2 research outputs found
Phrase-final words in Greek storytelling speech: a study on the effect of a culturally-specific prosodic feature on short-term memory
Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memoryrelated
processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of
Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between
the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination
of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening,
which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher
performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target
words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a
previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term
memory