Comparison of prosodic properties between read and spontaneous speech material

Howell, Peter; Kadi-Hanifi, Karima

doi:10.1016/0167-6393(91)90039-v

Cited by 148 publications

(46 citation statements)

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“…Second, there were more pauses in spontaneous style, which is consistent with previous observations (e.g., Howell and Kadi-Hanifi, 1991;Silverman, et al, 1992). The unplanned nature of spontaneous speech increases the number of pauses in this speech mode, many of which occur in unexpected locations such as inside syntactic phrases, for instance, inside a noun phrase between a noun and its modifier (tufan-ɛ [PAUSE] ʃaedid storm-EZ severe 'severe storm').…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Spontaneous style also exhibits more phrase-final lengthening (White, et al, 2010;Markó and Kohári, 2015 for Hungarian) and faster speech rate (Laan, 1997;Furui, et al, 2005 for Japanese; Yeung, et al, 2008 for Mandarin;Dellwo, Leeman, and Kolly, 2015 for Swiss German). There are fewer, shorter, and more regular pauses and fewer disfluencies, e.g., repetitions or deletions, in read speech (Howell and Kadi-Hanifi, 1991;Silverman, et al, 1992;Megyesi and GustafsonČapková, 2002 for Swedish;Wang, Li, and Yuan, 2008 for Mandarin).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Sadat‐Tehrani

2017

Questions and Answers in Linguistics

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This paper is an introductory investigation, comparing the intonation of Persian declaratives in read and spontaneous speech styles. The results indicate that 32% of the 254 spontaneous declaratives studied show one or more of the following intonational differences: a high or downstepped high tone at Intonational Phrase end, marking the incompleteness of the message; the existence of more pauses leading to a greater number of Intonational Phrases, pre-pause vowel lengthening, and pitch reset; a flatter contour and less pitch variation caused by a speaker's boredom or givenness of the information content; an initial high boundary tone resulted from a low degree of assertiveness.Keywords: intonation, prosody, Persian, read speech, spontaneous speech, pitch track IntroductionThis research reports some preliminary observations regarding the differences between the intonational properties of read and spontaneous speech in Persian. In studies that make use of read speech (also known as lab speech), the speaker is provided with the written version of the test materials and is possibly given some instructions as to how to read them. This type of speech is usually elicited in a laboratory setting and done for a specific linguistic purpose. Spontaneous speech refers to utterances produced without any external stimulus, e.g., a natural conversation carried out between two interlocutors. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the intonational differences between the two styles. The research on Persian intonation done in the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonation (Bruce, 1977;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Ladd, 2008) has so far implemented controlled speech (Mahjani, 2003;Jun, et al., 2003;Sadat-Tehrani, 2007;Taheri and Xu, 2012;Hosseini, 2014;and Rahmani, Rietveld, and Gussenhoven, 2016), and to the best of my knowledge, there has not been any documentation on the distinguishing characteristics of read and spontaneous speech. This paper is an initial investigation of this issue.The present paper does not intend to argue for the use of spontaneous over read data; although the use of read speech has been criticized as unnatural and unrepresentative of real speech, it has its own merit. For instance, in a laboratory setting, the researcher has full control over many variables and determines their effect on intonation patterns, which is not the case when studying unscripted speech. Also, spontaneous data may not always contain all the structures that the researcher plans to investigate -for more arguments in favour of lab speech see Xu (2010). The view here, in line with that in Wagner, Trouvain, and Zimmerer (2015), is that making use of Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 2:06 PM

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Sadat‐Tehrani

2017

Questions and Answers in Linguistics

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“…It is different from the prosody generated by other types of overt prosody such as spontaneous speech or disambiguating prosody. Spontaneous speech produces longer pauses but read speech produces more frequent tonal units or prosodic breaks, resulting in smaller prosodic phrases (Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991;Silverman, Blaauw, Spitz, & Pitrelli, 1992;Ayers, 1994). In spontaneous speech or when speakers are trying to disambiguate an ambiguous structure, speakers generate prosody from the information structure they intend to deliver 1220 JUN (Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong, 1991;Allbritten, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1996;Schafer, Speer, Warren, & White, 2000;Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003;Schafer, Speer, & Warren, 2005;Snedeker & Casserly, 2010 this issue).…”

Section: Implicit Prosody and Overt Prosody 1219mentioning

confidence: 98%

The implicit prosody hypothesis and overt prosody in English

Jun

2010

Language and Cognitive Processes

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This study investigates the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) by examining default phrasing in English, a low attachment language, in overt prosody generated by reading aloud sentences where a complex noun phrase serves as the head of a relative clause (NP1 NP2 RC). The prosodic phrasing of 27 sentences collected from 36 speakers was transcribed by three ToBI-trained labellers. Results show that, counter to the predictions of the IPH, the most common prosodic phrasing was (NP1 NP2)//(RC), which would be expected for high attachment preference languages. This default phrasing was found to be influenced by the length of the RC and by syntactically disambiguating properties of the RC verb (i.e., number agreement) only when the RC was short. It was suggested that the prosody generated in silent reading would not necessarily be the same as the prosody generated in reading aloud, especially when reading without skimming the material in advance. Based on the current results and data from previous studies, various ways to access implicit prosody are proposed.

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“…Jun (2010) has argued that it might not be possible to assess implicit prosody by comparing readers' overt read-aloud prosody to the judgments they make while or after silent reading. The prosody of read speech is easily recognizable as such, and differs substantially from spontaneous speech and "laboratory speech"(speech created for use in experiments), with shorter constituent phrases (so more pitch accents and breaks) (Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991). In both laboratory speech and spontaneous speech, the speaker begins with an intended message-level meaning that contributes to the generation of a corresponding prosodic structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

Speer

Foltz

2015

Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics

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Studies of silent sentence reading have shown indirect evidence for the impact of a default projected "implicit prosody" on sentence processing, such as longer processing times for sentences with final syntactic interpretations inconsistent with their assumed default prosody (e.g. Fernández, 2003). While explanations of such effects associate them with the presence of an auditory image, or "inner speech", there is no direct evidence tying such an image directly to the measured effects--that is, there is little information about how implicit prosody "sounds" in the mind of the reader. In two visual-to-auditory cross-modal priming experiments, we look for evidence of a link between the implicit prosodic contour generated during silent reading and the explicit prosodic contour pronounced on a subsequentlypresented auditory probe word. Pairs of text sentences that contained corrective contrasts (e.g. Jacquelyn didn't pass the test. Belinda passed the test.) were immediately followed by probes pronounced with pitch accent patterns consistent (BELINDA) or inconsistent (BELINDA) with the corrective contrast in the read text. Results in an initial experiment showed no priming from implicit to overt prosody, but instead a processing advantage for contrasts in verb position over those in subject position, as well as an advantage for no-accent probes over contrastively accented ones. The experiment was repeated with participants separated into two groups on the basis of the overt prosody they produced when reading a passage aloud. Results showed that individual differences in the read-aloud production correlate with the response pattern in the cross-modal task. The results provide some initial evidence about the nature of the auditory image produced as inner speech during silent reading.

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Comparison of prosodic properties between read and spontaneous speech material

Cited by 148 publications

References 2 publications

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

The implicit prosody hypothesis and overt prosody in English

The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

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