Los mecanismos europeos de fomento del cine

The prosodic characteristic of Malay are somewhat understudied instrumentally. Most of the studies reported in the literature are based on auditory and perceptual observations. In this section, related studies on the prosodic feature of Malay are presented. These include the rhythm, and stress of Malay, two key aspects that are related to the current study.

Previous studies describing Malay rhythm are very limited and based only on auditory observation. Farid (1980), Baskaran (1982) and Teoh (1994) believe that Malay is a syllable-timed language; i.e they agree in claiming that the basis of rhythm in Malay is the isochronous productions of syllables. It is worth noting that they have not carried out any instrumental study in order to substantiate their claim and it is based purely on auditory judgement.

One of the studies of acoustic metrics for differentiating the rhythmic properties of languages, Grabe and Low (2002), included Malay as one of the 18 languages they investigated. Based on the calculation taken from

consonantal and vocalic intervals from a single speaker of Malay, the results suggested that Malay is positioned in the stress-timed end of the PVI based continuum (see section 2.4.3).

Clearly this finding is completely the opposite of the auditory observations described above. However, the drawback of

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Grabe and Low’s (2002) study is that, it is based only on one speaker; and there is a possibility that the results could be influenced by individual differences in the way in which the materials were produced. Hence, it is not possible to say whether that study is able to reflect the rhythmic properties of speech in the general population of Malay speakers.

Based on the discussion in 2.2.2, stress is a prosodic feature related to the study of speech rhythm. As with the study of rhythm, the available

literature does not provide sufficient background to the phonetic properties of Malay stress. Earlier studies like Farid (1980), Baskaran (1982), Suhaila (1994) and Teoh (1994) claim that, based on auditory observation, there is no

systematic variation of syllable prominence in Malay connected speech.

Suhaila (1994) further claims that stress has no particular function in Malay connected speech. However, the first systematic instrumental study of the phonetic properties of Malay stress was reported by Zuraidah, Knowles and Yong (2008).

Zuraidah et. al (2008) conducted an experiment to identify the stress characteristics of Malay words. This was a preliminary study prior to the compilation of a larger corpus for the analysis of the prosodic characteristic of Malay. Their investigation focussed on two features which they hypothesized might be correlates of the lexical stress in Malay: syllable duration and the variation of F0 in the vowel in the final two syllables.

Zuraidah et. al (2008) studied 111 words produced in isolation by two female Malay native speakers. The material included simple and complex words as well as a few loan words from English; however it was not clear how many words were listed in each of the categories. The simple words had a

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maximum of four syllables, whilst the complex words were formed through four processes which were a) prefix + root, b) prefix + root +root, c) prefix + root + suffix, and d) prefix + prefix + root + suffix; the examples given were mem + baca ‘reading’, ber + bagai + bagai ‘a variety of something’, mem + per + bagai + kan ‘to have a variety’ respectively. Zuraidah et al. (2008) gave no account of how the words were distributed across different conditions, which made up the design of the experiment. The rationale for choosing these words appear to be to investigate the role of different morphological structures on the realisation of stress in Malay but what was noticeable about this study was that in the presentation of the findings of the study there was very little discussion of this.

The production of these words were recorded and digitized using MAC Speech Lab 2, they were segmented into 422 syllables. Each syllable was annotated with its duration and a phonological representation. Native speaker judgments on where the initial and final boundaries of the syllable were

employed. For instance, when a glottal stop was inserted before the words with an initial vowel and between two vowels sequence, the inserted glottal stops are treated as the onset consonant in the CV syllable; as the word istiadat

‘ceremony’ is segmented as /ʔɪs.tɪ.ʔa.dat/.

Likewise when glides are inserted between two adjacent vowels in some of the words like sosial ‘social’ is segmented as /so.sɪ.jɐl/; the inserted glide is treated as the onset to the final syllable. These phonological words were then divided into CV(C) sequences. Nevertheless, an issue which can be raised here instance relates to segmentation; Zuraidah et al. (2008) did not provide a detailed description of how this was carried out. This is

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particularly problematic in the case of vowel-glide sequences where it is well known that drawing a boundary between a vowel and a glide is far from straightforward in spectrographic analysis.

Zuraidah et al (2008) focused their research particularly on the final two syllables of those words as they observed that noticeable prosodic changes in Malay words in isolation usually occur in these two syllables. Hence, the final syllable was labeled 0, the penultimate syllable 1, and the preceding syllables as 2, 3 and 4. For the F0 plot, they observed that typically in 92 of the 111 words, the F₀ rises to a peak in the penultimate syllable followed by complete fall to the bottom of the speakers’ range on the last syllable.

The measurements for syllable durations showed that final syllable is the longest with the mean of 411.41 ms. It has to be noted that this study measured the whole syllable, which included both the consonantal and the vocalic segments. The ANOVA test also revealed that syllable position had a significant effect on the syllable duration. Post hoc analysis revealed that the duration of the final syllable was significantly longer than the other syllables.

The researchers also observed that there was no distinct variation in the realisation of vowels and consonants of Malay that could be attributed to the position of the syllable within the word.

The shortcoming of this experiment is that the morphological properties of these words were overlooked; there were imbalances in the selection of the words according to their morphological types, and when

analysing the data, Zuraidah et al. (2008) conflated the different word types. By doing so, they missed the possibility of investigating the role of morphological complexity on the way in which the kind of prosodic structure of these words is

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realised. Therefore, different morphological word types should to be analysed separately in order to ascertain a stress related pattern corresponding to the types of words.

Consequently, there are also some reservations regarding the use of syllable duration to determine the citation patterns of Malay since naturally syllables with CVC structure have longer duration than the CV syllable

structures, a predominant structure in Malay. Furthermore, it is also difficult to control and compare across different syllable structures.

Subsequently, using the same methodology, Zuraidah et. al (2008) analysed the connected speech data taken from a different study;

Zuraidah and Knowles, (2006) which comprised a seven-hour recording of audio broadcast interviews. The participants consisted of nine educated Malay speakers aged between 45 and 53 years old. These participants spoke standard spoken Malay. However, similar to the data of the isolated words, there were also no description on how the words were distributed across different conditions and the types of sentences available in this recording.

Zuraidah et. al, (2008) found that final lengthening could only be observed at phrase final position; words produced in non-phrase final position did not show lengthening of final syllable as they were observed to have when spoken in isolation. Statistically, Zuraidah et al. (2008) also found that, in this continuous speech data, when they exclude the phrase final syllable in their calculation, the syllable positions within the phrase has no effects on the

syllable duration and F0 unlike the findings of the words produced in isolation.

At the same time, they also found that there there was variability in syllable duration, a finding which is contrary to the auditory-based claim made

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previously by Farid (1980), Baskaran (1982), Suhaila (1994) and Teoh (1994) that Malay is syllable-timed. Perhaps it is not suprising to find high variability of syllable duration across the data because different types of syllable structures would yield different durational values; since syllables with more sounds like CVC would have longer duration that those syllables with CV structures.

Furthermore, in their analysis, Zuraidah et al. (2008) did not include

comparison of syllable durations across the same syllable structures to further support their claim for non-isochrony.

Zuraidah et al. (2008) concluded that ‘there are no phenomena in spoken Malay corresponding to what phonologists call stress’ (2008:10). They noted that no prominent patterns of the pitch and duration were established in the wider context of connected speech. Ultimately, this raises a question as to how Malay speakers achieve the contrast between new and old information.

This is something which we will return to following the results of the

experiment presented in Chapter 4; which seeks to investigate this issue further.

To the best of our knowledge, Zuraidah et al (2008) is the only study which looks at Malay stress instrumentally, and as pointed out above the study does have some important limitations. In view of the fact that understanding lexical stress is probably important in relation to comprehending the rhythmic properties of Malay. It was decided to dig deeper into the area which

Zuraidah et al. (2008) studied and to undertake a further study of lexical stress in Malay focussing on morphological structures and different numbers of syllables.

In conclusion, this chapter presents general background of the language and some of the aspects of Malay morphophonology relevant to this

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research. The next chapter aims to delve further into the area investigated by Zuraidah et al (2008) by taking into consideration the different types of morphological structures of Malay words and different number of syllables of the words which might influence the acoustic correlate of stress in Malay.

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Chapter 4

Identifying Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Malay