33
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Using Rapid Prosody Transcription to probe little-known prosodic systems: The case of Papuan Malay

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          This paper shows how the Rapid Prosody Transcription method (RPT, cp. Cole & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016) can be utilized when investigating the prosodic systems of a little-described language. We report the results of a set of perception experiments on the prosody of Papuan Malay, which support the claim made in earlier (production) studies that Malayic varieties appear to lack stress (i.e., lexical stress as well as post-lexical pitch accents). We show that inter-rater agreement of speakers of Papuan Malay is much lower for prosodic prominences than for boundaries when rating their native language. However, they show higher agreement when asked to rate prominences in German. Most importantly, they seem to make use of the same acoustic cues as a German control group. We therefore conclude that while Papuan Malay indeed seems to lack post-lexical pitch accents, speakers of Papuan Malay appear to be able to perceive the accentual prominences characteristic of German.

          Related collections

          Most cited references38

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            R: A language and environment for statistical computing

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains.

              In this paper it is shown that at the edges of prosodic domains, initial consonant and final vowels have more extreme (less reduced) lingual articulations, which are called articulatory strengthening. Linguopalatal contact for consonants and vowels in different prosodic positions was compared, using reiterant-speech versions of sentences with a variety of phrasings read by three speakers of American English. Four prosodic domains were considered: the phonological word, the phonological (or intermediate) phrase, the intonational phrase, and the utterance. Domain-initial consonants show more linguopalatal contact than domain-medial or domain-final consonants, at three prosodic levels. Most vowels, on the other hand, show less linguopalatal contact in domain-final syllables compared to domain-initial and domain-medial. As a result, the articulatory difference between segments is greater around a prosodic boundary, increasing the articulatory contrast between consonant and vowels, and prosodic domains are marked at both edges. Furthermore, the consonant initial strengthening is generally cumulative, i.e., the higher the prosodic domain, the more linguopalatal contact the consonant has. However, speakers differed in how many and which levels were distinguished in this way. It is suggested that this initial strengthening could provide an alternative account for previously observed supralaryngeal declination of consonants. Acoustic duration of the consonants is also affected by prosodic position, and this lengthening is cumulative like linguopalatal contact, but the two measures are only weakly correlated.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                1868-6354
                Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
                Ubiquity Press
                1868-6354
                01 July 2020
                2020
                : 11
                : 1
                : 8
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Universität zu Köln, Cologne, DE
                [2 ]ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Canberra, AU
                Article
                10.5334/labphon.192
                fef95781-4302-413e-a374-b3f267b74ff4
                Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 22 December 2018
                : 07 May 2020
                Categories
                Journal article

                Applied linguistics,General linguistics,Linguistics & Semiotics
                Papuan Malay,prosodic prominence,Rapid Prosody Transcription,German,stress

                Comments

                Comment on this article