Prosodic boundaries in the vicinity of utterance-medial parentheticals in French

Zsuzsanna Fagyal

doi:10.1515/prbs.2002.007

Focus Attracts Attachment

Language and Speech ◽

10.1177/00238309211033321 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002383092110333

Author(s):

Katy Carlson ◽

David Potter

Keyword(s):

Information Structure ◽

Focus Position ◽

Auditory Comprehension ◽

Perceptual Salience ◽

Wh Questions ◽

Prosodic Boundaries ◽

Sentence Interpretation ◽

Pitch Accents

There is growing evidence that pitch accents as well as prosodic boundaries can affect syntactic attachment. But is this an effect of their perceptual salience (the Salience Hypothesis), or is it because accents mark the position of focus (the Focus Attraction Hypothesis)? A pair of auditory comprehension experiments shows that focus position, as indicated by preceding wh-questions instead of by pitch accents, affects attachment by drawing the ambiguous phrase to the focus. This supports the Focus Attraction Hypothesis (or a pragmatic version of salience) for both these results and previous results of accents on attachment. These experiments show that information structure, as indicated with prosody or other means, influences sentence interpretation, and suggests a view on which modifiers are drawn to the most important information in a sentence.

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Reading Fluency in Children and Adolescents Who Stutter

Brain Sciences ◽

10.3390/brainsci11121595 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (12) ◽

pp. 1595

Author(s):

Mona Franke ◽

Philip Hoole ◽

Ramona Schreier ◽

Simone Falk

Keyword(s):

Children And Adolescents ◽

Reading Fluency ◽

Developmental Stages ◽

Matched Control ◽

Control Group ◽

Articulation Rate ◽

Prosodic Phrasing ◽

Age Related ◽

Prosodic Boundaries ◽

Decoding Ability

Speech fluency is a major challenge for young persons who stutter. Reading aloud, in particular, puts high demands on fluency, not only regarding online text decoding and articulation, but also in terms of prosodic performance. A written text has to be segmented into a number of prosodic phrases with appropriate breaks. The present study examines to what extent reading fluency (decoding ability, articulation rate, and prosodic phrasing) may be altered in children (9–12 years) and adolescents (13–17 years) who stutter compared to matched control participants. Read speech of 52 children and adolescents who do and do not stutter was analyzed. Children and adolescents who stutter did not differ from their matched control groups regarding reading accuracy and articulation rate. However, children who stutter produced shorter pauses than their matched peers. Results on prosodic phrasing showed that children who stutter produced more major phrases than the control group and more intermediate phrases than adolescents who stutter. Participants who stutter also displayed a higher number of breath pauses. Generally, the number of disfluencies during reading was related to slower articulation rates and more prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, we found age-related changes in general measures of reading fluency (decoding ability and articulation rate), as well as the overall strength of prosodic boundaries and number of breath pauses. This study provides evidence for developmental stages in prosodic phrasing as well as for alterations in reading fluency in children who stutter.

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Phonetic variation in the Korean liquid phoneme

Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America ◽

10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5002 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 701

Author(s):

Drew Crosby ◽

Amanda Dalola

Keyword(s):

Phonetic Variation ◽

Wide Range ◽

Complex Picture ◽

Prosodic Boundaries

Most discussions of the Korean liquid phoneme /l/ identify two allophones: a flap, [ɾ], in the onset of syllables, and an alveolar lateral approximant syllable-finally and in geminates. However, some research paints a more complex picture indicating a wide range of interspeaker variation for the precise articulatory realization of these allophones. The present research finds that in regards to the tap and laterals realizations previous descriptions are largely correct. It also affirms through analysis of F2 values that previous findings showing that the Korean lateral is palatalized before high front vocoids are correct. Most importantly, it analyzes F3 values to show that the retroflex variant is particularly prevalent near pauses, suggesting that retroflexion may be a secondary cue to prosodic boundaries.

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