Glossary

Prosody: acoustic properties of speech including intonation,tone, rhythm and lexical stress
Intonation: intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking
Pitch: the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound
Accent: the way a group of people pronounces the sounds of a language
Rhythm: variation of the accentuation of sounds over time
Tone: use of pitch in language to distinguish words
Syllable: consists of a nucleus (vowel), which is the central part of the syllable, and margins (consonants)
Stress: emphasis that may be given to syllables in a word

Session 1, Oct 19, 2006

First Session Oct 19, 2006

In the first session of "Models of prosody" we had a closer look at various definitions of the term "prosody".
"Prosody" was defined as the pattern of stress and intonation in a language.
According to answers.com, these prosodic features of a unit of speech are called suprasegmental features.

Further more, we found a definition related to poetic rythm and metrical structures. In the WordNet it was explained as "the study of poetic meter and the art of versification".

Wikipedia distinguishes between prosody in linguistics which includes intonation and vocal stress in speech, and prosody in poetry which includes vocal composition as function of rhythm and pitch.
"Intonation" was presented as a synonym of prosody several times. Other closely related terms were breath group, tune and speech melody.
Mr Gibbon put the emphasis on the terms "Intonation", "Pitch", "Syllable" and Accent".
In the next lines I will give some definitions of these terms and of other related words:

intonation: rise and fall of the voice pitch
accent: the relative prominence of a syllable or musical note (especially with regard to stress or pitch)
rhythm: the arrangement of spoken words alternating stressed and unstressed elements
Syllable: a syllable is a word or part of a word that can be pronounced with one impulse from the voice. A syllable always contains a vowel sound, and most syllables have consonants associated with the vowel.
Pitch: the property of sound that varies with variation in the frequency of vibration

Additionally, Mr Gibbon mentioned the term "Paralinguistics" in this context.

Homework: Practical tasks
Our task was to download these audio files and describe informally the kind of English involved
File 1: A : voice of a child
File 2: G : native, adult speaker
File 3: J : dialectal,foreign language speaker
File 4: D : native, adult speaker

1.We had to process them with Praat by creating word, syllable and tone annotation tiers.

(See the results in my following posts)

2.Further more, our homework was to annotate words and syllables and check the web for information about the ToBI annotation notation. On the site www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ame_tobi/labelling_guide_v3.pdf I found the following explanations:

"ToBI is a system for transcribing the intonation patterns and other aspects of the prosody of English utterances. It was devised by a group of speech scientists from various different disciplines who wanted a common standard for transcribing an agreed-upon set of prosodic elements, in order to be able to share prosodically transcribed databass across research sites in the pursuit of diverse research purposes and varied technological goals."

3.Then our task was to annotate the tones and describe the ones we have used, their distribution and their function (result can be found in following posts).