Some rhymes sound better than others, and some attempts at rhymes don’t seem to be rhymes at all. Our lab studies constraints on rhyming, and this experiment explores a particular one.
Bolton (1894) and Woodrow (1909) discovered some rhythmic regularities in how English speakers perceive sequences of sounds. This experiment tests one of these regularities, the so-called Iambic-Trochaic-Law.
Here are the slides from last week’s “targeted collaborative debate” at GLOW on What is deaccentuation, with Arto Anttila (Stanford University)
Wagner, Michael, Alvaro Iturralde Zurita, and Sijia Zhang (2021). Two dimensional parsing, the iambic trochaic law, and the typology of rhythm. Short Talk at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, UPenn [abstract] [slides]
Can a homophone antecedent cause deaccentuation?
It turns out yes:
Wagner, Michael (2020). Encoding a semantic contrast requires phonological contrast in English but not in French. Poster presented at the 61st Annual Conference of the Psychonomic Society on Nov 19 2020. [poster]
Just realized that my handbook article on prosodic focus, to appear in the upcoming Semantics Companion, has gone online on Nov 4 at the publisher’s website:
Wagner, Michael (2021). Prosodic focus. TheWiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. [doi]
Kilbourn-Ceron, Oriana & Matt Goldrick (2020): Oral presentation at 6:20 – 6:35pm Pacific Time on July 8 at LabPhon 17, University of British Columbia [abstract]
Wagner, Michael, Josiane Lachapelle, & Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron (2020). Liaison and production planning. Presentation in Poster session I at 12:00 – 13:30pm Pacific Time on July 6 at LabPhon 17, University of British Columbia [poster]
Link to live poster session (12:00 – 13:30pm Pacific Time on July 6): https://ca.bbcollab.com/guest/62edfe058f954ced974c038055b5aa7a
Kilbourn-Ceron, O., Clayards, M., and Wagner, M. (2020). Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through speech planning effects: A case study on coronal stop realizations. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 11(1). [doi]
Predictability has been shown to be associated with many dimensions of variation in speech, including durational variation and variable omission of segments. However, the mechanism or mechanisms that underlie these effects are still unclear. This paper presents data on a new aspect of predictability in speech, namely how it affects allophonic variation. We examine two coronal stop allophones in English, flap and glottal stop, and find that their relationship with predictability is quite different from what is expected under current theories of probabilistic reduction in speech. Flapping is more likely when the word that follows is more predictable, but is not influenced by the frequency of the word itself, while glottal stops are more likely in words that are less predictable. We propose that the crucial distinction between these two allophones is how they are conditioned by phonological context. This, we argue, interacts with online speech planning processes and gives rise to variability for context-dependent allophones. This hypothesis offers a specific, testable mechanism for certain predictability effects, and has the potential to extend to other factors that contribute to variability in speech
Martens, G., Torreira, F., and Wagner, M. (2020). Hat contour in dutch: Form and function. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020. [paper]
The hat contour is an intonation pattern which starts with a rise and ends in a fall. Although most researchers agree that it consists of a rise and fall, there is little consensus about the actual phonological form of this contour. Consequently, theories about the meaning of the hat pattern are very diverse as well. The current research attempts at gaining a better understanding of the relationship between the form and meaning of one specific hat contour in Dutch: Something we will refer to as the early-fall hat contour. We will test the hypothesis that an early fall encodes the presupposition that there are true alternatives to the asserted proposition. An online rating experiment was set up in which stimuli were manipulated for the timing of the fall (early fall vs. late fall) and the availability of alternative propositions. The results show that as predicted, an early-fall is less acceptable when all alternatives are ruled out than a late fall. Moreover, an early fall is preferred when there are true alternatives, which interprets as an effect of Maximize Presupposition. The effects are very small however, suggesting that more research is needed to understand these effects better. Index Terms: alternative propositions, hat contour, intonational meaning, maximize presupposition.
Gibson, Emma, Torreira, Francisco, and Wagner, Michael. (2020). The high-fall contour in North American English: A case study in imperatives. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020. [paper]
Imperatives are often uttered with a standard declarative falling contour. However, there are several claims that they can be pronounced with different tunes, leading to different illocutionary as well as attitudinal import. In this paper, we investigate one such tune, which we categorize as the “high-fall contour” and can be described as a nuclear high accent that is often scaled higher (or ‘upstepped’) compared to earlier accents. We show that it is used in the context of “weak” (suggestion-like) and “repeated” or “redundant” imperatives. The “weak” usage of the high-fall seems contradictory in pragmatic flavour to its use in repetitions, which usually sound like definite commands and not suggestions. We test for whether these uses may be distinguishable based on prenuclear patterns, as has been suggested in prior literature, and ultimately do not find evidence to suggest the tunes are distinct. We also observe that, surprisingly, imperative repetition leads to a lengthening of duration.
