Papers by Francisco Torreira
The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns ... more The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or 'project' as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker's turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next.
Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278036944_Timing_in_turn-taking_and_its_implications_for_processing_models_of_language [accessed Jun 12, 2015].
We investigate the extent to which French polar questions and continuation statements, two types ... more We investigate the extent to which French polar questions and continuation statements, two types of utterances with similar morphosyntactic and intonational forms but different pragmatic functions, can be distinguished in conversational data based on phonetic and visual bodily information. We show that the two utter- ance types can be distinguished well over chance level by automatic classification models including several phonetic and visual cues. We also show that a consid- erable amount of relevant phonetic and visual information is present before the last portion of the utterances, potentially assisting early speech act recognition by addressees. These findings indicate that bottom-up phonetic and visual cues may play an important role during the production and recognition of speech acts alongside top-down contextual information.
This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours -the fall... more This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours -the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request- align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the `nuclear' accent, associates with either a high or a low tonal element depending on phrase length (ii) that certain tonal elements can be realized or omitted depending on the availability of specific metrical positions in their intonational phrase, and (iii) that the high tonal element of the request contour associates with either a stressed syllable or an intonational phrase edge depending on phrase length. On the basis of these facts, and in contrast to previous descriptions of Spanish intonation relying on obligatory and constant nuclear contours (e.g., L* L% for all neutral statements), we argue for a less constrained intonational morphology involving tonal units linked to the segmental string via contour-specific principles.
This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation-when one party signals a... more This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation-when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk-into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a "hold"-when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfully held static-this position will not be disengaged until the problem is resolved and the sequence closed. We base this finding on qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora of conversational interaction from three unrelated languages representing two different modalities: Northern Italian, the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador, and Argentine Sign Language. The cross-linguistic similarities uncovered by this comparison suggest that visual bodily practices have been semiotized for similar interactive functions across different languages and modalities due to common pressures in face-to-face interaction.
We investigate the timing of pre-answer inbreaths in order to shed light on the time course of re... more We investigate the timing of pre-answer inbreaths in order to shed light on the time course of response planning and execution in conversational turn-taking. Using acoustic and inductive plethysmography recordings of seven dyadic conversations in Dutch, we show that pre-answer inbreaths in conversation typically begin briefly after the end of questions. We also show that the presence of a pre-answer inbreath usually co-occurs with substantially delayed answers, with a modal latency of 576 vs. 100 ms for answers not preceded by an inbreath. Based on previously reported minimal latencies for internal intercostal activation and the production of speech sounds, we propose that vocal responses, either in the form of a pre-utterance inbreath or of speech proper when an inbreath is not produced, are typically launched in reaction to information present in the last portion of the interlocutor’s turn. We also show that short responses are usually made on residual breath, while longer responses are more often preceded by an inbreath. This relation of inbreaths to answer length suggests that by the time an inbreath is launched, typically during the last few hundred milliseconds of the question, the length of the answer is often prepared to some extent. Together, our findings are consistent with a two-stage model of response planning in conversational turn-taking: early planning of content often carried out in overlap with the incoming turn, and late launching of articulation based on the identification of turn-final cues.
The study of phonetic contrasts and related phenomena, e.g. inter-and intra-speaker variability, ... more The study of phonetic contrasts and related phenomena, e.g. inter-and intra-speaker variability, often requires to analyse data in the form of measured time series, like f 0 contours and formant trajectories. As a consequence, the investigator has to find suitable ways to reduce the raw and abundant numerical information contained in a bundle of time series into a small but sufficient set of numerical descriptors of their shape. This approach requires one to decide in advance which dynamic traits to include in the analysis and which not. For example, a rising pitch gesture may be represented by its duration and slope, hence reducing it to a straight segment, or by a richer coding specifying also whether (and how much) the rising contour is concave or convex, the latter being irrelevant in some context but crucial in others. Decisions become even more complex when a phenomenon is described by a multidimensional time series, e.g. by the first two formants.
This study investigates whether a clear distinction can be made between the prosody of continuati... more This study investigates whether a clear distinction can be made between the prosody of continuation statements and polar questions in conversational French, which are both typically produced with final rising intonation. We show that the two utterance types can be distinguished over chance level by several pitch, duration, and intensity cues. However, given the substantial amount of phonetic overlap and the nature of the observed differences between the two utterance types (i.e. overall F0 scaling, final intensity drop and degree of final lengthening), we propose that variability in the phonetic detail of intonation rises in French is due to the effects of interactional factors (e.g. turn-taking context, type of speech act) rather than to the existence of two distinct rising intonation contour types in this language.
We investigate the realization and discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in pitch-unaccented... more We investigate the realization and discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in pitch-unaccented words in phrase-medial position in Spanish, a context in which intonational pitch accents are frequently absent. Results from production and perception experiments show that in this context durational and intensity cues to stress are produced by speakers and used by listeners above chance level. However, due to substantial amounts of phonetic overlap between stress categories in production, and of numerous errors in the identification of stress categories in perception, we suggest that, in the absence of intonational cues, Spanish speakers engaged in online language use must rely on contextual information in order to distinguish stress contrasts.
Tone languages are often reported to make use of utterancelevel intonation as well as of lexical ... more Tone languages are often reported to make use of utterancelevel intonation as well as of lexical tone. We test the alternative hypotheses that a) the coexistence of lexical tone and utterance-level intonation in tone languages results in a diminished functional load for intonation, and b) that lexical tone and intonation can coexist in tone languages without undermining each other's functional load in a substantial way. In order to do this, we collected data from two large typological databases, and performed mixed-effects and phylogenetic regression analyses controlling for genealogical and areal factors to estimate the probability of a language exhibiting grammatical devices for encoding polar questions given its status as a tonal or an intonation-only language. Our analyses indicate that, while both tone and intonational languages tend to develop grammatical devices for marking polar questions above chance level, tone languages do this at a significantly higher frequency, with estimated probabilities ranging between 0.88 and .98. This statistical bias provides cross-linguistic empirical support to the view that the use of tonal features to mark lexical contrasts leads to a diminished functional load for utterance-level intonation.
This study describes the weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish a... more This study describes the weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish and investigates the role of several potential conditioning factors, including morphological, lexical and probabilistic variables. Three acoustic parameters were examined: voicing, the difference in high-band (4-8 kHz) intensity between /s/ and the following vowel, and the duration of the dip in low-band (0-1.5 kHz) intensity in /s/. Over a third of the /s/ consonants exhibited uninterrupted voicing. All three parameters were highly sensitive to speech rate and, less consistently, to prosodic factors such as word position and stress. We also found that /s/ suffixes in redundant morphosyntactic contexts were more prone to weakening than other word-final /s/ segments. Several high-frequency words were particularly prone to weakening, but no general probabilistic effects were observed for factors claimed to favor reduction such as word frequency, contextual predictability or grammatical class. These findings demonstrate the complex variability characteristic of reduction phenomena in spontaneous speech. Phonetica 2012;69:124-148 Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the NCCSp investigates its conditioning factors. During the initial inspections of the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish (NCCSp from now on) [Torreira and Ernestus, 2010a], a recently created corpus of Madrid Spanish, we observed that intervocalic /s/ consonants, although always realized as sibilants, often exhibit short durations, uninterrupted voicing and decreased frication noise, resulting in a percept of consonantal weakening, i.e. such /s/ consonants seem less acoustically salient between vowels than longer, voiceless /s/ consonants exhibiting stronger frication (see subsection 1.2 below). In contrast to the aspiration and deletion of syllable-final /s/ ([s] > [h] > Ø) in coastal Latin American and southern Spanish dialects, a reduction process which has been the object of numerous studies (see extensive bibliography in Hernández-Campoy and Trudgill [2002]), the sort of /s/ reduction that we investigate here has only been described impressionistically in the philological literature for a few rural dialects of Castilian Spanish . This sort of /s/ reduction does not involve a complete loss of the oral constriction as in /s/ aspiration, and is referred to as /s/ weakening from now on for the sake of simplicity. In the present article, we describe it as it occurs in the NCCSp (see subsection 1.6 below for a description of this corpus), using quantitative acoustic phonetic methods.
In Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), [h + voiceless stop] clusters are realized as long pre-and p... more In Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), [h + voiceless stop] clusters are realized as long pre-and postaspirated stops. This study investigates if a new class of stops (realized as geminates with variable degrees of pre-and postaspiration) has emerged in this dialect, or if postaspiration in these clusters results from articulatory overlap. An experiment was carried out in which WAS speakers produced [h + voiceless stop] clusters under changes in speech rate and stress location. The duration of postaspiration, measured as voice onset, did not show systematic effects of any of the experimental variables. Moreover, trade-offs were observed between voice onset and preaspiration plus closure durations. These results indicate that postaspiration in WAS [h + voiceless stop] clusters is the consequence of extensive articulatory overlap. It is further hypothesized that the lengthening of closures in WAS stops preceded by [h] results from a different gestural mechanism affecting all [hC] clusters in this dialect. From a broader perspective, since extensive overlap and consonantal lengthening do not occur in the [hC] clusters of other Spanish varieties, these findings lend support to the idea that intergestural coordination patterns can be dialect-specific.
The present study compares the realization of intervocalic voiceless stops and vowels surrounded ... more The present study compares the realization of intervocalic voiceless stops and vowels surrounded by voiceless stops in conversational Spanish and French. Our data reveal significant differences in how these segments are realized in each language. Spanish voiceless stops tend to have shorter stop closures, display incomplete closures more often, and exhibit more voicing than French voiceless stops. As for vowels, more cases of complete devoicing and greater degrees of partial devoicing were found in French than in Spanish. Moreover, all French vowel types exhibit significantly lower F1 values than their Spanish counterparts. These findings indicate that the extent of reduction that a segment type can undergo in conversational speech can vary significantly across languages. Language differences in coarticulatory strategies and "base-of-articulation" are discussed as possible causes of our observations.
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Papers by Francisco Torreira
Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278036944_Timing_in_turn-taking_and_its_implications_for_processing_models_of_language [accessed Jun 12, 2015].
Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278036944_Timing_in_turn-taking_and_its_implications_for_processing_models_of_language [accessed Jun 12, 2015].