Francesco Burroni and Simone Harmath de Lemos presented a paper titled "A unified account for morphologically governed stress systems in Romance" at the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50), held virtually July 1-3 and July 6-8, 2020

Paper Abstract:

A still debated question in Romance phonology is whether the stress systems of Romance varieties are weight-sensitive. Italian and Brazilian Portuguese are two well-known examples of varieties where both weight-sensitive and weight-insensitive analyses have been put forth in the literature.

In this paper, we show that the assumptions required by weight-sensitive analyses of these languages do not with-stand closer scrutiny and that their empirical coverage is limited. Accordingly, capitalizing on a feature that was already present in some weight-sensitive analyses– underlying accents –, we present a new account based on lexical accents tied to morphemes.

We show that this analysis has both well-motivated assumptions and wider empirical coverage. Further, we show that an analysis of Italian and Brazil-an Portuguese as morphological lexical-accent systems can readily be extended to other Romance varieties as well, in a hitherto unexplored (quasi-)pan-Romance perspective.

Given these shared similarities across Romance varieties, we theorize that a morphological accent system arose in Proto-Romance after the dissolution of the weight-sensitive system of Latin. We then return to our key assumption, the categorical presence/absence of lexical accent on morphemes, and we show that it is supported experimentally by the results of a pilot nonce-word stress assignment study in Italian.

We conclude by sketching out two possible models of the lexical accent systems, one couched in Optimality Theory and one couched in a connectionist model of stress assignment.

Seung-Eun Kim and Dr. Sam Tilsen  presented a paper titled "Speech rate and syntactically conditioned influences on prosodic boundaries" at the 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody, held virtually May 25-28, 2020.

Paper Abstract: 

Previous studies of the interaction between syntactic structure and prosodic organization have not resolved whether there is articulatory and acoustic evidence for categories of prosodic boundaries or phrase types. One of the major problems in interpreting past studies is that the effects of speech rate have not been thoroughly examined.

In the current study, we used a visual analogue cue to elicit continuous variation in speech rate for the production of two types of relative clauses. We hypothesized that if syntactic structure is mapped to categorical differences in prosodic organization, then measures of articulator kinematics and acoustic durations at phrase boundaries should differ or should scale differently with rate.

Articulographic and acoustic data were collected from four English speakers. Analyses of gestural timing and movement range revealed strong differences in the effects of rate at boundaries before vs. after the relative clauses. Interaction effects between relative clause type and rate were found for some speakers. For acoustic measurements, both effects of boundary and relative clause type were observed.

These findings are important because they show that articulatory kinematic and acoustic variables are more sensitive to rate variation at some phrasal boundaries than others.

Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled "Phonetic cues of narrow focus are mediated by phonemic contrast in Nepali"  at Berkeley Linguistics Society Workshop (BLSW) 2020, held Feb 7-8, 2020 

Paper Abstract:

Phonetic studies of a broad range of languages have observed strengthening of segmental articulations in prosodically prominent positions (e.g., nuclear stress, narrow focus)[1][2][3][4][5]. Such "localized hyperarticulation" can enhance segments along different dimensions, however, not all properties or dimensions are affected equally[1][2][5]. This paper examines hyperarticulatory effects of narrow focus on the four-way laryngeal contrast (+/-voice, +/-SG) of Nepali stops as a case study, in order to address the broader question of to what extent the dimensions privileged by the gradient manifestations of hyperarticulation interact with the phonological system of contrasts.

Specifically, I investigate narrow focus[6] effects on two properties of Nepali aspirated stops: degree of closure and aspiration, corresponding to their [-cont] and [+SG] features respectively. Both are claimed to exhibit substantial lenition, with frequent spirantization and deaspiration in intervocalic or foot medial positions[7][8]. Crucially, variations along these two dimensions have different implications for the phonemic stop contrasts: deaspiration of aspirated stops results in the loss of contrast with unaspirated stops, while spirantization does not affect contrasts, since there are no phonemic fricatives at the same places of articulation as the oral stops.

I show that narrow focus has an anti-lenition effect on aspiration, but not on closure degree, in intervocalic position. This in turn suggests an interaction between phonetic focus cues and the system of phonemic contrasts, with hyperarticulation serving as a mechanism of contrast maintenance.

Method.

Four native Nepali speakers were recorded producing 32 real disyllabic words with dental stops /t, tʰ, d, dɦ/ in either word-initial or intervocalic position (e.g., tʰali, kətʰa, dɦatu, gədɦa); all are assumed to have initial stress[7]. The stimuli were embedded in two types of question-answer dialogues, with the target in the answer either bearing narrow focus, or in a backgrounded position preceding a verb that bears contrastive focus.

The stops were measured for prevocalic interval duration (PVI), comparable to VOT, previously used in languages with voiced aspirated stops[9]. The analysis focuses on the manifestation of /tʰ/ and /dɦ/, using /t/ and /d/ as reference points. Phonemically aspirated stops with PVIs within two standard deviations of the mean PVI of their unaspirated counterparts were coded as categorically deaspirated; ones with substantial noise before the release were coded as spirantized. Since hyperarticulation is taken here to include resistance to lenition, more consistent aspiration and an increase in overall PVI distribution constitute relative strength of the [+SG] feature; lack of spirantization constitutes relative strength of the [-cont] feature.

Results.

The results for the non-focus condition show lenition of both aspiration and stop closure intervocalically. Deaspiration occurred in 37.8% of the medial /dɦ/ tokens; spirantization occurred in 25% of medial /dɦ/ and 6.7% of medial /tʰ/ tokens. Under narrow focus, no stops deaspirated, and the overall PVI distributions for medial /tʰ/ and /dɦ/ increased significantly from the non-focus condition (p < 0.005). The rate of medial spirantization, on the other hand, did not change significantly under narrow focus (confirmed by logistic regression analysis). Spirantization never occurred in initial position and no effect of focus was observed on aspiration of initial stops.

Conclusion.

These findings demonstrate that narrow focus enhances the realization of the [+SG] feature but not the [-cont] feature of aspirated stops in Nepali. This is consistent with work on localized hyperarticulation in other languages showing that not all features are uniformly affected. Moreover, in Nepali, this strengthening only occurs in medial position, where lenition and contrast reduction occur in the absence of narrow focus. I thus propose that focus hyperarticulation in this case is primarily manifested as an anti-lenition or contrast maintenance effect. Finally, it can be seen that although phonetic strengthening is gradient in nature, it nevertheless interacts with the phonological system of contrasts resulting in enhancement of categorically contrastive features.

References

[1] de Jong, K. (1995). The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: Linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, pp. 491–504.

[2] Cho, T. (2005). Prosodic strengthening and featural enhancement: Evidence from acoustic and articulatory realizations of /a, i/ in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 177(6), pp. 3867-3878.

[3] Avesani, C., C. Zmarich, and M. Vayra (2007). “On the articulatory bases of prominence in Italian.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 981-984.

[4] Cole, J., H. Kim, H. Choi, and M. Hasegawa-Johnson (2007). “Prosodic effects on acoustic cues to stop voicing and place of articulation: Evidence from Radio News speech.” Journal of Phonetics 35, pp. 180-209.

[5] Mücke, D. and M. Grice (2014). “The effect of focus marking on supralaryngeal articulation – Is it mediated by accentuation.” Journal of Phonetics, 44, pp. 47-61.

[6] Ladd, D. R. (1980). The structure of intonational meaning: Evidence from English. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[7] Acharya, J. (1990). A Descriptive Grammar of Nepali and an Analyzed Corpus. PhD thesis. Georgetown University.

[8] Khatiwada, R. (2009). “Nepali.” JIPA, 39(3), pp. 373–380. [9] Schwarz, M., M. Sonderegger, and H. Goad (2019). “Realization and representation of Nepali laryngeal contrasts: Voiced aspirates and laryngeal realism.” In Journal of Phonetics, 73, pp. 113-127.

Forrest Davis and Dr. Abby Cohn presented a poster titled "Categorical and gradient dimensions of stress in English compounds"  at the 2020 Workshop of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLSW 2020), held Feb 7-8, 2020

Poster Abstract: 

We present an experiment investigating stress assignment in English compounds from the Boston University Radio News Corpus (Ostendorf et. al, 1995) as part of a larger project on the representation of compounds. The present work explores the relationship between phonological reduction in naturalistic speech and the perception of stress in compounds, concluding that gradient reduction has categorical reflexes in stress perception.