Language and Speech

This study adopts a multiple-methods approach to the investigation of prosody, drawing on insights from a quantitative methodology (experimental prosody research) as well as a qualitative one (conversation analysis). We use a k-means cluster analysis to investigate prosodic patterns in conversational sequences involving lexico-semantic contrastive structures. This combined methodology demonstrates that quantitative/statistical methods are a valuable tool for making relatively objective characterizations of acoustic features of speech, while qualitative methods are essential for interpreting the quantitative results. We find that in sequences that maintain global prosodic characteristics across contrastive structures, participants orient to interactional problems, such as determining who has the right to the floor, or avoiding disruption of an ongoing interaction. On the other hand, in sequences in which the global prosody is different across contrastive structures, participants do not generally appear to be orienting to such problems of alignment. Our findings expand the interpretation of “contrastive prosody” that is commonly used in experimental prosody approaches, while providing a way for conversation-analytic research to improve quantification and generalizability of findings.

This study investigates English listeners’ use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French. Liaison creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries, but is signaled by distributional cues (/z/ is a frequent liaison but not a frequent word onset; /t/ is a frequent word onset but a less frequent liaison) and acoustic-phonetic cues (liaison consonants are 15 per cent shorter than word-initial consonants). English-speaking French learners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (expected advantage for consonant-initial words) or /z/ (expected advantage for liaison-initial words). Their results were compared to those of native French speakers. Both groups showed an advantage for consonant-initial targets with /t/ but no advantage for consonant- or liaison-initial targets with /z/. Both groups’ competitor fixations were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant, but only the learners’ fixations to liaison-initial targets were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant. This suggests that English listeners use both top-down (distributional) and bottom-up (acoustic-phonetic) cues to liaison in French. Their greater reliance on acoustic-phonetic cues is hypothesized to stem in part from English, where such cues play an important role for locating word boundaries.

Although speakers often transmit their messages clearly and concisely, their speech also includes disfluencies, including filler words. We have analyzed the kinds of filler-like words (hereafter fillers) that native Basque speakers produce and the role that these fillers have within the discourse. We recorded six Basque L1 speakers in a natural setting designed to trigger spontaneous speech. Because Basque is an agglutinative language it may offer speakers certain options for filler use that have not been observed in studies of languages that do not have such a rich agglutinative morphology (e.g. English). When speakers are close to the retrieval of a to-be-produced word, but not quite able to access it, they may use the agglutinative morphology to give the listener clues to the syntactic category of the intended word. In Basque such clues could be provided by modifying the surface form of a filler.

Our corpus includes approximately 300 filler tokens. We provide analyses of the kinds of fillers this population produces and the contexts in which these appear. Certain fillers tend to be produced before beginning large units (e.g. sentences), whereas others usually precede smaller units. One filler (/zera/) behaves differently than the others. In particular, it assumes context-based forms that offer listeners partial information about the almost-retrieved word.

Sound symbolism is the process by which speakers link phonetic features with meanings non-arbitrarily. For instance, speakers across languages associate non-words with rounded vowels, like bouba, with round shapes, and non-words without rounded vowels, like kiki, with spiky shapes. Researchers have posited that this link results from a cognitive association between sounds and visual or proprioceptive cues made in their production (e.g. sounds of rounded vowels cue the image of rounded lips, which is mapped to rounded shapes). However, non-words used in previous studies differ from one another along multiple phonetic dimensions, some showing no clear iconic mapping to shape. This study teases apart these features, finding that vowel backness, consonant voicing, and consonant place of articulation each elicit a sound symbolic effect, which is amplified when these dimensions are combined. This investigation also probes object properties that can be involved in sound symbolic association, bringing the “bouba-kiki” paradigm, typically involving the use of abstract shapes, into the realm of real-world objects. To shed light on ways that sound symbolism may operate in natural language, this study suggests that future research in this paradigm would benefit from consideration of both more detailed phonetic correlates and more refined object properties.

OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries—a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback.

Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input.

In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation.