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Item Lenition and fortition of /r/ in utterance-final position, an ultrasound tongue imaging study of lingual gesture timing in spontaneous speech(Elsevier, 2021-04-16) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Taehong ChoThe most fundamental division in English dialects is the rhotic/non-rhotic division. The mechanisms of historical /r/-loss sound change are not well understood, but studying a contemporary /r/-loss sound change in a rhotic variety of English can provide new insights. We know that /r/ weakening in contemporary Scottish English is a gesture-timing based phenomenon and that it is socially indexical, but we have no phonetic explanation for the predominance of weak /r/ variants in utterance-final position. Using a socially-stratified conversational ultrasound tongue imaging speech corpus, this study investigates the effects of boundary context, along with other linguistic and social factors such as syllable stress, following-consonant place and social class, on lingual gesture timing in /r/ and strength of rhoticity. Mixed-effects modelling identified that utterance-final context conditions greater anterior lingual gesture delay in /r/ and weaker-sounding /r/s, but only in working-class speech. Middle-class speech shows no anterior lingual gesture delay for /r/ in utterance-final position and /r/ is audibly strengthened in this position. It is unclear whether this divergence is due to variation in underlying tongue shape for /r/ in these social-class communities, or whether utterance-final position provides a key location for the performance of social class using salient variants of /r/.Item Aspects of identifying prosodic impairment(2009) Peppé, Sue JEThis paper concludes the scientific forum on Prosody in Speech-Language Pathology that comprises an introduction Crystal, 2009, a lead article Peppé, 2009 and 11 responses to the lead article. This concluding paper is in part a summary of aspects of prosody that were fleshed out in the responses to the lead article, and in part a reply to some of the points raised by contributors. The concluding paper refers to the differing approaches to the taxonomy of prosody; the more specific material on the neurological bases of prosody; the manifestation of prosodic disorder in specific language impairment and Williams Syndrome; the state of the art of prosodic intervention; and the suggestion for assessing visual prosody. More attention is given to the issues of assessment and transcription, which attracted some differences of opinion. Some general methodological issues of testing e.g., standardization, age-appropriateness, and modelling are considered, as well as the possibility of automated assessment and suggestions for testing the perception of lexical stress. Impressionistic transcription and the techniques of conversation analysis are considered for their ability to identify the role of prosody in conversation, more particularly its effectiveness in achieving successful turnchange and interaction in highly unintelligible speech. The usefulness of acoustic analysis with and without phonological transcription is discussed, as well as the goals of transcription and the purposes it serves in the characterization of atypical prosody. The paper concludes by suggesting that better specification of what constitutes typical prosody is required, and that more attention needs to be paid to rhythmical atypicality and the interaction of segmental with suprasegmental impairment.Item Perception of pitch in glottalizations of varying duration by German listeners(University of Glasgow: Glasgow, 2015-08) Bissiri, Maria Paola; Zellers, M.Previous studies have shown that glottalization is not necessarily perceived as lower pitch but that pitch perception in glottalization can be influenced by the different size of prosodic domains relevant in the native language of the listener. Speakers of intonation languages were influenced by the preceding pitch context when judging the pitch of longer creaky voice stretches, while speakers of pitch-accent or tone languages were not. The current study investigates pitch perception by German listeners in glottalized stretches of speech whose duration varied along a 10-step continuum. We found that the duration of the glottalized stretches affected the categorization of the stimuli, and that the German listeners were not influenced by the preceding pitch context, unlike in a previous study on longer stretches of glottalization of constant duration. Possibly shorter stretches of glottalization are interpreted as segmental word-boundary phenomena rather than as intonation.Item The Relationship between Form and Function Level Receptive Prosodic Abilities in Autism(Springer Science & Business Media B.V., 2008) Järvinen-Pasley, Anna; Peppé, Sue JE; King-Smth, G.; Heaton, P.Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form- and function-level prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form- and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.Item Why is prosody in speech-language pathology so difficult?(2009) Peppé, Sue JEAn important question for speech-language pathologists is how best to define and characterize atypical prosody, with the eventual aim of designing effective intervention for it. With a view to investigating why prosodic atypicality should be hard to define and what considerations a speech-language pathologist should keep in mind, this paper begins by setting out some established functions of prosody and the forms that convey them, and goes on to review the neurological bases of prosodic disorder and some of the conditions in which prosodic disorder is known to occur. Factors in the perception of prosodic disorder are discussed, including the relationship between prosody and other aspects of communication, to identify the problems of distinguishing between prosody and interacting factors. The relationship between phonological prosodic categories and disordered prosody is considered, i.e., the problems of assigning disordered prosody to these categories for clinicians. Current methods of assessment, transcription and approaches to treatment are briefly considered, and an evaluation is made of how much progress has been made towards answering the initial question.Item Effects of vowel length and right context- on the alignment of Dutch nuclear accents(Elsevier Ltd, 2006-01) Schepman, A.; Lickley, Robin; Ladd, D. RobertWe measured the alignment of f0 landmarks with segmental landmarks in nuclear pointed hat- accents in controlled speech materials in Dutch. We varied the phonological length of the stressed vowel and the right context- (syllable membership of following consonant, presence/absence of stress clash). The nuclear accented word was always followed by an unaccented content word. Based on previous work we expected that the alignment would be substantially affected by vowel length, stress clash and syllable membership, but the only important effect was that of vowel length. We believe this can be explained by the fact that most previous studies have dealt with prenuclear accents and/or with nuclear accents in utterance-final position, whereas we are dealing with nuclear accents that are not in utterance-final position. We also explored the effects of using different quantitative definitions of our dependent and independent variables, and of using Multiple Regression rather than ANOVA, and conclude that our findings are robust regardless of the variables or analysis technique used. An important methodological conclusion from our comparative analyses is that tonal alignment is best expressed relative to a nearby segmental landmark. Proportional measures may also be useful, but need further investigation.Item Polite appearances: How non-manual features convey politeness in British Sign Language(De Gruyter Mouton, 2014-07) Mapson, RachelThis paper explores how non-manual features are key to conveying linguistic politeness in British Sign Language (BSL). Data were collected through five semi-structured interviews incorporating the elicitation of two speech acts commonly associated with research on linguistic politeness: requests and apologies. The data from this exploratory study suggest that nonmanual features (including specific mouth gestures and movements of the head and upper body) are more crucial for linguistic politeness than manual signs. The data indicate a degree of commonality between the features used for politeness in BSL and those previously identified in American Sign Language (Roush 1999; Hoza 2001, 2007). While non-manual features convey both linguistic and paralinguistic meaning in signed language (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006), their use in politeness highlights the complexity of the interaction between these two functions and illuminates an aspect of politeness frequently overlooked in much research: the use of intonation. Analysis of the use of nonmanual features for politeness also problematizes the categorization of politeness strategies using existing frameworks developed on spoken languages, such as the internal modifications outlined by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989).Item Assessing prosodic skills in five European languages: Cross-linguistic differences in typical and atypical populations(2010) Peppé, Sue JE; Martinez-Castilla, P.; Coene, Martine; Hesling, Isabelle; Moen, Inger; Gibbon, FionaFollowing demand for a prosody assessment procedure, the test Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C), has been translated from English into Spanish, French, Flemish and Norwegian. This provides scope to examine receptive and expressive prosodic ability in Romance (Spanish and French) as well as Germanic (English and Flemish) languages, and includes the possibility of assessing these skills with regard to lexical tone (Norwegian). Cross-linguistic similarities and differences relevant to the translation are considered. Preliminary findings concerning 8-year-old neurotypical children speaking the five languages are reported. The appropriateness of investigating contrastive stress in Romance as well as Germanic languages is considered: results are reported for assessing this skill in Spanish and English speakers and suggest that in Spanish it is acquired much later than in English. We also examine the feasibility of assessing and comparing prosodic disorder in the five languages, using assessments of prosody in Spanish and English speakers with Williams syndrome as an example. We conclude that, with caveats, the original design of the UK test may indicate comparable stages of prosodic development in neurotypical children and is appropriate for the evaluation of prosodic skills for adults and children, both neurotypical and with impairment, in all five languages. 2009 The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited.