GeHa · Gemination Harmony

Gemination Harmony

Research on speech has so far mainly dealt with how a sound in a given word is influenced by a neighbour sound (referred to as coarticulation). For instance, in the English word 'shoot', the rounded vowel ‘u’ is anticipated by rounding the lips on the sound ‘sh’. Far less explored are those cases of coarticulation that occur at distance, that is, from a certain sound to another one that is non adjacent to it. This phenomenon is more commonly referred as 'harmony' in phonology. The current project has investigated if non-local adjustments between sounds occur in words that differ at a temporal level. In particular, it has determined whether the initial consonant /p/ is temporally influenced by the durational differences of the medial consonant /l/ in word pairs such as the Italian 'palla' vs. 'pala'. The prediction is that the /p/ is longer when followed by a long /l/ than a short one (/p/ is longer in palla than in pala). The lengthening of the word-initial consonant helps speakers to enhance the upcoming durational contrast. Anticipation in speech planning is a phenomenon of high interest for articulatory models of speech production. It is also matter of debate for cognition. During the two-year fellowship, the researcher has also tried to determine how well in advance listeners use fine-grained speech cues (in this case, the lengthening of the word-initial consonant of the geminate word, cf. above) to spoken word recognition. Hence, the main question of the current project has been to determine whether anticipatory non-local adjustments can additionally be caused by prosody-based contrasts (and not only, by feature-based contrasts) such as the durational properties of a sound in production and comprehension. Studying the non-local adjustments determined by prosody-based contrast can deepen our understanding on the relation between phonetics and phonology, that is between the continuous properties of the speech sounds and their cognitive representation as abstract and categorical units. Knowing the physical property of speech sounds and its abstraction is crucial for our understanding of the core mechanisms underlying the human faculty of speech communication. The current project has achieved three important scientific objectives. The first objective has been to show that adjustments between non-adjacent segments in a word are not only caused by feature-based contrast (as in the case of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation or nasalization) but also by prosody-like contrasts, such as the temporal properties of a sound (as in gemination). The second important objective has been to reply to the question of why length contrast is prevalently binary across world languages, compared to other types of contrasts such as tone or height. The third objective has been to understand whether and, if so, how far non-local adjustments interact with prosodic-related factors (such as boundary strength) and performance-related factors (speech style differences between journalistic and casual speech).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union