Language Log

Are nonlinear vocal phenomena as distracting as people think?
Andrey Anikin, ORCID Icon Bioacoustics The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording (18 Sep 2025)

Keywords

Roughness    vocal communication    attention    infant cries    auditory salience    nonlinear vocal phenomena

In a comment on "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century", Rachel Churchill asked

Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?

I've sometimes noticed non-native English speakers – even those whose pronunciation and accent are pretty good – failing to use it. For example, they might say "This one is fifty GRAMS, but the other one is twenty GRAMS", where a native speaker would emphasise the "fifty" and "twenty" rather than the "grams". I'm guessing it's because their native language doesn't use contrastive emphasis and maybe they've never been taught the concept, but I don't know this for sure.

I responded:

See Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE ICASSP, 2015. The abstract:

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

See also "Victor Hugo, hélas", 4/13/2024, "LÀ encore…", 4/14/2024, and "Intonational focus", 4/21/2011.

Roger C. continued the discussion:

In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order; syntax is more flexible than in English.

And I responded:

I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.

"Interest(s)" (8/6/2025) engaged the often-unnoticed usage difference between "in the interest of" and "in the interests of". In a comment on that post, Yves Rehbein wrote

I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural.

And I responded

Indeed. See "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018, for an explanation of why /sts/ and /st/ and /s/ can be phonetically ambiguous. I've verified that this applies to interests / interest and will provide details in another post before long.

Will Shortz, "Sunday Puzzle: Artificially Confused", NPR Weekend Edition 8/9/2025:

The theme of today's puzzle is A.I. every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word has a long -A vowel sound and the second word has a long-I vowel sound.

Is it a "foo fighter" a fighter that fights foos? Or is it a fighter that IS foo? This should show up in the stress pattern, as in the difference between a "German teacher" as a teacher who teaches German (normally with stress on the first word), or a teacher who IS German (normally with stress on the second word).

Dave Grohl clears this up for us in a brief video clip:

Chris Button saw this bubble tea place at 3:45 PM today in Hollywood:

From the cafe's website:

BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin language mastery. Co-founders Eric and Philip, both "American Born Chinese" (ABC), chose the name to reflect their heritage and shared pride in their culture.

A hot bowl of congee / zuk1 粥 (Cantonese) / zhōu (Mandarin) / rice porridge / rice gruel, in its multifarious varieties, is one of my favorite Chinese dishes — at its best, congee is absolutely divine.  We've written about it often enough that I think most Language Log readers have a good idea of what it's like.  Here I only want to add some new information about it from a historical, literary, and linguistic vantage.

The paragraphs quoted here are from Nandini Das, "Dark Propensities", a review of Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes:  Opium's Hidden Histories (John Murray, 2023) in London Review of Books (3/20/25).

A CHINESE FRIEND and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I'm trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice porridge is one of them. Cooked rice can be revived by boiling in water, or simply by pouring water over it, although fancier versions use broth or green tea, as in Japanese ochazuke. It can be reassuringly warm in cold winters, or refreshingly cold in hot summers, and can be paired with side dishes from a single green chilli to pickled vegetables, or salted fish and eggs. My friend tells me that in Mandarin it is called 粥 (zhöu). I say that the Bengali word for the cold, overnight version is panta-bhaat, and the cooked version is phena-bhaat (bhaat means cooked rice). Then I remember that phena-bhaat is a regional term, associated with the Bengali of Kolkata, where I grew up. For my mother, whose culinary vocabulary was that of her childhood in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, cooked rice porridge was jaou, a softer pronunciation of the Mandarin zhöu. During my childhood, I realise, East Bengal's long-standing trade connections with the Chinese mainland were behind the steaming bowls of jaou-bhaat my mother cooked.

In Chinese they are called yùntú 韻圖 / 韵图.  These tools are vitally important in the development of Sinitic phonology, but barely known outside of sinological specialists, so — for the history of world phonology — it is worthwhile to introduce them to linguists in general.

A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional Chinese: 韻圖; pinyin: yùntú; Wade–Giles: yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used fǎnqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.

This is something I've been waiting for for decades:

"Onomatopoeia Odyssey:  How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025)

Something for everyone

In a comment on "Yair" (2/14/2025), Philip Taylor asserted that he routinely pronounces the orthographic "r" in the typical British filled-pause spelling "er":

« some Americans adopt a mistaken spelling pronunciation, rendering "er" with a final [r] » — well, speaking as a Briton, my "er" pauses, if prolonged, also end with an phoneme, although where exactly in the mouth I produce it I cannot be sure. Certainly it is totally unlike the trilled/r/ with which I might say "Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run run run", but I think that it might be fairly close to the phoneme in my Maigret or Rien de rien.

If Philip actually trills the /r/'s in "Run, rabbit, run", and he's not from Scotland, this is a big dialectological surprise. And it's equally unexpected if he produces something like a French uvular /r/ at the end of his filled pauses. More likely, this is an extreme example of why sociolinguists are skeptical of how people think they talk.

Still, it's worth a bit of time to confirm the OED's r-less assertion (audio) about British filled-pause pronunciation. This would be a big task, overall,  given the wide range of British speech across geographical, social, ethnic, and temporal variables, so I thought I'd start with the Royal family. (And I'll also end there, unless Philip's peculiar perceptions return in another form…)