Suprasegmental Properties

of Speech
Robert A. Prosek, Ph.D.
CSD 301
 Coarticulation (1)
• Speech sounds are not produced in isolation, but in
context

• syllables, words, and phrases

• Individual sounds lose their distinctiveness
• /mɑm/
• /ti/ vs /tu/
• At any one instant in time
• the vocal tract shows adjustments for more than one
sound

• this is coarticulation
 Coarticulation (2)
• Coarticulation direction
• Anticipatory
• features of a sound appear earlier than the sound
• forward coarticulation /æm/

• Retentive
• features of a sound carry over to the next one
• backward coarticulation /no/
• It takes time to make articulatory adjustments
 Coarticulation (3)
• Temporal complexity
• phonemes become shorter when syllable length
increases

• /ped/
• /sped/
• /spled/
• speech rate becomes a primary consideration
• acoustic cues are not tightly bound to traditional
phonemes
 Suprasegmentals (1)
• Clear speech

• speech produced with an effort to be highly intelligible

• contrast with conversational speech

• broadcasters and air traffic controllers

• characteristics

• slower

• avoidance of articulatory modifications

• greater intensity of consonants

• does this affect an individual’s intelligibility?

• yes

• add to the above

• greater f0 variability

• precise timing

• not simply loud speech

 Suprasegmentals (2)
• Prosody
• not confined to phonemes
• observed over much larger intervals
• three acoustic features
• f0 (pitch)
• I (loudness)
• duration (length)
• intonation is included under prosody
• patterns of pitch rise and fall plus stress
 Suprasegmentals (3)

• Phrasal stress (emphasis)

• giving prominence to a word or phrase
• linguistic stress
• lexical stress
• syllabic stress
• contrastive stress (contrasts with previous
information)
 Suprasegmentals (4)

• Boundary cues
• mark the ends of language units
• pauses
• changes in duration
• adjustments of pitch
• meter (rhythm)
• pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
 Suprasegmentals (5)
• Prosody is not a decoration

• auditory segmentation

• affect

• personal information

• speech rate

• pauses and vowels are shortened proportionately more

• stress patterns may change as well

• vocal effort

• adaptive adjustment to distance

• not the same as loudness

• neither is the same as intensity