A Flute, Musical Bows and Bamboo Clarinets that “Speak” in the Amazon Rainforest; Speech and Music in the Gavião Language of Rondônia

The Gavião, a native Amazonian group in Rondônia, Brazil, use three different traditional musical instruments that they identify as “speaking” ones and that are characterized by a very tight music-lyric relation through similar pitch patterns: a flute (called kotiráp), a pair of mouth bows (iridináp), and three large bamboo clarinets (totoráp), played by three different players, each one playing a single-note clarinet. They show in different ways the relation of acoustic iconicity which exists between the words of the songs’ lyrics and the music played on such instruments to “sing” the songs. Linguistic analysis makes it possible to understand the phonetic and phonological nature of the iconicity. The sung speech form, being intermediate between the spoken and the instrumental forms, is useful for both learning and explaining the musical notes. In a language with distinctive tone and length, such as Gavião of Rondônia, the first question about speech that is played by musical instruments is the relation between the melodies and the supersegmental phonology of the corresponding words in sung speech and in modal spoken speech. It is influenced by the phonological possibilities of the spoken form and by the musical possibilities of the instrumental form. The description and analysis of Gavião instrumental speech and song practices are found to be a noteworthy contribution to the typology of instrumental language surrogates associated with a tone language, one that calls for a reexamination of hypotheses about which aspects of the phonological/phonetic structure can be transposed in instrumental speech and how this can be done. The role of this kind of instrumental sung speech is artistic and also practical as it contributes to maintain the oral heritage. Such practice represents a little-studied and threatened cultural heritage of the traditional substratum of the cultures of Amazonia.

Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particle yo in student-professor conversation

Until recently Japanese interactional particles have largely been investigated in various social contexts without paying much attention to intonation. Building on Shimotani (2006) that examined discourse functions and the intonation yo in informal talk among friends, the current study intends to contribute to interactional particle research by analyzing yo in six sets of one-to-one student-professor conversations. The findings demonstrate that the students and professors exhibited different pitch patterns of yo. Students tended to use yo with a falling pitch [+fall] when performing pre-story-telling, and frequently used the n-desu-yo construction. The professor, on the other hand, often used yo [−fall] when providing opinions or advice. These results will be discussed from Ochs’ social constructive discourse approach perspective. The present study concludes that both discourse functions and pitch patterns in interactional particles are important linguistic resources used to construct speakers’ social personae and stance-building. As such, pedagogical implications will be provided.

Prominence and Expectation in Speech and Music Through the Lens of Pitch Processing

Speech and music reflect extraordinary aspects of human cognitive abilities. Pitch, as an important parameter in the auditory domain, has been the focus of previous research on the relations between speech and music. The present study continues this line of research by focusing on two aspects of pitch processing: pitch prominence and melodic expectation. Specifically, we examined the perceived boundary of prominence for focus/accent in speech and music, plus the comparison between the pitch expectation patterns of music and speech. Speech (Mandarin Chinese) and music stimuli were created with different interval steps that increased from 1 semitone to 12 semitones from the third to the fourth word/note of a sentence/melody. The results showed that ratings of both accent/focus and expectation/surprise increased with increasing semitone distance from the baseline (though this pattern was mixed with tonal stability profiles for the melodies). Nevertheless, the perceived boundary of prominence was different for music and speech, with the boundary for detecting prominence in speech higher than that in music. Expectation also showed different patterns for speech and music. The results thus favor the suggestion that speech prosody and music melody tend to require specialized pitch patterns unique to their own respective communication purposes.

Moraic Footing in Suzhou Chinese: Evidence from Toneless Moras

The current study provides additional phonetic data for the light-initial sandhi patterns in Suzhou Chinese, illustrating a context-sensitive pitch alternation that is not present after heavy-initial forms, and has not been attested in other neighboring Northern Wu varieties either. I propose that such pitch alternation is due to interpolation effects on toneless prosodic constituents, here toneless moras. A binary trochee built directly on moras yields an unparsed (i.e. toneless) final mora in light-heavy disyllables, accounting for the pitch patterns on the surface. Such an analysis is not only empirically adequate, but also echoes the cross-linguistic structural observation that a foot head lighter in weight than the dependent is generally dispreferred (Head-Dependent Asymmetry; cf. Dresher and van der Hulst 1998).

Lexical Tone Perception in Mandarin Chinese Speakers With Aphasia

The brain localization debate of lexical tone processing concerns functional hypothesis that lexical tone, owing to its strong linguistic features, is dominant in the left hemisphere, and acoustic hypothesis that all pitch patterns, including lexical tone, are dominant in the right hemisphere due to their acoustic features. Lexical tone as a complex signal contains acoustic components that carry linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic information. To examine these two hypotheses, the current study adopted triplet stimuli including Chinese characters, their corresponding pinyin with a diacritic, and the four diacritics representing Chinese lexical tones. The stimuli represent the variation of lexical tone for its linguistic and acoustic features. The results of a listening task by Mandarin Chinese speakers with and without aphasia support the functional hypothesis that pitch patterns are lateralized to different hemispheres of the brain depending on their functions, with lexical tone to the left hemisphere as a function of linguistic features.

Central and Eastern Europe

The languages of Central and Eastern Europe addressed in this chapter form a typologically divergent collection that includes Slavic (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, pluricentric Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Romance (Romanian). Their prosodic features and structures have been explored to various depths, from different theoretical perspectives, sometimes on the basis of relatively sparse material. Still, enough is known to see that their typological divergence as well as other factors contribute to vivid differences in their prosodic systems. While belonging to intonational languages, they differ in pitch patterns and their usage, duration, and rhythm (some involve phonological duration), as well as prominence mechanisms, accentuation, and word stress (fixed or mobile). Several languages in the area have what is referred to by different traditions as pitch accents, tones or syllable accents, or intonations.

Cortical and Subcortical Processing of Linguistic Pitch Patterns

Pitch is one of the major prosodic cues in speech. A central research question is the way the brain derives the percept of pitch from incoming acoustic information. After introducing the functional architecture of the human auditory system, this chapter reviews lesion and neuroimaging studies and human electrophysiological studies of the processing of linguistically relevant pitch patterns at the cortical and subcortical levels, respectively. Recent evidence demonstrates the malleability of pitch processing in response to long-term and short-term auditory experiences as well as to the immediate history of the sensory inputs. In addition, the role of pitch in syntax-level processing will be evaluated. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how these findings, along with recent technical advances, will allow future studies to explore the neurocognitive bases of phonological theories of pitch representation and, conversely, of how prosodic theories may inform the intricate nature of neural pitch processing.

Fundamental Aspects in the Perception of f0

This chapter outlines basic characteristics and principles in the perception of f0 and its interplay with other prosodic and segmental elements of speech. It focuses on those theoretical and empirical contributions that are essential for readers to know in order to conduct, interpret, and assess research on prosody and intonation. Thus, it starts with the psychophysical and psychoacoustic aspects of f0 and pitch, and continues with how perceived pitch patterns are constructed from f0 patterns in speech, also taking into account just noticeable differences. Stressing the various influences of sound segments in this construction process, critical concepts touched upon are intrinsic pitch, the missing fundamental, ‘segmental intonation’, and the theory of optimal tonal perception. Finally, an overview addresses the interplay between f0 and other aspects of prosody. This includes how f0 influences perceived duration and how f0, or rather perceived pitch, is in turn influenced by the acoustic energy level. Whenever useful, the chapter provides practical advice on how to measure and analyse f0 and pitch contours in speech.