Individual variability in the use of tonal and non-tonal cues in intonationa).

Greek uses H*, L + H*, and H* + L, all followed by L-L% edge tones, as nuclear pitch accents in statements. A previous analysis demonstrated that these accents are distinguished by F0 scaling and contour shape. This study expands the earlier investigation by exploring additional cues, namely, voice quality, amplitude, and duration, in distinguishing the pitch accents, and investigating individual variability in the selection of both F0 and non-F0 cues.

Lexical stress representation in spoken word recognition.

According to a popular model of speech production, stress is underspecified in the lexicon, that is, it is specified only for words with stress patterns other than the default, termed the "default metrics" assumption. Alternatively, stress may be fully specified in the lexicon as part of every lexical representation. In the current study the two accounts are tested in the perceptual domain using behavioral and eye-tracking data in Greek.

Comparing acoustic analyses of speech data collected remotely.

Face-to-face speech data collection has been next to impossible globally as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions. To address this problem, simultaneous recordings of three repetitions of the cardinal vowels were made using a Zoom H6 Handy Recorder with an external microphone (henceforth, H6) and compared with two alternatives accessible to potential participants at home: the Zoom meeting application (henceforth, Zoom) and two lossless mobile phone applications (Awesome Voice Recorder, and Recorder; henceforth, Phone). F0 was tracked accurately by all of the devices; however, for formant analysis (F1, F2, F3), Phone performed better than Zoom, i.

The Intonation and Pragmatics of Greek wh-Questions.

We experimentally tested three hypotheses regarding the pragmatics of two tunes (one high-ending, one flat-ending) used with Greek wh-questions: (a) the high-ending tune is associated with information-seeking questions, while the flat-ending tune is appropriate when wh-questions are not information-seeking, in which case their function can instead be akin to that of a statement; (b) the high-ending tune is more polite, and (c) more appropriate for contexts leading to information-seeking questions. The wh-questions used as experimental stimuli were elicited from four speakers in contexts likely to lead to either information-seeking or non-information-seeking uses. The speakers produced distinct tunes in response to the contexts; acoustic analysis indicates these are best analysed as L*+H L-!H% (rising), and L+H* L-L% (flat).

Effects of rhythm and phrase-final lengthening on word-spotting in Korean.

A word-spotting experiment was conducted to investigate whether rhythmic consistency and phrase-final lengthening facilitate performance in Korean. Listeners had to spot disyllabic and trisyllabic words in nonsense strings organized in phrases with either the same or variable syllable count; phrase-final lengthening was absent, or occurring either in all phrases or only in the phrase immediately preceding the target. The results show that, for disyllabic targets, inconsistent syllable count and lengthening before the target led to fewer errors.

The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies.

Two calling melodies of Polish were investigated, the routine call, used to call someone for an everyday reason, and the urgent call, which conveys disapproval of the addressee's actions. A Discourse Completion Task was used to elicit the two melodies from Polish speakers using twelve names from one to four syllables long; there were three names per syllable count, and speakers produced three tokens of each name with each melody. The results, based on eleven speakers, show that the routine calling melody consists of a low F0 stretch followed by a rise-fall-rise; the urgent calling melody, on the other hand, is a simple rise-fall.

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

This study addresses the lexical representation of stress in a series of 5 intramodal and cross-modal priming experiments in the Greek language using lexical decision tasks with auditory and visual targets. Three-syllable primes and targets were matched in first syllable segments, length, and other variables, and differed segmentally in the second and third syllable. Primes matched or mismatched targets in stress, which was placed on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable.

Speech rhythm analysis with decomposition of the amplitude envelope: characterizing rhythmic patterns within and across languages.

This study presents a method for analyzing speech rhythm using empirical mode decomposition of the speech amplitude envelope, which allows for extraction and quantification of syllabic- and supra-syllabic time-scale components of the envelope. The method of empirical mode decomposition of a vocalic energy amplitude envelope is illustrated in detail, and several types of rhythm metrics derived from this method are presented. Spontaneous speech extracted from the Buckeye Corpus is used to assess the effect of utterance length on metrics, and it is shown how metrics representing variability in the supra-syllabic time-scale components of the envelope can be used to identify stretches of speech with targeted rhythmic characteristics.

Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm.

This article reviews the evidence for rhythmic categorization that has emerged on the basis of rhythm metrics, and argues that the metrics are unreliable predictors of rhythm which provide no more than a crude measure of timing. It is further argued that timing is distinct from rhythm and that equating them has led to circularity and a psychologically questionable conceptualization of rhythm in speech. It is thus proposed that research on rhythm be based on the same principles for all languages, something that does not apply to the widely accepted division of languages into stress- and syllable-timed.

Tonal association and tonal alignment: evidence from Greek polar questions and contrastive statements.

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be used by native speakers under experimental conditions to identify the two contour types. It is further shown here that the observed differences in alignment are best attributed to differences in the overall tonal composition of these contours, which results in different degrees of crowding for the targets involved.