Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review

Abstract

Research on prosody has recently become an important focus in various disciplines, including Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This article reviews recent research advances on two key issues: prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence. Both aspects of prosody are influenced by linguistic factors such as syntactic constituent structure, semantic relations, phonological rhythm, pragmatic considerations, and also by processing factors such as the length, complexity or predictability of linguistic material. Our review summarizes recent insights into the production and perception of these two components of prosody and their grammatical underpinnings. While this review only covers a subset of a broader set of research topics on prosody in cognitive science, they are representative of a tendency in the field toward a more interdisciplinary approach.

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

“…In comparison, a corpus like the widely used Boston Radio Corpus, though consisting of a great variety of sentences, contains virtually no question intonation samples, and so is much less balanced for F 0 control than our corpora. On the other hand, syntactic structures other than statement/question contrast, affect mostly duration rather than F 0 (Wagner and Watson, 2010;Xu, 2011;Xu and Wang, 2009;Yang and Yang, 2012).…”

“…Many theories and computational models of F 0 patterns have been proposed over the years (Anderson et al, 1984;Bailly and Holm, 2005;Black and Hunt, 1996;Fujisaki et al, 2005;Grabe et al, 2007;Hirst, 2005Hirst, , 2011Jilka et al, 1999;Kochanski and Shih, 2003;Mixdorff et al, 2003;Pierrehumbert, 1980Pierrehumbert, , 1981Prom-on et al, 2009;Taylor, 2000;van Santen and Möbius, 2000;Xu and Wang, 2001;Xu, 2005), and a large number of empirical studies have been conducted (as reviewed by Wagner and Watson, 2010;ShattuckHufnagel and Turk, 1996;Xu, 2011). Despite the extensive effort, however, most of the critical issues still remain unresolved and some are still under heated debate (Arvaniti and Ladd, 2009;Ladd, 2008;Wagner and Watson, 2010;Wightman, 2002;Xu, 2011). This lack of consensus has been an obstacle to linking basic prosody research to applied areas, resulting in slow advances in developing applications with capabilities for processing prosody.…”

Caracterización prosódica del foco de tema y rema en las noticias

“…Estas propiedades formales cumplen una función lingüística y paralingüística, por lo que la prosodia es la medición y transcripción del acento, la entonación y el ritmo. El estudio de la prosodia intenta atribuir funciones a estas propiedades acústicas desde la óptica de un problema fundamental: mismos rasgos prosódicos contienen funciones estructurales muy diferentes, como la estructura lingüística y la estructura informativa (Brown, Salverda, Gunlogson y Tanenhaus, 2013;Wagner and Watson, 2010). La estructura informativa de un discurso se refiere a la conexión entre entidades lingüísticas y valores semánticos o de contenido, por una parte, y valores pragmáticos o contextuales en un determinado acto de habla, por otra.…”

Use of Lexical Stress during Oral Reading among Japanese EFL Learners

“…According to Wagner and Watson (2010), prosody comprises sphonological properties in speech, such as rise or fall of pitch and intonation, stress, and rhythm, which are all reflected by acoustic characteristics, from which semantic and syntactic cues are provided for language comprehension. Prosody is involved in any language use situation.…”

“…Prosody is involved in any language use situation. It functions to express the attitude or intension of speakers, and listeners try to understand their interlocutors' utterances mediated by prosodic features (Wagner & Watson, 2010).…”