On the Phonology and Semantics of Deaccentuation

The deaccentuation of given and/or repeated elements is familiar from many dialects of English. We propose that deaccentuation is essentially an optional postlexical phonological process of stress retraction triggered by two constraints: *Stress-Copy, which assigns a violation to a stress peak on a word with a segmentally identical copy in the left context, and Rightmost, which assigns a violation to every word between a stress peak and the right phrase edge. We quantify deaccentuation by defining it as being perceived with less stress than expected, where expected stress is calculated by an implementation of Liberman and Prince's (1977) phrasal stress algorithm. We provide empirical evidence for our analysis based on the first inaugurals of six former U.S. presidents

The role of pitch accent type in interpreting information status

The present study set out to pin down the role of four pitch accents, fall (H*L), rise-fall (L*HL), rise (L*H), fall-rise (H*LH), as well as deaccentuation, in interpreting new vs. given information in British English by the eyetracking paradigm. The pitch accents in question were claimed to convey information status in theories of English intonational meaning. There is, however, no consensus on the postulated roles of these pitch accents. Results clearly show that pitch accent type can and does matter when interpreting information status. The effects can be reflected in the mean proportions of fixations to the competitor in a selected time window. These patterns are also present in proportions of fixations to the target but to a lesser extent. Interestingly, the effects of pitch accent types are also reflected in how fast the participants could adjust their decision as to which picture to move before the name of the picture was fully revealed. For example, when the competitor was a given entity, the proportion of fixations to the competitor increased initially in most accent conditions in the first as a result of subjects' bias towards a given entity, but started to decrease substantially earlier in the H*L condition than in the L*H and deaccentuation conditions

On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

Intonation and discourse processing

This paper describes intonational cues to discourse structure, and the role that intonation plays in spoken discourse processing. We begin by discussing two main structures in discourse that one must consider when doing research on discourse processing: segmentation and information status. We then review a number of key studies from the phonetics literature which have investigated the intonational marking of these structures. Next, we discuss in detail the psycholinguistic research to date which has examined the role that intonation can play in facilitating or inhibiting the processing of discourse in English and other related languages. We conclude by outlining directions for future research in the area of intonation-discourse processing

L701: Accommodation to Speech Production in Task-Related Dialogue

Using the experimental setting of a joint construction task where visual contact between the two members of dyad is blocked, the communicative channels of eye-track and mouse-track are studied in order to ascertain whether their presence reduces the need for distinct introductory mentions of a referent; a phenomenon which has been found in the visual communication channel, as reported by Anderson et al (1997). A series of multiple regressions on the absolute durations of introductory and second identical mentions, and on the duration differences between corresponding first and second tokens reject this hypothesis, showing that the presence of one extra communicative channel reduces the overall length of tokens, two extra channels increases the overall length of tokens, but showing no effect of communication channel on the difference in duration between first and second tokens. The results are discussed and explanations for these findings are put forward

English prosodic marking of Information Structure by L1-Japanese second language learners

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

Prosody, Accessibility, and Sentential Negation in Brazilian Portuguese

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