•Native listeners rated prominence speech samples from English, French and Spanish.•Prominence ratings based on acoustic criteria and sentence meaning were compared.•The influence of acoustic & ...non-acoustic factors on prominence ratings was modeled.•Acoustic cues and prosodic boundary affected ratings similarly across languages.•Acoustic- and meaning-based prominence ratings converge more for English.•Prominence ratings for French and Spanish are more strongly based in acoustic cues.•Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels.
This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners’ perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure—English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors in predicting binary prominence ratings of individual listeners. In all three languages we find similar effects of prosodic phrase structure and acoustic cues (F0, intensity, phone-rate) on prominence ratings, and differences in the effect of word frequency and instruction. In English, where phrasal prominence is used to convey meaning related to information structure, acoustic and meaning criteria converge on very similar prominence ratings. In French and Spanish, where prominence plays a lesser role in signaling information structure, phrasal prominence is perceived more narrowly on structural and acoustic grounds. Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels for each language. Distinctions in ToBI pitch accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, unaccented) are reflected in empirical and model-predicted prominence ratings. In addition, words with a ToBI pitch accent type that is typically associated with contrastive focus are more likely to be rated as prominent in Spanish and English, but no such effect is found for French. These findings are discussed in relation to probabilistic models of prominence production and perception.
We examined L2 learners' interpretation of pitch accent cues in discourse memory and how these effects vary with proficiency and working memory (WM). One hundred sixty-eight L1-Chinese participants ...learning L2-English listened to recorded discourses containing pairs of contrastive alternatives and then took a later recognition memory test. Their language proficiency and WM were measured through standard tests and the participants were categorized into low, medium, advanced, and high advanced language proficiency groups. We analyzed recognition memory task performance using signal detection theory to tease apart response bias (an overall tendency to affirm memory probes) from sensitivity (the ability to discern whether a specific probe statement is true). The results showed a benefit of contrastive L + H* pitch accents in rejecting probes referring to items unmentioned in a discourse, but not contrastive alternatives themselves. More proficient participants also showed more accurate memory for the discourses overall, as well as a reduced overall bias to affirm the presented statements as
. Meanwhile, that the benefit of L + H* accents in rejecting either contrast probes or unmentioned probes was modulated for people with greater working memory. Participants with higher WM were quite sure that it did not exist in the memory trace as this part of discourse wasn't mentioned. The results support a contrast-uncertainty hypothesis, in which comprehenders recall the contrast set but fail to distinguish which is the correct item. Further, these effects were influenced by proficiency and by working memory, suggesting they reflect incomplete mapping between pitch accent and discourse representation.
•Speakers distinguish focus types by manipulating phonetic parameters.•These include f0 peak height, tonal onglide and tone target height.•All speakers show the same systematic pattern in ...manipulating continuous parameters.•Manipulation does not lead to discrete choices of pitch accent in all speakers.•Results call for integration of discrete and continuous aspects of intonation.
It has already been observed that there is no one-to-one mapping between intonational categories and the pragmatic functions they are used to express. For instance, in German a particular pitch accent (L+H∗) is often used to express contrastive (corrective) focus, but neither is the use of this pitch accent confined to this function nor is this the only pitch accent used to express it. In particular, there are considerable differences across speakers in the use of pitch accents and the functions they express. In this paper we look at the phonetic parameters that are characteristic of each of these pitch accents (f0 peak alignment, tonal onglide and target height) and observe a striking similarity across speakers: All speakers modulate each parameter in the same direction, e.g. the f0 peak is aligned later for contrastive focus than for narrow focus. Whereas for some speakers this is transcribed as two different pitch accents (L+H∗ vs. H∗), for others it is not, and the peak alignment is treated as phonetic variation within one accent type (H∗). To capture both the differences and similarities in intonation, we therefore argue for an integrated analysis of the discrete phonological pitch accents and the modulation of continuous phonetic parameters that characterise them.
•The AAC hypothesis is proposed to theorize L1-to-L2 positive transfer.•The AAC hypothesis embodies acoustic, attentional, and contextual elements.•Non-natives outperform natives on English stress ...discrimination.•L1 Cantonese language experience enhances L2 English stress discrimination.•Rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction constrain the non-native advantage.
Can non-natives outperform natives on speech discrimination? Surprisingly, Cantonese listeners discriminated English stress more accurately than did English listeners. To ascertain its generalizability, I further ask whether this Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination is equally potent across pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. Sixty Cantonese and English listeners completed four blocks of English stress discrimination task with varying pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. In the absence of rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction, the Cantonese listeners outperformed the English listeners on English stress discrimination. However, the Cantonese advantage disappeared when either rising pitch accent pattern or vowel reduction was present. When both rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction were present, the Cantonese listeners even performed poorer than the English listeners. The findings underscore two constraints of the Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination—rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction. Based on collective research on non-native advantage in speech perception, the Acoustic-Attentional-Contextual hypothesis is proposed.
•Stressed gestures are longer, larger and faster than unstressed gestures.•The velocity effects are due to changes in displacement.•Accent does not exert additional strengthening on the stressed ...gestures.•Accent exerts minor strengthening effects over the whole word.•Except final vowel duration, kinematic measures do not encode focus type.
It is well reported that articulatory movements comprising prominence units are longer, larger, and faster than their non-prominent counterparts. However, it is unclear whether these effects arise at the level of lexical stress, accent, or both, reflecting a hierarchy of prominence, i.e., being stronger when induced by accent as opposed to stress. It is also uncertain whether prominence-induced kinematic effects are invariant across positions of stress within the word, types of focus that accent denotes, and positions of words in the phrase. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study to assess the supralaryngeal kinematic correlates of prominence in Greek across three stress positions (antepenultimate, penultimate, ultimate; i.e., all possible stress positions in Greek), two accentual conditions (accented and de-accented), and two phrasal positions (phrase-medial and phrase-final). Focus type is also considered, with the accentual conditions coming from two types of focus (broad and narrow), while the de-accented conditions are by default unfocused. Our results indicate that stressed syllables involve longer, larger, and faster gestures than their unstressed counterparts, regardless of the position of stress within the word. Notably, variation in velocity is accounted for by variation in displacement. Presence of accent does not further expand the stressed gestures, although it is related to minimal kinematic changes across the whole word, the exact profile of which depends on stress position. With the exception of final vowel duration, focus type is not systematically encoded in these kinematic effects. Finally, interactions are detected between the kinematic profile of prominence and that of boundaries. Implications of our findings for the hierarchy of prominence and its cross-linguistic differences are discussed, and a gestural account of prominence and boundaries is put forward.
Suprasegmental features are often affected by brain damage, and are typically accompanied by motor speech disorders such as dysarthria, apraxia of speech (AOS), and foreign accent syndrome (FAS). ...However, there is no report of a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS.
We describe a female Japanese patient who developed a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS, with accompanying mild Wernicke's aphasia due to head injury, in order to investigate the mechanism of pitch accent disorder based on speech production models.
We analysed her spontaneous speech, confrontation naming, repetition, reading aloud, and the error patterns in her pitch accents in two sessions. Additionally, we gave her a reading aloud test of homonyms with different accent patterns and an auditory discrimination task of pitch accents.
The patient exhibited a significant recovery from aphasia, and paraphasia was observed to almost disappear, although the pitch accent errors remained in all speech modalities. While she was able to auditorily distinguish between correct and incorrect pitch accents, she was unaware of her own abnormally accented speech. The results of the analysis of the error patterns in her pitch accents revealed that they, even if incorrect for the selected words, did not actually deviate from the correct patterns in the Osaka dialect, her native dialect.
Our observations suggest that the process of pitch accent production may be independent of that of phoneme production. Moreover, it may be that her accent abnormalities were not produced randomly during the process of articulation, but instead may have been due to a problem in selecting pitch accent patterns from the repertoire of Osaka accent patterns allocated to the corresponding words. This suggests that the patient's pitch accent disorder was a problem in a higher level of linguistic processing, i.e., lexical pitch accent encoding, rather than the motor control of speech production.
This Special Issue features a collection of state-of-the art articles on the intonational patterns of different types of bilinguals (e.g., second language learners; heritage speakers; simultaneous ...bilinguals), with a particular focus on understudied language pairings and encompassing a wide variety of languages (e.g. Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, German, English, French, Inuktitut, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Spanish). The papers in this Special Issue address a number of questions that have so far remained unanswered: Can we determine a hierarchy of difficulty or transferability? How does prosody interact with other components of the grammar, such as morphology or syntax, in a contact situation? Which aspects are more prone to bidirectional interference? Which changes in intonation make speakers sound foreign in their second (or first) language? The papers in this Special Issue offer answers to these questions and open up multiple avenues for future research. We hope that this Special Issue will inspire future studies on intonation and bilingualism.
Prosodic stresses are known to affect the meaning of utterances, but exactly how they do this is not known in many cases. We focus on the mechanisms underlying the meaning effects of ironic prosody ...(e.g., teasing or blaming through an ironic twist), which is frequently used in both personal and mass-media communication. To investigate ironic twists, we created 30 sentences that can be interpreted both ironically and nonironically, depending on the context. In Experiment 1, 14 of these sentences were identified as being most reliably understood in the two conditions. In Experiment 2, we recorded the 14 sentences spoken in both a literal and an ironic condition by 14 speakers, and the resulting 392 recorded sentences were acoustically analyzed. In Experiment 3, 20 listeners marked the acoustically prominent words, thus identifying perceived prosodic stresses. In Experiment 4, 53 participants rated how ironic they perceived the 392 recorded sentences to be. The combined analysis of irony ratings, acoustic features, and various prosodic stress characteristics revealed that ironic meaning is primarily signaled by a stress shift from the end of a sentence to an earlier position. This change in position might function as a "warning" cue for listeners to consider potential alternative meanings of the sentence. Thus, beyond giving individual words a stronger contrastive or emphatic role, the distribution of prosodic stresses can also prime opposite meanings for identical sentences, supporting the view that the dynamic aspect of prosody conveys important cues in human communication.
The question of whether intonation events are speech categories like phonemes and lexical tones has long been a puzzle in prosodic research. In past work, researchers have studied categoricality of ...pitch accents and boundary tones by examining perceptual phenomena stemming from research on phoneme categories (i.e., intonation boundary effects-peaks in discrimination sensitivity at category boundaries, perceptual magnet effects-sensitivity minima near the best exemplar or prototype of a category). Both lines of research have yielded mixed results. However, boundary effects are not necessarily related to categoricality of speech. Using improved methodology, the present study examines whether pitch accents have domain-general internal structure of categories by testing the perceptual magnet effect. Perceived goodness and discriminability of re-synthesized productions of Dutch rising pitch accent (L*H) were evaluated by native speakers of Dutch in three experiments. The variation between these stimuli was quantified using a polynomial-parametric modeling approach. A perceptual magnet effect was detected: (1) rated "goodness" decreased as acoustic-perceptual distance relative to the prototype increased (Experiment 1), and (2) equally spaced items far from the prototype were more frequently discriminated than equally spaced items in the neighborhood of the prototype (Experiment 2). These results provide first evidence for internal structure of pitch accents, similar to that found in color and phoneme categories. However, the discrimination accuracy gathered here was lower than that reported for phonemes. The discrimination advantage in the neighborhood far from the prototype disappeared when participants were tested on a very large number of stimuli (Experiment 3), similar to findings on phonemes and different from findings for lexical tones in neutral network simulations of distributional learning. These results suggest a more transient nature of the perceptual magnet effect in the perception of pitch accents and arguably weaker categoricality of pitch accents, compared to that of phonemes and in particular of lexical tones.
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