Temporal properties of spoken Swedish / Bertil Lyberg.

Bibliografía: p. 63-65.

Introduction -- Background -- General -- Some fundamentals of Swedish prosody -- Quantity -- Stress -- Pitch -- Some production data -- Descriptions of the durational properties of spoken Swedish -- Positional effects in other languages -- Models based on production constraints -- The power-law model -- The short-term memory model -- The Fo dependent model -- Timing. Some central questions -- The preprogramming span -- Isochrony -- Extrinsic/intrinsic timing -- Methodology -- Speech material -- Measurements and statistics -- Observations on positional effects -- Experimental design -- Durational effects -- Word level -- Phrase level -- Alternative description of production data -- Fundamental frequency manifestations -- Segment duration. A function of fundamental frequency change? -- Introduction -- Experiment -- Observations -- Outline of a fundamental frequency dependent model for segment duration -- Basic concepts of an Fo dependent model -- Generation of the fundamental frequency contour -- Generation of the segment duration values -- The importance of timing and fundamental frequency contour in the perception of prosodic categories -- Introduction -- Experimental design -- Results -- Concluding remarks -- Summary of the main observations -- The preprogramming span -- Positional effects on segment durations: a perturbation at a relatively peripheral level -- Bibliography.

For certain languages the duration of speech segments varies in a systematic way depending on the position in the word and the phrase. The aim of the present thesis is to describe and to explain some of the temporal regularities of spoken Swedish. A systematic mapping of these properties is expected to provide some insight into certain aspects of the mental processes underlying the temporal organization of speech.
In a series of experiments some of the temporal regularities were studied in prosodically neutral words and sentences containing both the acute accent (accent I) and the grave accent (accent II). The segment duration values were also studied in relation to another intonation parameter, the fundamental frequency contour.
The present results show that the durational variations at word level will only happen in phrase-final positions and the lengthening process of syllables in the final position seems to be a result of the signalling of the phrase boundary. In computation of segment variations only two word positions have to be considered the phrase-final and the non-final phrase position. It was also found strong evidences in favour of a relationship between segment duration and fundamental frequency change. It seems therefore quite unparsimonious to describe segment durations and fundamental frequency variations as two independent phenomena and an F dependent model is hypothesized for the generation of the segment duration values in different positions in words and phrases. According to this model the variation of the segment duration in different places in a sentence is only a secondary effect of the F events which carry the major burden of signalling the prosodic contents and may be executed by a regulation system at a fairly peripheral level.