Session Meaning and Speech:

Between Meaning and Speech: On the Role of Communicative Functions, Representations and Articulations

Type: special
Chair: Carlos Gussenhoven
Date: Tuesday - August 07, 2007
Time: 16:00
Room: 2 (Orange)

 

Meaning and Speech-1 On the relationship between phonology and phonetics (or why phonetics is not phonology)
Amalia Arvaniti, University of California, San Diego
Paper File
  In this presentation, I argue that unifying phonetics and phonology in the grammar has undesirable consequences. Evidence for this position is provided from various sources, but focuses on intonation, an area of linguistic structure that has often been viewed as not requiring an abstract phonological representation.
Meaning and Speech-2 Speech as articulatory encoding of communicative functions
Yi Xu, University College London; Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA
Paper File
  Speech conveys communicative meanings by encoding functional contrasts. The contrasts are realised through articulation, a biomechanical process with specific constraints. Phonology, phonetics or any other theories of speech therefore cannot be autonomous from either communicative functions or biophysical mechanisms. Successful speech modeling can be achieved only if communicative fucntions and biophysical mechanisms are treated as the core rather than the margins of speech.
Meaning and Speech-3 Non-equivalence between phonology and phonetics
Aditi Lahiri, University of Konstanz
Paper File
  In her paper, Arvaniti supports a producton and perception model which distinguishes phonological representations from their phonetic surface form. She draws on intonational data as evidence that an abstract phonological representation is necessary to capture native speakers’competence to extract unique significance when faced with multiple phonetic variations. This view is in direct contrast to models which advocate that contours are holistic and all variation must be coded in detail. My commentary professes sympathy with Arvaniti’s approach and adds further evidence from segmental variation in support of abstract representations.
Meaning and Speech-4 The missing link between articulatory gestures and sentence planning
Chilin Shih, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Greg Kochanski, Oxford University
Su-Youn Yoon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Paper File
  The motivation of this paper is to build a bridge between phonology and phonetics with implementation models. The challenge is to explain a wide range of phonetic forms in diverse speaking styles, including laboratory speech, spontaneous speech, fluent and non-fluent speech and model them as ordely variations of one coherent communication system. In the paper, we will focus on the effect of sentence planning on articulatory gestures. Data from spontaneous speech provides strong evidence for anticipatory effects and partial reduction effects. How and when they occur reflect the speaker’s sentence planning strategies. It is hypothesized that much of the discrepancy between laboratory speech and spontaneous speech can be accounted for with a model that can represent these effects, such as the weights used in the Stem-ML model.

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