Elsevier

Speech Communication

Volume 47, Issues 1–2, September–October 2005, Pages 71-79
Speech Communication

Short communication
Neutralization or truncation? The perception of two Russian pitch accents on utterance-final syllables

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2005.06.004Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a perception experiment that was carried out to verify the hypothesis that in Russian the contrast between pitch accents LH*L and LH* on utterance-final syllables is neutralized. Recordings for the experiment were 10 sets of three short utterances with word stress in the ultimate, penultimate and antepenultimate syllable of the utterance-final word. These utterances were read aloud by four female and four male native speakers. They were asked to realize accents LH*L and LH* in the utterance-final word. After instructions and rehearsing, recordings were made separately for each of the two types. In the perception experiment, 30 native subjects listened to short utterances selected from the recordings and presented in 180 pairs: 120 pairs with ultimate stress and, in order to test whether listeners can hear the difference at all, 60 pairs with penultimate and antepenultimate word stress in utterance-final position. The 180 stimuli pairs consisted of short utterances with realizations of LH*L and LH* on the final word, each pair containing two same or two different types of pitch accent. The task was to compare two stimuli in a pair and to indicate on a score form whether two realizations in a stimulus pair count as passable imitations of each other and thus belong to the same type of pitch accent. The same/different judgments indicate that listeners successfully distinguished between the two pitch accents in the antepenultimate and penultimate conditions, but much less so in the ultimate condition. This suggests that the two accents are truncated in final position, but not neutralized.

Section snippets

Background and hypothesis

Till the present day most descriptions and transcriptions of Russian intonation have been based on the holistic approach of Bryzgunova, 1977, Bryzgunova, 1980, Bryzgunova, 1984. Non-holistic treatments are, for instance, Fougeron, 1989, Kodzasov, 1996, Kodzasov, 1999, Nikolaeva, 2000, Odé, 1989, Svetozarova, 1982. Recent works by Yokoyama (2001) and Igarashi, 2002, Igarashi, 2004a, Igarashi, 2004b discuss issues on Russian intonation in an autosegmental phonological framework. In my view,

Pitch accents LH*L and LH* defined

According to Odé’s classification, Russian has six types of rising pitch accent, four types with large excursion, and two with normal excursion (for a full description see Odé, 1989, p. 119). Based on a thoroughly analysed corpus of 15 minutes (Odé, 1989, 115pp.), the experimentally verified accents LH*L and LH* discussed in this article have on average the following specifications: an excursion size of >15 semitones measured from the average low level reached by a given speaker in final falls,

Recordings

Recordings were made in order to arrive at a set of short utterances with accents LH*L and LH* realized in words in utterance-final position with ultimate, penultimate and antepenultimate word stress. These utterances could then be used for the verification of the hypothesis in an experimental setting. The recording of these utterances was carried out in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The recordings were made on a Marantz CDR300 digital CD-recorder with a Sony electret stereo directional microphone.

Perception experiment

The perception experiment was conducted to verify the hypothesis that types LH*L and LH* occurring on utterance-final syllables are neutralized. Listeners fulfilled a paired-comparison task; pairs consisted of two stimuli containing realizations either of the same pitch accent or of different pitch accents. Utterances for the stimuli pairs were selected from the recordings described in Section 3. The perception experiment consisted of 180 pairs and 30 native listeners carried out the task.

Discussion and conclusion

The results presented in Fig. 4 clearly show that pitch accents LH*L and LH* on utterance-final syllables are not neutralized and the hypothesis must be rejected. In this position, there is a significant difference between pairs with LH*L vs LH*L and LH* vs LH* on the one hand, and pairs with LH* vs LH*L on the other (see Section 4.2). Scores for the latter pairs are almost at chance level. If there were neutralization of the contrast between the two accents, the middle bar in Fig. 4 would have

Acknowledgements

This research is financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO (dossiernr. 355-75-004).

The author expresses her gratitude to Carlos Gussenhoven, Rob van Son and especially to an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References (21)

  • Boersma, P., Weenink, D., 2005. Praat: doing phonetics by computer. Computer program, version 4.3.16. Available from:...
  • E.A. Bryzgunova

    Zvuki i intonatsiia russkoi rechi

    (1977)
  • E.A. Bryzgunova
  • E.A. Bryzgunova

    Emotsional’no-stilisticheskie razlichiia russkoi zvuchashchei rechi

    (1984)
  • I. Fougeron

    Prosodie et organisation du message. Analyse de la phrase assertive en russe contemporain

    (1989)
  • C. Gussenhoven

    Transcription of Dutch intonation, prosodic typology—the phonology of intonation and phrasing

  • Gussenhoven, C., Rietveld, T., Kerkhoff, J., Terken, J., 2003. ToDI, Transcription of Dutch Intonation, Courseware,...
  • Y. Igarashi

    Tak nazyvaemaia neitralizatsia intonatsii—fonologicheskoe opisanie russkoi intonatsii

    Bull. Jpn. Assoc. Study Russ. Lang. Lit.

    (2002)
  • Igarashi, Y., 2004a. Segmental anchoring of F0 under changes in speech rate: evidence from Russian. In: Proceedings of...
  • Y. Igarashi

    Fonetika i fonologiia intonatsii v voprositel’nykh predlozheniiakh v russkom iazyke

    Bull. Jpn. Assoc. Study Russ. Lang. Lit.

    (2004)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (12)

  • On the neutralizing status of truncation in intonation: A perception study of boundary tones in German and Russian

    2013, Journal of Phonetics
    Citation Excerpt :

    These results support the assumption by Dinnsen (1985, p. 276) mentioned above that the acoustic cues for neutralized forms do not necessarily coincide with the main phonetic manifestation of the underlying phonological distinction. Perceptual impact of truncation in Russian and whether it leads to a complete neutralization of the tonal contrast was explicitly addressed by Odé (2005) who investigated truncated and fully realized forms of LHH- vs. LHL-tonal sequences using the classical ‘perceptual equivalence’ paradigm ('t Hart, Collier, & Cohen, 1990). The stimuli for this perception experiment contained productions of the two patterns in various segmental and syllabic environments by eight fully trained linguists who were native speakers of Russian.

  • On the acoustic correlates of high and low nuclear pitch accents in American English

    2010, Speech Communication
    Citation Excerpt :

    Another possible explanation is that the height of the F0 peak for the late accented syllable may be influenced by the natural F0 declination which can occur over the course of declarative statements. While the effects of tonal crowding have been described in a number of contexts (Arvaniti et al., 2006; Arvaniti and Garding, 2007; Grabe et al., 2000; Ode, 2005), the principles that govern these effects have not been fully and systematically explored. Moreover, tonal crowding effects can be seen as part of the more general question of how F0 and other acoustic exponents of tonal targets are realized with respect to the segmental content of an utterance.

View all citing articles on Scopus

The issue discussed in this article was presented at the International Conference on Tone and Intonation in Europe, 9–11 September 2004, Santorini, Greece.

View full text