The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Abstract

| Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed.Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects, or failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests --Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins.Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Time) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 57 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

Short-term perceptual re-weighting in suprasegmental categorization

“…The stimulus space was defined by orthogonal acoustic manipulations across duration and F0 contour over tokens of the spoken English phrase “study music.” The tokens were created by recording the voice of a native English speaker saying the phrases “Dave likes to STUDY music” (early focus) and “Dave likes to study MUSIC” (late focus), with emphasis placed either on STUDY, or MUSIC. The two recordings were then ‘morphed’ together using STRAIGHT software (Kawahara & Irino, 2005; Jasmin et al, 2020ab,c): the F0 was extracted from voiced segments of the two utterances; next, aperiodic aspects of the signal were identified and analyzed; then, the filter characteristics of the signal were calculated. Finally, the two “morphing substrates” (speech from each recording decomposed into F0, aperiodic aspects, and filter characteristics) were manually time aligned by marking corresponding ‘anchor points’ in both recordings.…”

A Longitudinal Investigation of Explicit and Implicit Auditory Processing in L2 Segmental and Suprasegmental Acquisition

“…Contrastive focus stimuli were taken from the Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP; Jasmin, Dick, & Tierney, 2020). This test battery consists of minimal pairs of recorded phrases which are identical lexically but differ on a single prosodic feature.…”

Altered functional connectivity during speech perception in congenital amusia

“…The morphed speech varied only in duration and pitch, while all other aspects of the acoustics (such as amplitude and spectral characteristics other than pitch) were the same, held constant at 50% between the two original recordings during morphing. This stimulus set is freely available (Jasmin et al, 2019b).…”