Speech Prosody in Mental Disorders Ding, Hongwei; Zhang, Yang
Annual review of linguistics,
01/2023, Letnik:
9, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In response to uncovering brain mechanisms underlying vocal communication and searching for biomarkers for mental illnesses, speech prosody has been increasingly studied in recent years in multiple ...disciplines, including psycholinguistics. In this article, we provide an up-to-date synthesis of the theoretical foundation and empirical evidence to profile linguistic and emotional prosody in the proper characterization of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and depression. Our review reveals a need to develop theoretically motivated and methodologically integrated approaches to the study of context-driven comprehension and expression of pragmatic-affective prosody, which will help elucidate the core features of socio-communicative problems in individuals with mental disorders. We propose that comprehensive models within and across the conventional cognition-emotion-language trichotomy need to be developed to integrate current findings and guide future research. In particular, there needs to be due emphasis on investigating multisensory and cross-modal effects in normal and pathological prosody research. Our review calls for multidisciplinary efforts to address the challenging issues to inform and inspire the advancement of linguistic theories and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.
•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.
Pronoun interpretation in Italian White, Lydia; Goad, Heather; Garcia, Guilherme Duarte ...
Linguistic approaches to bilingualism,
2/2024
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
We explore potential effects of prosody on pronoun interpretation in Italian, building on previous research which
has shown that second language learners/users (L2ers) assign non-target ...interpretations to overt pronouns. We investigate effects
of contrastive stress and pause, proposing that these will result in changes to default antecedent preferences for overt and null
pronouns, for L2ers and for native speakers. An experiment was conducted, involving English-speaking L2ers of Italian and Italian
native speakers. Participants were presented with auditory stimuli like
Lorenzo ha scritto a Roberto quando Ø/lui si è
trasferito a Torino
‘Lorenzo wrote to Roberto when (he) moved to Turin’ and indicated their preferred antecedent for
the pronoun. Overt versus null pronouns, presence versus absence of stress on overt pronouns, and presence versus absence of pause
between clauses were manipulated. The results yielded significant differences for antecedent choices between null and overt
pronouns, consistent with earlier literature. In addition, stress was significant for both groups. Implications of a prosodic
approach to ambiguity resolution are discussed.
Child‐directed language can support language learning, but how? We addressed two questions: (1) how caregivers prosodically modulated their speech as a function of word familiarity (known or unknown ...to the child) and accessibility of referent (visually present or absent from the immediate environment); (2) whether such modulations affect children's unknown word learning and vocabulary development. We used data from 38 English‐speaking caregivers (from the ECOLANG corpus) talking about toys (both known and unknown to their children aged 3–4 years) both when the toys are present and when absent. We analyzed prosodic dimensions (i.e., speaking rate, pitch and intensity) of caregivers’ productions of 6529 toy labels. We found that unknown labels were spoken with significantly slower speaking rate, wider pitch and intensity range than known labels, especially in the first mentions, suggesting that caregivers adjust their prosody based on children's lexical knowledge. Moreover, caregivers used slower speaking rate and larger intensity range to mark the first mentions of toys that were physically absent. After the first mentions, they talked about the referents louder with higher mean pitch when toys were present than when toys were absent. Crucially, caregivers’ mean pitch of unknown words and the degree of mean pitch modulation for unknown words relative to known words (pitch ratio) predicted children's immediate word learning and vocabulary size 1 year later. In conclusion, caregivers modify their prosody when the learning situation is more demanding for children, and these helpful modulations assist children in word learning.
Research Highlights
In naturalistic interactions, caregivers use slower speaking rate, wider pitch and intensity range when introducing new labels to 3–4‐year‐old children, especially in first mentions.
Compared to when toys are present, caregivers speak more slowly with larger intensity range to mark the first mentions of toys that are physically absent.
Mean pitch to mark word familiarity predicts children's immediate word learning and future vocabulary size.
To clarify the role of prosodic phrasing in the emergence of phrase structure, it is necessary to be clear as to how syntactic phrasing relates to prosodic phrasing. The core proposal here is that a ...distinction must be made between two basic types of syntactic constructions; namely, syntactic configurations for which prosodic phrasing is part of the definition of the construction, and phrase structure proper, which is independent of prosodic phrasing. This distinction implies a somewhat more complex view of the interface between syntax and prosody than is currently widely assumed. Rather than conceiving of prosodic phrases as derivative of syntactic phrases, prosodic phrasing and syntactic phrase structure are seen here as alternative ways of relating words to each other, forming larger units from smaller ones. Against this background, the emergence of phrase structure is conceived of as the emancipation of syntax from prosodic scaffolding.
► Few but recursive prosodic categories are superior to multiple categories. ► Syntactic grounding of all prosodic categories can be fully maintained. ► Minimal/maximal projections of prosodic ...categories are indispensable. ► OT-constraints can model the interplay of the different factors involved.
Research on Japanese prosody, especially on the pitch accent system of the language, has for a long time found that a single domain “phonological phrase” is not sufficient. Rather, two domains need to be distinguished, which go by various names (Minor vs. Major Phrase, Accentual vs. Intermediate Phrase). While empirically well-founded, these developments, together with similar findings in other languages, have resulted in a dissolution of the originally tightly organized universal prosodic hierarchy into a collection of many prosodic types, each instantiated here and there in different languages, but never simultaneously realized within a single language. Two strands of recent work, that of Selkirk (2009:205–219, 2011a), and of Ito and Mester (2007, 2009a, 2009b) converge on a common theme from different directions. On the one hand, Selkirk has developed a vastly simplified approach to the syntax–prosody mapping which distinguishes only three levels (word, phrase, and clause) where syntactic constituents are systematically made to correspond to phonological domains (“Match Theory”). On the other hand, Ito and Mester have argued that the empirically necessary subcategories (such as Minor vs. Major Phrase) need to be understood not as additional categories existing in their own right, but rather as instances of recursively deployed basic categories. This paper carries forward this line of prosodic hierarchy research and shows that the recursion-based conception implemented within Match Theory allows for a conceptually and empirically cleaner understanding of the phonological facts and generalizations in Japanese as well as for an understanding of the respective roles of syntax and phonology in determining prosodic constituent structure organization, and the limitation in types of distinctions in prosodic category that are made in phonological representation. Finally, a formal constraint-based OT analysis is developed that provides an account of the varying tonal and accentual structures in syntactic collocations of varying sizes and structures.
This paper deals with multimodal displays of non-affiliative stances and assessments in face-to-face triadic storytelling activities. Building on conversational analytical research that has ...highlighted the co-constructed nature of storytelling activities and the intersubjective nature of stance-taking, this paper takes a multimodal perspective and focusses on how interactants use language, prosody, gaze, and gestures to express stances that are non-affiliative to different degrees. The paper addresses two issues: We first concentrate on the ways that disaffiliative assessments and stances are communicated as multimodal packages before zooming in on the ways that storytellers and recipients deal with displays of disaffiliation. This includes both verbal and nonverbal strategies to highlight disaffiliation and interactional work to jointly mitigate it. By its focus on multimodal stance-taking in storytelling activities, the paper ties in with both the recently growing interest in the multimodal nature of stance-taking as well as recent pleas to revisit interactional storytelling from a multimodal perspective.
This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker
("you know") in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics ...using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of
were found.
mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of
in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F
, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of
. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of
. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of
in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.
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