Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Juncture prosody across languages : similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她 # 狗饼干”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 # 饼干”). These production data showed that prosodic disambiguation is realized very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin speakers also showed higher levels of accuracy in disambiguation compared to English speakers, indicating language-specific differences in the extent to which prosodic cues are used. However, Mandarin, but not English, speakers showed a decrease in accuracy when pausing cues were removed. Thus even with high similarity in both structural ambiguity and production cues, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Intonational structure as a word-boundary cue in Tokyo Japanese

While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an accentual phrase (APR) would be as a potential word-boundary cue for Japanese listeners. A corpus study shows that it should allow listeners to locate approximately 40–60% of word onsets, while causing less than 1% false positives. We then present a word-spotting study which shows that Japanese listeners can, indeed, use accentual phrase boundary cues during segmentation. This work shows that the prosodic patterns that have been found in the production of Japanese also impact listeners’ processing

Native Language Influence in the Segmentation of a Novel Language

Published online: 04 Apr 2016.A major problem in second language acquisition (SLA) is the segmentation of fluent speech in the target language, i.e., detecting the boundaries of phonological constituents like words and phrases in the speech stream. To this end, among a variety of cues, people extensively use prosody and statistical regularities. We examined the role of pitch, duration, and transitional probabilities (TPs) between adjacent syllables in the segmentation of a novel language by native speakers of German and compared their responses with the segmentation by the listeners with a phonologically different native language: Italian. We used an artificial language with different prosodic cues marking the boundaries of statistically defined words. In artificial-language learning experiments, we compared how Germans and Italians use prosodic and statistical cues for segmenting continuous speech. We show that native phonology modulates the processing of prosodic cues in novel languages. While native speakers of Italian interpret prosodic cues at both the word and the phrasal level, native speakers of German interpret them exclusively at the phrasal level. Phrasal prosody can facilitate the segmentation of a novel language when prosodic and statistical cues lead to the same segmentation solution. Word-level prosody does not necessarily facilitate segmentation, but it can disrupt it when statistical and prosodic cues lead to different segmentation solutions.The research leading to these results was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement Number 269502 (PASCAL), by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, and by the Basque Foundation of Science, Spain

Perception of phrasal prosody in the acquisition of European Portuguese

A central issue in language acquisition is the segmentation of speech into linguistic units and structures. This thesis examines the role played by phrasal prosody in speech segmentation in the acquisition of European Portuguese, both in the processing of globally ambiguous sentences by 4 and 5 year old children and in early word segmentation by 12 month-old infants. Past studies have shown that phrasal prosody is used by adults in ambiguity resolution, for example to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences involving a low or high attachment interpretation of a given phrase (e.g, Hide the rabbit with a cloth). In a first exploratory experiment, and given previous unclear findings in the literature on European Portuguese, we investigated whether prosodic phrasing might guide speech chunking and interpretation of these globally ambiguous sentences by adult listeners. In an eye-tracking experiment, which also included a pointing task, we found that EP adult speakers were not able to use phrasal prosody to disambiguate the structures tested. Both the results from eye gaze and the pointing task indicated the presence of a high attachment preference in the language, regardless of phrasal prosody. These findings required a better understanding of adult interpretation of these utterances before a productive study could be conducted with young children. Building on the lessons learned from this exploratory study, we conducted two new experiments examining young children (and adults) abilities to use prosody, in a different sort of globally ambiguous utterances where differences in phrasal prosody were triggered by the syntaxprosody interface and part of the common, default prosody of the sentences (i.e., in compound word versus list reading structures, like ‘guarda-chuva e pato,’ umbrella and duck vs. ‘guarda, chuva e pato’, guard, rain and duck). An eye-tracking paradigm (along the lines of De Carvalho, Dautriche, & Christophe, 2016a) was used to monitor the use of phrasal prosody, namely the contrast between a Prosodic Word boundary (PW) in the compound word interpretation and an Intonational Phrase boundary (IP) in the list interpretation, during auditory sentence processing. An offline pointing task was also included. Results have shown a clear developmental trend in the use of phrasal prosody to guide sentence interpretation, from a general inability at age 4 to a still developing ability at age 5, when local prosodic cues were still not enough and the support of distal cues was necessary to achieve disambiguation, unlike for adults. While the previous experiments investigated the ability to use prosody to constrain lexical and syntactic analysis, thus looking into the combination of lexical, syntactic and prosodic knowledge at a young age, in a final set of experiments, we asked whether phrasal prosody is exploited to chunk the speech signal into words by infants, in the absence of prior lexical knowledge. Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm (Altvater-Mackensen & Mani, 2013), we tested 12-month-olds use of phrasal prosody in early word segmentation beyond the utterance edge factor, by examining the effects of two prosodic boundaries in utterance internal position, namely the IP boundary (in the absence of pause) and the PW boundary. Our findings showed that early segmentation abilities are constrained by phrasal prosody, since they crucially depended on the location of the target word in the prosodic structure of the utterance. Implications of the findings in this thesis were discussed in the context of prosodic differences across languages, taking advantage of the atypical combination of prosodic properties that characterizes EP.No âmbito da aquisição da linguagem, a segmentação de fala em unidades e estruturas linguísticas é uma questão central. Esta dissertação examina o papel desempenhado pelo fraseamento prosódico na segmentação de fala, na aquisição do Português Europeu (PE), no que diz respeito ao processamento de frases globalmente ambíguas por parte de crianças aos 4 e 5 anos de idade e à segmentação precoce de palavras aos 12 meses. Estudos anteriores mostraram que o fraseamento prosódico é usado pelos adultos na resolução de ambiguidade, por exemplo, para desambiguar frases sintaticamente ambíguas envolvendo uma interpretação de low ou high attachment de um dado sintagma (e.g.,’Hide the rabbit with a cloth’ Esconde o coelho com um pano). Num estudo exploratório, e dados os resultados pouco claros de trabalhos anteriores para o Português Europeu, investigámos se o fraseamento prosódico poderia guiar a organização da fala em unidades específicas, bem como a interpretação das frases globalmente ambíguas, por parte de participantes adultos. Numa experiência de eye-tracking, que incluía também uma tarefa de apontar, observámos que os participantes adultos do PE não conseguiram usar o fraseamento prosódico para desambiguar as estruturas testadas. Quer os resultados do movimento dos olhos quer os da tarefa de apontar evidenciaram a preferência pelo high attachment na língua, independentemente do fraseamento prosódico envolvido. Estes resultados implicaram compreender melhor a interpretação adulta destes enunciados antes de se conduzir um estudo com crianças. Com base nas observações feitas neste estudo exploratório, conduzimos duas experiências novas por forma a examinar a capacidade de uso da prosódia, por parte das crianças (e adultos), num outro conjunto de enunciados globalmente ambíguos, em que as diferenças de fraseamento prosódico foram desencadeadas pela interface sintaxe-prosódia e por parte da prosódia default das frases (i.e., em compostos versus estruturas em formato de lista, como ‘guarda-chuva e pato,’ vs. ‘guarda, chuva e pato’). Um paradigma de eye-tracking (na linha de De Carvalho, Dautriche, & Christophe, 2016a) foi usado para monitorizar o uso do fraseamento prosódico, nomeadamente o contraste entre uma fronteira de Palavra Prosódica (PW) na interpretação de composto e uma fronteira de Sintagma Entoacional (IP) na interpretação de lista, durante o processamento auditivo da frase. Também foi incluída uma tarefa off-line de apontar. Os resultados mostraram um claro desenvolvimento no uso do fraseamento prosódico na interpretação das frases; de uma incapacidade geral de interpretação das frases aos 4 anos a uma clara evolução nas competências aos 5 anos, altura em que as pistas prosódicas locais ainda são insuficientes e o apoio do contexto prosódico da frase é necessário para alcançar a desambiguação, diferentemente do adulto. Enquanto as experiências anteriores investigaram a capacidade de usar a prosódia para restringir a análise lexical e sintática, olhando para a combinação de conhecimento lexical, sintático e prosódico numa idade precoce, num conjunto final de experiências, questionámos se o fraseamento prosódico é explorado, por parte das crianças, para organizar o sinal de fala em palavras, na ausência de conhecimento lexical prévio. Recorrendo a uma versão modificada do paradigma visual habituation (Altvater-Mackensen & Mani, 2013), testámos o uso do fraseamento prosódico para a segmentação precoce de palavras além do fator limite do enunciado, por parte de crianças com 12 meses de idade. Examinámos o efeito de duas fronteiras prosódicas em posição interna de enunciado, nomeadamente a fronteira de IP (na ausência de pausa) e a fronteira de PW. Os nossos resultados mostraram que a capacidade de segmentação precoce é afetada pelo fraseamento prosódico, na medida em que depende da localização da palavra-alvo na estrutura prosódica do enunciado. Partindo da combinação atípica das propriedades prosódicas que caracterizam o PE, as implicações do conjunto de estudos desenvolvidos no âmbito desta dissertação foram discutidas no contexto das diferenças prosódicas entre línguas

Differential contribution of prosodic cues in the native and non-native segmentation of French speech

This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lp-2012-0018.This study investigates the use of prosodic information in the segmentation of French speech by mid-level and high-level English second/foreign language (L2) learners of French and native French listeners. The results of two word-monitoring tasks, one with natural stimuli and one with resynthesized stimuli, show that as L2 learners become more proficient in French, they go from parsing accented syllables as word-initial to parsing them as word-final, but unlike native listeners, they use duration increase but not fundamental frequencyx (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries. These results are attributed to: (1) the L2 learners' native language, in which F0 rise is a reliable cue to word-initial boundaries but not word-final boundaries; (2) the co-occurrence of F0 and duration cues in word-final syllables in French, rendering L2 learners' use of F0 rise unnecessary for locating word-final boundaries; and (3) the optional marking of word-initial boundaries by F0 cues in French, thus making it difficult for non-native listeners to tease the two types of F0 rise apart. We argue that these factors prevent English listeners from attending to F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French, irrespective of their proficiency in French