We view speech as organized articulatorily in terms of units that result from the speaker opening and closing the mouth, e.g., mandible. How much the mandible (aka jaw) opens during each syllable is determined by the characteristics of the vowel phoneme, and also the prosodic relationship of the syllable to other syllables in the utterance. Regression analyses of jaw displacements in an utterance containing all mid front /e/ vowels with prominence ratings (Rapid Prosodic Transcription (RPT) by English listeners shows significant correlations between jaw and perceived prominence. The results suggest increased jaw displacement results in changes in acoustic information, which listeners may use to recognize nuclear stress in English. The results can be interpreted to support a view of temporal organization of spoken utterances as a series of syllables in which the speaker opens the jaw more for the important items in the utterance; specifically, in English, the syllable with the largest magnitude in the utterance (in terms of jaw displacement) is perceived as having the nuclear stress.
Cite as: Erickson, D., Huang, T., Menezes, C. (2020) Temporal organization of spoken utterances from an articulatory point of view. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 11-15, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-3
@inproceedings{erickson20_speechprosody,
author={Donna Erickson and Ting Huang and Caroline Menezes},
title={{Temporal organization of spoken utterances from an articulatory point of view}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={11--15},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-3}
}