Suprasegmentals

• Segmental
• refers to phonemes and allophones and their attributes
• Supra- or extra-segmental
• Elements that transcend or extends across segmental boundaries
 Suprasegmentals
Speech has…
• Melody
• Intonation
• Rhythm
• Stress
• Tempo
Prosody
• Rate and/or duration
• Quantity
 Intonation
• Intonation contour
• F0 changes over time
• Intonation contour marks
• Grammatical information
• Phrase boundaries
• Sentence type
• Affective information
• Emotion
Grammatical Information

• Marking phrase boundaries

• F0 declination
• Marking sentence type
• Statement vs. question
• “overide” F0 declination
 Marking Phrase Boundaries
Pressure
Sound
F0

Time
Why does F0 decline toward the end of a
phrase?
Some possible explanations
• Linguistic explanation
• Physiologic explanation
Pressure
Marking Sentence Types
Sound
F0
Frequency

Time
Clinical Example
Healthy Male Control Hypokinetic dysarthria
Stress

• Syllabic stress
• Primary, secondary and tertiary stress
• Lexical stress
• e.g. noun-verb distinction for “complex”
• Emphatic stress
• Highlight a word in a phrase
Stress

• Related to “effort”
• Acoustic correlates
• Complex percept
• Fundamental frequency
• Intensity
• Duration
 Syllabic stress
Pressure
Sound
F0
Frequency

OBject obJECT
Tempo

• Rate/durational aspects of speech

• Relative rate/durational measures
• Relative duration within a phrase/utterance
• Absolute rate/durational measures
• Speech rate
• Articulation time
• Pause time
• Articulation rate
Relative Duration
Selected Contextual considerations

• Marking grammatical events

• Phrase final lengthening
• Phonetic influences
• Local phonetic environment
• Vowel duration preceding voiced consonants
• Consonant clusters
• Marking Rhythm
• Stress
Vowel duration preceding consonants

“pod”

Vowel=303 msec

“pot”
Vowel=221 msec
Speech Tempo

• Typically expressed as # of speech elements/time

• Typically expressed as syllables/sec or words/syllables per minute
• Can be quite variable depending on communication pressures
• Quite variable from person to person
• Habitual speech rate is somewhat stable within a speaker
Tempo Measures

• Speaking rate
• Number of syllables/words/total speaking time
• Can be informative about overall rate of information
transfer
 Tempo Measures
• Articulation time
• Duration occupied by speech-related acoustic energy
• Pause time
• Duration between “runs” of speech-related acoustic energy
• Associated with inspiration and/or syntactic boundaries
• Operational definitions often require pause time to be at
least 200-250 msec
• Articulation rate
• Number of syllables or words/articulation time
Acoustic Comparison
Intelligibility

• Estimate of how well the speaker is understood

• Ways to estimate intelligibility

• Scaling methods
• Transcription/forced choice tasks
• Word level
• Sentence level
Words vs. Sentences

• Words
• If constructed properly, can provide information about “goodness” of
phonetic contrasts
• e.g. target: “coat” foils: “goat”, “code”, “tote”
• Sentences
• perhaps an increased face validity
• Allows contextual cues
• Incorporates some suprasegmental factors
Communication Efficiency

• some have attempted to estimate the efficiency of communication

• Combining
• Speech rate
• Intelligibility
• i.e. intelligible syllables per second (or syllables/words per minute)