Week 6. Prosody

1
Week 6. Prosody

• Phones, phonemes are segments
• Problem of segments not enough for
  representation of speech sounds
• The same segmental string can have more than one
  meaning
• eg. y?s can have at least six meanings
• Thus, we need something else
• -gt suprasegmentals (prosody)

2
(cntd.)

• Speech communication is done via
• segmentals
• phonemes, phones
• suprasegmentals (prosody)
• pitch, loudness, length
• necessary for speech communication
• independent of segmental features (vowels and
  consonants)

3
Prosodic features

• Stress
• Pitch accent (sentence stress)
• Intonation
• Tone
• Duration

4
Prosodic units

• Prosodic units units at which prosodic features
  are realized.
• Hierarchy of prosodic units
• Utterance
• Intonational phrase
• phonological phrase
• prosodic word
• syllable
• The basic unit syllable

5
The syllable

• Definition
• There is no agreed definition of a syllable
• Sonority is sometimes used for definition
• sonority loudness of a sound relative to that of
  other sounds with the same length, stress, pitch
• hierarchy low V gt high V gt liquid gt nasal gt
  voiced fricative gt voiceless fricative gt voiced
  stopgt voiceless stop
• Other ways
• relative prominence
• chest pulse theory
• abstract unit

6
The syllable (cntd.)

• Summary
• a syllable is the smallest possible unit of
  speech communication every utterance must
  contain at least one syllable

7
The structure of a syllable

• nucleus obligatory
• onset, coda optional
• syllable
• ??
• (onset) nucleus (coda)

8
syllable (cntd.)

• Sometimes rhyme (rime) is introduced
• syllable
• ??
• (onset) rime
• ??
• nucleus (coda)

9
Syllabification

• The problem of how to divide a word into
  syllables
• eg) happy h? p? or h?p ?
• Kahn(1976) introduced a general method
• onset first association
• ambisyllabicity
• Thus p of h?p? belongs to both syllables ?
  ambisyllabic segment

10
Syllable structure of English and Korean

• English CCCVCCCC
• Korean
• CVCC (Phonological)
• CVC (Phonetic)
• The difference between two languages causes
  incorrect pronunciation
• Syllable structure constraints

11
Stress-timing vs. syllable-timing

• Prosody characterizes types of language
• syllable-timed language
• duration between syllables are considered the
  same
• Korean, Japanese, Italian
• stress-timed language
• duration between stresses are considered the same
• English, German