Drawing on a parallel mechanism of motivic similarity in melody perception of music study, this research explores the convergence of perceived prosodic highlight allocations from lower-level prosodic units in reflecting higher-level discourse prosody. Based on the assumption that discourse prosody in cross-genre Mandarin speech corresponds to a coarsely graded distinction of prosodic contrastiveness that can be realized in limited numbers of variations (variation as in the sense of music study), this study attempts to test the feasibility of such convergence. It is demonstrated that numbers of prosodic variations at discourse-levels can be successfully narrowed down after merging. While the convergence for higher-level discourse prosody is achievable, the study further unveils the source for the divergent realizations of prosodic variations. The cross speech-genre analyses show that the divergence is directly associated with the chunking size of discourse-prosodic units in that the larger the planning size is, the more divergence exhibited in the numbers of nonmergeable prosodic patterns. The study thus offers an alternative insight to the commonly shared view toward the limited number of intonation variations found at higher levels of prosody discourse.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.