Pragmatic effect of prosody in academic lectures (using the material of English-language lectures)

The article is devoted to highlighting the results of the study of prosodic parameters in the implementation of the imperatives in the texts of two types of institutional discourse, namely, lecture and preaching. Proceeding from the presence of common intentional criteria of lecture and preaching discourse (transfer of knowledge and formation of point of view / belief), these discourses are considered in the article as a special type of institutional teaching discourse with a similar compositional structure. In the implementation of the operational strategies of the lecturer and the preacher, an important role is played by the methods of stimulating the audience to communicative actions, which are carried out, in particular, by imperative utterances. The work contains a description of the results of a phonetic study of imperative utterances and their linguistic interpretation, as a result of which a systematic description of the prosodic organization of various types of imperatives used in lecture and preaching discourses is presented, the characteristic patterns of the intonation structure of the studied speech realizations are highlighted. On the basis of the conducted research, it was stated that loudness, tempo, phrasal stress and melodic contour are the main prosodic means of realizing motivation in any part of the text of a lecture or a sermon. Depending on the degree of participation of prosodic parameters in the implementation of imperatives, three main prosodic components were identified that participate in the differentiation of the type of lecture or sermon. In lecture discourse, the prosodic parameters that differentiate the classroom / online lecture are melody, stress and tempo. In preaching discourse, the main prosodic markers of the differentiation of temple / distant preaching are melody, rhythm and loudness. The audit analysis made a statement of the existence of a certain pattern in the use of imperatives, depending on the type of lecture and preaching discourses and their compositional part, and demonstrated the concentration of the largest number of differential intonation features in the introduction and the smallest - in the general main part of the texts. The main result of the audit analysis was the advancement of certain intonational parameters as informative for the implementation and differentiation of imperatives in various types of discourse.

In a multimedia world it is now common to record professional presentations, on video or with audio only. Such recordings include talks and academic lectures, which are becoming a valuable resource for students and professionals alike. However, organising such material from a diverse set of disciplines seems to be not an easy task. One way to address this problem is to build an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system in order to use its output for analysing such materials. In this work ASR results for lectures from diverse sources are presented. The work is based on a new collection of data, obtained by the Liberated Learning Consortium (LLC). The study's primary goals are two-fold: first to show variability across disciplines from an ASR perspective, and how to choose sources for the construction of language models (LMs); second, to provide an analysis of the lecture transcription for automatic determination of structures in lecture discourse. In particular, we investigate whether there are properties common to lectures from different disciplines. This study focuses on textual features. Lectures are multimodal experiences - it is not clear whether textual features alone are sufficient for the recognition of such common elements, or other features, e.g. acoustic features such as the speaking rate, are needed. The results show that such common properties are retained across disciplines even on ASR output with a Word Error Rate (WER) of 30%.

The paper considers two polar members of gender opposition, social and linguistic phenomena, as a fuzzy set revealing fuzzy, overlapping areas while distinguishing between feminine and masculine properties as regards to male and female intonation patterns in acted speech. As a social construct, gender is reflected in gender stereotypes—certain signs of group identity that can be realized through intonation patterns. These patterns possess certain distinctive features forming male/female category memberships. The research reveals that some prosodic parameters in acted speech are not gender-specific, thus making up overlapping areas in male/female speech. The claim is that the fuzzy set approach to the study of gender opposition questions the binary cut of the object under study and gives rise to the thought that in acted speech prosody this opposition is not clearly cut.

Prosodic mitigation characterizes Catalan formal speech: The Frequency Code reassessed

The aim of this research is to explore ways to ensure continuity between pre-university training of international students and their education in the chosen professional program by optimizing the teaching of subject-specific lecture courses, thereby facilitating the successful academic adaptation of foreigners in Russian universities. The article is devoted to the consideration of the linguo-methodological features of the academic lecture as the most important component of the educational process in the university and the specifics of its organization for international students studying in mixed academic groups. Rightly believing that the success of foreign students in mastering a specialty largely depends on the degree of their adaptation to the new academic environment, the authors analyze in detail the main difficulties faced by non-native speakers in perceiving and understanding lecture material in Russian, and offer specific recommendations to subject teachers on adapting the academic lecture to the needs of such an audience. Issues of structuring the lecture, the pace and complexity of speech, as well as the use of visual aids in the classroom are considered. The need for close and multifaceted interaction between Russian language teachers and teachers of special disciplines is especially emphasized. The scientific novelty of the study lies in a comprehensive approach to considering the academic lecture as a linguodidactic phenomenon functioning at the intersection of language and professional training of foreign students. As a result of the study, recommendations were developed on structuring and adapting lecture material, taking into account the level of language training of non-native speakers.

Human Speech conveys speaker's emotional state along with linguistic intelligence. Meaning of a speech sample changes when it is uttered with different emotions. The present paper gives a description of different types of studies conducted to analyze, perceive and recognize commonly occurring emotions in Hindi speech. These have been classified as anger, happiness, fear, sadness, surprise in addition to neutral. Intonation, intensity and duration patterns changes due to changes in sentence types as well as due to changes in emotions. A relationship among the measured acoustic parameters and the patterns has been used to classify them. Experiments have been conducted to study and recognise emotions based on phonetic as well as prosodic parameters in the speech samples due to changes in emotions. These parameters include MFCC & their derivatives and prosodic parameters as the F0, A0 and Duration. In one of the experiment vowel segments taken from continuously spoken sentences and in another experiment Hindi digits were used as speech samples for machine recognition of emotions using the Neural Net classifiers. Human perception experiments have been conducted at all levels of experiments and compared the results with machine recognition performance. In most cases it has been found that machine recognition was found to be better compared to human performance. Both Phonetic as well as prosodic parameters play role in identification of emotions.

Introduction Heather Goad and Yvan Rose 1. Introduction A significant portion of research conducted on the acquisition of phonology has traditionally focussed on segmental development, on the acquisition of contrasts, and on processes commonly affecting target sounds. While early generative research was primarily concerned with first language (L1) learners (Smith 1973; Ingram 1974), an important body of work was devoted to second language (L2) learners (Eckman 1977; Flege 1980) and to individuals exhibiting delayed or disordered phonological development as well (e.g., Grunwell 1975; Ingram 1976). In the 1970s and early 1980s, the segmental focus of work in acquisition was largely due to influence from theoretical research in generative phonology at the time, which accorded no formal status to the syllable or to hierachical representations more generally (Chomsky and Halle 1968). With the onset of nonlinear phonology (Goldsmith 1976; Kahn 1976) and subsequent development of highly articulated models of feature organization (Sagey 1986), the acquisition research on segment structure shifted to investigating the ways that feature organization could predict paths in the emergence of contrasts (Rice 1996; Brown and Matthews 1997) and appropriately constrain the rule components of developing grammars (Hancin-Bhatt 1994; Levelt 1994; Dinnsen 1998). The new focus on highly structured representations in theoretical phonology led to the development of nonlinear approaches to prosodic representation (Selkirk 1980; Clements and Keyser 1983). With this, some attention was turned to the acquisition of syllable structure, stress, and prosodic constraints on word shape in [End Page 139] both first (Spencer 1986; Fikkert 1994) and second language acquisition (Broselow 1984; Archibald 1993). Researchers also began to systematically investigate the role that prosodic factors play in segmental acquisition (e.g., Macken 1992). While nonlinear phonology standardly assumes that both segments and prosodic units are highly articulated, they constitute independent modules of the grammar. These modules can, of course, interact, but the architecture of the model predicts their behaviour to be largely autonomous. In the more recently developed Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), the opposite view is taken as a starting point. In OT, where the principal source of explanation is a set of universal, rankable constraints, a single constraint can contain both segmental and prosodic information, and constraints which express segmental generalizations can be inter-ranked with those that express prosodic generalizations. In short, segmental-prosodic interaction is expected to be the norm. The interactive approach that defines OT is supported by work on positional effects in end-state grammars, namely, that the realization of segmental contrasts is often dependent on position in the string: a greater range of contrasts is observed in those positions that are strong, while loss or lack of contrast is observed in contexts that are weak. Strong-weak asymmetries are conventionally tied to structural considerations, that is, to prosodic licensing (Itô 1986; Goldsmith 1990; Harris 1997; in OT, see, e.g., Zoll 1998). Recently, however, other sources of explanation have been sought; strong-weak asymmetries have been attributed to the relative strength of perceptual cues (e.g., Steriade 1999; Côté 2000) or to psycholinguistic considerations (e.g., Beckman 1997). Regardless of the source of explanation for position-sensitive effects, an appeal to markedness enters into most accounts of the asymmetries observed. Specifically, faithfulness to segmental contrast is less likely to be respected in weak positions where markedness considerations take priority. Turning to acquisition, there is widespread recognition that in first language development, children's early productions are unmarked (Jakobson 1968; Demuth 1995; Gnanadesikan in press). In second language acquisition, where most research has focussed on the acquisition of aspects of grammar where the L1 is a subset of the L2, markedness has been shown to play an important role in shaping interlanguage (IL) outputs as well (Eckman 1977; Broselow, Chen, and Wang 1998). These two factors, the focus on position-sensitive effects and on the role of markedness in shaping grammars, serve to contextualize the theme of the current issue: segmental-prosodic interaction in phonological acquisition. Our goal has been to include articles that reflect different points of view on the formalization of this interaction. While some contributions discuss the effects of prosodic factors on learners' development, others appeal to alternative sources of explanation for...

This study explored the acoustic realization of focus in several dialects of Mediterranean Peninsular Spanish. The materials consisted of two corpora of declarative sentences with differences of neutral versus broad versus narrow focus and neutral versus single versus dual focus triggered by wh-question contexts. For that goal values of focal prominence in three prosodic parameters, F0, duration, and amplitude, were investigated through intonation contours and digital spectrograms of seven male speakers’ emissions. The statistical analysis of the measurements has shown no acoustic differences among focused and unfocused items, and among sentences in the two corpora. The results provided support for prior studies in American and Canary Spanish which were undertaken through similar experimental designs. However, these data appeared to contradict the general findings reported elsewhere which have shown a higher degree of prominence in the marking of focus both in cognate languages like French and Italian and in Germanic languages.

The pragmatics and prosody of variable tag questions in English: Uncovering function-to-form correlations

El presente trabajo indaga sobre la influencia de la depresion posparto (DPP) materna en las caracteristicas prosodicas del Habla Dirigida al Bebe (HDB) y las emisiones preverbales infantiles en diversos contextos de interaccion madre-hijo/a. Participaron 40 madres y sus bebes entre 3 y 6 meses de edad. Las madres fueron evaluadas con la Escala de DPP de Edimburgo (Cox, Holden y Sagoysky, 1987) y las diadas madre-hijo fueron filmadas en sesiones de juego no estructurado; 27 madres no presentaron indicadores de DPP y 13, si. Las madres con DPP emitieron menor cantidad de vocalizaciones que las del grupo control y presentaron menor intensidad media y maxima al hablarle a sus bebes de 5-6 meses y esto fue particularmente observable en bebes varones (p < .07). Ademas, estas madres usaron menos curvas descendentes al dirigirse a bebes mas pequenos (3-4 meses) y curvas ascendentes y descendentes al dirigirse a sus hijos varones (p < .01). En los bebes –tanto en los de 5-6 meses como en varones– (con madres con DPP se observo menor produccion de emisiones preverbales, aunque sin ser significativa. La DPP materna impacto en los bebes mas pequenos observandose una disminucion de la frecuencia fundamental (p < .01) y de las intensidades media y maxima, pero solo en bebes varones (p < .05). Tambien se hallo una ausencia de curvas con forma de U en los varones e hijos de madres con DPP (p < .05). Aparentemente, la DPP afecta el HDB materno, el que varia a nivel acustico y prosodico en funcion de la edad del bebe afectando las emisiones preverbales, siendo mayor el impacto en los varones.

This chapter deals with segmentation, definition of basic units and annotation of the first corpus of Russian narratives by individuals with brain damage – people with aphasia and right hemisphere damage – and neurologically healthy speakers. We show that parameters such as pause length and intonation contours cannot be used for segmentation of impaired speech. Instead, they use syntactic criteria for the identification of the basic, or – as they are called in this paper – elementary discourse units (EDUs). The Russian CliPS (Clinical Pear Stories) corpus contains multi-layer annotation of audio- and video-recordings, performed on micro- and macro-linguistic level, and can be used as a source for qualitative and quantitative research on various aspects of speech in aphasia and right hemisphere damage.

The research aims to reveal the peculiarities of the linguistic means of imperative utterances which function in the lecture and sermon discourses. They encourage students/parishioners to engage in the learning process fully. The following tasks were formulated: to categorize imperative utterances in the view of characteristic features of the mentioned discourses; to characterize the lexical-syntactic peculiarities of each type of imperative phrases. The object of the research is an oral English-language institutional discourse of two kinds – academic (lecture) and religious (sermon). The subject of the study is the lexical and syntactic arrangement of imperative utterances in the lecture and sermon discourses. To achieve the aim, both general scientific and unique linguistic research methods found application. Conclusions of the study are as follows: the functioning of imperative utterances in the sermon and lecture discourse is determined by such linguistic and extralinguistic factors as the expressiveness/implicitness of the imperative constructions, the syntactic structure of the imperative constructions, the communicative-pragmatic orientation, and the targeted nature of the order/ localization of the imperative construction in the compositional text structure. In our work, direct and indirect explicit constructions, aimed at an immediate action, are viewed as operational imperative statements. According to the communicative-pragmatic orientation and considering the temporal signs, we distinguish two main types of motivation: simultaneous and post-communicative. The communicative-pragmatic orientation criterion also makes it possible to single out constructions intended to induce physical/mental impact (in lectures) and spiritual/mental impact (in sermons). The prospect of further investigation is studying non-verbal features of lecture and sermon discourses.

The aim of the research is to reveal the peculiarities of the linguistic means of imperative utterances which function in the lecture and sermon discourses. For the purpose of the aim, the following tasks were formulated:http://onlinecorrector.com.ua/%D1%82%D0%B0% D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9-%D1%83 to categorize imperative utterances in the view of peculiarities of the lecture and sermon discourses; to characterize the lexical-syntactic peculiarities of each type of imperative utterances; to establish recurrence of each type of imperative utterances depending on the structure of the lecture or sermon. The object of the research is an oral English-language institutional discourse of two types – academic (lecture) and religious (sermon); the subject of the research is the lexical syntactic arrangement of imperative utterances in the lecture and sermon discourses. To achieve the aim, both general scientific and special linguistic research methods have been applied. The functioning of imperative utterances in the preaching and lecture discourse is caused by such linguistic and extralinguistic factors as the expressiveness / implicitness of the imperative constructions, the syntactic structure of the imperative constructions, the communicative-pragmatic orientation, the addressing of the order/ localization of the imperative construction in the compositional text structure. Direct and indirect explicit constructions aimed at the immediate action are considered in the work as operational imperative statements. According to the communicative-pragmatic orientation, taking into account the temporal signs, we distinguish two main types of motivation: simultaneous and post-communicative. The communicative-pragmatic orientation criterion also made it possible to single out constructions intended to induce physical/mental impact (in lectures) and spiritual / mental one (in sermons). The prospect of further investigation is seen in the study of the non-verbal features of lecture and sermon discourses. A comparison of linguistic, prosodic, and kinetic means of expressing motivation can be a significant contribution to the study of the category of imperatives

In this study, we investigated the relationship between turn-taking and prosody. We considered that to interact smoothlyin real-time communication, speakers must show presignalsto turn-taking as prosodic features before turn edges. We at-tempted to discriminate the turn change by the decision treemethod using only prosodic features in turn-final accentualphrases that include earlier positions compared with turn-finalmora. In the discrimination experiment, we used the corpus ofJapanese spontaneous dialogue, and defined prosodic parame-ters such as F0 contour, power contour and duration. We com-pared the two parameter conditions for using parameters withand without the final mora of turns. From the results, the ac-curacy under the conditions of not using the parameters of thefinal mora is 80%, which is not significantly worse than the re-sult of 83% when using all parameters. Taking into accountonly prosody was used, we consider this result to be reasonablygood. 1. Introduction In real-time communication, we can interact very smoothly us-ing speech. There has been a growing appreciation of the im-portant role of prosody in human-human, and also in human-machine communication [1, 2]. Prosody has functions that en-able listeners to achieve real-time and easy understanding, andto control dialogue smoothly. Making effective use of prosodicinformation leads us to the expectations of improvements inthetechnologiesofspeechunderstanding,speechsynthesis,andspoken dialogue systems.In this study, we focus on the dialogue management func-tions of prosody with respect to turn-taking. There have beenmany previous studies on turn-taking and prosodic informa-tion, in various research fields. For example, intonation pat-terns at sentence boundaries are relevant to modality and dis-course functions [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. From another point of view,for practical applications such as human-machine dialogue sys-tems, prosodic features are used to detect suitable timing forturn-taking or backchannel [9, 10, 11, 12]. Most of these stud-ieshaveshownthatparticularcombinationsoflexical,syntacticand prosodic information in turn-final can function as cues forsignalling that a speaker wants to keep the floor or wants to endthe turn.In order to judge whether it is possible to take the turn ornot, however, the hearer does not necessarily have to perceivethe speaker’s utterance to the last phoneme. We observed thatturn-taking proceeded very smoothly with minimal delay be-tween consecutive speaking turns. In some cases, there werealsosuccessfulturntransitionswithshortoverlap,called“latch-ing”. Therefore, when taking into account these phenomena, inaddition to the above cues at the edges of turns, it is consideredthat more global cues to turn-taking exist. The speakers mightshow presignals as prosodic features before the turn edge, sothat the listeners clearlyknow whether aspeaker wantsto finisha speaking turn at an earlier time before a possible transitionpoint. Moreover, in our previous study, we evaluated the effec-tiveness of prosodic features at earlier positions for estimatingthe syntactic structure [13, 14].Thus, in the present study, we aim to treat prosodic func-tions more positively with respect to turn-taking. We considerthat prosodic information might have some potential to morestrongly express a speaker’s attitude regarding turn-taking.From this point of view, we attempt to judge whether the turnchanged or not using only prosodic features. We focused onthe final phrases of utterances which include not only turn-finalmora but also earlier positions of turn-final, and also attempteddiscrimination under the condition of using all features exceptthe final mora. We used the contours, heights and peaks of F0and the power, duration and speaking rate as the prosodic pa-rameters.

Neste artigo, estuda-se o comportamento prosódico de orações adverbiais desgarradas no Português Brasileiro (PB) e no Português Europeu (PE), sendo utilizados o arcabouço teórico da Fonologia Prosódica (Nespor; Vogel, 1994) e da Fonologia Entoacional (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 1996). Foram analisados 1800 dados de leitura (900 de cada variedade do português) e feitas aferições de duas pistas prosódicas: contorno melódico e duração das sílabas no fim do sintagma entoacional (IP). Os resultados revelam que o desgarramento na língua falada parece ser licenciado, primordialmente, tanto em PB quanto em PE, pela maior duração nas sílabas finais do IP. Para o PB, além da variação fonética dada pelo comportamento duracional das últimas sílabas do IP, o desgarramento é caracterizado por um padrão melódico diferente do verificado nas orações adverbiais anexadas à oração núcleo (majoritariamente, L+H*L% para as não desgarradas e L+H*H% para as desgarradas), o que sugere o fato de, para além da variação fonética, o fenômeno constituir um padrão fonológico diverso no português brasileiro.