Researchers investigating a broad array of questions in spoken language prosody routinely base their arguments on measurements taken from the F0 contours of representative speech samples. These analyses, however, frequently involve abstracting F0 contours away from the segmental strings that bear them, potentially overlooking in the process the role played by segmental qualities such as sonority or periodicity in the realization of F0 patterns by speakers and their interpretation by listeners. This paper reports the results of two experiments investigating how perception of F0 contours is affected by the segmental string over which those contours are realized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is unclear whether individuals with agrammatic aphasia have particularly disrupted prosody, or in fact have relatively preserved prosody they can use in a compensatory way. A targeted literature review was undertaken to examine the evidence regarding the capacity of speakers with agrammatic aphasia to produce prosody. The aim was to answer the question, how much prosody can a speaker "do" with limited syntax? The literature was systematically searched for articles examining the production of grammatical prosody in people with agrammatism, and yielded 16 studies that were ultimately included in this review.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Unison production is a common aphasia treatment technique in which the clinician and the person with aphasia (PWA) produce phrases aloud together. It can be implemented using a typical "conversational," syntax-influenced prosodic timing structure, or with a "metrical," beat-based timing structure, but to date no study has directly compared these two approaches. This study compared the effects of metrical versus conversational prosodic timing during unison production on the (a) accuracy of participants' spoken output and (b) timing alignment of participants' productions with the stimuli.
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June 2022
The LaMIT database consists in recordings of 100 Italian sentences. The sentences in the database were designed so to include all phonemes of the Italian language, and also take into account the typical frequency of each phoneme in written Italian. Four native adult speakers of Standard Italian, raised and living in Rome, Italy, two female and two male, pronounced the sentences in two different recording sessions; two repetitions for each sentence per speaker were therefore collected, for a total of 800 recordings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Italian lexical gemination is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. In contrast, syntactic gemination occurs across word boundaries and affects the initial consonant of a word in specific contexts, such as the presence of a monosyllabic morpheme before the word.
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