Prosody leaks into the memories of words

Tang, Kevin; Shaw, Jason A.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104601

Cited by 17 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 139 publications

(138 reference statements)

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“…Intensity was found to play a small but significant role in both perception experiments, with lower intensity eliciting more Apology responses, but no effect was found in production. As with F0, Tang and Shaw (2020) found decreased intensity corresponding to greater contextual predictability, and based on the fact that lexical frequency is also expected to result in overall lower prominence, decreased intensity might also be expected in lower-frequency forms. At the same time, lower intensity has been shown to be associated with sadness (Pereira & Watson, 1998) and lack of assertiveness/dominance (Puts et al, 2007), both of which may be expected in Apology compared to ExcusEME productions.…”

Section: Intensitymentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Durational differences across members of homophone pairs have also been shown to be conditioned by other factors, including the morphological status of the word (Seyfarth et al, 2018), the underlying phonological form of the word (“incomplete neutralization,” Port & O’Dell (1985) among many others), and orthography (Warner et al, 2004). Additional factors systematically affecting duration that have not been tested specifically with homophones could also be expected to play a role as well (e.g., contextual predictability: Seyfarth, 2014; Tang & Shaw, 2020). Bell et al (2009), in a corpus study of conversational English, showed that three separate factors—frequency, contextual predictability, and repetition—all contribute independently to durations of spoken words, even though they are all correlated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though duration is the most well-studied property, similar influences might be expected on other acoustic dimensions, particularly those which, like duration, are heavily influenced by the extent of articulatory reduction. A few studies have given evidence for other types of differences: Wright (2004) shows that properties of the lexical neighborhood affect spectral characteristics of vowels, with “easy” lexical items (i.e., those with low neighborhood density and high relative frequency) showing systematically less dispersion in the F1-F2 space than “hard” lexical items, and Tang and Shaw (2020), using a large telephone corpus of Mandarin Chinese, show that contextual predictability has significant effects on maximum pitch and intensity, dimensions related to prosodic prominence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Martinuzzi

Schertz

2021

Lang Speech

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We examine the use of multiple subphonemic differences distinguishing homophones in production and perception, through a case study focusing on the distinction between two polysemous senses of the English word “sorry” (apology vs. attention-seeking). An analysis of production data from voice actors revealed significant and substantial durational differences between the two meanings. Tokens expressing an apology were longer than attention-seeking tokens, and the situational intensity of the context also independently affected duration. When asked to identify the meaning in a two-way forced-choice task after hearing each token spliced out of its context, listeners were above chance (64.7% accuracy) in identifying the intended meaning, and their responses were significantly correlated with the duration, intensity, and intonation contour (but not mean F0) of the productions. In a second perception task, listeners heard tokens of “sorry” that had been systematically manipulated to vary in duration, intensity, and intonation contour, with responses indicating that each of these dimensions played an independent role in listeners’ judgments. The results highlight the importance of broadening the scope of research on the use of subphonemic detail during lexical access and considering a wider range of lexical and non-lexical factors that condition variability on multiple acoustic dimensions, in order to work toward a more accurate picture of the systematic variability available in the input and tracked by listeners.

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Section: Intensitymentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Martinuzzi

Schertz

2021

Lang Speech

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“…The authors found that time constraints determine how much information speakers can convey in a conversational turn and hypothesized that speakers maximize their articulatory effort in unstressed vs. stressed vowels, which can also lead to increased dynamics for unstressed vowels compared to stressed vowels. Tang and Shaw (2020) noted that this principle applies to their findings on word duration as a function of predictability in Mandarin Chinese. The amount of time speakers allocate to a linguistic unit is a function of its importance, that is, less predictable words are produced with longer durations.…”

Section: Prosodic Prominence and Predictability Based Formant Movementmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The smooth signal redundancy (SSR) hypothesis Turk, 2004, 2006) proposes that the impact of the predictability of linguistic events on the phonetic encoding of these events is mediated by the prosodic structure, in particular by lexical stress. An alternative interpretation is that the assignment of the prosodic structure is conditioned by predictability (Tang and Shaw, 2020). Both perspectives entail that predictability is tightly interwoven with the prosodic structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Formant Trajectories in German Read Speech: Impact of Predictability and Prominence

2021

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Phonetic structures expand temporally and spectrally when they are difficult to predict from their context. To some extent, effects of predictability are modulated by prosodic structure. So far, studies on the impact of contextual predictability and prosody on phonetic structures have neglected the dynamic nature of the speech signal. This study investigates the impact of predictability and prominence on the dynamic structure of the first and second formants of German vowels. We expect to find differences in the formant movements between vowels standing in different predictability contexts and a modulation of this effect by prominence. First and second formant values are extracted from a large German corpus. Formant trajectories of peripheral vowels are modeled using generalized additive mixed models, which estimate nonlinear regressions between a dependent variable and predictors. Contextual predictability is measured as biphone and triphone surprisal based on a statistical German language model. We test for the effects of the information-theoretic measures surprisal and word frequency, as well as prominence, on formant movement, while controlling for vowel phonemes and duration. Primary lexical stress and vowel phonemes are significant predictors of first and second formant trajectory shape. We replicate previous findings that vowels are more dispersed in stressed syllables than in unstressed syllables. The interaction of stress and surprisal explains formant movement: unstressed vowels show more variability in their formant trajectory shape at different surprisal levels than stressed vowels. This work shows that effects of contextual predictability on fine phonetic detail can be observed not only in pointwise measures but also in dynamic features of phonetic segments.

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