Abstract

The challenge of prosodic annotation is reflected in commonly reported variability among trained annotators in the assignment of prosodic labels. The present study examines individual differences in the perception of prosody through the lens of prosodic annotation. First, Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) reveal the non-linear pattern of some acoustic cues on the perception of prosodic features. Second, these same models reveal that while some of the untrained annotators are using these cues to determine prosodic features, the magnitude of effect differs quite dramatically across the annotators. Finally, the trained annotators follow the same cues as subsets of the untrained annotators, but present a much stronger effect for many of the cues. The findings show that while prosody perception is systemically related to acoustic and contextual cues, there are also individual differences that are limited to the selection and magnitude of the factors that influence prosodic rating, and the relative weighting among those factors.

Highlights

  • Through the modulation of pitch, tempo, loudness, voice quality, and other properties of speech, prosody serves many functions in spoken language

  • In the ratings from 32 untrained annotators over just the 477 content words, there are a maximum of 15264 possible boundary marks and the same number of possible prominence marks

  • The only component that fails to obtain statistical significance is the random smooth for Part of Speech by subject, indicating that there is a shared effect of Part of Speech on boundary marking that does not differ by subject

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Summary

Introduction

Through the modulation of pitch, tempo, loudness, voice quality, and other properties of speech, prosody serves many functions in spoken language. There is striking variation in prosodic patterning across languages and dialects, reflecting grammatical differences in the prosodic structures that locate prominences and boundaries, in their tonal specification, and in their phonetic realization. Many if not all languages are reported to use prosodic phrasing to structure speech into units that are morpho-syntactically or semantically delimited. Languages may differ in the alignment of prosodic phrases to morpho-syntactic units, in the size of prosodic phrases and the number of phrase level distinctions, or in the phonological features used to demarcate the edges of prosodic phrases (Jun, 2005, 2014; Selkirk, 2011). Some languages mark focus with prominence, while other languages do not, or use prominence in conjunction with syntactic devices for the expression of focus (Féry, 2013)

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