This paper deals with intonation of spontaneous Russian. It contains a description of the principles of prosodic annotation used in the new corpus of spontaneous speech—CoRuSS, and statistical data derived from this corpus. The prosodic annotation system was developed specially for the purpose; it is an extension and development of a well-known system of Intonation Constructions by E. A. Bryzgu...

This study focuses on how French heterosyllabic sibilant clusters are produced by one French native speaker and by three Italian learners of French-L2. In French, these clusters are frequent and are reported to show place assimilation; in Italian, on the contrary, they are very rare and speakers are expected to repair the phonotactically marked sequences by epenthesizing a schwa. In the current...

Within and across languages the realization of consonant voicing is highly variable. This study aims to identify, and quantify, the segmental, prosodic and positional factors that have an influence on consonant voicing. A widely used acoustic measure of voicing, viz. voice onset time, is known to have disadvantages both in a cross-linguistic framework, where it fails to provide sufficient Infor...

Prosodic influences on phonetic realizations of four Dutch consonants (/t d s z/) were examined. Sentences were constructed containing these consonants in word-initial position; the factors lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundary were manipulated between sentences. Eleven Dutch speakers read these sentences aloud. The patterns found in acoustic measurements of these utterances (e.g...

This paper explores the prosodic realization of single affirmative cue words functioning as backchannels in cooperative task-oriented dialogues. It focuses on the comparison between four major lexical items signaling this meaning (mhm, no, uhhuh, áno) and compares the results with the realization of backchannels in a similar corpus of American English. Additionally, the entrainment properties o...

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and amplitude measures of syllable rhymes were used to as...

This study examines the acquisition process of L2 Japanese intonation by Swedish learners at intermediate and advanced levels. Regarding the realization of L2 intonation as ‘interlanguage’, it focuses on the acquisition process of various parameters and their phonetic realizations that are relevant in determining Japanese intonation. The parameters can be phonological, syntactic, and discourse ...

Attitudinal information in a spoken utterance can be lexically encoded; it can also be conveyed by intonation, including modification of voice quality. This study aims to investigate how speaker attitude affects the realization of glottalized tones in Vietnamese. A specific recording setup was designed; a corpus containing attitudinal sentencefinal particles (SFPs) was recorded by ten speakers....

This paper provides an OT account for the realization of informational focus in Mandarin Chinese. The analysis is based on the conclusion drawn in my dissertation (Li 2009) that informational focus in Mandarin is realized in-situ with prosodic prominence (sentential stress), but no part is in particular prosodically more prominent if the entire sentence is the focus or when the sentence-final e...

This study examines the acoustic realization of two complementary sets of vowels in Shanghai Chinese: One appearing in open syllables only (OSVs) and the other in closed syllables with a glottal coda (PGVs). Two factors consonant onset and prominence level were controlled to test the null hypothesis that PGVs are reduced realization of the OSVs due to their short duration. Results showed spectr...