Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.
Two studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances ( N = 47 N=47 ) or reading them ( N = 40 N=40 ). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.
This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duration, presence of pitch accent and intonation boundary) and non-prosodic variables (e.g., type of verbal argument, presence of clause boundary, part-of-speech and number of syllables) on the perception of prominence in spontaneous Estonian. Following the methodology of Rapid Prosody Transcription, 396 randomly selected speech fragments from ten speakers were presented over the internet to 51 prosodically untrained listeners, whose task was to highlight the words they heard as prominent. The same dataset was annotated for intonational pitch accents and boundary tones by two experts. The results demonstrate that the strongest predictors of prominence perception are the pitch and duration of stressed syllables together with the presence of a pitch accent while the non-prosodic variables are somewhat weaker. The study corroborates earlier findings in that the perceptual salience in spoken language processing depends largely on the acoustic signal-based cues. Kokkuvõte. Nele Ots ja Eva Liina Asu: Prominentsuse taju eesti keeles: prosoodia kiirtranskribeerimise uurimus eesti keele kõnelejatega. Artikkel uurib eri prosoodiliste tunnuste (põhitoon, rõhulise silbi kestus, tooni aktsendi ja intonatsioonipiiri olemasolu) ning mitteprosoodiliste tunnuste (verbi argument, klausipiiri olemasolu, sõnaliik ja silpide arv) mõju prominentsuse tajule spontaanses eesti keeles. Lähtudes prosoodia kiirtranskriptsiooni (Rapid Prosody Transcription, RPT) metodoloogiast, esitati 396 juhuslikult valitud spontaanse kõne lõiku interneti teel 51-le prosoodia valdkonnas koolitamata kuulajale, kelle ülesandeks oli tekstis esile tõsta sõnad, mis kuuldusid neile rõhulisena. Kaks kõneprosoodia uurijat transkribeerisid samades kõne lõikudes tooniaktsendid ja intonatsioonipiirid. Tulemused näitavad, et prominentsuse taju tähtsaimad ennustajad on tooniaktsent, põhitoon ning silbi kestus. Mitteprosoodilised tunnused mõjutavad prominentsuse taju mõnevõrra vähem. Katse tulemused kinnitavad varasemate uurimuste järeldust, et tajutud prominentsus sõltub eelkõige akustilistest signaalipõhistest tunnustest. Märksõnad: prominentsus, taju, intonatsioon, tooniaktsent, sõnaliik, argumendistruktuur, prosoodia kiirtranskriptsioon (RPT), eesti keel
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