A new California chapter of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society is currently forming. Anyone interested in becoming involved, or in being informed of upcoming events, please contact jonathan at)musiclanguage.net.
The community here at Music & Language Studies is growing. As you see below, the first “guest” posting has appeared with Bruce Richman’s discussion of his approach to using songs in teaching English speech intonation and rhythm.
I would like to invite others who are interested to email me regarding the possibility of contributing to this website. All subscribers are able to post comments. If you would like to upload files, add links, or write posts, please let me know.
Best to all,
Jonathan Pearl
jonathan @ musiclanguage.net
Incursões em torno do Ritmo da Fala
by Plínio A. Barbosa (plinio@iel.unicamp.br)
Campinas, Brazil: Pontes Editores.
www.ponteseditores.com.br
ponteseditores@ponteseditores.com.br
The book Incursões deals with all components (including their coupling relations) of a dynamical model of speech rhythm, which is named throughout the book the reference model for practical reasons. The computational-mathematical implementation of the model is couched on dynamical systems theory, and presupposes that the rhythmic system underlying speech communication has three levels of coupling at three distinct temporal scales. Read the rest of this entry »
ROA 846-0506
Dissertation: Prosodic Processes in Language and Music
Maartje Schreuder <M.J.Schreuder@rug.nl>
Direct link:
http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=846
Abstract:
This dissertation makes a comparison of language and music. As composer Lerdahl and linguist Jackendoff show in their ‘Generative Theory of Tonal Music’, these two cognitive behaviors share aspects, such as hierarchical structure, in which prominent elements are separated from non-prominent elements by means of preference rules and rhythmic and phrasing phenomena. Recent constraint-based approaches to phonology, such as Optimality Theory, show that the similarities are even more striking for phonological and musical analyses.
This dissertation shows that music theory may help to solve linguistic issues with which linguistic theory alone finds it hard to deal. Three such issues are investigated experimentally. The first issue is whether speech is just shortened and compressed when people speak faster, with the same rhythmic structure, or whether the speech rhythm changes. The second issue is the question whether recursion can be found in phonology. Are phrasing phenomena such as early accent placement applied repeatedly in embedded phonological phrases? The third issue is major and minor modality in intonation contours of cheerful and sad speech.
One of the main findings is that listeners appear sometimes to base their perception on auditory illusions, not always on the sound signal as it is. Listeners hear what they expect to hear. As in music, rhythm is perceived as more regular than it is in reality. The results of this research confirm the assumption that speech and music share many features. Both are ‘made of’ sound, and both kinds of sound signal are structured by the listener in a similar way.
Comments: PhD Dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-367-2637-9.
Keywords: laboratory phonology, musicology, prosody, rhythm, secondary stress, early accent placement, fast speech, tempo, timing, recursion
Areas: Phonology,Phonetics
Type: PhD Dissertation
Direct link:
http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=846
The Where to Study and Conferences pages have been updated.
Links have been added to the Software page, including links to the tools EXMARaLDA and PRAAT.
First Langauge and the Journal of Child Language have been added to the Journals page.
Need to add a critical commentary on dichotic listening experiments. Why are these studies still so often cited? From my review of the literature most of them are fatally flawed by too many confounds, especially in their assumptions regarding what consititutes linguistic (or “verbal”) vs. non-verbal stimuli. But see Kimura’s (1967) comments, p. 167, acknowledging the difficulty of determining “what verbal activity consists in”.
A terminology page has been added under the heading Resources.
