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A Perceptual Study of Intonation. An Experimental-Phonetic Approach to

Speech Melody

Article  in  Language · September 1992

DOI: 10.2307/415797

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Linguistic Society of America

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Carlos Gussenhoven
Reviewed work(s):
A Perceptual Study of Intonation. An Experimental-Phonetic Approach to Speech Melody
by Johan 't Hart; René Collier ; Antonie Cohen
Source: Language, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 610-614
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
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610 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 3 (1992)

particular, a standard transcription of Dravidian retroflex consonants would

have been useful.
I have one additional remark to make on an editorial matter. C and (pre-
sumably) the Cambridge copy-editor make no effort to observe the infamous
that/which distinction in restrictive relative clauses. For this relief, much
thanks, and why can't American publishers give up on this device, whose sole
virtue (speaking as the husband of a copy-editor) is that it gives copy-editors
more billable hours?
REFERENCES
BIDOT,E. 1925. La clef du genre des substantifs franCais (Methode dispensant d'avoir
recours au dictionnaire). Poitiers: Imprimerie Nouvelle.
KEENAN,EDWARD, and BERNARDCOMRIE.1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal
grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8.63-99.
MEL'CUK,IGOR.1958. Statistika i zavisimost' roda francuzskix suscestvitel'nyx ot ix
okoncanija. Voprosy statistiki reci, 112-30. Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningrad-
skogo Universiteta.
TUCKER,G. R.; W. E. LAMBERT;and A. A. RIGAULT. 1977. The French speaker's skill
with grammatical gender: An example of rule-governed behavior. The Hague: Mou-
ton.
Departmentof Linguistics [Received 10 February1992.]
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4376

A perceptual study of intonation. An experimental-phonetic approach to speech

melody. By JOHAN 'T HART, RENE COLLIER, and ANTONIE COHEN. (Cam-
bridge studies in speech science and communication.) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990. Pp. xv, 212. Cloth $49.50.
Reviewed by CARLOSGUSSENHOVEN, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.
This book may be seen as a main report of the intonation research carried
out since 1957 at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in Eindhoven. In
eight chapters the authors (henceforth HCC) set out their research strategy
and methodology, as well as the theoretical and practical results of their work.
The 'Introduction' (Ch. 1, 1-9) explains how HCC set themselves the task of
isolating the linguistically significant elements from the welter of large and small
FO variations in the speech signal obtained from Dutch utterances. This sifting
out of 'involuntary' and 'voluntary' pitch movements led on the one hand to
an interest in perceptual thresholds (what cannot be heard cannot be significant)
and on the other to the subjective evaluation of variously 'stylized' versions
of original FOcontours. Ch. 2 ('Phonetic aspects of intonation', 10-37) includes
the results of their psycho-acoustic interest in the form of a very useful overview
of pitch-perception studies. The chapter also contains a careful discussion of
the physiology of phonation and pitch variation, including that of intrinsic pitch,
perturbations, and a (necessarily eclectic) account of pitch measurement tech-
niques.
Ch. 3 ('The IPO approach', 38-67) spells out the IPO research methodology.
The first step in their analysis-resynthesis procedure concerns the elimination
 REVIEWS 611

of 'irrelevant detail' with the help of a '"piecewise" linear approximation of

the FOcurve' (41) that is indistinguishable from the original contour ('perceptual
equality'). The second step involves the replacement of the straight-line sec-
tions in the contour with standardized straight-line sections, or 'perceptually
relevant pitch movements', such that the resultant contour sounds like a suc-
cessful imitation of the other version ('perceptual equivalence'). The stand-
ardization is arrived at partly by averaging values observed in various contours
and partly by 'convenience'; the latter criterion implies maximum simplification
of the standard values within the limits determined by the acceptability of the
resulting contours. The third step amounts to making an inventory of the var-
ious combinations in which the pitch movements occur in a representative
corpus. Next, the numerous possible pitch contours are categorized into larger
classes, called 'intonation patterns', on the basis of the results of sorting and
matching experiments.
As HCC observe, the experimental evaluation of 'perceptual equality' is
much easier than that of 'perceptual equivalence'. 'Perceptual equality' means
what it says, but two contours that are perceptually equivalent may well be
clearly distinguishable, and subjects may therefore have different ideas about
what counts as a successful imitation. It has been considered a weakness of
the IPO approach that no satisfactory operationalization has been offered for
'perceptual equivalence', but this difficulty does not of course uniquely afflict
the IPO approach. Nor should it be exaggerated. Researchers do not appear
to be in constant doubt about sameness or difference, and they generally seem
to be able to separate variations of pitch range and the like from what we may
call the phonological composition of the contour. I have never heard anyone
express doubts about the validity of the contrasts represented in the IPO gram-
mar, for example.
Ch. 4 ('A theory of intonation', 68-120) is intended as the core of the book.
It is an amalgam of research results and a defense of certain theoretical claims.
The discussion is structured in the form of ten propositions that range from
the uncontroversial to the idiosyncratic. The observation that pitch movements
can be described in terms of their direction, their timing, their slope, and their
size belongs in the former category, while the statement that the smallest unit
of analysis is the (IPO) pitch movement is an example of the latter. This position
contrasts on the one hand with the British English tradition in which complex
pitch movements like the 'fall-rise' are recognized, and on the other hand with
phonological analyses which, following Pierrehumbert 1980, recognize tone
segments ('pitch levels'). The 'levels' approach comes in for a good deal of
criticism, but the arguments raised against it are unconvincing. I will return to
this point below. The chapter also contains a revised statement of the intonation
grammar of Dutch, and gives a new arrangement of the pitch movements into
'blocks'. There is a 'Prefix', which is optional and recursive and is comparable
to prefinal tone units; a 'Root', comparable to a final tone unit; and an optional
'Suffix', equivalent to Pierrehumbert's H%. HCC might have been more gen-
erous with the exemplification of the contours. For example, it is not clear to
me what is meant by a contour consisting of a single movement '2', a movement
612 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 3 (1992)

that does not lend accent; the existence of accentless utterances (e.g. Bolinger
1991:10) is controversial, and some clarification would have been welcome.
This also goes for the apparent (?) interchangeability of 'A' and 'B' in Prefixes.
Collier & 't Hart (1981) give 'A' in situations that have only 'B' in the book
under review.
Ch. 5 ('Declination', 121-50) presents a most thorough treatment of the phe-
nomenon of declination, including a number of interesting research results that
were previously unpublished or only available in internal reports. The conclu-
sion is that there is an important, though not exclusive, connection with de-
creasing subglottal pressure. In Ch. 6 ('Linguistic generalizations', 151-68) a
case is made for the phonological status of the pitch movements, while Ch. 7
('Applications', 169-90) reviews the many ways in which the IPO intonation
grammar has been put to use: it has been applied in speech synthesis and in
the artificial larynx produced for laryngectomized patients. The methodology
has been applied to the intonation of English, Russian, and German, and has
yielded comparable, if more detailed, descriptions of the intonations of these
languages.
Not surprisingly, the orientation of the book is in large measure phonetic,
covering both production and perception. (The absence of any discussion of
the interaction between the alignment of pitch movements and the segmental
structure is striking, and is perhaps explained by the fact that most of the
experimental work was with resynthesized speech, which is more likely to have
segment durations that are appropriate for the intonation used.) However, the
linguistic status of the pitch movements is also a prominent concern. HCC's
claim is that the pitch movements, which arose as a result of the stylizations
and standardizations, are not just convenient chunks that allow contours to be
coded, but actually represent phonological units. Ch. 5 is devoted in part to a
refutation of the 'pitch-level' approach to intonation description presented in
Pierrehumbert 1980. The main objective would appear to be that the pitch
targets need to be timed with respect to positions in the utterance, and that to
'enrich the "levels" concept with a temporal dimension deprives it of its sim-
plicity, which was its major raison d'etre in intonation analysis' (76); related
to this is the charge that this approach cannot account for the fact that tran-
sitions between targets do not have 'invariant melodic properties, such as a
fixed rate of change ...' (76). Of course, HCC are setting up a straw man here.
Association of tone segments is a very explicit element in the relevant pho-
nological descriptions, and different transitions arise as a matter of course. The
same goes for the charge that intermediate levels require a proliferation of units
(77). Pierrehumbert (1980:27, 76) argued convincingly against such a position,
showing that these levels arise from a phonetic implementation algorithm that
calculates phonetically different targets for identical phonological tones as a
function of phonological context, in much the way that the same vowel will
have different durations in different contexts.
Unfortunately, there are other instances of this type of argumentation. Prop-
osition 10 specifies, quite unobjectionably, that knowledge of upcoming lin-
 REVIEWS 613

guistic information, e.g. clause boundaries, is necessary in order to make the

right choices from the available elements. Thus, the choice of pitch movements
characteristic of Root Patterns may depend on the information that the next
accent is the final accent, since the Root Pattern itself is final. HCC present
this as an argument against the 'Tone Sequence' (TS) model, Ladd's 1983 term
for intonational theories that generate the contour from a linear arrangement
of elements, like Pierrehumbert 1980. (And unlike e.g. Garding 1983 and Thor-
sen 1983, which are based on a superimposition of different contour elements.
In fact, the IPO model is by and large a TS model, with the shape of the contour
being defined by the string of pitch movements. The inclusion of a separate
declination component causes it to deviate from a TS model pur-sang.) But of
course a TS model is not the same thing as a finite-state grammar, and HCC's
argument against it is simply out of order. It is true that Pierrehumbert 1980
also argues for a phonetic implementation of her phonological representation
that requires no look-ahead, but this is a different issue. (Here the IPO theory
differs from Pierrehumbert's, in that it requires the declination that is needed
to start off the realization of the contour to be length-dependent.)
In Ch. 7 the claim is worked out that the IPO movements provide the correct
units in which combinatory rules and relations among contours can be ex-
pressed, if they are represented in terms of five binary features. The chapter
is admirably explicit, and it strikes the present reviewer as an exemplary ex-
ercise in phonological analysis-one which, however, leads to the inescapable
conclusion that the units are the wrong ones. In no instance does the featural
representation allow for a simple statement. The property of 'accent" cannot
be captured, as is evident from Rule Al: 'Assign the feature [+Prominence
Lending] to a pitch movement that has one of the following feature combi-
nations: [-+-rise, -late, -spread], or [-rise, -late, -early, -spread], or
[- rise, -full]' (161). This is hardly more of a generalization than the statement
that movements '1', '3', 'A', and 'E' are accent-lending. The occurrence of
more movements on the same syllable is covered by the statement that 'Two
successive movements that constitute a Prefix or a Root can be joined on the
same syllable. This contraction is obligatory in the Prefix if it is followed by
either Root /3C/ or /4A/. The Suffix rise can also cooccur on the same syllable
with a complete Root or with the second pitch movement of a Root' (158). It
is fair to say that HCC are careful about making unwarranted claims here; they
concede that 'our phonetic description does not really advance our understand-
ing of intonation as a linguistic phenomenon' (165). Indeed, they insist on calling
their features 'phonetic', and reserve 'phonological' for the 'levels' treatments,
apparently seeing the role of a phonological description as a device that has
the IPO grammar as its output, rather than as something that will obviate the
need for this grammar. In any event, they reject the analysis of the hat pattern
in Ladd 1983, giving a number of arguments why it falls short of an explanatory
account. At the risk of appearing to feel neglected, I note the absence in this
chapter, as indeed in Collier 1989, of any comment on the claim made in Gus-
senhoven 1984, 1988 that the IPO grammar has missed a number of categorical
 614 LANGUAGE, VOLUME68, NUMBER 3 (1992)

contrasts, incorporation of which would necessitate the addition of still more

pitch movements to their inventory. The point is relevant because these con-
trasts are predicted by the phonological analysis presented in my articles.
This book is an important publication, if only because it lays out the phi-
losophy and research results of a highly influential tradition of intonation re-
search in the Netherlands. This tradition is characterized by a concern with
finding ways of validating descriptions by means of perception experiments,
and as such it sets a standard for related research. The book is important, too,
because it contains compact presentations of the results of research into various
aspects of pitch production and perception. However, the claims made about
linguistic aspects are overstated, while the objections against phonological anal-
yses are either easily refutable or insufficiently supported. The book is beau-
tifully produced and is pleasant to read, with only an occasional Dutchism like
'the aimed at interpretation' spoiling one's enjoyment.
REFERENCES
BOLINGER, DWIGHT. 1991. The dimensions of accent. Pragmatics and language learning,
ed. by Lawrence F. Bouton and Yamuna Kachru, 9-28. Urbana-Champaign: Uni-
versity of Illinois Division of English as an International Language.
COLLIER, RENE. 1989. On the phonology of Dutch intonation. Worlds behind words:
Essays in honour of Prof. Dr. F. G. Droste on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday,
ed. by F. J. Heyvaert and F. R. Steurs, 245-59. Louvain: Leuven University Press.
, and JOHAN 'T HART. 1981. Cursus Nederlandse intonatie. Louvain: Acco.
GARDING,EVA. 1983. A generative model of intonation. Prosody: Models and mea-
surements, ed. by Anne Cutler and D. Robert Ladd, 11-25. Berlin: Springer.
GUSSENHOVEN, CARLOS.1984. Deze daling is dus een stijging. Verslagen van het acht-
en-dertigste Nederlands Filologencongres, 303-21. Amsterdam: Academic Pub-
lishers Association.
. 1988. Adequacy in intonation analysis: The case of Dutch. Autosegmental studies
on pitch accent, ed. by Harry van der Hulst and Norval Smith, 95-121. Dordrecht
& Providence: Foris.
LADD,D. ROBERT.1983. Phonological features of intonational peaks. Lg. 59.731-59.
JANET B. 1980. The phonetics
PIERREHUMBERT, and phonology of English intonation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. [Published, New York: Garland, 1990.]
THORSEN,NINA. 1983. Two issues in the prosody of Standard Danish. Prosody: Models
and measurements, ed. by Anne Cutler and D. Robert Ladd, 27-38. Berlin:
Springer.
Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen [Received 28 January 1992.]
Instituut Engels-Amerikaans
Erasmusplein I
6525 HT Nijmegen
The Netherlands

The Niger-Congo languages: A classification and description of Africa's largest

language family. Edited by JOHNBENDOR-SAMUEL.Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1989. Pp. xi, 505. Cloth $42.75, paper $27.50.
Reviewed by LARRYM. HYMAN,University of California, Berkeley
In its editor's words, this book aims to 'provide those interested in the lan-
guages of Africa with a useful overview and an introduction to the main lan-

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