminary, proof-of-concept study.Methods: Video recordings from a semi-structured clinical research interview were available from 47 first-episode psychosis patients. Audio tracks of the video recordings were extracted, and after review of quality, 25 recordings were available for phonetic analysis. These files were de-noised and a trained phonologist extracted a 1-minute sample of each patient's speech. WaveSurfer 1.8.5 was used to create, from each speech sample, a file of formant values (F0, F1, F2, where F0 is the fundamental frequency and F1 and F2 are resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity). Variability in these phonetic indices was correlated with severity of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative symptom scores using Pearson correlations.Results: A measure of variability of tongue front-to-back position-the standard deviation of F2-was statistically significantly correlated with the severity of negative symptoms (r=-0.446, p = 0.03).Conclusion: This study demonstrates a statistically significant and meaningful correlation between negative symptom severity and phonetically measured reductions in tongue movements during speech in a sample of first-episode patients just initiating treatment. Further studies of negative symptoms, applying computational linguistics methods, are warranted. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Lunden 2006 gave evidence from a production study with Norwegian speakers that shows there is a proportional relationship between V, the canonical light rhyme, and heavy syllable rhymes. The average proportional increase of a heavy rhyme over a light V rhyme was notably consistent across all positions. Crucially, a final VC rhyme did not reach the same proportional increase in a duration that a non-final VC or VXC did, as final lengthening disproportionally affected V-final rhymes. This poster presents an MFC experiment with Norwegian speakers that finds evidence from the perceptual side for the proportional increase theory of weight.

“VP”-fronting involving an unergative or transitive (agentive) vP depends on a rise-fall, bridge-contour intonation (Büring 1997) in order to be acceptable. (1) [/Ein Außenseiter gewonnen] hat hier noch nie. a.NOM outsider won has here yet never ‘It has never happened here that an outsider won.’ Furthermore, the fronted vP must express partially discourse-old information, have a non-specific/generic subject, and denote a proposition that is quantified over, not asserted. Pitch tracks show the bridge-contour ‘wrapping’ vP into one large prosodic (Intonational) phrase with a high edge tone, reducing vP-contained DPs to major phrases.