Ling 795T -- Practicum in Intonation

Summer 2004 Term 1 (Call No. 11165-9)

Contents

• Description
• Administration
• Readings
• Notes from class
• Schedule of labs
• Schedule of project reports
• Useful links

Description

This course has two aims and two parts. There are no prerequisites for either part other than a very basic background in linguistics or speech science. One part aims to introduce and review the intonational system of (many standard varieties of) English. The other part is aimed at students who want to learn about the intonation system of another language (or of other varieties of English not covered in the first part). Students can sign up for just the first part (for 3 credit hours) or sign up for both parts (for 5 credit hours).

The first part will focus on practical aspects of E-ToBI, the "Tones and Break Indices" intonational transcription system for many varieties of English which is widely used in academic research and speech technology. The primary objective of this part of the course is for students to become competent in using the E-ToBI system, giving them a common language for sharing work on intonation, for transcribing data for individual research, and for adapting the ToBI framework for developing a comparable tool for analyzing the prosody/intonation of another variety of English (or even another language). Students will learn to analyze and interpret the acoustic properties of speech needed to make accurate prosodic transcriptions. Exercises will use many types of read and spontaneous speech produced by many speakers in a variety of contexts, so that different styles, registers, and dialects of English can be transcribed and compared. As a final project, students who have signed up for only this part will work alone or in small groups recording, digitizing, and analyzing a particular aspect of English intonation relevant to their individual interests.

Administration

Class Times and Locations:

Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 9:30-11:18, Journalism 220.

Instructor:

Mary E. Beckman
office: room 07 Oxley, tel 292-9752
email: mbeckman@ling.osu.edu
office hours: Mondays at 8:30, Tuesdays-Fridays at 1:00 (except for Wednesday-Friday of the first week), & by appointment.

Laurie Maynell will teach the class on Thursday and Friday of Week 1, when the primary instructor is attending LabPhon9. Her e-mail is maynell@ling.osu.edu and her office is in 24 Oxley.

Coursework:

We will be working through the Guidelines for ToBI Labelling together and one component of the course work is to label utterances in this collection of examples both in class and on your own in preparation for the next class. We will also collect other utterances (including ones that you contribute yourselves, if that fits your purpose for taking the course) for all of us to label individually before comparing our analyses in class. These "labs" will not be graded for "correctness" but for honest effort in trying to apply the annotation conventions in a timely way so that we can pool our insights and questions in the class period when the utterances will be discussed. The succession of labelling assignments is listed in the Schedule of labs, and the utterances themselves will be linked into this page there at least a week before they will be discussed in class.

The other component of the course is to develop your own project, as noted above, and there will be interim deadlines for reporting on different steps of this work. These steps and deadlines are described below under Schedule of project reports.

The final grade will depend on (1) your timely completion of the "labs" and on (2) your interim project reports, in different proportions depending on whether you are taking the course for 3 credits (in which case the two components will contribute equally) or for 5 credits (in which case the second component will count for 70% rather than 50% of the grade).

Readings

For all students in the course:

• Mary E. Beckman & Julia Hirschberg (1994). The ToBI Annotation Conventions.
  This is a basic reference that you will be using throughout the term rather than reading in one go.
• Mary E. Beckman & Gayle Ayers Elam (1994). Guidelines for ToBI Labelling. pdf or html
  Read the relevant part up to a particular "practice" in preparation for the class session where we start to go over the concepts relevant to a particular set of practice utterances. For example, read Sections 2.3-2.5 in preparation for the class on Thursday of Week 1. You can get the example utterances from here and the associated TextGrid files from here.
• Janet Pierrehumbert & Julia Hirschberg (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, & Martha E. Pollack (eds.) Intentions in Communication, pp. 271-311. MIT Press.
  This reading is optional, but you will find it particularly helpful during Weeks 2 and 4.

• Mary E. Beckman, Julia Hirschberg, & Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (in press). The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. To appear in Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. draft
  Read this during Week 1, as background for formulating your project plan and choosing readings relevant to your project.
• Other readings on the project topic, to be chosen in consultation with the instructor.

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Notes from class

• Week 1: notes on stress patterns and questions from Thursday and Friday.
• Week 2: responses to questions from Week 1.
• Week 2: questions and discussion from Tuesday's class, and kmitchOMG example utterance discussed in class.
• Week 2: Abstract, slides, and audio files from Mary Beckman's talk "Tone inventories and tune-text alignments" in the Wednesday talk series, presented on 30 June 2004.
• Week 2: questions and discussion from Thursday's class, Homaidan's speech files that we used to illustrate how to overlay one F0 contour on another in Praat, and the Praat script that we wrote to do this.
• Week 2: questions and discussion from Friday's class, and the speech files (including Fangfang's mom's production) that we talked about at the beginning of class.
• Week 3: questions and discussion from Tuesday's class.
• Week 3: Abstract, slides, audio files from Shelome Gooden's talk "Word Level Prosody in Jamaican Creole", in the Wednesday talk series, presented on 7 July 2004.
• Week 3: question and discussion from Thursday's and Friday's classes.
• Week 4: question and discussion from Monday's class.

Schedule of labs

• Week 1, prepare for Tuesday: Practice 1, easy utterances -- get all of Practice 1 utterances by right clicking here
• Week 1, prepare for Thursday: Practice 1, intermediate and difficult utterances. Also look at Practice 2, easy utterances, to be able to do them in class -- get all of Practice 2 by right clicking here
• Week 1, prepare for Friday: Practice 2, intermediate and difficult utterances

• Week 2, look over for Monday: Practice 3, easy utterances -- get all of Practice 3 by right clicking here
• Week 2, prepare for Thursday: Practice 3, intermediate utterances.
  Also look at Practice 4, easy utterances, so we can start doing them in class -- get all of Practice 4 by right clicking here
• Week 2, prepare for Friday: Practice 4, intermediate utterances.

• Week 3, Monday is a university holiday.
  Prepare for Tuesday: Practice 4, difficult utterances. Also look at Practice 5, easy utterances, so we can start doing them in class -- [All of the utterances in Practice 5 have already been introduced in earlier practices.]
• Week 3, prepare for Thursday: Send instructor any utterances from your project that you would like us to go over in class during the Praat tutorial on this day. [We will not assign Practice 5 as a lab, but please look over the utterances by Friday, and send the instructor an e-mail if you have any questions about the break indices in any of them.]
  
• Week 3, prepare for Friday: Any questions that you have regarding the break indices for Practice 5; practice 6, easy utterances -- get Practice 6 by right clicking here.

• Week 4, prepare for Monday: Practice 6, intermediate and difficult utterances.
• Week 4, prepare for Thursday: the two utterances in the file Week4lab, which are from the ViC corpus.

Schedule of project reports

• Week 1, Tuesday: Give instructor a short (no more than a sentence or two) description of the general topic that you want to work on for your project.
• Week 2, Tuesday: Give instructor a more specific description of the project and a list of relevant readings for your project.
• Week 3, Tuesday: Turn in an annotated bibliography and meet with the instructor to summarize findings and questions from readings, and meet with the instructor to make a plan for recording a relevant set of utterances to begin answering the questions.
  Here is the schedule of meetings.
• Week 4, Monday: Provide a brief review of your preliminary impressions from analyzing the first set of recordings, and meet with the instructor to make a plan for more recordings or for a more detailed analysis of the first recordings.
  Here is the schedule of meetings.
• Week 4, Thursday and Friday: Present a brief (15 minute) report reviewing your results to date and describing your plans for continuing your project after the end of the course.
  Here is the schedule of who will present on which of the two days.

Useful links

More links will be added as the course progresses and it becomes clearer what different students' interests are. out what the

• The home page for Praat where you can download the latest version. The link to the directory where we are putting the example praat scripts that we are writing together.
• The home page for the ToBI framework, where you can find useful links to work on the intonational systems of various languages.
• The home page for Laurie Maynell's and Allison Blodgett's ToBI Clinic.
• The home page for the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary "a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English". Stresses are marked (although they are not always accurate), so you can use this to look up the stress pattern of words for which you're not sure of the American English stress pattern.

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