Alejna Brugos

Boston University | BU · Department of Linguistics

Researchers investigating a broad array of questions in spoken language prosody routinely base their arguments on measurements taken from the F0 contours of representative speech samples. These analyses, however, frequently involve abstracting F0 contours away from the segmental strings that bear them, potentially overlooking in the process the rol...

Previous perceptual studies show that High pitch accents with maximum F0 extended in time sound higher than sharp-peaked counterparts with identical maximum F0 to listeners of various language backgrounds. It is not clear, however, whether this 'plateau' effect extends to the perception of Low pitch accents. We report results from two perception ta...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time....

Two conflicting views have been advanced of what defines ‘default’ high pitch accents in various West Germanic languages, including English: One equates these accents fundamentally with a rise to a high turning point, while the other focuses on the fall from it. Both views arise from the assumption within Autosegmental-Metrical theory that the phon...

Prosodic categories, like other grammatical categories, are realized with wide variability, yet listeners interpret linguistic meaning with apparent ease. ToBI aims to capture the linguistically meaningful prosodic elements of utterances, but does not capture the variability in acoustic cues that the labeller (and listener) must interpret in order...

Speakers break their otherwise continuous speech stream into meaningful segments, the edges of which are marked by audible cues such as pauses, rate changes and pitch movement. Prosodic boundaries, as these segment edges and the cues marking them are known, play a role critical to language processing and spoken language acquisition. While great pro...

Results of two perception experiments suggest that using timing measures alone to compute prosodic structure misses valuable information from pitch. Previous research showed that pitch can distort perceived duration: tokens with dynamic or higher f0 are perceived as longer than comparable level-f0 or lower-f0 tokens, and silent intervals bounded by...

Although most participants (N = 62) in an F0 scaling experiment judged open syllables (day) as higher in pitch than closed syllable tokens (dane, dave) with the same F0 contour, a subset did not. Results indicate that, in general, listeners perceptually discount F0 over coda regions when judging overall F0 level, and the degree of discount is relat...

Previous research showed that pitch factors can distort perceived duration: tokens with dynamic or higher f0 tend to be perceived as longer than comparable level-f0 or lower-f0 tokens, and silent intervals bounded by tokens of widely differing pitch are heard as longer than those bounded by tokens closer in pitch (the kappa effect). Fourteen subjec...

In both tone and intonation systems, segmental context is known to influence production and perception of target F0 contours in various ways. Many languages, for example, prefer to realize critical F0 events during maximally sonorous intervals, either by varying the timing of pitch movements, or by virtue of distributional limitations on certain co...

Recent evidence that pitch-movement shape can influence perceived alignment of rising (LH) pitch accents in several languages appears to challenge the well-established level-based approach to intonation embodied in the AM model, wherein it is typically assumed that the alignment and scaling of well-defined turning points (TPs) in the F0 contour are...

Results of a perception experiment show that the size of the pitch difference between spoken words on either side of a pause affects perception of pause duration, demonstrating that the auditory kappa effect can obtain in speech materials. The auditory kappa effect is an illusion whereby, in a sequence of tones and intervening silent intervals, the...

Recent studies have shown that the Tonal Center of Gravity is a better classifier than F0 Turning Points for at least two contrastively timed pitch accents in American English intonation contours. Within this framework, a binary F0 weighting function derived from the F0 contour can be used instead of the natural F0 contour without a degradation in...

This study of the alignment of L- in the H* L- H% contour of American English finds the strongest predictor of the location of the retracted phrase-accent “elbow” to be the location of the accent-related F0 peak, rather than one of a set of metrical “attractors” investigated. A strong correlation between peak height and elbow sharpness suggests tha...

Since the inception of the autosegmental-metrical approach to intonation (Bruce 1977, Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 1996), the location and scaling of f0 turning points have been used to characterize phonologically distinct f0 contours in various languages, including American English. This approach is undermined, however, by the difficulty listeners exp...

Using the alternatives (alt) tier in ToBI transcriptions allows labellers to capture annotation ambiguities explicitly; this labelling innovation allows researchers to address several open research questions concerning prosodic phonology. Furthermore, the standard alt notation allows this data to be shared among researchers and to be machine-readab...

Discourse boundaries have been associated with an increased rate of disfluent events. It is hypothesized that the reason for this increase is the heavy processing requirement incurred either in planning the next chunk of discourse or in the introduction of many new or high perplexity entities. In a sample of academic lecture speech, we find that no...

A production task was designed to elicit a specific intonation contour, characterized by an exaggerated rise‐fall‐rise in f0 (L+H * L−H% in ToBI terms), conveying an attitude of ‘‘dismayed surprise.’’ Speakers were given models, a short practice period, and a preceding context for each utterance. A targetlike rise‐fall‐rise contour (including H * L...

The phonetic realization of intonational targets in the f0 contour is not always straightforwardly predicted by their affiliations in the segmental string, and the phrase tones of American English are a type of target for which several hypotheses about the domain of realization have been advanced. By varying the metrical structure of target words a...

The occurrence of peaks and valleys of the F0 contour of an utterance on non-prominent syllables in American English (as on the -ing or a- in reading again) raise the question of how to label these inflection points. Analysis of samples from prosodically-labelled corpora of natural speech*(MIT Maptask and BU FM Radio News) show that H* !H* sequence...

The occurrence of F0 peaks on nonprominent syllables in American English (e.g., -ing or a- in reading again) raises the question of how to label these inflection points. This pattern is not infrequent, as shown by samples from two prosodically labeled corpora of natural speech (ToBI labeled MIT Maptask and BU FM Radio News). The Maptask sample from...