Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba
Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba
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揭示 Medʉmba 中短语突出性的音调和时间相关性
DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Kathryn Franich
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kathryn Franich
描述非洲声调语言中的韵律突出关系是出了名的困难，因为突出的典型声学线索（F0 的变化、强度的增加等）可能很难与那些标记音调对比的线索区分开来。声调是跨语言的音节突出和韵律边界的重要线索，在非洲语言中发挥着多种作用：声调通常表示词汇对比，本身可以是语素，也可以以关键方式与韵律相互作用，这一事实使建立突出性的任务变得更加复杂。本研究建立在对 Medʉmba（一种草地班图语）声调模式的语音概括的基础上，并使用语音循环范式来研究短语级显着性变化的音节的相对时间。具体来说，我们研究了假设出现在语音短语边缘的音节之间的时间不对称性，这些音节带有高的短语重音，而那些位于短语中间位置的音节则不带有高重音。结果表明，重音音节与非重音音节的时间排列存在显着差异，重音音节的出现位置明显更接近先前语音循环研究中确立的突出吸引位置。我们表明这些发现不能仅仅归因于语气的差异。研究结果证明了相对时间对齐作为韵律突出性的相关性的重要性。研究结果还指出，持续时间的增加是一种语音属性，可以区分具有短语突出性的音节和不具有短语突出性的音节。
Characterizing prosodic prominence relations in African tone languages is notoriously difficult, as typical acoustic cues to prominence (changes in F0, increases in intensity, etc.) can be difficult to distinguish from those which mark tonal contrasts. The task of establishing prominence is further complicated by the fact that tone, an important cue to syllable prominence and prosodic boundaries cross-linguistically, plays many roles in African languages: tones often signal lexical contrasts, can themselves be morphemes, and can also interact in key ways with prosody. The present study builds on phonological generalizations about tonal patterns in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language, and uses the speech cycling paradigm to investigate relative timing of syllables varying in phrase-level prominence. Specifically, we investigate timing asymmetries between syllables hypothesized to occur at the edge of a phonological phrase, which carry a high phrase accent, and those in phrase-medial position, which do not. Results indicate significant differences in the temporal alignment of accented versus non-accented syllables, with accented syllables occurring significantly closer to positions established as prominence-attracting in previous speech cycling research. We show that these findings cannot be attributed to differences in tone alone. Findings demonstrate the importance of relative temporal alignment as a correlate of prosodic prominence. Findings also point to increased duration as a phonetic property which distinguishes between syllables bearing phrasal prominence from those which do not.