Pitch accent perception and autistic traits for non-native listeners

Abstract

This study examines the role of the autistic traits in predicting the prosodic prominence for non-native listeners. The subjects completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ: Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) questionnaire and participated in the Rapid Prosody Transcription Task (Cole et al., 2010), where they marked the prominent words and prosodic boundaries of Barack Obama’s political speech recordings (475 s in total). The recordings were previously annotated by two trained phoneticians using the ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) conventions for Mainstream American English (Beckman, 1997). Previous studies have shown that native speakers and L2 learners use different acoustic measures as predictors of their perception of prosodic prominence (Pinter et al., 2014; You, 2012). Furthermore, Iao et al. (2017) found that individuals who were less sociable were less able to discriminate foreign lexical pitch difference. Therefore, this study takes intrinsic individual difference into account (assessed by AQ) to see its effect on the perception of pitch accents in English for non-native listeners. The overall results will also speak to issues regarding the development of prosody acquisition and the role of attention in prosodic processing.This study examines the role of the autistic traits in predicting the prosodic prominence for non-native listeners. The subjects completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ: Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) questionnaire and participated in the Rapid Prosody Transcription Task (Cole et al., 2010), where they marked the prominent words and prosodic boundaries of Barack Obama’s political speech recordings (475 s in total). The recordings were previously annotated by two trained phoneticians using the ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) conventions for Mainstream American English (Beckman, 1997). Previous studies have shown that native speakers and L2 learners use different acoustic measures as predictors of their perception of prosodic prominence (Pinter et al., 2014; You, 2012). Furthermore, Iao et al. (2017) found that individuals who were less sociable were less able to discriminate foreign lexical pitch difference. Therefore, this study takes intrinsic individual difference into account (assessed by AQ) to see its e...