On the notion of 'fine phonetic detail'in communicative phonetic science

The case of speech reduction

Klaus J. Kohler

IPDS, Kiel

Speech Reduction Workshop at MPI for PsycholinguisticsNijmegen, 15 June 2008

1 Theory and methodology of 'fine phonetic detail'

• 'fine phonetic detail' current term in speech analysis– 2 diametrically opposed philosophies of science

(a) replacing auditory assessment

¶ by detailed acoustic or articulatory measurement to fill pre-established phonological categories

¶ subsequent inferential statistics to confirm these categories as phonologies of speech production

¶ they also enter into perceptual experiments

¶ weak or no link to functions in communication

¶ this is the Laboratory Phonology paradigm

(b) supplementing fine auditory assessment ¶ by fine physical measurement¶ in relation to specific speech functions in

communicative interaction¶ including the listener even in speech production ¶ this is the paradigm behind the Sound-to-Sense

project¶ Sarah Hawkins & John Local, Sound to Sense:

Introduction to the Special Session, 16th ICPhS 2007

2 Fine phonetic detail in speech reduction

• the Laboratory Phonology paradigm is not suited to handle speech reduction in an illuminating way– because phonological contrasts at the lexical level

may disappear at the phrase level and be irrelevant for the listener and for communication

– and non-lexical contrasts may emerge in fine phonetic detail as highly relevant for the listener

– and reduction is not just a mechanical articulatory process but depends on communicative function

• I will provide illustrations of the broad spectrum of articulatory reduction in lexical items with German data from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech

• the reductions will be analyzed as processes – in which articulatory movements are curtailed or

eliminated– and articulatory prosodies, such as palatalization, are

nevertheless maintained and surface as new distinctive features

– on the one hand, these reductions are differential mechanical simplifications in utterance context

– on the other, they retain the essentials of the articulatory movements that characterize the whole set of realizations of a lexical item for a listener

• therefore, the new distinctive features will then be discussed from the point of view of essential perceptual cues– which Oliver Niebuhr is going to elaborate on with

experimental results in his presentation• finally the functional, communicative dependence of

phonetic manifestation in speech reduction will be discussed with examples from German and English

• German wahrscheinlich ein bisschen "probably a little"

ƒ

• all the segments that are characterized by palatality – – are dropped as segmental units– which can be understood as articulatory

simplification

¶ and are opposed as front closure/side opening and front opening/side closure, and are levelled to the latter

¶ the unstressed vowel gets absorbed in the tongue-body raising movement from to ¶ in the unstressed sonorant environment the

fricative stricture is not made

¶and nasalization runs through the rising gesture

– the unstressed function word is generally reduced to the nasal, which is assimilated to a following labial

– the result is a palatal trajectory + – so the palatal feature of the lost segments stays,

attached to the nasal– and this is a signal to the listener that the

derivative suffix - is there

• all derivative suffixes –lich may undergo the same basic articulatory reduction processes– but they are also shaped by the preceding and

following articulatory movements, into which the reductions are embedded

• they are different for

eigentlich

– unstressed syllable preceding – in it, the opening movement out of the plosive

closure is usually not realised¶out of 68 instances not a single one has

– results in one dorsal-velar movement – and, with early velic lowering, in , or just in

vowel nasalization, without velar contact– in , the sequence allround closure, central

closure – lateral opening, central opening – lateral closure is simplified in various ways:

– the palatal frication in the last syllable may be strong, weak, or absent

– a stop closure in the transition from the second to the last syllable may be integrated into the dorsal tongue movement, as the rest of the syllable, and be pre-velar/palatal , rather than apical-alveolar

– the nasality of the 2nd-syllable offset may be carried into the onset of the last syllable

¶ ¶complete integration into the dorsal raising

gesture, elimination of the apical gesture

¶ intervocalic apical gesture

– thus the dynamic vocal-tract shaping in the execution of the two syllables is highly variable

¶coordination of

° 2 opening-closing gestures

° 2 oral articulators – tongue dorsum and tip

° velic action

° glottal activity

¶ leads to multitude of phonetic variants

– a segmental phonetic transcription provides only an abstraction from the time processes involved

¶ therefore spectrogram illustrations of the main variants from quite elaborated to quite reduced

– the spontaneous corpus does not contain instances of reductions to a simple dorsal tongue movement into a high palatal position

¶ but they are possible

¶ I have produced them in multiple repetitions of the phrase Das ist eigentlich ganz guter Wein. "This is really quite good wine "

¶ ¶

– they differ from the indefinite article in

Das ist ein ganz guter Wein.

"This is quite a good wine."

¶ in fine phonetic detail of nasalization on a palatal vs. a velar dorsal tongue movement

¶ in ein the vowel tends to be reduced in spectral dynamics and duration and may be elided

¶ the nasal is place-assimilated to a following cons

¶ in eigentlich long residual palatal movement

¶

– duration: words: 197 – 188ms, vowels: 197 – 129 ms; : 79 – 18 msformant end: F1 262 – 391Hz; F2 1984 – 1876Hz; F3 3594 – 3520Hzmore/less palatal, in spectrum and time; perceptual testinggreater cohesion of article with next word: shorter initial cons

3 Functions of speech reductions

• these reductions are context and situation-bound

wahrscheinlich has 1 post-stress syllable– extreme levelling of the post-stress syllable fits

into a rhythm where another beat follows and a weak syllable intervenes, as in the example given

– it would thus be unlikely utterance-final– or immediately before another beat, as, e.g., in

wahrscheinlich krank– it is also tied to a modal-particle meaning– and alien in the expression of graded probability,

as in, e.g., höchst wahrscheinlich

eigentlich has 2 post-stress syllables– levelling of both opening gestures is rare

presupposes integration in weak rhythm section

¶up-beat: das ist 'ganz guter 'Wein

¶ in thesis: 'trifft sich doch recht 'gut– common pattern is di-syllabic of varying complexity

¶most elaborate before dysfluency and pauses

also 'ich hätte jetzt <äh> <A>

'ja, 'heute kann ich 'auch, <P> 'jeden 'Termin

¶even tri-syllabic in slow speaking style

ich hab 'nur noch 'Ostern frei

¶strongly reduced di-syllabic forms when whole word in weak rhythm section

wie 'lang soll die 'Woche 'sein?

den 'ganzen 'Tag ] , 'das ist also 'kein 'Problem

° phrase boundary, but no break

ich 'bin 'gar nicht 'da

– reductions again tied to a modal-particle meaning¶ in all the examples, eigentlich fulfils the function

of attenuating categoricalness, e.g.ich bin eigentlich gar nicht daich hab' eigentlich nur nach Ostern frei ¶ in eigentlich ganz guter Wein, it lowers the

meaning of ganz to 'moderately' ° vs. 'particularly' in ein ganz guter Wein° functional difference coded by FPD palatality

vs. velarity, auditorily acute vs. grave° perceptual robustness increases with

syntagmatic extension of the feature

– these reductions not possible with the meaning 'really', vs. 'actually', which emphasizes categorical contrast

was ist 'Phonetik 'eigentlich? "what is Phonetics really?"

occurs in last accented position in prosodic phrasevs. was ist 'Phonetik eigentlich? / eigentlich

'Phonetik?"what is Phonetics actually?

• These phrase-phonetic patterns are regular in relation to communicative situations– and can go even further– Sarah Hawkins & Rachel Smith "Polysp: a

polysytemic, phonetically rich approach to speech understanding", Italian Journal of Linguistics, 13 (2002)

¶conveying the meaning of I DO NOT KNOW

¶ I don't know

¶dunno

¶ expanded forms, different kinds of exasperation

¶ forms reduced to dynamically changing vocalic resonances, rudiments of three syllables

° from more open to less open

° with increasing lip narrowing

° most extreme form can be ° not slurred drunken speech

° but casual speech when otherwise occupied

– we find exactly the same reductions in the German equivalents

keine Ahnung

weiß ich nicht

– and the same intensifications

keine Ahnung

weiß ich nicht

• These data show basic principles of speech production– speech articulation occurs along a scale from

elaboration to reduction

¶ reduced to dynamically changing vocal-tract resonances at the low end,

¶where consonantal, especially apical, strictures, riding on dorsal tongue movements are eliminated

¶ in conjunction with communicative functions

¶and, contrariwise, consonantal strictures are reinforced in functionally conditioned elaboration

– in this functional perspective, speech articulation is intimately linked to speech rhythm and prosody

4 Conclusion

• We need to develop the study of speech as a unitary communicative phonetic science– in which every speech phenomenon may be

studied from 4 perspectives– that must converge on the central goal to

understand how humans communicate with speech in languages

¶ linguistic categorization

¶speech signal analysis

¶speech perception and understanding

¶communicative function– in a step-wise progression

¶ from the isolated word and sentence

¶ to complex phonetic patterns in speech interaction

• The paradigm

From Sound to Sense

which I have presented for the analysis of phrase-level pronunciation– takes variability in speech production and

perception as its point of departure

– it does not assume phonological invariance– but establishes regularities of flexible sound

patterns– paying attention to fine phonetic detail– in relation to communicative situations and

functions– in the languages of the world

• So, let me finish with a quotation from

Stephen Handel, Listening. An introduction to the perception of auditory events, MIT Press, 1989, p. 162

"… it seems almost impossible to define phonetic categories in fixed acoustic terms. We may be able to define phonetic categories in terms of higher-order dynamic acoustic variation, but this effort is just beginning. The resolution of the issue is still to come."