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A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress reveals that the former are characterized by having a high tone, higher F0 scaling, and greater intensity, but shorter duration with respect to lexically stressed vowels. Emphatic stress can thus be characterized as anchoring an intonational pitch accent on a lexically unstressed syllable. When this phenomenon occurs, primary lexical stress is still cued by duration. Compared with other lexically unstressed vowels, vowels with emphatic stress have greater duration and intensity, and less vowel centralization. Thus, vowels are hyperarticulated when bearing emphatic stress. In particular, schwa is more open, without merging with /a/. Regarding the distribution of emphatic stresses, the most common pattern observed is binary or rhythmic ("les institucions" "the institutions"), with emphatic stress occurring two syllables before the primary stress. Less frequently, emphatic stress appears on the first syllable of the prosodic word ("nacionalitats" "nationalities"), occasionally producing stress clash ("el marc" "the framework"). (Contains 9 notes, 10 tables and 13 figures.)

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish 2, 4 and 6 year-olds, and compared with the (adult-directed) speech of their mothers. Results reveal that child speech does not fall into a well-defined rhythmic class: for all three languages, it is more "vocalic" (higher %V) than adult speech and has a tendency towards lower variability (when normalized for speech rate) in vocalic interval duration. Consonantal interval variability, however, is "higher" in child speech, particularly for younger children. Nevertheless, despite the identification of common, cross-linguistic patterns in child speech, the emergence of language-specific rhythmic indices is also clearly observable, even in the speech of 2 year-olds. (Contains 18 notes, 6 tables, and 7 figures.)

To segment continuous speech into its component words, listeners make use of language rhythm; because rhythm differs across languages, so do the segmentation procedures which listeners use. For each of stress-, syllable-and mora-based rhythmic structure, perceptual experiments have led to the discovery of corresponding segmentation procedures. In the case of mora-based rhythm, similar segmentation has been demonstrated in the otherwise unrelated languages Japanese and Telugu; segmentation based on syllable rhythm, however, has been previously demonstrated only for European languages from the Romance family. We here report two target detection experiments in which Korean listeners, presented with speech in Korean and in French, displayed patterns of segmentation like those previously observed in analogous experiments with French listeners. The Korean listeners' accuracy in detecting word-initial target fragments in either language was significantly higher when the fragments corresponded exactly to a syllable in the input than when the fragments were smaller or larger than a syllable. We conclude that Korean and French listeners can call on similar procedures for segmenting speech, and we further propose that perceptual tests of speech segmentation provide a valuable accompaniment to acoustic analyses for establishing languages' rhythmic class membership. (Contains 4 figures.)

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results that test the plausibility of this hypothesis. These results are tied together within a model of the architecture of the first stages of language processing, and their acquisition. (Contains 5 figures and 3 footnotes.)

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically ambiguous French sentences (e.g., "Les gants et les bas lisses" "the smooth gloves and stockings") in a way that disambiguated the scope of the adjective. When the final adjective ("lisses") applies to the conjoined NP, a prosodic boundary is warranted immediately before the adjective; when it applies to the second NP alone, a boundary before that NP is more appropriate. Length of the second noun and the adjective were varied from one to four syllables to investigate length-related tendencies toward phonological boundary marking and toward rhythmic placement of IA. For the materials from six speakers whose readings were correctly interpreted by native listeners, incidence of word-initial prosodic peaks was affected by both structure and length, with most reliable occurrence at onsets of Minor/Phonological Phrases. The only effect of rhythmicity independent of phrase structure was omission of FA in stress clash with IA. (Contains 4 tables, 3 figures, and 1 footnote.)

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or "en" to form staatsschuld "national debt" and "statenbond" "confederation". Previous research has shown that the use of linking elements is guided by paradigmatic analogy, a factor that in the absence of other factors would lead to paradigm uniformity. However, there is considerable freedom in the use of linking elements, suggesting that other factors are relevant as well. We present studies showing that both stress and length affect their use, and that, in an experimental setting, the linking element en is less favored in lengthened compounds. However, the results observed in this experiment can only be explained satisfactorily in terms of rhythm: the preference for a recurrent pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The general conclusion of this study concerns the distinction between language behavior guided by stored knowledge or by processing factors. Models based on analogy (exemplar-based models) rely on stored knowledge. This study shows that apart from that, rhythm plays its own role. Rhythmic structures facilitate language processing, and a preference for perfect rhythm explains which variant of a compound (with or without the linking element) is chosen. Given the universal nature of analogy and rhythm, the issue of the balance between these two components of linguistic knowledge is relevant for a wide array of languages. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures, and 7 footnotes.)

In Estonian, as in a number of other languages, the nuclear pitch accent is often low and level. This paper presents two studies of this phenomenon. The first, a phonetic analysis of carefully structured read sentences shows that low accentuation can also spread to the prenuclear accents in an intonational phrase. The resulting sentence contours are used as evidence to evaluate alternative phonological analyses of low accentuation, and H+L* is shown to account best for the data. The second study presents quantitative evidence from fundamental frequency values which supports this phonological analysis. Finally, the distribution of prenuclear pitch accents is discussed. High and low accents can co-occur in an intonational phrase, but only in patterns obeying a specific sequential constraint. A fragment of an intonational grammar for Estonian is presented capturing the observed distributional restrictions. (Contains 13 figures and 6 footnotes.)

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was previously observed only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report three experiments in which speakers of Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese but similar to it in crucial aspects of rhythmic structure, heard speech in Japanese and in their own language, and Japanese listeners heard Telugu. For the Telugu listeners, detection of target sequences in Japanese speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. The same results appeared when Japanese listeners heard Telugu speech containing only codas permissible in Japanese. Telugu listeners' results with Telugu speech were mixed, but the overall pattern revealed correspondences between the response patterns of the two listener groups, as predicted by the rhythmic similarity hypothesis. Telugu and Japanese listeners appear to command similar procedures for speech segmentation, further bolstering the proposal that aspects of language phonological structure affect listeners' speech segmentation. (Contains 4 figures.)

Application of recently developed rhythmic measures to passages of read speech in colloquial and formal Tamil revealed some significant differences between the two varieties, which are in diglossic distribution. Both were also distinguished from a set of control data from British English speakers reading an equivalent passage. The findings have implications for the usefulness of the rhythmic measures and also the temporal characteristics of Tamil. High levels of interspeaker variability affected the measures; in some cases differences within each group of five speakers exceeded those separating distinct languages, indicating that such measures may not be reliable indicators of typological status. Discrepancies between previous findings and remeasurements of the same data also show the measures to be sensitive to differences in measurement criteria, specifically the treatment of pauses. The results confirm that the differences between colloquial and formal Tamil encompass durational characteristics, which appear to be largely explicable from differences in their syllabic structure. Provisional comparison with other languages suggests that their rhythmic properties cannot easily be captured by reference to traditional rhythmic classes. This may explain previous confusion in the literature over Tamil's temporal characteristics, which have been variously described in terms of stress-timing, syllable-timing, and mora-timing. (Contains 10 figures, 6 tables, and 5 footnotes.)

The traditional phonetic classification of language rhythm as stress-timed or syllable-timed is attributed to Pike. Recently, two different proposals have been offered for describing the rhythmic structure of languages from acoustic-phonetic measurements. Ramus has suggested a metric based on the proportion of vocalic intervals and the variability ("SD") of consonantal intervals. Grabe has proposed Pairwise Variability Indices (nPVI, rPVI) calculated from the differences in vocalic and consonantal durations between successive syllables. We have calculated both the Ramus and Grabe metrics for Latvian, traditionally considered a syllable rhythm language, and for Latvian as spoken by Russian learners. Native speakers and proficient learners were very similar whereas low-proficiency learners showed high variability on some properties. The metrics did not provide an unambiguous classification of Latvian. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

Explores the acoustic nature of Singapore English. In directly comparable samples of British and Singapore English, two types of acoustic measurements were taken--calculation of a variability index reflecting changes in vowel length over utterances, and measurements reflecting vowel quality. Findings provide acoustic data that support the hypothesized cross-varietal difference in rhythmic patterning. (Author/VWL)

Researchers comparing the signing of deaf early and late learners of Swiss German Sign Language were struck by the difference in the production of signs by two groups of signers. Specifically that the signing of early learners was easier to watch and understand, because it was more rhythmic. Analyses were made of temporal aspects of the production of signs that might function as prosodic elements. (Author/VWL)

Argues that intonation is best analyzed as an overt marking of the focus structure of a sentence. The linguistic level of f-structure in which both topic and focus are identified provides the link between context, interpretation, syntax, and intonation. (Author/VWL)

Compares the ability of English speakers and Portuguese speakers to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task that tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli.(Author/VWL)

Schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion are two types of phonological variation that occur frequently in Dutch. In this study, a series of picture-naming experiments investigated whether schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion are arbitrary processes or whether they are contextually driven and take place in speech-planning process. Findings are discussed in relation to speech-planning mechanism and are incorporated in a speech-production model. (Author/VWL)

When church lectors and beginning and advanced drama students read the same passage, the drama students used faster articulation, faster speech rates, and fewer pauses than church lectors. Expert and nonprofessional evaluators preferred the advanced drama students, followed by the beginning drama students and then the church lectors. (Author/RL)

Vocal activity in spontaneous speech appears to alternate between regular periods of high and low activity. These cycles may be properties of social systems, internal cognitive rhythms, or physiological rhythms that affect readiness to initiate activity. (Author/RL)

Two experiments are reported in which the presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate and fricative when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. (Author/AMH)