Marta Ortega-Llebaria

• Ph.D. in Linguistics
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pittsburgh

Cross-language studies have shown that English speakers use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress less consistently than speakers of Spanish and other Germanic languages ; accordingly, these studies have attributed this asymmetry to a possible trade-off between the use of vowel reduction and suprasegmental cues in lexical access. We put forward the...

Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes pitch perception in specific ways, and consequently Chinese speakers may not process pitch in English words – e.g., “Rose?” spoken as a question versus “Rose” spoken as a statement – in the same way as native speakers of non-tonal languages do. If so, what are those pitch processing differences and...

English speakers’ perception of word-stress in Spanish was compared to that of native Spanish controls. All participants performed a word-stress detection task in Spanish declarative sentences and reporting clauses where the identification of a syllable as stressed or unstressed was dependent of the perception of phonetic detail. Phonetic detail wa...

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Ca...

In Mandarin Chinese pitch is used to express both lexical meanings via tones and sentence-level meanings via pitch-accents raising the question of which information is processed first. While research with meaningful sentence materials suggested a general processing advantage of tone over pitch-accents, research on pure tones and nonce speech in pre...

Building on Jun’s prosodic typology (2005, 2014), this study examines how head and edge languages differ in their strategies for expressing focus. While head languages like English rely on pitch expansion in focus and post-focal compression, edge languages like Japanese are thought to emphasize boundary cues. Inspired by the framework proposed by M...

Bilingualism and the study of speech sounds are two of the largest areas of inquiry in linguistics. This Handbook sits at the intersection of these fields, providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent, cutting-edge work on the sound systems of adult and child bilinguals. Bringing together contributions from an international team of world-l...

The phonetic expression of broad and narrow focus in pitch-accent languages like Japanese differs significantly from that in stress-accent languages like English. Our research indicates that in Tokyo Japanese the edges of an Accentual Phrase (AP) are strengthened by jaw opening and by elongating its duration. Those cues are crucial for differentiat...

The phonetic expression of broad and narrow focus in pitch-accent languages like Japanese differs significantly from that in stress-accent languages like English. For instance, the strategy of “focal pitch expansion – post-focal pitch compression” is effective only when the focused word is accented (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988), and broad focus s...

Word stress, the placing of emphasis through greater volume or duration on a particular syllable in a word, differs across languages. In some languages, word stress is predictably and consistently placed on a particular syllable of every word. However, in other languages word stress is variable and therefore unpredictable, and the meaning of a word...

This chapter reviews the last 25 years of L2 (second language) prosody research in three sections, word stress (Section 21.2), sentence intonation (Section 21.3), and rhythm (Section 21.4), and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and bilingual contexts. While my selection of section topics is somewhat arbitr...

Word stress, the placing of emphasis through greater volume or duration on a particular syllable in a word, differs across languages. In some languages, word stress is predictably and consistently placed on a particular syllable of every word. However, in other languages word stress is variable and therefore unpredictable, and the meaning of a word...

In the Spanish which is spoken in Spain, there are notable pronunciation changes in plosive sounds. More specifically, voiceless plosives (/p t k/) may be transformed into voiced voiced plosives (/b d g/) or even approximants (/β ð ɤ/) when positioned between vowels (see Hualde et al. 2011). A study by Martínez Celdrán (2009) involving one Murcia s...

This paper constitutes a pioneering attempt to explore the pitch-based macro-rhythm measures proposed by Jun [4], namely macroR_Var and macroR_Freq, in a large L2-speech database and relate them to micro-rhythm measures based on vowel and consonant interval durations. It also proposes a refinement of Jun's macroR_Freq. Eleven 2.5-minute TED talks i...

Purpose Script training is a well-established treatment for aphasia, but its evidence comes almost exclusively from monolingual English speakers with aphasia. Furthermore, its active ingredients and profiles of people with aphasia (PWA) that respond to this treatment remain understudied. This study aimed to adapt a scripted-sentence learning protoc...

L2 rhythm has often been measured as the duration variation of vowel and consonant intervals using Varco and PVI measures (micro-rhythm). In the present study, in addition to micro-rhythm, we examined macro-rhythm (i.e., the duration variation of intervals between F0 events), and vowel duration in relation to three phonological patterns (i.e., cont...

Including contributions from a team of world-renowned international scholars, this volume is a state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, showcasing new empirical studies alongside critical reviews of existing influential speech learning models. It presents a revised version of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) for the first ti...

We explored whether examining duration and intensity in addition to pitch in domains other than those of akusento could throw some new insights on the Japanese acoustic expression of Focus. A link to the poster as well as a walkthrough video summarize promising results on this first exploration.

The contrast between Narrow and Broad Focus in the educated Tokyo Japanese dialect is expressed as a pitch reset between consecutive Accentual Phrases (APs) where the pitch range of the AP in focus is expanded while the post-focal AP pitch range is compressed and de-phrased. Because of Japanese akusento, lexical pitch accents are not accompanied by...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Because duration and morae express lexical contrasts in Japanese, e.g., ojiisan “old man” vs ojisan “uncle,” narrow focus (e.g., I prefer the WHITE horse) is expressed mainly by pitch cues. Yet, in colloquial registers, adding a mora to some qualifiers conveys emphasis (e.g., sugoku tsukareta “very tired”—sugooku tsukareta...

Although learning second language phonology is a difficult task, orthographic input may support the learning of difficult sound contrasts through a process known as orthographic facilitation. We extended this research by examining the effects of orthographic input together with individual differences in three different phonological learning process...

Changing the F0-contour of English words does not change their lexical meaning. However, it changes the meaning in tonal languages such as Mandarin. Given this important difference and knowing that words in the two languages of a bilingual lexicon interact, the question arises as to how Mandarin-English speakers process pitch in their bilingual lex...

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e., subject (noun) vs. subject (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress typicality effect, has been s...

This paper documents for the first time the intonation system of Tucumán Spanish, an understudied variety of Argentinian Spanish. Semi-spontaneous speech illustrating the intonation of main sentence types, i.e. broad focus statements, partial and absolute interrogatives, and imperatives and vocatives, was elicited from 31 native speakers of Tucumán...

In a tone language such as Mandarin Chinese, the same pitch contour-e.g., an ascending F0-conveys information about both lexical meaning via tones-e.g., Tone 2-and sentence-level meaning-e.g., question-via PA. Which information (tone vs. pitch accent) is processed earlier？ Li, Yang, and Hagoort (2008) showed that tone violations elicited an N400 ef...

Cross-dialect differences might be restricted to prosodic properties, but language dialects can also differ at the segmental level affecting vowel and/or consonantal sound repertoires. Examining infants' ability for cross-dialectal discrimination can be informative about the early availability of cues other than rhythm or intonation. Preliminary da...

Although there is consistent evidence that higher levels of processing, such as learning the form-meaning associations specifi c to the sec- ond language (L2), are a source of diffi culty in acquiring L2 speech, no study has addressed how these levels interact in shaping L2 per- ception and production of intonation. We examine the hypothesis of wh...

Infants as young as two months of age have already built a primary level of representation of their native language sound system based on its general rhythmic properties, i.e. duration and intensity information carried by vowels in connected speech. However, this primary level of representation of the familiar language is not sufficient to succeed...

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effe...

While there is an extensive body of research on the phonetic correlates that express broad and contrastive focus in most Romance languages, there are not many empirical studies on this topic for Romanian (Hualde, 2002). In this study we measured patterns of pitch alignment, pitch range and duration in relation to broad and contrastive focus in Roma...

In both Spanish and Catalan, narrow contrastive focus and presentational broad focus in nuclear position have different pitch accent choices, namely a rising or a falling pitch accent, respectively. In words with final stress, narrow contrastive focus displays a rise-fall complex pitch gesture in the last syllable of the utterance. This article inv...

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effe...

Previous research shows that speakers of stress-accent languages rely on pitch-accents to perceive word stress in sentences spoken with declarative intonation, while in unaccented sentences, like post-focal contexts, they rely on other cues, i.e., duration in Spanish or vowel reduction in English. However, there is no experimental evidence on the e...

Book Review

We provide evidence for the perception of the stress contrast in de-accented contexts in Spanish. Twenty participants were asked to identify oxytone words which varied orthogonally in two bi-dimensional paroxytone-oxytone continua: one of duration and spectral tilt, and the other of duration and overall intensity. Results indicate that duration and...

According to Sluijter and colleagues (1996a, 1997), stress is independent from accent because it has its own phonetic cues: stressed vowels are longer and have flatter spectral tilts than their unstressed counterparts. However, Campbell and Beckman (1997) show that, for American English, these duration and spectral tilt patterns are a consequence o...

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers written by well-known researchers in the field of Romance phonetics and phonology. An important goal of this book is to bridge the gap between traditional Romance linguistics — with its long and rich tradition in data collection, cross-language comparison, and phonetic variation — and labo...

This study assessed the extent to which second-language learners are sensitive to phonetic information contained in visual cues when identifying a non-native phonemic contrast. In experiment 1, Spanish and Japanese learners of English were tested on their perception of a labial/ labiodental consonant contrast in audio (A), visual (V), and audio-vis...

This article is concerned with the acoustic correlates that characterize stress and accent in Catalan and Spanish. We analyzed four acoustic correlates of stress (syllable duration, vowel quality, overall intensity, and spectral balance) in four conditions, namely, stressed and unstressed syllables in both accented and unaccented environments. This...

This paper examines the effect of inventory constraints and the phonetic factors of stress and vowel context in the lenition of English and Spanish intervocalic voiced stops. Five native speakers of American English and five native speakers of Caribbean Spanish were recorded saying bi-syllabic words containing intervocalic /b/ and /g/. The intervoc...

This study was designed to identify English speech contrasts that might be appropriate for the computer-based auditory-visual training of Spanish learners of English. It examines auditory-visual and auditory consonant and vowel confusions by Spanish speaking students of English and a native English control group. 36 Spanish listeners were tested on...

In both Spanish and Catalan, narrow contrastive focus and presentational broad focus in nuclear position have different pitch accent choices, namely a rising or a falling pitch accent, respectively. In oxytonic words, narrow contrastive focus displays a rise-fall complex pitch gesture in the last syllable of the utterance. This article investigates...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the effects of intonational pitch accents and focus on durational patterns in Spanish and Catalan. As it is well-known, accentual prominence is phonetically different in stress accent languages and non-stress accent languages (Beckman 1986). In stress-accent languages like English or Spanish, accentual promi...