Effects Of Prosody Research Articles

Interaction of right- and left-edge prosodic boundaries in syntactic parsing

This electrophysiological study investigated how right- and left-edge prosodic boundary tones interact in the processing of syntactic structure. Swedish sentences of the type ‘Peter hit Larry(NP2) and Jason(NP3) fell/hard…’ were used. A verb (‘fell’) requires a clause boundary between NP2 and NP3, whereas an adverb (‘hard’) implies continuation of the first clause, which incorporates NP3 as a coordinated object. The effects of right-edge prosody associated with NP2 and left-edge prosody associated with NP3 were tested. Results suggest interaction between prosodic right- and left-edge boundary cues both at the earliest stages of processing the left-edge boundary tone on NP3 and at the immediately following word category distinction. Right-edge boundary tones on NP2 yielded an early positive deflection (P200) and a later positivity (CPS). Left-edge tones on NP3 showed a P200 effect only if preceded by a right-edge boundary on NP2. In the absence of a prosodic right-edge boundary, left-edge tones instead yielded an early negativity (N100), suggesting that they were unexpected. At the following word category distinction point, adverbs, showing continuation of the first clause, produced an anterior negativity when preceded by both right- and left-edge prosodic boundaries. The negativity is thought to reflect detection of a syntactically incorrect word category. Syntactically un-preferred constructions with an adverb following NP3 received generally lower acceptability ratings and gave rise to a P600 effect in all conditions. Syntactically preferred constructions with verbs following NP3 showed a similar P600 only when not preceded by either right- or left-edge boundary tones.

The Effect of Prosody on Distributional Learning in 12‐ to 13‐Month‐Old Infants

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve‐ to thirteen‐month‐old infants were exposed to an artificial language comprised of 3‐word‐sentences of the form aXb and cYd, where X and Y words differed in the number of syllables. Training sentences contained a prosodic boundary between either the first and the second word or the second and the third word. Subsequently, infants were tested on novel test sentences that contained new X and Y words and also contained a flat prosody with no grouping cues. Infants successfully discriminated between novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, suggesting that the learned adjacent relations can be abstracted across words and prosodic conditions. Under the conditions tested, prosody may be only a weak constraint on syntactic categorization. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of Coarticulation, Prosody, and Noise Freshness on the Intelligibility of Digit Triplets in Noise

In a number of European countries, a functional self-test to screen for hearing impairment is available via telephone and the Internet. The tests estimate speech-reception thresholds using an adaptive procedure in which digit triplets are presented at varying signal-to-noise ratios. In different languages, the stimuli were created either with or without coarticulation; and some implementations use fresh noise samples, while others do not. The present investigation concerns the influence of coarticulation, prosody, and noise freshness on measured thresholds. We performed a laboratory study using 12 normal-hearing listeners. In a blocked design we compared speech-reception thresholds for conditions with and without fresh noise tokens. In each block we used three types of triplets: with coarticulation and prosody, with neither, and without coarticulation but with prosody. Thirty-six thresholds were recorded per subject, and they were analyzed using analyses of variance. The results showed no significant differences among the three triplet conditions. The freshness of the noise did not affect thresholds when, at least, a fresh noise token was used per threshold estimate (23 presentations). Scores dropped significantly when a whole experimental block was performed with a single noise token.

Prosodic conditioning of phonetic detail in German plosives

This study investigates the prosodic conditioning of phonetic details which are candidate cues to phonological contrasts. German /b, d, g, p, t, k/ were examined in three prosodic positions. Lenis plosives /b, d, g/ were produced with less glottal vibration at larger prosodic boundaries, whereas their VOT showed no effect of prosody. VOT of fortis plosives /p, t, k/ decreased at larger boundaries, as did their burst intensity maximum. Vowels (when measured from consonantal release) following fortis plosives and lenis velars were shorter after larger boundaries. Closure duration, which did not contribute to the fortis/lenis contrast, was heavily affected by prosody. These results support neither of the hitherto proposed accounts of prosodic strengthening (Uniform Strengthening and Feature Enhancement). We propose a different account, stating that the phonological identity of speech sounds remains stable not only within, but also across prosodic positions (contrast-over-prosody hypothesis). Domain-initial strengthening hardly diminishes the contrast between prosodically weak fortis and strong lenis plosives.

Peripheral responses to attended and unattended angry prosody: A dichotic listening paradigm

We investigated the effects of angry prosody, varying focus of attention, and laterality of presentation of angry prosody on peripheral nervous system activity. Participants paid attention to either their left or their right ear while performing a sex discrimination task on dichotically presented pseudo-words. These pseudo-words were characterized by either angry or neutral prosody and presented stereophonically (anger/neutral, neutral/anger, or neutral/neutral, for the left/right ear, respectively). Reaction times and physiological responses (heart period, skin conductance, finger and forehead temperature) in this study were differentially sensitive to the effects of anger versus neutral prosody, varying focus of attention, and laterality of presentation of angry prosody.

Fujisaki's Model of Fundamental Frequency Contours for Thai Dialects

Problem statement: In general, there are a number of rural dialects i n Thai. However, four dialects are mainly spoken by Thai people residing in four core region including central, north, northeast and south regions. Recognizing and synthe sizing Thai speech with different dialects are consequently difficult. Approach: Prosody is an important factor that must be taken into account, since the prosody effects on not only the naturalne ss but also the intelligibility of speech. To treat the problem, the speech prosody is carefully preserved through modeling the fundamental frequency (F0) contours. The differences among the model parameters of four Thai dialects have been summarized. This study proposed an analysis of model parameters for Thai speech prosody with four regional dialects and two genders which is a preliminary wor k for speech recognition and synthesis. Fujisaki's modeling; a powerful tool to model the F0 contour h as been adopted. Seven derived parameters from the Fujisaki's model are as follows. The first para meter is baseline frequency which is the lowest lev el of F0 contour. The second and third parameters are the numbers of phrase commands and tone commands which reflect the frequencies of surges of the utterance in global and local levels, respectively. The fourth and fifth parameters are p hrase command and tone command durations which reflect the speed of speaking and the length of a s yllable, respectively. The sixth and seventh parameters are amplitudes of phrase command and tone command which reflect the energy of the global speech and the energy of local syllable. Results: In the experiments, each regional dialect includes 200 samples of one sentence with male and female speech. Therefore our speech database contains 1600 utterances in total. The results show ed that most of the proposed parameters can distinguish four kinds of regional dialects explici tly. Conclusion: By using the Fujisaki's model, the results confirm that the proposed parameters can di stinguish the regional dialects efficiently. In the future research, they were expected to be applied i n the speech recognition and synthesis with various regional dialect characteristics.

Phoneme restoration methods for investigating prosodic influences on syntactic processing

We present a novel method for establishing the preferred interpretation of ambiguities in spoken sentences. It makes use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when noise replaces phoneme(s) in a word, listeners report that they perceive the word as intact and congruent with the context. If the word disambiguates a potentially ambiguous sentence, the word that is “heard” reveals which interpretation listeners assigned. The advantage of this method is its naturalness: no deliberative judgements, no interrupting task, no attention drawn to the ambiguity, and no reliance on anomalous sentences. Our experiments examined the contribution of prosodic phrasing to syntactic ambiguity resolution, using three different tasks to probe what participants thought they had heard: Visual Word Choice, Sentence Repetition, and Speech Shadowing. All three tasks showed a powerful effect of prosody on the resolution of two syntactic ambiguities in Bulgarian.

Analytical Study on Fundamental Frequency Contours of Thai Expressive Speech Using Fujisaki's Model

Problem statement: In spontaneous speech communication, prosody is an important factor that must be taken into account, since the prosody effects on not only the naturalness but also the intelligibility of speech. Focusing on synthesis of Thai expressive speech, a number of systems has been developed for years. However, the expressive speech with various speaking styles has not been accomplished. To achieve the generation of expressive speech, we need to model the fundamental frequency (F0) contours accurately to preserve the speech prosody. Approach: Therefore this study proposes an analysis of model parameters for Thai speech prosody with three speaking styles and two genders which is a preliminary work for speech synthesis. Fujisaki's modeling; a powerful tool to model the F0 contour has been adopted, while the speaking styles of happiness, sadness and reading have been considered. Seven derived parameters from the Fujisaki's model are as follows. The first parameter is baseline frequency which is the lowest level of F0 contour. The second and third parameters are the numbers of phrase commands and tone commands which reflect the frequencies of surges of the utterance in global and local levels, respectively. The fourth and fifth parameters are phrase command and tone command durations which reflect the speed of speaking and the length of a syllable, respectively. The sixth and seventh parameters are amplitudes of phrase command and tone command which reflect the energy of the global speech and the energy of local syllable. Results: In the experiments, each speaking style includes 200 samples of one sentence with male and female speech. Therefore our speech database contains 1200 utterances in total. The results show that most of the proposed parameters can distinguish three kinds of speaking styles explicitly. Conclusion: From the finding, it is a strong evidence to further apply the successful parameters in the speech synthesis systems or other speech processing technologies.

Fill the Gap! Combining Pragmatic and Prosodic Information to Make Gapping Easy

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today. Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called 'nongapping' reading, where John greeted Ben, and the highly unpreferred 'gapping' reading, where Ben greeted Paul. In the first experiment, participants listened to dialogues and gave a speeded response as to which reading of an ambiguous target sentence first comes to mind. In the second experiment, they also responded to a visual probe that was presented during the presentation of the ambiguous target. The results show that context and prosody have independent and strong effects on both on-line processing and off-line interpretation of gapping; in the right combination they can make gapping as easy as the normally preferred nongapping reading.

Interaction between prosody and intelligibility

In the lead article, Peppé (2009) provides a clear and detailed overview of prosody as it relates to the field of speech-language pathology, an often marginalized and misunderstood subject. Peppé makes a convincing case as to why speech-language pathologists should take notice of atypical prosody in the speech of their clients and provides an overview of current methods of documentation. Peppé also briefly notes that prosody can affect intelligibility and the purpose of this article is to expand upon this point. This article discusses current research on the effect of prosody on intelligibility in the speech of deaf individuals and individuals with neurological disorders. Research findings on acoustic dimensions of prosody and intelligibility are also examined. Finally, this article presents a case study of a child with highly unintelligible speech due to multiple articulatory errors. The child's appropriate use of intonation is examined in several examples as a possible factor that aids intelligibility. Based on the evidence provided in this case study, it is argued that further research is needed in order to determine what degree prosodic cues facilitate the intelligibility of disordered speech.

Once more with feeling: The effects of emotional prosody on hemispheric specialisation for linguistic processing

Speech perception requires a bilateral network of neural systems, with the left hemisphere specialised for linguistic processes including phonology, and the right hemisphere specialised for paralinguistic processes including emotional prosody. The present study used dichotic listening to determine how these two processing systems interact. Experiment 1 confirmed that the left hemisphere was specialised for the linguistic task, and the right hemisphere was specialised for the prosodic task. In Experiment 2, participants performed the linguistic task, but the words were spoken in prosodies that were neutral, happy, angry, or sad. Although the emotional prosody was irrelevant for the task, there was an attenuation of the typical right ear advantage when words were spoken with sad prosody, suggesting greater right hemisphere contributions to linguistic processing for sad speech. Similar effects were not observed with angry or happy prosody, suggesting that emotional prosody per se does not facilitate right hemisphere linguistic processing. Results are interpreted in terms of both psychoacoustic and emotion-specific theories of hemispheric specialisation.

Reading for the Stimmung? About the Ontology of Literature Today

For some years now, inside observers have felt that literary studies has arrived at a moment of stagnation. Not only has a fifty-year-long sequence of changing “paradigms” come to a standstill since the final years of the twentieth century; not only are we longing for new “master thinkers” who do not appear; but, epistemologically, we seem to be stuck in the extreme (and unfruitful) tension between seeing literary texts as “allegories” of the impossibility of language to refer to any outside referent (following the dogma of “deconstruction” and the linguistic turn) and a somehow naïve optimism regarding the capacity of literary texts to refer to an outside world as it is implicitly carried and sometimes professed by “cultural studies.” In this situation, the concept of Stimmung (most frequently illustrated by metaphors of being wrapped into, say, weather, or the sound of music) offers an alternative view of the ontology of literature, without falling back into the long-frustrated attempts to “define literature.” Many (if not all) of the texts that we call “literary” provide us with exactly this impression of “being wrapped” into the material world—a material world in which texts can evoke a material impression (the “lightest” possible material impression, however) through effects of prosody. “Reading for the `Stimmung'” can connect us with unusual immediacy to the Stimmung of a past historical period and a different cultural environment. “Reading for the `Stimmung'” may open new perspectives for the historical analysis and aesthetic appreciation of literary texts, and, at the same time, bring us back to a number of scholarly concerns that we have abandoned since the late 1970s.

Prosody Effects on Korean Students' Production and Perception of English Bilabial Stops in VCV

Prosody Effects on Korean Students' Production and Perception of English Bilabial Stops in VCV

Prosody and performance in language production

Language production theories should explain how speakers generate an utterance's sound structure. One critical question is whether prosody and performance effects have different sources in the production system. It is argued that algorithms designed to predict phenomena such as pauses or intonational breaks are problematic because they tend to conflate prosody and planning. In addition, algorithms that have been proposed have not been evaluated systematically enough to allow their strengths and weaknesses to be assessed and compared, and to the extent that the algorithms have been evaluated, it is clear that they are only moderately successful at predicting the dependent measures of interest. Experimental work suggests that prosodic effects are based on prosodic constituency to the left of a potential boundary, and hesitations are due to planning of syntactic and semantic constituents to the right. Thus, any adequate algorithm must distinguish between prosody and performance, prosodic and syntactic-semantic constituency, and planning and execution effects.

Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults)

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238–299]. This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint—prosody—to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments (“You can feel the frog with the feather”). Four to six-year-olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200 ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun (“feather”). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500 ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities.

Effects of emotional prosody on auditory extinction for voices in patients with spatial neglect

The response of attention systems to emotional stimuli has been intensively investigated in the visual modality. Several findings suggest that neural mechanisms influencing selective attention towards emotional stimuli involve brain systems that are partly independent of cortical networks associated with the control of voluntary attention. To test this hypothesis in the auditory modality, we used a dichotic-listening paradigm in six right-hemisphere patients with left spatial neglect syndrome and left ear extinction during bilateral auditory stimulation. Three different meaningless emotional prosodic utterances (anger, fear, and happiness) were presented to the right or left ear, either alone or paired with another neutral utterance on the other side. Results showed fewer misses for emotional relative to neutral stimuli presented to the left ear, for all emotion categories, including happiness. In addition, we also examined the correlation between the site of brain lesions and the performance of patients for reporting left-ear stimuli. This exploratory anatomical analysis suggested that the relative advantage for emotional over neutral voices may be modulated by the site and extent of brain damage. This modulation consists of reduced influences of emotional prosody in patients with lesions in right ventral prefrontal lobe or right superior temporal cortex. Taken together, our results have provided new evidence that emotional attention mechanisms may be triggered in the auditory modality by negative and positive vocal stimuli.

The effects of prosody on articulation in English (review)

The effects of prosody on articulation in English (review)

The Preschool Repetition Test: An Evaluation of Performance in Typically Developing and Clinically Referred Children

To determine the psychometric properties of the Preschool Repetition (PSRep) Test (Roy & Chiat, 2004), to establish the range of performance in typically developing children and variables affecting this performance, and to compare the performance of clinically referred children. The PSRep Test comprises 18 words and 18 phonologically matched nonwords systematically varied for length and prosodic structure. This test was administered to a typical sample of children aged 2;0-4;0 (n = 315) and a clinic sample of children aged 2;6-4;0 (n = 168), together with language assessments. Performance in the typical sample was independent of gender and socioeconomic status but was affected by age, item length, and prosodic structure and was moderately correlated with receptive vocabulary. Performance in the clinic sample was significantly poorer but revealed similar effects of length and prosody and similar relations to language measures overall, with some notable exceptions. Test-retest reliability and interrater reliability were high. The PSRep Test is a viable and informative test. It differentiates within and between typical and clinic samples of children and reveals some unusual profiles within the clinic sample. These findings lay the foundations for a follow-up study of the clinic sample for investigation of the predictive value of the test.

The effects of enthusiasm on skill acquisition by children with autism.

Abstract This paper describes three studies addressing the effects of enthusiasm (E) versus non-enthusiasm (NE) on the of skills taught to young children with autism.. Study 1 compared the effects of E vs. NE for teaching similar skills with slightly different topographies. Study 2 compared the effects of E vs. NE while teaching exactly the same skill; and study 3 examined the social validity of E vs. NE. Results of the first two studies were variable. E had no effect on skill in three cases; more effect than NE in two cases; and less effect than NE in one case. Study 3 indicated that parents and professionals discriminated the difference between the two conditions and preferred E over NE. Keywords: autism, enthusiasm, skill acquisition, social validity. Introduction Several instructional methods have been shown to be effective when teaching skills to children diagnosed with autism, including incidental teaching (Hart & Risley, 1968), discrete trial teaching (Lovass, 1987), milieu teaching (Kaiser, 1993), and naturalistic teaching strategies (Charlop-Christy & LeBlanc, 1999). Although differences exist among these instructional methods, several procedures are used consistently across each. For example, each method typically includes clear instructions, prompting, a system for prompt fading (e.g., prompt delay), and reinforcement of correct responses. In addition to these commonly used procedures to teach new skills, a recommendation is often made for teachers to be enthusiastic during instruction. In fact, being enthusiastic while teaching has been described as an important component in a number of models proposed for teaching children with autism. For example, in their discussion of the Developmental Social-Pragmatic model Prizant, Wetherby, and Rydell (2000) stated that emotional expression and affect sharing are central to the interactive and learning process (p. 205). Similarly, in their description of peer-implemented pivotal response training, Schreibman, Stahmer, and Pierce (1996) highlighted the importance of positive affect used by peers during the training. They recommended that peers should act in a highly animated fashion both verbally and nonverbally to increase social competence (p. 365). Furthermore, enthusiasm has been described as a good instructional method when providing praise (Anderson, Taras, & O'Malley Cannon, 1996, p. 187) and as crucial in fostering language acquisition (Rappaport, 1996, p. 307). Despite these claims about the importance of enthusiasm when teaching young children with autism, few studies have addressed this issue and most have included only typically developing children or adults. For example, Burts, McKinney and Burts (1985) investigated the effects of three levels of teacher enthusiasm (low, medium, and high) to teach concepts to young typical children. No differences were found between the three levels of enthusiasm on learning the concepts. Teachers reported, however, that students were more attentive, interested, and responsive in the high enthusiasm condition. In another study, Filcheck, McNeil, and Herschell (2001) examined the effects of enthusiastic praise, non-enthusiastic praise, and non-enthusiastic description on compliance and general behavior of 30 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. The results from this study showed that the children had significantly higher rates of compliance in the non-enthusiastic description condition than in the enthusiastic praise condition. The children, however, had higher rates of general behavior (i.e., marble dropping game) in the enthusiastic praise condition than in the non-enthusiastic description condition. In another study, Lamers and Hall (2003) examined the effects of voice prosody (i.e., enthusiastic, conversational, monotonous) during instruction for children with autism and typical children. In study 1, only 3 of 12 children with autism showed a preference for a particular prosody (preference varied across children). …

Lack of Implicit Prosody Effects in Deaf Readers of Japanese

Abstract Prosodic contours have been claimed to be implicitly imposed on sentences read in silence, thereby affecting the interpretation of ambiguous constructions (the implicit prosody hypothesis, Fodor 2002). Some of the strongest evidence supporting this hypothesis manipulated the prosodic length of segments (Hirose 2003). However, such manipulations also increase the number of characters in the critical words, thus the results may not reflect the influence of prosodic factors but rather how perceptual mechanisms and working memory handle written words with larger numbers of characters. If so, such results should be replicable with readers who have low ability in handling prosodic information. We report experimental results suggesting that deaf readers are not sensitive to Hirose’s length manipulations. Therefore, the manipulations are likely to be related to prosodic contours rather than some other type of length measurement.