The Role of Acoustic Parameters in Distinguishing Persian Simple Past and Present Perfect Tenses
Journal Title: Journal of Researches in Linguistics - Year 2020, Vol 12, Issue 2
Abstract
Abstract This paper addressed the acoustic factors involved in distinguishing simple past and present perfect tenses in Persian. The pronunciation of Persian simple past and present perfect tenses in colloquial speech are the same segmentally but different in terms of the position of stress. In an experimental study, the pattern of distribution of some important prosodic parameters, including F0, intensity, and duration, was investigated in a speech corpus consisting of 24 sentences. Results suggested that none of the study parameters could differentiate simple past and present perfect tenses reliably and consistently. After normalizing F0 and computing the average pitch for all acoustic data per speaker, it was found that it is the value of F0 peaks and valleys in the target syllables that makes a fundamental distinction between simple past and present perfect. Results of statistical tests confirmed this finding, suggesting that the local F0 value is a reliable and consistent parameter that distinguishes simple past from present perfect in both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Keywords: Simple past, Present perfect, Local F0, Duration, Intensity Introduction This paper addressed the acoustic factors involved in distinguishing simple past and present perfect tenses in Persian. The pronunciation of Persian simple past and present perfect tenses in colloquial speech are the same segmentally but different in terms of the position of stress. Stress is a linguistic property of a word, specifying which syllable is stronger in the word compared to any others. Early studies, such as Fry (1955, 1958), Lieberman (1960), Beckman (1986), Harrington, Beckman, and Palethorpe (1998) (see also Laver, 1994 for an overview) have shown that there are clear acoustic differences between stressed and unstressed syllables: stressed syllables are realized with a higher pitch, higher intensity, longer duration, and more peripheral vowel quality than unstressed syllables. Studies in many stress accent languages show that the realization of a stressed syllable differs from the unstressed syllable due to having a higher pitch. Also, results have shown that speakers consistently used duration to distinguish between open and central vowels having contrastive stress at the word level, while contrastive stress between open vowels at the phrase level was mainly accompanied by the intonational prominence contrast. Compared to F0 and duration, the relation of intensity variation needs to be discussed further in the speech signal to word stress. On the one hand, previous work has generally emphasized that intensity manipulations prove much weaker cues than duration in perceived stress (Fry, 1955, 1958; Turk & Sawusch, 1996, for English; Mol & Uhlenbeck, 1956, for Dutch). Furthermore, several different operationalizations of intensity, such as intensity summed over time (Beckman, 1986) and spectral tilt (i.e., the degree to which intensity changes as frequency increases) (Sluijter & van Heuven, 1996a; Sluijter, van Heuven, & Pacilly, 1997), have been shown to be consistent correlates of stress. For example, Sluijter and van Heuven (1996) argue that previous study has demonstrated that, on the one hand, loudness variation virtually inconsequential for perceived stress is typically based on analyses that do not distinguish between word stress and, on the other hand, pitch accent-induced prominence. They note that if a more accurate measure of intensity is used, the traditional account of stress as a local increase in loudness seems justified. Materials and Methods In an experimental study, the pattern of distribution of some important prosodic parameters, such as F0, intensity, and duration, was investigated in a speech corpus consisting of 24 sentences. The target words in such sentences were simple past and present perfect tenses that would be produced with a flat pitch melody characterizing post-focal accent, and that the phrase-level accent was far away from the target word so that no effects of the accent would be observed there. All acoustic measurements were taken using the speech software Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2020). In each word, syllable and vowel boundaries were manually identified and annotated as the measurement intervals. Segmentation criteria were based on both waveform and spectrogram cues, as suggested by Peterson and Lehiste (1960). Measurements of all acoustic variables were made automatically using ProsodyPro (Xu, 2020). Discussion of Results and Conclusions Results suggested that none of the parameters selected could differentiate simple past and present perfect tenses reliably and consistently. After normalizing F0 and computing the average pitch for all acoustic data per speaker, it was found that it is the value of F0 peaks and valleys in the target syllables that makes a fundamental distinction between simple past and present perfect. Results of statistical tests confirmed this finding, suggesting that the local F0 value is a reliable and consistent parameter that distinguishes simple past from present perfect in both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.
Authors and Affiliations
Vahid Sadeghi* Associate Professor, Department of English and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran vsadeghi@hum. ikiu. ac. ir Amene Emadi MA in Linguistics, Department of English Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran emadi. amene. ls@gmail. com *Corresponding author
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- EP ID EP705251
- DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.22108/jrl.2021.125083.1510
- Views 75
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