Intonation in Spanish declaratives : differences between lab speech and spontaneous speech

The present study compares the intonation of Spanish declarative utterances in lab speech and spontaneous speech. Most studies of Spanish intonation have used lab speech, collected in an experimental setting and often scripted. This allows the researcher to control many factors, but the results cannot be assumed to be representative of spontaneous speech. The present study takes the most characteristic traits of the intonation of declarative sentences in Spanish lab speech and examines whether the same traits exist in spontaneous speech. It is shown that there are notable differences between the intonation of Spanish declaratives in lab speech and spontaneous speech. While some of the differences are minor, others are quite significant. Differences of one degree or another exist in the areas of the presence of F0 rises through stressed syllables, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering and deaccenting

Urdu intonation

The current study is an analysis of an Urdu speech corpus using a Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription system to develop a model of Urdu intonation. The analysis indicates that Urdu has three pitch accents (L*, L*+H, H*) and boundary tones associated to two phrase types: accentual phrase (AP) boundaries (Ha, La) and intonational phrase (IP) boundaries (L%, H%, LH%). The AP is a pitch bearing unit on a single word, or more than one word in the context of (a) izāfat, (b) conjunctive vāo, (c) case markers, (d) complex postpositions, and (e) complex verbs. Moreover, this study also investigates the tonal structure of declarative, interrogative (wh-questions, yes/no-questions), and imperative (semi-honorific, polite honorific) sentences in neutral focus context using 50 utterances produced by ten speakers. Results indicate that (i) all declarative sentences consist of a series of APs, represented as (aL) L* (H) Ha, except the sentence final AP, represented as (H*) L%. (ii) wh-questions are different from their corresponding declaratives in terms of pitch range and the final boundary tone; (iii) imperatives are different form their corresponding declaratives in terms of final boundary tone

Speakers' rapidly-updated expectations influence prosodic realization of information structure

A production experiment was conducted to investigate the role of perspective-taking in the prosodic marking of information structure. Participants played an interactive game in which they produced verbal instructions that directed an addressee to place objects in locations on the computer screen. We manipulated (i) the participants' assumptions about the addressee's familiarity with the objects and (ii) the addressee's accuracy in identifying the objects. F0 measurements of the participants' utterances were analyzed with Smoothing-spline ANOVA models. We find that speakers' expectations about the addressee's knowledge state influence the prosodic realization of both new and given information, and that speakers rapidly update their expectations based on the addressee's behavior during the conversation

Caracterización prosódica del foco de tema y rema en las noticias

The study of prosody with regard to the paralinguistic function is progressing in two areas, the discursive analysis of the information structure, and the prosodic analysis of textual categories. On one hand, the oral information discourse in the media is an established exemplary type of discourse thus its analysis is patterned-oriented. On the other, the news locution is a still a sort of an announcers’ challenge due to the most peculiar communication conditions of the act. This study analyses a corpus of five news announced in three television channels by three different news readers. First, the discourse segments are defined as theme and rheme units. Next, the new, old and meditated information foci are spotted. And lastly, it is measured the pitch range (in percentages), the duration of the stressed syllable and the pitch peak of a corpus of 228 foci. The ANOVA factorial analysis characterizes the rheme focus by the syllable lengthening and characterizes the mediated focus by the pitch peak. These global features are stressed or nuanced by the announcer’s personal style. Whereas the spontaneous style does not make a great use of the pitch peak and is centered on the duration structure to mark the news information, the sensationalist style applies the pitch peak to all three types of accents, and the standard public style marks the rheme focus with duration and the discursive focus with the pitch peak as a turning point of the global melodic contour.El estudio de la prosodia con función paralingüística avanza en la actualidad en dos frentes, el análisis discursivo de la estructura informativa y el análisis prosódico de las categorías textuales. Por una parte, el discurso oral informativo en los medios representa un tipo de discurso estable y modélico, por lo que facilita el análisis discursivo. Por otra parte, la locución informativa constituye un reto dadas las especiales condiciones comunicativas del acto. Este estudio analiza un corpus de cinco noticias emitidas en tres canales de televisión y por parte de tres locutores diferentes. Primero, los segmentos discursivos son definidos como unidades de tema y rema. A continuación se localizan los focos de información nueva, vieja y mediada. Y por último, se mide el rango tonal (porcentual), la duración de la sílaba tónica y el pico tonal de un total de 228 acentos. El análisis factorial ANOVA muestra una caracterización del foco de rema mediante alargamiento silábico y una caracterización del foco discursivo mediante pico tonal. Estos rasgos generales se acentúan o matiza en los tres estilos de locución. Mientras el estilo espontáneo usa menos el pico tonal y se limita al alargamiento silábico para marcar la información nueva, el estilo sensacionalista aplica el pico tonal para los tres tipos de focos y el estilo referencial público marca el rema con la duración y el acento discursivo con un pico tonal como inflexión melódica de su cantinela

Intonation and pragmatic enrichment: how intonation constrains ad-hoc scalar inferences

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference

How focus particles and accents affect attachment

This project shows that focus and information structure, as indicated by the focus particle “only” and pitch accents, influence syntactic attachment, in contrast to the well-known effects of prosodic boundaries on attachment. One written questionnaire, one completion study, and several auditory questionnaires show that the position of “only” strongly affects attachment preferences in ambiguous sentences, while contrastive pitch accents have smaller effects. The two types of focus marking do not interact but independently impact attachment. These results support a modified version of the Focus Attraction Hypothesis, with ambiguous material drawn to attach to the most important information in a sentence. This research shows that information structure can affect sentence structure as well as discourse coherence

Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure.

This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subject-verb-object sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people's productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences