THE SLAYING OF LADY MONDEGREEN, BEING A STUDY OF FRENCH TONAL ASSOCIATION AND ALIGNMENT AND THEIR ROLE IN SPEECH SEGMENTATION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Pauline Susan Welby, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2003 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Mary E. Beckman, Adviser Professor Christopher H. Brew Adviser Dr. H´el`ene Lœvenbruck Department of Linguistics Professor Shari R. Speer c Copyright by Pauline Susan Welby 2003 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates French intonational structure and the role of language- specific intonational cues to speech segmentation, the listener’s task of determining where words begin and end. The Lady Mondegreen of the title never existed: she was created in the imagination of a young child who missegmented a line from one of her favorite poems. French intonation is characterized by an obligatory fundamental frequency (f 0) rise on the last syllable of a phrase (1a) and an optional early rise near the beginning (1b). (1) a. Les gamins sages jardinaient. ‘The good kids were gardening.’ b. Les gamins sages jardinaient. A production experiment examined the text-to-tune alignment of these rises, the timing of f 0 peaks and valleys with respect to segmental landmarks. The low starting point of the early rise was consistently located at the function word-content word boundary (e.g., the determiner-noun boundary in les | gamins sages). There was also sometimes an f 0 inflection or elbow at that boundary, even where there was no early rise. The evidence supports a model in which the early rise is a bitonal phrase accent and the late rise a bitonal pitch accent. Three perception experiments examined whether the early rise and f 0 elbow serve as cues to content word beginnings. Natural speech was recorded and f 0 manipulated ii through resynthesis. In Experiment 1, participants listened to noise-masked minimal and near-minimal pairs of phrases differing only in segmentation and presence versus absence of an early rise (e.g., le niveau de m´ec´enat ‘the level of patronage’/ le niveau de mes s´enats ‘the level of my senates’) and indicated what they heard. Listeners in- terpreted an early rise as a marker of a content word beginning. In Experiment 2, the timing of the early rise was manipulated in minimal pairs of nonwords. Sequences like £Çº Ò ÑºÐºÑ were perceived as two words (mes lamondines ‘my lamondines’) when the early rise started at the second syllable ([Ð]) and as a single word (m´elamondine) when it started at the first syllable ( Ñ ). Using a similar paradigm, Experiment 3 showed that not only early rises, but also simple f 0 elbows, cued content word begin- nings. iii to my niece Charlotte Jane Ward my sister Lenore Christine Welby my mother Evelyn Louise Major Welby and to the memory of my grandmother Mary Anne Sweeney Welby iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The moment I first saw the red-brick gables and tower of Oxley Hall, home to Ohio State’s linguists, I thought to myself, “I am going to love coming to work here every day.” And I have. I start by thanking my committee members, Mary Beckman, Chris Brew, H´el`ene Lœvenbruck, and Shari Speer, each of whom has contributed to the dissertation and to my growth as a linguist. I am very grateful to my adviser, Mary Beckman, for sparking my interest in phonetics and intonation and for her constant support and confidence in me and my work throughout my graduate career. Mary’s patience and guidance helped me find a dissertation topic that truly excited me, and her advice along the way was essential in v completing the dissertation. I have enjoyed and immensely benefited from our years of discussions, and I appreciate that her door is always open for her students. My work on French intonation began as part of a Prosody and Processing seminar co-taught by Mary Beckman and Shari Speer in the summer of 2001. That seminar and Shari’s own work on prosody and ambiguity in English helped me understand the importance of examining production and perception together. Shari also provided valuable input on the design of the perception experiments and gave many helpful comments on the manuscript. Chris Brew also gave valuable feedback on the manuscript, as well as guidance on the analysis of the production data and on the corpus search in Chapter 5. Through- out the dissertation, I have used tools I learned auditing Chris’s winter 2000 compu- tational linguistics seminar. H´el`ene Lœvenbruck, of the Institut de la Communication Parl´ee in Grenoble, gave invaluable advice and assistance at every stage of the dissertation, from encouraging my nascent interest in French intonation, to helping me hammer out experiment details, to inviting me to ICP to run my experiments, to providing thoughtful, detailed comments on the final manuscript. I am grateful for her innumerable contributions to the dissertation, her generosity with her time, and her enthusiasm for my work. I have had the good fortune to be part of the Ohio State Department of Linguistics. I thank the chair, Peter Culicover, and the former chair, Brian Joseph, for fostering a department culture that is both intellectually challenging and supportive. I would like to thank a number of my professors at Ohio State for their contribu- tions to my dissertation research: Keith Johnson, who always has time for his students and who gave me a great deal of advice on phonetics, statistics, and scripting; Julie vi Boland, now at the University of Michigan, who introduced me to psycholinguistics; Beth Hume, who gave me valuable comments and a phonologist’s perspective on my first paper on French intonation; and Christiane Laeufer, who provided helpful input as a member of my generals exam committee. Outside of the classroom, I have benefited from the department’s very active Speakers Series and discussion groups. I have learned a lot from my work as a research associate on various projects, and I thank the professors who supported me on their grants: Mary Beckman and Chris Brew, and Jan Edwards, Marios Fourakis, and Rob Fox of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science. I have also greatly benefited from the opportunity to teach undergraduate linguistics. My years at Ohio State have been shared with many fun, smart, and kind people. I have fond memories of: hikes, late-night study sessions, trips to the movies and the symphony and the ballpark, practice talks, rotation ping pong, airport runs, conver- sations about linguistics and everything else, potlucks, World Cup 2002 matches at 3am on the big screens at Crew Stadium, lunches around the lab table, OSU football games, summer Ultimate, tea breaks, juggling, dinners at the Blue Nile.... I thank my friends for the fun times and for their support in many ways big and small that helped me to stay the course. My thanks go especially to: Mike Calcagno, Nick Cipollone, Kordula De Kuthy, Robin Dautricourt, Robin Dodsworth, Anna Feldman, Janice Fon, Craig Hilts, Erhard Hinrichs and family, Tsan Huang, Kiwa Ito, Stefanie Jannedy, Sun-Hee Lee, Soyoung Kang, Matt Makashay, Julie McGory, Grant McGuire, Detmar Meurers, Amanda vii Miller-Ockhuizen, Youn Noh, Bill Raymond, Anton Rytting, Liz Strand, Tom Stew- art, Giorgos Tserdanelis, Shravan Vasishth, Jennifer Venditti, David White, Neal Whitman, Steve Winters, Peggy Wong, and Kiyoko Yoneyama. And to Allison Blodgett, who has been a devoted friend since the early years of endless problem sets and labs and who is always there to talk through a data analysis problem or to convince me to pack up work for the day and go to the movies, as appropriate. To Mariapaola D’Imperio, Svetlana Godjevac, and Rebecca Herman, who from the very beginnings of my graduate career have inspired me by their example as meticulous and energetic researchers who always make time for important things like good food and friends. To Vanessa Metcalf, who helped ease the pressures of my final year in Columbus with many tasty salads and bad TV shows. I miss sitting on our front porch in Clintonville, sipping ice tea and watching the tomatoes and basil grow. To Laurie Maynell, who is always ready to listen and offer a word of encouragement or a joke. To Jen Muller, who makes me laugh and pumpkin pie. To Ben Munson, who I can always count on to be there for me, personally and professionally. I thank him for his comments on an early version of Chapter 4 and his input on the title of the dissertation. The working title was something deadly boring about “French rises” and speech segmentation. But in an e-mailed comment typical of his trademark wit, Benobservedthat“‘Frenchrises’couldmeananything...Frenchpeoplegettingup in the morning, political revolts in France....” So, thanks to him, the title is now less boring (though still deadly). I would also like to thank my running buddy, Beth Hume. Our early morning runs and our races with the other members of the Binary Feet, the department running viii club, were a great source of stress relief for me. And training to run a half-marathon gave me a lot of confidence in what I could do if I worked hard. I have had a number of rewarding opportunities to spend time outside of my home department. I thank Julie Boland for inviting me to be a visiting student in her lab at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in the spring of 1999. I thank Monique and Pierre Philit for generously giving me a place to stay while I was taking classes in Lyon in the summer of 2000.