| 1. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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Multimodal levels of prominence : a preliminary analysis of head and eyebrow movements in Swedish news broadcasts
- 2015
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Ingår i: Proceedings from Fonetik 2015 : Lund, June 8-10, 2015. Working Papers 55. 2015. - Lund, June 8-10, 2015. Working Papers 55. 2015.. - Lund : Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. - 0280-526X. ; 55, s. 11-16, s. 11-16
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents a first analysis of the distribution of head and eyebrow movements as a function of (a) phonological prominence levels (focal, non-focal) and (b) word accent (Accent 1, Accent 2) in Swedish news broadcasts. Our corpus consists of 31 brief news readings, comprising speech from four speakers and 986 words in total. A head movement was annotated for 229 (23.2%) of the words, while eyebrow movements occurred much more sparsely (67 cases or 6.8%). Results of χ2-tests revealed a dependency of the distribution of movements on the one hand and focal accents on the other, while no systematic effect of the word accent type was found. However, there was an effect of the word accent type on the annotation of ‘double’ head movements. These occurred very sparsely, and predominantly in connection with focally accented compounds (Accent 2), which are characterized by two lexical stresses. Overall, our results suggests that head beats might have a closer association with phonological prosodic structure, while eyebrow movements might be more restricted to higher-level prominence and information-structure coding. Hence, head and eyebrow movements can represent two quite different modalities of prominence cuing, both from a formal and functional point of view, rather than just being cumulative prominence markers.
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| 2. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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Perception of South Swedish Word Accents
- 2006
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Ingår i: Conference proceedings from Fonetik 2006 : Lund, June 7-9, 2006. Working Papers in Linguistics, Lund University, Centre for Languages and Literature - Lund, June 7-9, 2006. Working Papers in Linguistics, Lund University, Centre for Languages and Literature. - 0280-526X. ; 52, s. 5-8
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A perceptual experiment concerning South Swedish word accents (accent I, accent II) is described. By means of editing and resynthesis techniques the F0 pattern of a test word in a phrase context has been systematically manipulated: initial rise (glide vs. jump) and final concatenation (6 timing degrees of the accentual fall). The results indicate that both a gliding rise and a late fall seem necessary for the perception of accent II, while there appear to be no such specific, necessary cues for the perception of accent I.
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| 3. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Accentual falls and rises vary as a function of accompanying head and eyebrow movements
- 2018
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Ingår i: Proceedings FONETIK 2018. - Gothenburg : University of Gothenburg. ; , s. 5-7
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this study we examine prosodic prominence from a multimodal perspective. Our research question is whether the phonetic realization of accentual falls and rises in Swedish complex pitch accents varies as a function of accompanying head and eyebrow movements. The study is based on audio and video data from 60 brief news readings from Swedish Television (SVT Rapport), comprising 1936 words in total, or about 12 minutes of speech from five news anchors (two female, three male). The results suggest a tendency for a cumulative relation of verbal and visual prominence cues: the more visual cues accompanying, the higher the pitch peaks and the larger the rises and falls.
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| 4. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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Acoustic features of multimodal prominences : Do visual beat gestures affect verbal pitch accent realization?
- 2017
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Ingår i: Proceedings of The 14th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP2017). - Stockholm : International Speech Communication Association. - 2308-975X.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The interplay of verbal and visual prominence cues has attracted recent attention, but previous findings are inconclusive as to whether and how the two modalities are integrated in the production and perception of prominence. In particular, we do not know whether the phonetic realization of pitch accents is influenced by co-speech beat gestures, and previous findings seem to generate different predictions. In this study, we investigate acoustic properties ofprominent words as a function of visual beat gestures in a corpus of read news from Swedish television. The corpus was annotated for head and eyebrow beats as well as sentence-level pitch accents. Four types of prominence cues occurredparticularly frequently in the corpus: (1) pitch accent only, (2) pitch accent plus head, (3) pitch accent plus head plus eyebrows, and (4) head only. The results show that (4) differs from (1-3) in terms of a smaller pitch excursion and shorter syllable duration. They also reveal significantly larger pitch excursions in (2) than in (1), suggesting that the realization of a pitch accent is to some extent influenced by the presence of visual prominence cues. Results are discussed in terms of the interaction between beat gestures and prosody with a potential functional difference between head and eyebrow beats.
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| 5. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Auditory vs. audiovisual prominence ratings of speech involving spontaneously produced head movements
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody : Speech Prosody 2022 - Speech Prosody 2022. - : International Speech Communication Association. - 2333-2042. ; , s. 352-356, s. 352-356
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Visual information can be integrated in prominence perception, but most available evidence stems from controlled experimental settings, often involving synthetic stimuli. The present study provides evidence from spontaneously produced head gestures that occurred in Swedish television news readings. Sixteen short clips (containing 218 words in total) were rated for word prominence by 85 adult volunteers in a between-subjects design (44 in an audio-visual vs. 41 in an audio-only condition) using a web-based rating task. As an initial test of overall rating behavior, average prominence across all 218 words was compared between the two conditions, revealing no significant difference. In a second step, we compared normalized prominence ratings between the two conditions for all 218 words individually. These results displayed significant (or near significant, p
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| 6. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert
(författare)
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Between Fall and Fall-Rise : Substance-Function Relations in German Phrase-Final Intonation Contours
- 2005
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Ingår i: Phonetica. - Basel : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1423-0321 .- 0031-8388. ; 62:2-4, s. 196-214
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has not been established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end of the phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum between falling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR differ with respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal, and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps. First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the necessary background information on the phonetics of the contours. In the second step, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using the paradigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically generated stimuli on nine semantic scales, such as ‘impolite/polite’. The hypotheses were generally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement, while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F in that it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impoliteness. The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the addition of a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F0; the functional consequence is a reduction of communicated dominance.
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| 7. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Compounds in interaction : patterns of synchronization between manual gestures and lexically stressed syllables in spontaneous Swedish
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN2020). - : KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prosody and gesture share common functions in communication, one of which is the signaling of prominence. However, we still know relatively little about how these two domains are coordinated with one another. The current study explores timing relationships between hand gestures and stressed syllables in Swedish compounds. Compounds in Swedish usually have two stressed syllables, enabling us to investigate possible differences in alignment between gestures and stressed syllables as a function of their phonological status (primary, secondary stress). We find a tendency for stressed syllables to be accompanied by movement phases of gestures, with the primary stressed syllable somewhat more likely to arise with a movement phase than the secondary stressed syllable. The stressed syllables also show tendencies for close temporal alignment with transitions between one gesture phase to another, though not all gesture phase types may start in alignment with the second stressed syllable. Our data thus provide additional support for the common function of prosody and gesture in signaling prominence in spoken communication and indicate that transitions between gesture phases as well as the gestures themselves may contribute to prominence marking.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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Dip and hat pattern: a phonological contrast of German?
- 2008
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Ingår i: Speech Prosody 2008, Fourth International Conference. - Campinas : The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). ; , s. 269-272
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Is the high plateau in a ‘hat pattern’ a phonetic artefact, or does it reflect a phonological feature? Can it contrast with a low plateau, i.e., a ‘dip pattern’? The presented perception experiment supports the phonological point of view, since it shows that the dip/hat contrast can disambiguate German oder-constructions, which are interpretable as ‘alternative’ or ‘yes/no-questions’. This specific function may be derived from a more general substance–function relation: While a hat pattern has a ‘bracketing function’, a dip signals detachment.
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| 10. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Do dialect-specific prosodic properties shape the path to contrastive focus? : Production and comprehension data from 3-5 year-old children acquiring Stockholm or Scania Swedish
- 2023
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Konferensbidrag (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Cuing information structure (IS) is a fundamental function of prosody in many languages. For instance, in English or Dutch, a contrastive focus on the color adjective in a phrase like ‘the green boat’ is marked by a pitch accent on GREEN and, crucially, a lack of post-focal accent on BOAT: ‘the GREEN boat’. Listeners infer from this prosodic structure that ‘boat’ represents already activated (given) information and that the color that is specially mentioned represents one out of a set of alternatives. According to research findings, children achieve proficiency in the production of prosodic IS encoding within the age range of 4 to 8 years, displaying considerable variability. This variability is suggested to result from structural prosodic differences between languages. For instance, Stockholm Swedish speaking children mark (non-contrastive) focus using the Swedish prominence cuing H(igh) tone in an adult-like manner already at 4-5 years, while Dutch speaking children handle Dutch intonational pitch accents only after the age of 7-8 years. One hypothesis is that this relates to the presence of lexical pitch accents in Swedish, which could make Swedish speaking children more sensitive to prosodic contrasts; in addition, the combination of lexical accent + prominence H results in a complex contour which is particularly salient. However, studies investigating this have usually had a strict focus on speech production. The few previous studies that have conducted parallel production and comprehension experiments have typically used offline methods to assess comprehension. More recent studies using online methods such as eye tracking have usually not included children younger than 6 years of age and have not been complemented by production data. In this study we combine production and comprehension experiments, using eye tracking, to study contrastive focus prosody in 3- to 5-year-old children speaking either Scanian or Stockholm Swedish. In Scanian, instead of adding the prominence H-tone for focus, phrase-level prominence is encoded through phonetic adjustments of the (lexical) HL accent patterns. By comparing these two Swedish varieties we can thus control for phonological features (incl. lexical tone), as well as grammar and lexicon, when exploring effects of prosodic-typological differences. In our production experiment we elicit adjective-noun phrases in three different focus conditions (broad, contrast on adjective, contrast on noun), using an interactive video/card game. Production data are analyzed acoustically and auditorily. As for comprehension, our visual-word eye-tracking experiment makes use of the same pictures of colored objects to investigate whether and how children rely on prosody for reference resolution (e.g., Where is the yellow boat? And where is the GREEN boat?). The time course of eye movements will be analyzed using growth curves. Both production and eye-tracking data will be analyzed as a function of dialect, age and standardized measures of language production and comprehension (The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales), as well as compared to data from adult controls. Data are currently being collected. A preliminary analysis of eye-tracking data from 24 Scanian children (ages 3-5 years collapsed) and a subset of adults from both dialects suggests similar comprehension of focus prosody as in adults (as a mismatched focus prosody in the adjective successfully elicits looks at the foil item in all groups), although processing appears to be slower, and anticipatory strategies differ slightly from those of adults (as the color of the first-mentioned adjective in a trial elicits looks at the color-matched distractor in adults, but not in children). An analysis contrasting comprehension data for both dialects, as well as a preliminary analysis of production data will be presented at the conference.
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