Irina Djelovska
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Tajudeen Mamadou Yacoubou
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program:
Authors: Irina Djelovska, Tajudeen Mamadou Yacoubou
Session: Session 2: 10:00 am – 10:50 am
Poster: 87
Abstract
This research aimed to identify the impact of prosodic structure and tone on vowel space. More specifically, we investigate the question: how the prosodic position of a vowel in a giving sentence impacts its formants in a tone language. To answer that research question, the paper replicates Schulz et al’s (2016) study of the impacts of prosodic position on vowel space in 5 European languages. The present study differs from Schulz et al (2016) in basing the study on the 5-tone Mande language Dan spoken in Côte-d’Ivoire. We hypothesized that vowels are more peripheral in syllables at the beginning of phonological phrases than at the end of such phrases. Also, the modality (whether the sentence is a question or statement) was considered, since yes/no questions are known to have faster speech rate than their corresponding statements. The data was collected in a production study involving eight (8) native Dan speakers in Côte-d’Ivoire. These audio files were then processed in Praat, where the prosodic boundaries were manually segmented. After the segmentation, the data was then tidied up using R’s tidyverse, as well as the statistical analysis. Each speaker was identified by their age, hometown, and sex, and the utterances varied by lengths (short and long), and tone (Top, High, Mid, Low). The statistical analysis that is underway compares vowels F1 and F2 in the aforementioned prosodic positions. We fitted several linear mixed effect models with F1 and F2 as the dependent variable, and prosodic position, tone and utterance length as independent variables. When completed, this study will improve the current understanding of how prosodic structure affects the vowel space size in a tone n language. Several studies have done similar research, but not of tonal languages [1], so this study offers a new angle on the subject and highlights what is an overlooked but important aspect of language: tones. With the limited study of Dan in general, not only does this study benefit prosodic studies as a whole, but also constitutes one of the first studies of this type in a tone language. [1] E. Schulz, Y. Mi Oh, Z. Malisz, B. Andreeva, B. Möbius, “Impact of Prosodic Structure and Information Density on Vowel Space Size”, Speech Prosody 2016, pp. 350-354, 2016.
