Discourse constraints on prosodic marking in lexical replacement repair

This paper reports on an investigation of instances of lexical replacement repair, in which a speaker replaces one lexical choice with another, sampled from Dutch spontaneous interaction. The study is driven by the question as to what motivates a speaker to produce a particular instance of self-repair with or without ‘prosodic marking’ ― with or without notable prosodic prominence ― and the notion that a close consideration of the discourse context in which the repair is embedded, and its function in that context, is paramount in addressing this question. The study explores the empirical grounds for two proposals regarding the function of prosodic marking: one in which marking is a response to the speaker’s embarrassment or unease at the error or infelicity, and one in which marking is done for the listener’s benefit, to highlight particularly important information. This paper describes three discourse contexts in which prosodic marking is notably common, and argues that both proposals find some support in these contexts. The analysis suggests that speakers’ decisions for or against prosodic marking are based at least on considerations of epistemic authority, precision and exaggeration, and discourse coherence

The prosodic design of Modern Standard Arabic political monologues

The aim of this study is to describe and understand the prosodic design of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) political monologues. To work towards this aim, we compare two political monologues produced by the same speaker with a broadcast news reading produced by a news announcer. Through comparison of political monologues and broadcast news reading, we highlight linguistic strategies which could be used in any genre of speech, and also what we argue to be persuasive strategies which contribute to the political work of persuasion. We rely on a combination of prosodic, syntactic, and discourse (semantic) evidence to account for linguistic strategies, and on a similar combination of prosodic, syntactic, and discourse (semantics and pragmatics) evidence to account for persuasive strategies, but our primary contribution is highlighting the use of prosody as a persuasive political strategy. A further contribution of this work to the field of knowledge is the elaboration of a set of fine-grained prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures proposed for broadcast MSA monologues. The prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures are first labelled independently according to a set of criteria (set out in Chapter 4 Methods). Then, we triangulate the results of labelling the prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures independently, in Chapters 5-6 leading up to Chapter 7 where the major contribution of this work is highlighted, that is, the use of prosody as a persuasive strategy. The main argument in this work is structured in this gradual way because of the way the process of segmentation is carried out on all three data samples. The process of segmentation starts with identification of abstract forms, and then associates functions to these abstract forms based on detailed explanations of specific linguistic phenomena drawn from the process of triangulation. Therefore, the methodology implemented for broadcast MSA, which can also serve as a methodology for analysing MSA political monologues, is an integral and essential part of the main argument in this thesis

Right Dislocation and Afterthought in German - Investigations on Multiple Levels

When investigating the right sentence periphery in German, two constructions are encountered that appear to be rather similar at first glance: right dislocation and afterthought. Irrespective of this superficial similarity, right dislocation and afterthought can be distinguished at multiple levels of linguistic description. This thesis aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of right dislocation and afterthought by providing empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, employing analyses of experimentally acquired data as well as corpus analyses. It is shown that right dislocation and afterthought are best defined on the basis of the functions they take in discourse rather than on the basis of their prosodic realisations, and that their functional differences are reflected in a number of linguistic parameters, such as their morpho-syntactic con¬straints as well as their degree of syntactic integratedness, their prosodic features, and even their punctuation in written texts

More than words: Recognizing speech of people with Parkinson's disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the fastest-growing neurological disorder in the world, with approximately 10 million people currently living with the diagnosis. Hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) is one of the symptoms that appear in early stages of the disease progression. The main aim of this dissertation is to gain insights into listeners’ impressions of dysarthric speech and to uncover acoustic correlates of those impressions. We do this by exploring two sides of communication: speech production of people with PD, and listeners’ recognition of speech of people with PD. Therefore, the studies in this dissertation approach the topic of speech changes in PD from both the speakers' side - via acoustic analysis of speech, and the listeners' side - via experiments exploring the influence of expertise and language background on recognition of speech of people with PD. Moreover, to obtain a more comprehensive picture of these perspectives, the studies of this dissertation are multifaceted, explore cross-linguistic aspects of dysarthric speech recognition and include both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. The results demonstrate that listeners' ability to recognize speech of people with PD as unhealthy is rooted in the acoustic changes in speech, not in its content. Listeners’ experience in the fields of speech and language therapy or speech sciences affect dysarthric speech recognition. The results also suggest that tracking speech parameters is a useful tool for monitoring the progression and/or development of dysarthria and objectively evaluating long-term effects of speech therapy

Informativeness, Timing and Tempo in Lexical Self-Repair

This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast throughout, and that relatively highly informative repairs are produced relatively slowly. For informativeness, we implement measures based on repair semantics, lexical frequency counts and cloze probabilities. Our results highlight differences between factual and linguistic error repairs, which have not been consistently distinguished in previous studies, and provide some evidence to support the notion that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast. They confirm that lexical frequency counts are rough measures of contextual predictability at best, and reveal very few significant effects of our informativeness measures on the temporal organization of lexical self-repair. Moreover, although we can confirm that most repairs have a repair portion that is fast relative to its reparandum, this cannot be attributed to the relative informativeness of the two portions. Our findings inform the current debate on the division of labour between inner and overt speech monitoring, and suggest that, although the influence of informativeness on speech production is extensive, it is not ubiquitous

Conversational eyebrow frowns facilitate question identification: An online VR study

Conversation is a time-pressured environment. Recognising a social action (the ‘speech act’, such as a question requesting information) early is crucial in conversation to quickly understand the intended message and plan a timely response. Fast turns between interlocutors are especially relevant for responses to questions, since a long gap may be meaningful by itself. Human language is multimodal, involving speech as well as visual signals from the body, including the face. But little is known about how conversational facial signals contribute to the communication of social actions. Some of the most prominent facial signals in conversation are eyebrow movements. Previous studies found links between eyebrow movements and questions, suggesting that these facial signals could contribute to the rapid recognition of questions. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether early eyebrow movements (eyebrow frown or raise vs. no eyebrow movement) facilitate question identification. Participants were instructed to view videos of avatars where the presence of eyebrow movements accompanying questions was manipulated. Their task was to indicate whether the utterance was a question or a statement as accurately and quickly as possible. Data was collected using the online testing platform Gorilla. Results showed higher accuracies and faster response times for questions with eyebrow frowns, suggesting a facilitative role of eyebrow frowns for question identification. This means that facial signals can critically contribute to the communication of social actions in conversation by signaling social action-specific visual information, and provide visual cues to speakers’ intentions

The Role of Prosodic Stress and Speech Perturbation on the Temporal Synchronization of Speech and Deictic Gestures

Gestures and speech converge during spoken language production. Although the temporal relationship of gestures and speech is thought to depend upon factors such as prosodic stress and word onset, the effects of controlled alterations in the speech signal upon the degree of synchrony between manual gestures and speech is uncertain. Thus, the precise nature of the interactive mechanism of speech-gesture production, or lack thereof, is not agreed upon or even frequently postulated. In Experiment 1, syllable position and contrastive stress were manipulated during sentence production to investigate the synchronization of speech and pointing gestures. An additional aim of Experiment 2 was to investigate the temporal relationship of speech and pointing gestures when speech is perturbed with delayed auditory feedback (DAF). Comparisons between the time of gesture apex and vowel midpoint (GA-VM) for each of the conditions were made for both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Additional comparisons of the interval between gesture launch midpoint to vowel midpoint (GLM-VM), total gesture time, gesture launch time, and gesture return time were made for Experiment 2. The results for the first experiment indicated that gestures were more synchronized with first position syllables and neutral syllables as measured GA-VM intervals. The first position syllable effect was also found in the second experiment. However, the results from Experiment 2 supported an effect of contrastive pitch effect. GLM-VM was shorter for first position targets and accented syllables. In addition, gesture launch times and total gesture times were longer for contrastive pitch accented syllables, especially when in the second position of words. Contrary to the predictions, significantly longer GA-VM and GLM-VM intervals were observed when individuals responded under provided delayed auditory feedback (DAF). Vowel and sentence durations increased both with (DAF) and when a contrastive accented syllable was produced. Vowels were longest for accented, second position syllables. These findings provide evidence that the timing of gesture is adjusted based upon manipulations of the speech stream. A potential mechanism of entrainment of the speech and gesture system is offered as an explanation for the observed effects