Scope: The Journal of Speech Sciences [JoSS] covers experimental aspects that deal with scientific aspects of speech, language and linguistic communication processes. Coverage also includes articles dealing with pathological topics, or articles of an interdisciplinary nature, provided that experimental and linguistic principles underlie the work reported. Experimental approaches are emphasized in order to stimulate the development of new methodologies, of new annotated corpora, of new techniques aiming at fully testing current theories of speech production, perception, as well as phonetic and phonological theories and their interfaces. Qualis: B1 Knowledge area: Linguística, Letras e Artes Founded since: 2011 E-ISSN: 2236-9740 Short title: J. of Speech Sci. E-mail: pabarbosa.unicampbr@gmail.com Unit: IEL Responsible Editor: Plinio Almeida Barbosa DOI: 10.20396
An ultrasonographic and acoustic study of two minimal pairs in English
Comparing articulatory and acoustic characteristics is relevant because they exhibit congruence and carry crucial information for maintaining perceptual contrasts. In this paper, articulatory and acoustic data of English front vowel minimal pair productions are analyzed in a case study comparing the speech productions of a North American English speaker and a Brazilian Portuguese speaker. The analysis comprises acoustic metrics (F0, F1, F2 in Hz and duration in ms) and ultrasound data. The results of the ultrasound and acoustic analyses of English vowel minimal pairs produced by the Brazilian speaker show that front vowel contrasts existing in the L2 (English) but not in the L1 (Portuguese) were not implemented by the L2 speaker, despite her having formal instruction in English. Specifically, the mid-low and low vowel minimal pair was undifferentiated in the Brazilian speaker’s productions. These results reinforce the need for research into and implementation of speech production and perception training practices in L2 instruction.
Copyright (c) 2026 Amaury Flávio Silva, Mário Augusto de Souza Fontes, Sandra Maria dos Santos Madureira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Sociophonetic study of the Capixaba speech rhythm
Meireles and Barbosa have presented studies that show the influence of speech rate on speech rhythmic restructurings (see [1] for data in French, and [2], [4] for data in Brazilian Portuguese). Rhythmic restructuring is defined here as the reorganization of stress groups (henceforth SG) as speech rate increases. The speech rate influence on speech rhythmic reorganizations can be explained by the Dynamical Speech Rhythm model [2] [5] (henceforth DSR). In this model, speech rhythm is considered as a “consequence of the variation of perceived duration along the entire utterance” [2]. Intrinsic segmental duration is normalized through the use of abstract vowel-to-vowel (henceforth VV) duration (see [2] [4]). Entrained, abstract VV duration is used as the control parameter to generate prosodic variation. The maxima of VV duration delimitate produced SG as rhythmic units in Brazilian Portuguese. Using the DSR model as a theoretical framework, Meireles and Barbosa have run acoustic and articulatory experiments that show the influence of speech rate on speech rhythm (see [4] for a broad explanation): (i) Meireles and Barbosa [4] investigated how speech rate acts to articulatorily reorganize lexical stress in Brazilian Portuguese; (ii) Meireles and Barbosa [4] ran acoustic and articulatory (EMMA) experiments, so as to study speech rhythm reorganizations due to speech rate increase in Brazilian Portuguese. This paper follows the line of reasoning of Barbosa’s and Meireles’ research. Nevertheless, it sheds new light on the phenomenon of rhythmic restructuring since it correlates phonetic variables (mean and standard deviation of VV and SG durations) with social variables (gender and age). Main results have shown that social variables variation reorganizes speech rhythm and modifies some phonetic parameters in the following way: a) the standard deviation of vowel-to-vowel (VV) duration and stress group duration is smaller for the male gender and the advanced age; b) stress group duration tends to be vary less for the male gender and the advanced age (rhythmic restructurings make VV units smaller, but with a greater number of VV units per stress group, what results in a statistically constant stress group duration at these variables); c) the number of VV units per stress group proportionally increases from the young age to the advanced age due to rhythmic restructurings; and d) the male gender and the advanced age exacerbate the mixture character of Brazilian Portuguese rhythm, i.e., tendencies to syllable as to stress-timed rhythm.
Copyright (c) 2021 Jair de Almeida Silva, Alexsandro Rodrigues Meireles https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cross-cultural dimensions organizing prosodic attitudes reception
We present a meta-analysis of results from experimental studies on attitude reception in seven languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Cantonese, American English, Hindi). The studies involved free-labeling of perceived attitudes in audio-visual stimuli. The productions of 88 speakers from the seven languages were obtained using the same elicitation methodology, allowing to record sixteen audiovisual attitudes. These performances, rated in preceding works using a free-labeling paradigm, were grouped and analyzed to compare how the attitudinal performances spread along the main dimensions of the shared cognitive representation. A hierarchical clustering then regrouped attitudinal expressions as a function of their cognitive proximity. A large cluster solution showed the main dimension that organizes these expressions may be interpreted as the “Unpredictability” dimension proposed by Fontaine et al. (2007) for emotions, followed by the Evaluation-Pleasantness one; Activation-Arousal and Potency-Control arrived later but played a determinant role in the organization of attitudes. A fine-grained 13-cluster solution showed most attitudes were singled out by the listeners despite the variations in speakers and elicitation contexts. The analysis of each of these clusters brings insight into the cultural similarities and differences in the reception of these different attitudinal expressions. A notable result is the variation in valence attributed to the expression of Irony that underlines the potential communication problems that may be linked to interaction routines. On the other hand, Surprise was clearly identified. The existence and importance of the Unpredictability dimension and its relation to the illocutionary opposition between assertive and interrogative acts underlines the pertinence of Mello & Raso’s (2011) analysis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Albert Rilliard, João Antônio de Moraes, Donna Erickson, Marine Guerry, Angelika Hönemann, Tan Lee, Matthew King-Hang Ma, Hansjörg Mixdorff, Preeti Rao, Takaaki Shochi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This dossier is a tribute to Heliana Mello, offered by former students, friends, and colleagues who collaborated with her throughout her academic career. At the same time, it celebrates the fifteen years of activity of the Laboratory for Empirical and Experimental Studies of Language (Leel), of which Heliana was among the founders and the first coordinator, beginning in 2009. The volume brings together contributions that reflect many of the disciplinary areas in which Heliana was engaged.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tommaso Raso, Deise Prina Dutra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This paper examines prominence from a pragmatic, phonological and acoustic-articulatory perspective. Based on results of a corpus-based analysis of Topic prosodic units in four languages (Italian, Brazilian and European Portuguese, and American English), three types of topic prosodic forms (TPFs) are described. Also are reviewed studies reporting phonological organization of English prominence patterns, as well as acoustic and articulatory characteristics of prominence, i.e., broad focus, narrow focus and emphasis, and specifically, how jaw lowering increases with increased prominence. Topic prominence has its scope on the whole prosodic unit, while narrow focus/emphasis prominence has its scope on one word. To examine the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of global prominence in a Topic prosodic unit compared with local prominence when the final topic word is emphasized, a pilot study of TPFs as spoken by an American English speaker was done. The results suggest that global Topic prominence differs from that of marking narrow focus/emphasis; narrow focus/emphasis prominence and Topic prominence are two different types of prominences both from the acoustic-articulatory and from the functional point of view. A new articulatory finding is that only for local prominence, i.e., when the topic word is emphasized, does the jaw show the largest amount of lowering in the phrase; for global prominence, the largest amount of jaw lowering occurs on another word within the phrase, not on the final topic word. Our findings, thus, suggest that there are different types of prominences whose functional values are reflected in the formal cues that implement them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tommaso Raso, Donna Erickson, Malin Svensson Lundmark, Johan Frid, Sylvain Coulange https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Textual patterns and machine learning classification in academic writing
This study investigates linguistic patterns in academic texts produced within the Graduate Program in Linguistic Studies (PosLin) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. A corpus comprising 1,270 documents, 730 master's dissertations and 540 doctoral theses was compiled and analyzed using computational linguistic techniques. Exploratory analyses included the extraction of unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, and the classification of the most frequent tokens into morphological categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). Despite the shared institutional context and research tracks, subtle differences in lexical and structural features were observed between the two academic levels. To evaluate whether these differences could support automated classification, machine learning models were trained on bag-of-words representations of the texts. Gradient Boosting emerged as the most effective algorithm, achieving an AUC of 0.989 with only the 1,000 most frequent tokens, demonstrating that high classification accuracy can be reached without extensive computational overhead. The results show that textual analysis combined with supervised learning can effectively distinguish academic genres within a single graduate program. Furthermore, the approach holds potential for broader applications in genre classification, fake news detection, and discourse analysis. This study also reinforces the importance of continued research in computational linguistics for underrepresented languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, especially in the context of formal and academic writing.
Copyright (c) 2025 Crysttian Arantes Paixão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This study explores the role of parenthetical structures and reported speech in the organization of spontaneous spoken discourse, focusing on their functional and prosodic features. Building on the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), the paper examines how the two discourse-levels work, interact, and contribute to the overall architecture of speech. Parentheticals, operating within an intra-enunciative plane, introduce secondary content that is prosodically marked by pitch lowering, boundary pauses, and reduced prominence. In contrast, reported speech introduces an external or fictive voice, establishing a meta-enunciative level often marked by a quotative frame and prosodic shift such as pitch increases or expanded pitch ranges. Despite their formal and functional differences, both phenomena exhibit complementary roles in structuring discourse and challenge the notion of a linear discourse model by revealing a stratified organization of speech, where utterances can be embedded, layered, and recontextualized in real time. Based on empirical data from a corpus-driven analysis, this study highlights the close relationship between prosody and discourse function, showing how speakers manage multiple communicative layers within a single interaction.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Panunzi, Valentina Saccone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The expression of the manner of motion in Portuguese and other languages
We compared verbs expressing the manner of motion in oral narratives by speakers of Romance and Germanic languages, respectively classified as verb-framed and satellite-framed according to L. Talmy’s Motion Typology. We used a Bayesian statistical analysis on aggregated and disaggregated data from 12 speakers per language. For Brazilian Portuguese, we used data from 14 speakers. Considering inter-typological variation, the manner per motion-verb ratios demonstrated a more varied use of manner verb types by the speakers of the satellite-framed languages, as expected from theory: German (0.33), English (0.46), Spanish (0.18), Italian (0.17), French (0.08), and Brazilian Portuguese (0.23). These results also show a substantial similarity between Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, with slightly fewer types of manner verbs in the French narratives. In general, speakers of Germanic languages preferred to use manner over other types of verbs, with mean per-speaker rates of 5.10 and 5.27 for German and English, respectively. In contrast, the mean rates demonstrated a preference for other verb types (such as path verbs) among speakers of Romance languages: Italian (1.37), French (1.22), Brazilian Portuguese (2.21), and particularly Spanish (0.98): Analysis of disaggregated data for Brazilian Portuguese and English showed substantial variability among speakers in their use of motion verbs in general and manner verbs in particular. It brought the rate of manner-verb usage down for English to 4.35 and Brazilian Portuguese to 1.86.
Copyright (c) 2025 Aparecida Oliveira, Luiz Max Carvalho, Rafael Fernandes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Spaces, parallelism, and the nominal clause
The rules of a language interact with world knowledge in order to generate the meaning in certain verbless sequences, when the latter are conjoined to clauses. In such cases the cognitive representation corresponding to the verbless sequence is completed through the insertion of a copy of the schema evoked in the clause, so as to generate a well-formed cognitive structure. This happens by effect of a rule of schema retrieval, which is part of the structure of the language, but is also subject to grammatical, semantic, and symbolic conditions, which instantiate a degree of interference between cognitive and formal spaces. This process is triggered by the presence of certain coordinating conjunctions, in particular e ‘and’, and is subject to conditions of semantic parallelism between the two members of the construction. The phenomenon is studied in relation to the data of standard Brazilian Portuguese.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mário Alberto Perini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This paper proposes a revision of the status of the long parenthetical (i.e., formed by more than one phonological word) within the theoretical framework of Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). Using empirical evidence from spontaneous speech corpora, we argue that the long parenthetical should not be understood as a non-illocutionary informational unit within an informational pattern but rather as a distinct discursive level. Our findings indicate that the parenthetical level temporarily suspends the illocutionary level, allowing the speaker to momentarily distance themselves from the here and now of the ongoing utterance to provide additional metalinguistic information or perform secondary illocutions. We show evidence that indicates that the parenthetical level is structured around illocutionary units, follows the same organizational principles as other discursive levels, and exhibits distinct prosodic characteristics, including lower average f0 and higher articulation rate. Additionally, we show that the parenthetical level is recursive and can also occur within the metaillocutionary level. Finally, evidence from gestural studies suggests that transitions to the parenthetical level are accompanied by systematic changes in gestural pattern, similarly to how it occurs at the metaillocutionary level.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bruno Rocha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Palestine/Israel UN Resolutions Corpus (PIURC)
This paper introduces the Palestine/Israel United Nations Resolution Corpus (PIURC), a data set comprising UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions related to the Palestine/Israel conflict. The corpus provides a valuable resource for analysing the role of the UN in shaping the discourse around this conflict. The paper details the data selection process, limitations, and potential extensions of the corpus. It demonstrates how standard corpus linguistic and text analysis methods, including the analysis of word frequency and text dispersion, can reveal key patterns such as lexical frequencies and thematic variations, offering insights into the evolving discourse on human rights and geopolitical issues. The PIURC enables future interdisciplinary research, contributing to a deeper understanding of the United Nations' role in the Palestine/Israel conflict and its broader implications. Potential extensions to the corpus include incorporating resolutions from Special and Emergency Sessions of the General Assembly, as well as texts in languages other than English. These additions would enhance the data set's comprehensiveness, further supporting nuanced analyses of the UN's discourse and decision-making processes in this and other geopolitical contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Annabelle Lukin, Izabella Rosa Malta, Rodrigo Araújo e Castro, Tamer Morris, Alexandra García Marrugo, Emily Crawford https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Presuppositions, affordances and the unfolding of conversations
This paper explores the intersection of semantic presuppositions and affordances, with a particular focus on how technological changes reshape the common ground in conversations. By analyzing examples of conversational oddities, the paper illustrates how the conditions for felicitous speech acts extend beyond linguistic structures into the social environment. The paper then investigates how changing technologies, like the shift from landlines to cell phones, alter the informational landscape of conversations. Drawing on examples from the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus, it demonstrates how these changes impact the initial information available to interlocutors, influencing conversational appropriateness. Finally, the paper proposes a theoretical link between the semantic vocabulary of presuppositions and the theory of affordances, arguing that both constrain conversational and joint actions by shaping what is taken for granted in specific contexts. One consequence of this view is that Stalnaker’s account of presuppositions as beliefs is insufficient to capture everything that is taken for granted in the structure of a conversation. The paper offers a richer understanding of how conversations unfold in response to diverse informational constraints.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ernesto Perini-Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Toward a formal ontology for corpus linguistics
Ontologies have been among us for about 30 years, proving their importance in domains like medicine, biology, and law, to mention a few. They are studied in multiple scientific disciplines, including philosophy, computer science, information science, and even linguistics. In this paper, we present an initiative to build an ontology for corpus linguistics in the scope of the C-ORAL-BRASIL project. We first introduce the interdisciplinary nature of ontologies, asking what they are, both in linguistics and fields of artificial intelligence, like knowledge representation. Then, we explain the top and middle levels that integrate the initiative and present a fragment of the corpus linguistics ontology, focusing on more relevant classes. Definitions, labels and relationships of such fragments are presented in the appendix. The complete resulting ontology counts around 260 classes and 90 relationships distributed over three layers: domain, middle and top-level ontologies. Finally, we offer our final remarks about the experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mauricio Almeida, Tommaso Raso, Heliana Mello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Content and function words in oral discourse
The goal of this paper is to verify whether there is an acoustic difference between a reduced form of the verb poder (po’) ‘to be able to’ and the noun pó ‘powder’ in Brazilian Portuguese oral discourse. The reduction of the verb occurs in contexts in which it is an auxiliary in periphrases formed with the infinitive. This process results in a form segmentally homonymous with the noun pó [‘pɔ]. As the literature states that function words are shorter in duration than content words, homonymy is expected to occur at the segmental, but not at the suprasegmental level. To verify this hypothesis, we analyzed data from Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech, selecting the parameters of normalized duration (in smoothed z-score), mean intensity, mean f0 of both [‘pɔ] and its contiguous words, and the mean frequency of the formants (F1 and F2) of the vowel of both the verb and the noun. Statistically significant results were found only for duration, confirming that the auxiliary verb (a function word) is shorter than the noun (a content word). It is suggested that the suprasegmental level, namely duration, is an important correlate in differentiation between two segmentally homonymous words but from different categories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luis Filipe Lima e Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Comparisons between face-to-face and telephone speech
This pilot study aims at comparing two speech corpora in order to capture possible features of two different speech formats. The first corpus is a face-to-face speech corpus, the C-ORAL-BRASIL I (Raso and Mello, 2012) and the second corpus is a phone call corpus, part of the C-ORAL-BRASIL II (Raso; Mello; Ferrari, to appear), both in spontaneous informal Brazilian Portuguese. Through a pipeline prepared in Python, we compared: illocutionary complexity, informational density, overlapping, and disfluencies. Our results indicated that the speakers in the telephone calls had to use more vocal elements to convey a message while in face-to-face interactions the message would be divided in speech and gestures. The findings will be of interest to those who deal with speech corpora in different formats and are interested in selecting certain features for the comparison. Furthermore, this study has methodological ramifications because the elements examined here are very likely to occur in spontaneous speech in any format, and need to be compared carefully.
Copyright (c) 2025 João Victor Pessoa Rocha, Átila Augusto Soares Vital https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Theticity and subject inversion: a misconception? What can we learn from colloquial Israeli Hebrew?
Thetic constructions are generally perceived as presenting a split between semantic and syntactic predication. Studies in theticity maintain that inverse order of subject and predicate is a prominent criterion for the identification of thetic sentences, with an added factor being the lack of agreement between the constituent perceived as subject and the constituent perceived as predicate. Another criterion for identifying a sentence as thetic is the so-called sentence focus as opposed to focus of a single sentence constituent. The purpose of this article is to present a syntactic analysis of thetic sentences that have been commonly analyzed as verb-initial ones or, in short, VS constructions, as manifested in Colloquial Israeli Hebrew. The analysis offered here is based on previous research on IH sentence structure, which demonstrated that many sentences in IH are unipartite, containing only a predicate domain. The syntactic approach underlying this analysis is functional, communicative, discourse-based, and grounded in information structure. For the study of spoken language, an analysis of segmental elements must be combined with prosodic analysis. The study of thetic constructions presented here draws on research into existential-presentative constructions in colloquial IH, viewing them as unipartite sentences. It will be proposed that what appears to be a VS structure should not be analyzed as a bipartite sentence where a verb (or predicate) is followed by a subject, but rather as a sentence consisting only of a predicate domain, which includes an essential predicative core in second position and an embedded initial component.
Copyright (c) 2025 Shlomo Izre'el https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Hate speech compounds in the German immigration discourse on Twitter
This paper examines the use of derogatory prefixes and productive compounding as linguistic vehicles of hate speech in German Twitter, with a special focus on ethnic and religious minorities, on the background of the European immigration crisis. The linguistic mechanisms discussed focus on both morphology and semantics and include slur expansion, stereotype-based pseudo-slurs, fusion words, narrative encoding and the use of metaphor, among others. Specifically, we identify and document five main stereotypes for recent Muslim immigrants, as well as the main derogatory narration metaphors used in the German immigration discourse (e.g. disease, disaster, war). We discuss and classify over 500 individual lexical examples and tweet fragments, showing how pejorative word elements (e.g. animal tropes) are amalgamated with target group connotaters to achieve various desired effects, both denotative and connotative, as well as humour-based techniques such as puns, irony and understatement. The work is based on an unabridged, grammatically and semantically annotated 2 billion word Twitter corpus, harvested between 2017 and 2019.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eckhard Bick https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
According to Language into Act Theory, the identification of illocutionary types in speech is based on two premises: a) the speaker's affect is the activating force of illocution; b) prosodic contours convey the illocutionary force. This paper aims to clarify both assumptions by presenting arguments that link affect to prosody and prosody to pragmatic activities. The first part is dedicated to sketching the theoretical framework (Human Birth Theory), grounding the concept of affect, which must be distinguished from emotion and attitude. It focuses on its application to the domain of language performance and the relation between affect and prosody. The second part presents empirical arguments supporting the idea that prosodic contours guide the interpretation of illocution. The “Taken-for-granted assertions,” “Evident assertions,” “Requests for confirmation,” and “Open questions,” illocutionary types not identified in previous corpus-based taxonomies, are shaped by dedicated prosodic contours and defined according to pragmatic parameters. Parameters are scalar and connected to the speaker’s affective force: a) the speaker’s commitment to the truth, the relevance of the content, and the speaker’s affective involvement for assertions; b) the speaker’s estimation of the addressee’s knowledge, the type of linguistic behavior requested, and the speaker’s affective involvement for questions. The distinction between prosodic contours bearing illocutionary value and the prosodic properties that are a function of the speaker’s attitude is faced, showing that the latter does not change the prosodic model. The comparison between “Taken for granted assertion” and “Open question” shows how subtle prosodic cues can change the pragmatic interpretation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Emanuela Cresti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Prosodic synchrony and the semantic affiliation of gestures in the multimodal utterance
In the last decade, much research in the Autosegmental framework (Loehr 2012; 2014; Rohrer et al. 2023; Rohrer 2022) has highlighted a strong synchronization between Strokes' apex and prosodic prominences (pitch accents and prosodic edges). The paper addresses whether the synchrony with prosodic prominence signals the gesture’s semantic affiliation. The question is studied through the fine-grained analysis of an interview given by an actor where gestures were previously annotated (Cantalini 2022). The detection of prominences is achieved following the Language into Act Theory (Cresti 2000; Moneglia & Raso 2004), which connects Perceptively Relevant Prosodic Contours (‘t hart et al. 1990) to the pragmatic functions of the Information Units (IUs). Even assuming this framework, the synchronization of gestures to prosodic prominence is systematic. The paper shows that the affiliation of gestures must concern the IU where the prominence falls (neither backward nor forward). Prosodic synchrony, however, does not determine the type of semantic affiliation, which can be lexical, modal, or pragmatic; it does, however, impose substantial restrictions. The stance of modal gestures can scope on one word or one IU. Pragmatic gestures correlate with the pragmatic functions foreseen by L-AcT and synchronize with prominences bearing the corresponding value. IUs not bearing a functional prominence (Scanning IU) can affiliate lexical or modal but never pragmatic gestures.
Copyright (c) 2025 Massimo Moneglia, Giorgina Cantalini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Gesture structure, insights from annotation guidelines
This paper analyzes the internal structure of gestures, namely preparation, stroke, and recovery, by making a close reading of early (1970’s onwards) definitions. Those definitions are centered around segmenting the gesture based on saliency, creating an opposition between the stroke, the most well-defined part of the gesture, and other phases. Although this definition initially relied heavily on the association to speech, the need to operationalize the annotation forced definitions more linked to articulation features (Linguistic Annotation System for Gestures, Bressem et al., 2013). Later studies, mainly linking gestures to phonological structures of speech, started to rely on gesture kinematics to define gesture structure, which are motion-based features such as velocity profiles and movement targets (Kita et al., 1998; Loehr, 2004; Rohrer et al., 2023). The latter provides a qualitative base for the use of motion tracking technology in gesture studies, leading to the interpretation that the stroke can be better defined by its velocity profile than in connection with articulation features. In terms of theory, this impacts how gestures can be segmented and understood in language, without necessarily needing to fully integrate the phonology of the utterance it is associated to. It seems that gesture-speech association depends on the transparency it shows to its speech affiliated, moving from a tight synchrony for less representational and beat gestures, to a loose synchrony for iconic and recurrent gestures.
Copyright (c) 2025 Camila Antônio Barros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A qualitative systematic review of intra-speaker variation in the human voice
Audio deepfake detection is essential for addressing societal challenges such as differentiating real news from fake content or authenticating voice recordings in legal contexts. However, identifying whether a voice is human or AI-generated requires knowing which characteristics to examine, and the choice of voice features for this task is relatively unguided. This justifies the systematic review presented in this paper. Hypothesizing that human voices exhibit more intra-speaker variation than deepfakes, the aim of this review has been to summarize and analyze the published studies on the topic of intra-speaker variation in human voice. A systematic search was conducted in Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and the electronic database of the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, initially identifying 305 studies. After removing duplicates and applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 36 articles were selected for analysis. Findings highlight speaking style as a major factor in intra-speaker variation affecting various acoustic parameters. This review suggests that experts may prioritize features that show higher within-speaker variation, while noting that their utility for deepfake detection must be verified on deepfake datasets.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eugenia San Segundo, Jonathan Delgado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Acoustic and perceptual profiles of American English social affective expressions
This pilot study reports on acoustic and perceptual profiles of two American female speakers’ productions of six American English social affective expressions: Authority, Declaration, Irritation, Sincerity, Uncertainty and walking on eggs as spoken in the linguistic sentence frame, Mary was dancing. The acoustic profile describes the prosodic characteristics of the utterances as a whole, as well as the voice quality characteristics of the nuclear stress syllable in the utterances. The perceptual profiles describe listeners’ 3 dimensional VAD emotional ratings, i.e., Valence, Arousal, and Dominance, of the utterances and listeners’ auditory impressions of the nuclear stress syllable. Multifactorial Analyses were applied to examine the relation between the prosodic characteristics and the VAD scales, and also the relationship between voice quality measurements on the nuclear stress vowel and auditory perceptions. The prosodic MFA results indicate that for these two American English speakers, a soft / noisy voice, with weak harmonics and irregular rhythm with pauses and hesitations, as in the expressions of Uncertainty and WOEG, is perceived by listeners as accommodating and not positive. Loud, tense voices with energy in the upper frequencies, as in the expression of Irritation, are perceived as Aroused. Expressions of Authority, Declaration, and Sincerity tend to have comparatively regular rhythm and relatively flat intonation. The MFA analysis of voice quality measurements and auditory perceptions suggests that Normalized Amplitude Quotient may indeed be a good estimate for tense voice due to glottal closing behavior, Cepstral Peak Prominence, a good estimation for strong non-noisy harmonics, Peak Slope, a good estimate of spectral related tense voice, and Hammarberg Index, for distribution of spectral energy, i.e., strong or weak energy in the upper frequencies.
Copyright (c) 2024 Donna Erickson, Albert Rilliard, Ela Thurgood, João Moraes, Takaaki Shochi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Os efeitos da intensificação de sentido sobre a duração silábica
O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar uma caracterização acústica da duração silábica e do núcleo silábico de palavras em contextos de atribuição de intensificação de sentido. Trata-se de um recorte do estudo anterior (Varela, 2024), no qual a intensificação de sentido foi caracterizada acusticamente, em termos de duração, frequência fundamental (f0) e ênfase espectral (intensidade) das sílabas e seus fones entre as posições pretônica, tônica e postônica de palavras intensificadoras realizadas por professores do ensino básico. Os dados foram obtidos por meio de um experimento de leitura de um texto adaptado realizado em três contextos de intensificação (neutro, intensificado e extraintensificado), cujo enunciado-veículo “no meio do caminho tinha (uma) [palavra-alvo] pedra” foi realizado com as seguintes palavras-alvo intensivas: muita, baita, mega, profusa e vultosa. Foram extraídas as medidas acústicas de duração (segmental, sílaba fonológica e unidades VV), f0 (mediana e desvio-padrão) e intensidade relativa (ênfase espectral), por meio do script GenAcousticsSegments, no programa de análise acústica PRAAT. Os dados são de seis participantes (masculinos e femininos) professores do ensino básico de Campinas/SP e região de São Paulo. Resultados demonstraram que a duração silábica aumenta conforme são atribuídos os contextos de intensificação, caracterizando uma relação icônica entre alongamento silábico e efeitos de intensificação de sentido.
Copyright (c) 2024 Fernando Luiz Pompeu Varela https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Acoustical characterization of the svarabhakti vowels in [Cɾ] and [ɾC] clusters in Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Pelotas (RS)
This study aims to provide an acoustic description of the sequences [Cɾ] and [ɾC] (in words such as "prato" and "carta") in Brazilian Portuguese, a context where svarabhakti vowels, short vocalic elements that replicate the quality of the syllable's nuclear vowel, are observed. To assess the role of different linguistic variables in the production and duration of this vocalic fragment, three experiments were conducted for word elicitation, varying in control levels. Dependent variables analyzed included presence of the svarabhakti vowel, absolute duration, relative duration, and vocalic quality. Independent variables encompassed experiment type, stress pattern, syllable position of the tap, point of articulation, voicing of the consonant adjacent to the tap, and nuclear vowel quality. The participants consisted of five monolingual women aged between 47 and 69 years, residing in Pelotas (Rio Grande do Sul). Interviews were conducted in a quiet setting using a Zoom H4N digital recorder. Results revealed that in the analyzed sample, svarabhakti vowels were present in 93.9% of productions, with an approximate duration of ¼ of a nuclear vowel. Their occurrence was higher in [Cɾ] syllables compared to [ɾC], and their duration was significantly longer in more controlled experiments, in pre-vocalic position, under stressed syllables, and preceding voiced consonants with dorsal articulation. Findings suggest that the svarabhakti vowel is formed by the same articulatory gesture as the syllable's nuclear vowel, thus not constituting an independent gesture.
Copyright (c) 2024 Felipe Bilharva da Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Letter to the editor on seeing an elephant
This contribution is part of the Debate section that dialogues with the two-part paper "The Syntax of Existential Constructions" by Shlomo Izre'el from Tel-Aviv University published in Volume 11 in 2022. This letter is a reply to Rivka Halevy in the same section and published in Volume 11 in 2022 and to Pavel Ozerov in the same section and published in Volume 12 in 2023. First, I will refer to Rivka Halevy’s rejoinder, where she mainly addressed typological issues, among which the syntactical status of the pivot is especially intriguing. I will then deal with Pavel Ozerov’s rejoinder, who addressed the theoretical framework upon which my analysis of the existential-presentative constructions was based. Here I will deal with the complexities in defining and analyzing a syntactic predicate and its relations to the pragmatic notion of comment. In guise of a conclusion, I will touch upon some general observations on the study of language.
Copyright (c) 2024 Shlomo Izre'el https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The third language imitation of Spanish rhotic-lateral contrast by Akan-English bilingual children and adults
This study explores the third language imitation of the Spanish rhotic-lateral contrast by Akan-English bilingual children and adults. Specifically, it examines this phenomenon, with respect to (i) first language transfer in the imitation of the Spanish rhotic-lateral contrast, (ii) the effect of orthographic input on the imitation of the rhotic-lateral contrast in Spanish as a third language, and (iii) the effect of age of acquisition with the inclusion of a comparison between children and adults. Whereas rhotics and laterals are contrastive in most varieties of Spanish and English, they are in free variation in Akan (Guerini, 2018). The participants in this study consisted of 20 Akan-English bilinguals between the ages of 8-10yrs and 18-55. The conditions included an imitation task with auditory input only and another with orthographic input. The results showed evidence of L1 transfer, a positive effect of orthography, and a better performance of children. This study has important implications as it provides data from an understudied population in the field of L2/L3 speech learning.
Copyright (c) 2023 Linda Ahima, Gabriela Martinez Loyola, Laura Spinu, Yasaman Rafat https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The effects of context of learning on the perception of Spanish stress by Japanese speakers
This study explores the effect of context of learning on the perception of Spanish lexical stress. Spanish is considered a mixed system (with predictable and unpredictable stress) and a stress-accent language. Tokyo Japanese is a good example of a language without stress, but with pitch-accent. Two groups of Japanese speakers (20 in Bogotá and 25 in Japan) and a control group of 20 Spanish speakers completed a stress identification task, consisting of nine sets of 3 syllable accentual minimal triplets with each having an oxytone (e.g., nabidó), a paroxytone (e.g., nabido), and a proparoxytone (e.g., nábido). The results demonstrated that there was a significant effect of context of learning, with learners in Japan (88%) having a significantly (p=0.000) higher error rate than the learners in Colombia (60%). This study sheds highlights the effect of context of learning on L2 speech learning by demonstrating that immersion can enhance L2 stress perception.
Copyright (c) 2023 Elkin Sierra, Gabriela Martinez Loyola, Takuya Kimura, Ryan Stevenson, Rajiv Rao, Yasaman Rafat https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language users possess knowledge about the second language (L2) phonological system and their own L2 pronunciation, known as phonological awareness and phonological self-awareness, respectively. Higher awareness about the L2 phonology has been shown to be beneficial for L2 pronunciation accuracy (e.g. Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2010), making it relevant to know which features L2 learners are able to notice and how the L2 phonology can be brought into the learners’ attention better. The aim of the paper is to examine language learners’ awareness about their own pronunciation by investigating which L2 segmental features are noticed, how one’s intelligibility is perceived and how participants view their phonological self-awareness abilities. 33 L1 Finnish learners of English enrolled in an English phonetics and phonology course recorded a speech sample and later listened to it by noting down the perceived pronunciation deviations on selected features. The participants also answered a phonological self-awareness questionnaire. The results indicate that the learners noticed segmental deviations in their productions, mainly in relation to consonantal voicing and vowel duration. The participants also perceived themselves as highly intelligible and reported it to be easy to notice the gap in their pronunciation, to identify pronunciation deviations in other speakers’ speech and to identify Finnish-accented English. Nevertheless, the overall verbalization of noticing was scarce and the participants manifested difficulties in explaining the noticed phenomena. The discussion relates the phonological self-awareness findings to pedagogical applications.
Copyright (c) 2023 Hanna Kivistö de Souza, Pekka Lintunen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Studies on prosody and autism by an acoustic analysis approach
This review, linked to Núcleo de Estudos sobre Prosódia e Ensino de Língua (NEPEL//UFRRJ), is dedicated to the data survey of scientific material published under the theme autism and prosody in the last decade. This paper aims to collect published papers under the topic mentioned in which present as methodological approach the acoustic analysis, in a time frame from 2011 to 2020/2021. Thereunto, specific keywords were selected, along with the usage of boolean operators for the research in 6 different index platforms: ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, MLA, SciELO and Scopus. As the research progressed, 174 articles were collected. Afterwards, we tabbed the data into different categories, of which resulted in 74 relevant articles. Finally, with the analysis completed, we pointed both comparative and contrasting aspects from those researched papers and concluded that the papers published under the theme of Autism Spectrum Disorder and prosody are scarce in quantity. Thence, we also aimed to report possible alternatives and to lead future research into the theme of autism and prosody, using the acoustic analysis as its approach.
Copyright (c) 2023 Leandro Lisboa, Tania Mikaela Garcia Roberto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
In this paper we address the long-standing issue of how prosodic patterns are linked to meanings. We explore the idea that prosodically realized communicative functions, such as focus and sentence modality, are analogous to lexical morphemes, the smallest sound units that carry meaning. We considered evidence of a four-way similarity between lexical morphemes and prosodic functions. First, similar to lexical morphemes, each prosodic function consists of multiple phonetic components. Second, like segmental phonemes, individual prosodic components are meaningless themselves, but act jointly to mark both intraand inter-functional contrasts. Third, like lexical morphemes, prosodic functions have allomorph-like variants whose occurrences are conditioned by factors like location in sentence and interaction with other prosodic functions. Finally, similar to lexical morphemes, prosodic functions are language-specific and the specificity has likely historical sources. We examined the evidence by a) reviewing existing literature on speech prosody, b) conducting two new experiments on the production of focus and sentence modality in General American English and Mandarin Chinese, and c) training an articulatory-functional model on focus, modality, tone and stress in English and Mandarin, and synthesizing fully-detailed F0 contours with the learned functional targets. Overall, all the evidence examined is in support of the hypothesis. In particular, the consistency between the target parameters obtained from acoustic analysis and computational modeling, and the close match between functionally synthesized and naturally produced F0 contours demonstrate the plausibility of establishing a clear link between function-specific categorical representations and fine-detailed surface prosody.
Copyright (c) 2013 Fang Liu, Yi Xu, Santitham Prom-on, Alan C. L. Yu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/