255 research outputs found
A Quantitative Comparative Study of Prosodic and Discourse Units, the Case of French and Taiwan Mandarin
International audienceno abstrac
Examining reading fluency in a foreign language: Effects of text segmentation on L2 readers
Grouping words into meaningful chunks is a fundamental process for fluent reading. The present study is an attempt to understand the relationship between chunking and second language (L2) reading fluency. The effects of text segmentation on comprehension, rate, and regression in L2 reading were investigated using a self-paced reading task in a moving-window condition. The participants were intermediate and advanced level Japanese EFL learners. The difficulty of chunking a text negatively affected comprehension and smoothness for the intermediate learners, while the advanced learners were able to overcome chunking difficulty. In this study, although the negative effects of chunking difficulty were observed, the positive effects of assisting chunking were not clearly detected, which was interpreted as suggesting that the relationship between chunking and reading needs to be considered in light of the complex interplay between text difficulty and different aspects of reading
Prosodic boundary phenomena
Synopsis:
In spoken language comprehension, the hearer is faced with a more or less continuous stream of auditory information. Prosodic cues, such as pitch movement, pre-boundary lengthening, and pauses, incrementally help to organize the incoming stream of information into prosodic phrases, which often coincide with syntactic units. Prosody is hence central to spoken language comprehension and some models assume that the speaker produces prosody in a consistent and hierarchical fashion. While there is manifold empirical evidence that prosodic boundary cues are reliably and robustly produced and effectively guide spoken sentence comprehension across different populations and languages, the underlying mechanisms and the nature of the prosody-syntax interface still have not been identified sufficiently. This is also reflected in the fact that most models on sentence processing completely lack prosodic information.
This edited book volume is grounded in a workshop that was held in 2021 at the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fĂŒr Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). The five chapters cover selected topics on the production and comprehension of prosodic cues in various populations and languages, all focusing in particular on processing of prosody at structurally relevant prosodic boundaries. Specifically, the book comprises cross-linguistic evidence as well as evidence from non-native listeners, infants, adults, and elderly speakers, highlighting the important role of prosody in both language production and comprehension
Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers
This article provides an introductory tutorial on prosodic features such as tone and accent for researchers working on little-known languages. It specifically addresses the needs of non-specialists and thus does not presuppose knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of prosodic features. Instead, it intends to introduce the uninitiated reader to a field often shied away from because of its (in part real, but in part also just imagined) complexities. It consists of a concise overview of the basic phonetic phenomena (section 2) and the major categories and problems of their functional and phonological analysis (sections 3 and 4). Section 5 gives practical advice for documenting and analyzing prosodic features in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente
Le chunking perceptif de la parole : sur la nature du groupement temporel et son effet sur la mémoire immédiate
Dans de nombreux comportements qui reposent sur le rappel et la production de sĂ©quences, des groupements temporels Ă©mergent spontanĂ©ment, crĂ©Ă©s par des dĂ©lais ou des allongements. Ce « chunking » a Ă©tĂ© observĂ© tant chez les humains que chez certains animaux et plusieurs auteurs lâattribuent Ă un processus gĂ©nĂ©ral de chunking perceptif qui est conforme Ă la capacitĂ© de la mĂ©moire Ă court terme. Cependant, aucune Ă©tude nâa Ă©tabli comment ce chunking perceptif sâapplique Ă la parole. Nous prĂ©sentons une recension de la littĂ©rature qui fait ressortir certains problĂšmes critiques qui ont nui Ă la recherche sur cette question. Câest en revoyant ces problĂšmes quâon propose une dĂ©monstration spĂ©cifique du chunking perceptif de la parole et de lâeffet de ce processus sur la mĂ©moire immĂ©diate (ou mĂ©moire de travail). Ces deux thĂšmes de notre thĂšse sont prĂ©sentĂ©s sĂ©parĂ©ment dans deux articles.
Article 1 : The perceptual chunking of speech: a demonstration using ERPs
Afin dâobserver le chunking de la parole en temps rĂ©el, nous avons utilisĂ© un paradigme de potentiels Ă©voquĂ©s (PĂ) propice Ă susciter la Closure Positive Shift (CPS), une composante associĂ©e, entre autres, au traitement de marques de groupes prosodiques. Nos stimuli consistaient en des Ă©noncĂ©s et des sĂ©ries de syllabes sans sens comprenant des groupes intonatifs et des marques de groupements temporels qui pouvaient concorder, ou non, avec les marques de groupes intonatifs. Les analyses dĂ©montrent que la CPS est suscitĂ©e spĂ©cifiquement par les allongements marquant la fin des groupes temporels, indĂ©pendamment des autres variables. Notons que ces marques dâallongement, qui apparaissent universellement dans la langue parlĂ©e, crĂ©ent le mĂȘme type de chunking que celui qui Ă©merge lors de lâapprentissage de sĂ©quences par des humains et des animaux. Nos rĂ©sultats appuient donc lâidĂ©e que lâauditeur chunk la parole en groupes temporels et que ce chunking perceptif opĂšre de façon similaire avec des comportements verbaux et non verbaux. Par ailleurs, les observations de lâArticle 1 remettent en question des Ă©tudes oĂč on associe la CPS au traitement de syntagmes intonatifs sans considĂ©rer les effets de marques temporels.
Article 2 : Perceptual chunking and its effect on memory in speech processing:ERP and behavioral evidence
Nous avons aussi observĂ© comment le chunking perceptif dâĂ©noncĂ©s en groupes temporels de diffĂ©rentes tailles influence la mĂ©moire immĂ©diate dâĂ©lĂ©ments entendus. Afin dâobserver ces effets, nous avons utilisĂ© des mesures comportementales et des PĂ, dont la composante N400 qui permettait dâĂ©valuer la qualitĂ© de la trace mnĂ©sique dâĂ©lĂ©ments cibles Ă©tendus dans des groupes temporels. La modulation de lâamplitude relative de la N400 montre que les cibles prĂ©sentĂ©es dans des groupes de 3 syllabes ont bĂ©nĂ©ficiĂ© dâune meilleure mise en mĂ©moire immĂ©diate que celles prĂ©sentĂ©es dans des groupes plus longs. Dâautres mesures comportementales et une analyse de la composante P300 ont aussi permis dâisoler lâeffet de la position du groupe temporel (dans lâĂ©noncĂ©) sur les processus de mise en mĂ©moire.
Les Ă©tudes ci-dessus sont les premiĂšres Ă dĂ©montrer le chunking perceptif de la parole en temps rĂ©el et ses effets sur la mĂ©moire immĂ©diate dâĂ©lĂ©ments entendus. Dans lâensemble, nos rĂ©sultats suggĂšrent quâun processus gĂ©nĂ©ral de chunking perceptif favorise la mise en mĂ©moire dâinformation sĂ©quentielle et une interprĂ©tation de la parole « chunk par chunk ».In numerous behaviors involving the learning and production of sequences, temporal groups emerge spontaneously, created by delays or a lengthening of elements. This chunking has been observed across behaviors of both humans and animals and is taken to reflect a general process of perceptual chunking that conforms to capacity limits of short-term memory. Yet, no research has determined how perceptual chunking applies to speech. We provide a literature review that bears out critical problems, which have hampered research on this question. Consideration of these problems motivates a principled demonstration that aims to show how perceptual chunking applies to speech and the effect of this process on immediate memory (or âworking memoryâ). These two themes are presented in separate papers in the format of journal articles.
Paper 1: The perceptual chunking of speech: a demonstration using ERPs
To observe perceptual chunking on line, we use event-related potentials (ERPs) and refer to the neural component of Closure Positive Shift (CPS), which is known to capture listenersâ responses to marks of prosodic groups. The speech stimuli were utterances and sequences of nonsense syllables, which contained intonation phrases marked by pitch, and both phrase-internal and phrase-final temporal groups marked by lengthening. Analyses of CPSs show that, across conditions, listeners specifically perceive speech in terms of chunks marked by lengthening. These lengthening marks, which appear universally in languages, create the same type of chunking as that which emerges in sequence learning by humans and animals. This finding supports the view that listeners chunk speech in temporal groups and that this perceptual chunking operates similarly for speech and non-verbal behaviors. Moreover, the results question reports that relate CPS to intonation phrasing without considering the effects of temporal marks.
Paper 2: Perceptual chunking and its effect on memory in speech processing: ERP and behavioral evidence
We examined how the perceptual chunking of utterances in terms of temporal groups of differing size influences immediate memory of heard speech. To weigh these effects, we used behavioural measures and ERPs, especially the N400 component, which served to evaluate the quality of the memory trace for target lexemes heard in the temporal groups. Variations in the amplitude of the N400 showed a better memory trace for lexemes presented in groups of 3 syllables compared to those in groups of 4 syllables. Response times along with P300 components revealed effects of position of the chunk in the utterance.
This is the first study to demonstrate the perceptual chunking of speech on-line and its effects on immediate memory of heard elements. Taken together the results suggest that a general perceptual chunking enhances a buffering of sequential information and a processing of speech on a chunk-by-chunk basis
Complex vowels as boundary correlates in a multi-speaker corpus of spontaneous English speech
We have found empirical evidence of a correlation in English between words containing complex vowels (diphthongs and triphthongs) and âgold-standardâ phrase break annotations in datasets as apparently different as seventeenth-century verse and a Reith lecture transcript on economics from the late twentieth-century. Spontaneous speech in the form of BBC radio news reportage from the 1980s again exhibits this statistically significant correlation for five out of ten speakers, leading to speculation as to why speakers should fall into two distinct groups. The experiment depends on the automatic annotation of text with a priori knowledge from ProPOSEL, a prosody and part-of-speech English lexicon
Computational Approaches to the SyntaxâProsody Interface: Using Prosody to Improve Parsing
Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.
Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected in a previous study were reanalyzed using native speaker judgment and automatic methods (forced alignment). Results demonstrate similar prosodic splitting behavior as in English in contradiction to the original studyâs findings.
Chapter 3 presents a number of studies examining whether syntactic ambiguity can yield different prosodic patterns, allowing humans and/or computers to resolve the ambiguity. In an experimental study, humans disambiguated sentences with prepositional phrase- (PP)-attachment ambiguity with 49% accuracy presented as text, and 63% presented as audio. Machine learning on the same data yielded an accuracy of 63-73%. A corpus study on the Switchboard corpus used both prosodic breaks and phrase lengths to predict the attachment, with an accuracy of 63.5% for PP-attachment sentences, and 71.2% for relative clause attachment.
Chapter 4 aims to identify aspects of syntax that relate to prosody and use these in combination with prosodic cues to improve parsing. The aspects identified (dependency configurations) are based on dependency structure, reflecting the relative head location of two consecutive words, and are used as syntactic features in an ensemble system based on Recurrent Neural Networks, to score parse hypotheses and select the most likely parse for a given sentence. Using syntactic features alone, the system achieved an improvement of 1.1% absolute in Unlabelled Attachment Score (UAS) on the test set, above the best parser in the ensemble, while using syntactic features combined with prosodic features (pauses and normalized duration) led to a further improvement of 0.4% absolute.
The results achieved demonstrate the relationship between syntax, syntactic phrase length, and prosody, and indicate the ability and future potential of prosody to resolve ambiguity and improve parsing
Predictability effects in language acquisition
Human language has two fundamental requirements: it must allow competent speakers
to exchange messages efficiently, and it must be readily learned by children. Recent
work has examined effects of language predictability on language production, with
many researchers arguing that so-called âpredictability effectsâ function towards the
efficiency requirement. Specifically, recent work has found that talkers tend to reduce
linguistic forms that are more probable more heavily. This dissertation proposes the
âPredictability Bootstrapping Hypothesisâ that predictability effects also make language
more learnable. There is a great deal of evidence that the adult grammars have
substantial statistical components. Since predictability effects result in heavier reduction
for more probable words and hidden structure, they provide infants with direct
cues to the statistical components of the grammars they are trying to learn.
The corpus studies and computational modeling experiments in this dissertation
show that predictability effects could be a substantial source of information to language-learning
infants, focusing on the potential utility of phonetic reduction in terms of word
duration for syntax acquisition. First, corpora of spontaneous adult-directed and child-directed
speech (ADS and CDS, respectively) are compared to verify that predictability
effects actually exist in CDS. While revealing some differences, mixed effects regressions
on those corpora indicate that predictability effects in CDS are largely similar
(in kind and magnitude) to predictability effects in ADS. This result indicates that predictability
effects are available to infants, however useful they may be.
Second, this dissertation builds probabilistic, unsupervised, and lexicalized models
for learning about syntax from words and durational cues. One series of models is
based on Hidden Markov Models and learns shallow constituency structure, while the
other series is based on the Dependency Model with Valence and learns dependency
structure. These models are then used to measure how useful durational cues are for
syntax acquisition, and to what extent their utility in this task can be attributed to
effects of syntactic predictability on word duration. As part of this investigation, these
models are also used to explore the venerable âProsodic Bootstrapping Hypothesisâ
that prosodic structure, which is cued in part by word duration, may be useful for
syntax acquisition. The empirical evaluations of these models provide evidence that
effects of syntactic predictability on word duration are easier to discover and exploit
than effects of prosodic structure, and that even gold-standard annotations of prosodic
structure provide at most a relatively small improvement in parsing performance over raw word duration.
Taken together, this work indicates that predictability effects provide useful information
about syntax to infants, showing that the Predictability Bootstrapping Hypothesis
for syntax acquisition is computationally plausible and motivating future behavioural
investigation. Additionally, as talkers consider the probability of many different
aspects of linguistic structure when reducing according to predictability effects,
this result also motivates investigation of Predictability Bootstrapping of other aspects
of linguistic knowledge
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