The acoustics of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian vowels: A corpus study.

A comprehensive examination of the acoustics of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian vowels is lacking to date, and this article aims to fill that gap. Six acoustic variables-the first three formant frequencies, duration, mean f0, and mean intensity-of 11 615 vowel tokens from 140 speakers were analysed using linear mixed models, multivariate analysis of variance, and linear discriminant analysis. The vowel system, which comprises six phonemes in stressed position, [ε a ɔ i ɤ u], was examined from four angles.

The combined effects of contextual predictability and noise on the acoustic realisation of German syllables.

Speakers tend to speak clearly in noisy environments, while they tend to reserve effort by shortening word duration in predictable contexts. It is unclear how these two communicative demands are met. The current study investigates the acoustic realizations of syllables in predictable vs unpredictable contexts across different background noise levels.

Local and Global Cues in the Prosodic Realization of Broad and Narrow Focus in Bulgarian.

In this study, local and global prosodic cues for information structure are examined in the elicited production of six Bulgarian sentences. The sentences were produced in response to different questions, devised to prompt different focus realizations (broad focus and non-contrastive and contrastive narrow focus). Results show that speakers consistently differentiate broad and narrow focus by means of both local and global acoustic cues, by producing different pitch accent types on the nuclear syllable and reducing the 'phonetic strength' of the default pre-nuclear accent in the narrow focus condition.

Do rhythm measures reflect perceived rhythm?

In a production study, Bulgarian, English and German verses with regular poetic metrical metres of different types and elicited prose utterances with varied accentual patterns are produced in textual and iterative (dada) form and measured at syllable level according to the pairwise variability index (PVI) principle. Systematic differences in PVI values show that the measure is sensitive to metrical differences. But variations for utterances with the same metrical structure and comparable measures for accentually different utterances show the measure to be insensitive to the temporal distribution of accents.