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Phonology and intonation
(2007)
The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind.
Phonology and intonation
(2007)
The encoding standards for phonology and intonation are designed to facilitate consistent annotation of the phonological and intonational aspects of information structure, in languages across a range of prosodic types. The guidelines are designed with the aim that a nonspecialist in phonology can both implement and interpret the resulting annotation.
F2 slope as a Perceptual Cue for the Front-Back Contrast in Standard Southern British English
(2017)
Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [i.]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [u.]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /u./ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /i.// u./ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /i./ from /u./by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /i./if it has a rising F2 slope and as /u./if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /epsilon/-/./and /ae/-/./, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+ front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].