In this paper it is shown that at the edges of prosodic domains, initial consonant and final vowels have more extreme (less reduced) lingual articulations, which are called articulatory strengthening. Linguopalatal contact for consonants and vowels in different prosodic positions was compared, using reiterant-speech versions of sentences with a variety of phrasings read by three speakers of American English. Four prosodic domains were considered: the phonological word, the phonological (or intermediate) phrase, the intonational phrase, and the utterance. Domain-initial consonants show more linguopalatal contact than domain-medial or domain-final consonants, at three prosodic levels. Most vowels, on the other hand, show less linguopalatal contact in domain-final syllables compared to domain-initial and domain-medial. As a result, the articulatory difference between segments is greater around a prosodic boundary, increasing the articulatory contrast between consonant and vowels, and prosodic domains are marked at both edges. Furthermore, the consonant initial strengthening is generally cumulative, i.e., the higher the prosodic domain, the more linguopalatal contact the consonant has. However, speakers differed in how many and which levels were distinguished in this way. It is suggested that this initial strengthening could provide an alternative account for previously observed supralaryngeal declination of consonants. Acoustic duration of the consonants is also affected by prosodic position, and this lengthening is cumulative like linguopalatal contact, but the two measures are only weakly correlated.
REFERENCES
1.
Abacus Concepts (1992). StatView (Abacus Concepts, Inc., Berkeley, CA).
2.
Beckman, M., and Edwards, J. (1994). “Articulatory evidence for differentiating stress categories,” in Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology III, edited by P. A. Keating (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England), Chap. 2, pp. 7–33.
3.
Beckman, M., Edwards, J., and Fletcher, J. (1992). “Prosodic structure and tempo in a sonority model of articulatory dynamics,” in Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody, edited by G. Docherty and D. R. Ladd (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England), pp. 68–86.
4.
Beckman, M., and Pierrehumbert, J. (1986). “Intonational structure in English and Japanese,” Phonology (Yearbook) 3, 255–310.
5.
Browman, C., and Goldstein, L. (1992). “Articulatory phonology: an overview,” Phonetica 49, 155–180.
6.
Byrd, D. (1996). “Influences on articulatory timing in consonant sequences,” J. Phon. 24, 209–244.
7.
Byrd, D. M. (1994). “Articulatory timing in English consonant sequences,” Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, distributed as UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 86, 1–196.
8.
Byrd
, D.
, Flemming
, E.
, Mueller
, C. A.
, and Tan
, C. C.
(1995
). “Using regions and indices in EPG data reduction,”
J. Speech Hear. Res.
38
, 821
–827
.9.
Byrd, D., Narayanan, S., Kaun, A., and Saltzman, E. (1997). “Phrasal signatures in articulation,” to appear in Proceedings of Laboratory Phonology V (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England).
10.
Cole
, R.
, Jakimik
, J.
, and Cooper
, W.
(1978
). “Perceptibility of phonetic features in fluent speech
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
64
, 44
–56
.11.
Cooper, A. (1991). “Laryngeal and oral gestures in English /p,t,k/,” Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2, University of Provence (Aix-en-Provence, France), pp. 50–53.
12.
de Jong
, K.
(1995
). “The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: Linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
97
, 491
–504
.13.
Dilley, L., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., and Ostendorf, M. (1996). “Glottalization of word-initial vowels as a function of prosodic structure,” J. Phonetics 24, 423–444.
14.
Farnetani, E., and Vayra, M. (1996). “The role of prosody in the shaping of articulation in Italian CV syllables,” in Proceedings of the 1st ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Production Modeling and 4th Speech Production Seminar, Autrans, France, edited by P. Perrier, F. Bustarret, and R. Laboissière (Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France).
15.
Fougeron, C., and Keating, P. (1996). “Variations in velic and lingual articulation depending on prosodic position: Results for two French speakers,” UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 92, 88–96 (Also available electronically in the European Student Journal of Language and Speech at http://web-sls.essex.ac.uk/web-sls/).
16.
Fowler, C. A., and Saltzman, E. (1993). “Coordination and coarticulation in speech production,” Lang. Speech 36, 171–195.
17.
Fromkin, V. (1965). “Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation,” UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 3, 1–184.
18.
Fujimura, O. (1990a). “Methods and goals of speech production research,” Lang. Speech 33, 195–258.
19.
Fujimura, O. (1990b). “Articulatory perspectives of speech organization,” in Speech Production and Speech Modelling, edited by W. J. Hardcastle and A. Marchal (Kluwer, Dordrecht), pp. 323–342.
20.
Gelfer, C. E., Harris, K. S., and Baer, T. (1987). “Controlled variables in sentence intonation,” in Laryngeal Function in Phonation and Respiration, edited by T. Baer, C. Sasaki, and K. S. Harris (Little, Brown, Boston, MA), pp. 422–435.
21.
Hawkins, J., and Cutler, A. (1988). “Psycholinguistic factors in morphological asymmetry,” in Explaining Language Universals, edited by J. Hawkins (Blackwells, Oxford), pp. 281–317.
22.
Hinton, V. A. (1996). “Interlabial pressure during production of bilabial phones,” J. Phonetics 24, 337–349.
23.
Hock, H. H. (1992). “Initial strengthening,” in Phonologica 1988, edited by W. U. Dressler et al. (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England), pp. 101–110.
24.
Jun, S. (1993). “The phonetics and phonology of Korean prosody,” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University.
25.
Keating, P. A. (1995). “Effect of prosodic position on /t,d/ tongue/palate contact,” poster presented at the XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, 1995 (unpublished).
26.
Keating, P. A., Lindblom, B., Lubker, J., and Kreiman, J. (1994). “Variability in jaw height for segments in English and Swedish VCVs,” J. Phonetics 22, 407–422.
27.
Klatt, D. H. (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in a connected discourse,” J. Phonetics 3, 129–140.
28.
Krakow, R. A. (1989). “The Articulatory Organization of Syllables: A kinematic analysis of labial and velic gestures,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.
29.
Krakow, R. A., Bell-Berti, F., and Wang, Q. E. (1994). “Supralaryngeal declination: evidence from the velum,” in Producing Speech: A Festschrift for Katherine Safford Harris, edited by F. Bell-Berti and L. Raphael (AIP, Woodbury, NY), Chap. 23, pp. 333–353.
30.
Ladd, D. R. (1984). “Declination: A review and some hypotheses,” Phonology (Yearbook) 1, 53–74.
31.
Ladefoged, P. (1967). Three Areas of Experimental Phonetics (Oxford U.P., London).
32.
Larkey
, L.
(1983
). “Reiterant speech: An acoustic and perceptual validation
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
73
, 1337
–1345
.33.
Lindblom
, B.
(1963
). “Spectrographic study of vowel reduction
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
35
, 1773
–1781
.34.
Löfqvist, A. (1996). Personal communication.
35.
Maeda, S. (1976). “A characterization of American English Intonation,” Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
36.
Moon
, S. J.
, and Lindblom
, B.
(1994
). “Interaction between duration, context, and speaking style in English stressed vowels
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
96
, 40
–55
.37.
Öhman, S. (1967). “Word and sentence intonation: a quantitative model,” STLQ Progr. Status Rep. Stockholm 2/3, 20–54.
38.
Oller
, D. K.
(1973
). “The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
54
, 1235
–1247
.39.
Pierrehumbert, J., and Beckman, M. (1988). Japanese Tone Structure (MIT, Cambridge, MA).
40.
Pierrehumbert, J., and Talkin, D. (1992). “Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop,” in Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody, edited by G. Docherty and D. R. Ladd (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England), Chap. 4, pp. 90–117.
41.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., and Turk, A. (1996). “A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing,” J. Psycholinguistic Res. 25(2), 193–247.
42.
Silverman, K., Beckman, M., Pitrelli, J., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C., Price, P., Pierrehumbert, J., and Hirschberg, J. (1992). “TOBI: A Standard for Labeling English Prosody,” 1992 International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, edited by J. J. Ohala, T. M. Nearey, B. L. Derwing, M. M. Hodge, and G. E. Wiebe (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada), Vol. 2, pp. 867–870.
43.
Sluijter
, A. M. C.
, van Heuven
, V. J.
, and Pacilly
, J. J. A.
(1997
). “Spectral balance as a cue in the perception of linguistic stress
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
101
, 503
–513
.44.
Straka, G. (1963). “La division des sons du langage en voyelles et consonnes: peut-elle être justifiée?” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature, Centre de Philologie et de Littératures Romanes de l’Université de Strasbourg, Vol. I, pp. 17–99.
45.
’t Hart, J., Collier, R., and Cohen, A. (1990). A Perceptual Study of Intonation: An Experimental-Phonetic Approach to Speech Melody, Cambridge Studies in Speech Science and Communication (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, England), Chap. 5, pp. 121–150.
46.
Thorsen
, N.
(1985
). “Intonation and text in Standard Danish
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
77
, 1205
–1216
.47.
Vaissière, J. (1986). “Comment on Abbs’s Paper,” in Invariance and Variability in Speech Processes, edited by J. S. Perkell and D. H. Klatt (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ), pp. 220–222.
48.
Vaissière, J. (1988). “Prediction of velum movement from phonological specifications,” Phonetica 45, 122–139.
49.
van Lieshout
, P. H.
, Starkweather
, C. W.
, Hulstijn
, W.
, and Peters
, H. F. M.
(1995
). “Effects of linguistic correlates of stuttering on emg activity in nonstuttering speakers
,” J. Speech Hear. Res.
38
, 360
–372
.50.
Vayra, M., and Fowler, C. (1992). “Declination of supralaryngeal gestures in spoken Italian,” Phonetica 49, 48–60.
51.
Wightman
, C. W.
, Shattuck-Hufnagel
, S.
, Ostendorf
, M.
, and Price
, P. J.
(1992
). “Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
92
, 1707
–17
.
This content is only available via PDF.
© 1997 Acoustical Society of America.
1997
Acoustical Society of America
You do not currently have access to this content.
