Importance Of Prosody Research Articles

Prosody in narratives: An exploratory study with children with sex chromosomes trisomies

Although language delays are common in children with sex chromosome trisomies [SCT], no studies have analysed their prosodic abilities. Considering the importance of prosody in communication, this exploratory study aims to analyse the prosodic features of the narratives of 4-year-old children with SCT.Participants included 22 children with SCT and 22 typically developing [TD] children. The Narrative Competence Task was administered to elicit the child's narrative. Each utterance was prosodically analysed considering pitch and timing variables.Considering pitch, the only difference was the number of movements since the utterances of children with SCT were characterised by a lower speech modulation. However, considering the timing variables, children with SCT produced a faster speech rate and a shorter final syllable duration than TD children.Since both speech modulation and duration measures have important syntactic and pragmatic functions, further investigations should deeply analyse the prosodic skills of children with SCT in interaction with syntax and pragmatics.

Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis ("TOPsy"): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception.

Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016)], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes.

The influence of prosody on politicians’ credibility

Prosody is an important feature in communication, and the way a speaker uses the various elements of prosody in public speaking may affect listeners’ perceptions and thus the speaker’s credibility. This paper explores this topic in relation to speeches made in English by three politicians representing their countries’ 2020 Olympic bids at the 125th IOC (International Olympic Committee) Session in Argentina in September 2013. Of these, the speech given by the Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, received widespread critical attention due her style of delivery. As such, it illustrates the importance of prosody in public speaking. However, how prosody affects credibility remains unclear. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of prosody on listeners’ perceptions of politicians’ credibility. We conducted prosody analysis and rhetorical analysis on the three-minute speeches given by the different candidates at the IOC Session. We also conducted a credibility test to assess the relationship between prosody and credibility. The results confirm that prosody influences speakers’ credibility, with the most credible and the best speaker being the politician who used the highest loudness, a moderate pitch level with a wide pitch range, and a faster speech rate with enough pauses of sufficient length. The study also showed that the less influential the prosody parameters were, the more credible the speaker was perceived to be.

Voice features of telephone operators predict auditory preferences of consumers

Abstract What makes a human voice agreeable is a matter of scientific discussion. Whereas prosody was shown to play a role regarding “male-female” attraction, the impact of frequency modulations in “non-sexual”, notably commercial, contexts has attracted little attention. Another point unaddressed in the literature is auditory sensitivity to short-term frequency modulations as current studies focus more on sentence. Thirty French female operators were recorded over the phone. All “bonjour” greeting words were classified in terms of frequency modulation linearity and orientation at the syllable and word levels. Then, the different voices were played back to students and seniors who had to rate each voice according to their degree of agreeableness. Listeners preferred non-monotonous voices. Differences between age-classes were greater than between sex-classes. Results suggest that short-term frequency changes are important for auditory evaluation of voice agreeableness. This study opens new research perspectives concerning the importance of prosody during consumer-seller interactions.

The Importance of Prosody in a Proper English Pronunciation for EFL Learners

The present article deals with the acquisition of Received Pronunciation (RP) English prosodic features namely word-sentence stress and intonation by Algerian learners of English as a foreign language. It aims at identifying ways of helping learners achieve a good pronunciation through the mastery of these features. The work was based on data retrieved from the observation and study of 30 third year students of English at the University of Oran as they majored in BA English. The corpus was collected through recordings which were carried out on two phases, prior and after being taught the prosodic features and their rules in order to evaluate their pronunciation accuracy. Results were analyzed acoustically with Praat software (Boersma, 2001) and show that by placing stress and intonation patterns in the right place in words and utterances, 20% of students achieved nearly a prefect pronunciation, 46% clear and 33% understandable, suggesting that the aforementioned features play an important role in pronunciation accuracy and speech intelligibility. Based on these results the current study makes recommendations for prioritizing supra-segmental features in pronunciation teaching classes, and suggests real and computerized environments to assess students’ progress (Hardison, 2004).

The Importance of Prosody in a Proper English Pronunciation for EFL Learners

The present article deals with the acquisition of Received Pronunciation (RP) English prosodic features namely word-sentence stress and intonation by Algerian learners of English as a foreign language. It aims at identifying ways of helping learners achieve a good pronunciation through the mastery of these features. The work was based on data retrieved from the observation and study of 30 third year students of English at the University of Oran as they majored in BA English. The corpus was collected through recordings which were carried out on two phases, prior and after being taught the prosodic features and their rules in order to evaluate their pronunciation accuracy. Results were analyzed acoustically with Praat software (Boersma, 2001) and show that by placing stress and intonation patterns in the right place in words and utterances, 20% of students achieved nearly a prefect pronunciation, 46% clear and 33% understandable, suggesting that the aforementioned features play an important role in pronunciation accuracy and speech intelligibility. Based on these results the current study makes recommendations for prioritizing supra-segmental features in pronunciation teaching classes, and suggests real and computerized environments to assess students’ progress (Hardison, 2004).

Graphemic Analysis and the Spoken Language Bias.

In the history of linguistics, the investigation of written language got off on the wrong foot. For a long time, writing was regarded as a secondary medium, its raison d'etre being the recording of spoken language. Spoken language in turn was regarded as the primary object of linguistic investigation. Consequently, there was no interest in an unbiased analysis of writing; if writing was analyzed at all, it was seen through the eyes of phonology. It took decades for things to improve, but written language was eventually accepted as a linguistic object in its own right. Yet the old spoken-language-bias is still influential, for example in the call for papers to this research topic. It is (as mostly nowadays) stated implicitly, which makes it harder to tackle. The topic editors state the importance of prosody for spoken language and the lack of its explicit marking in written language. On this basis they suggest that 'the informativeness of written text may seem astonishing.' This line of reasoning could be called the phonocentric fallacy: What is important in spoken language must be important in written language; moreover, there cannot be independent structures and relations in writing mediating between graphemic form and meaning, i.e., bypassing the phonological route.

Putting Prosody First — Some Practical Solutions to a Perennial Problem: The Innovalangues Project

This paper presents some of the difficulties of teaching languages, in particular English, in the context of LSP/LAP2 programmes in French universities. The main focus of this paper will be the importance of prosody, especially in English, as an area where these difficulties may be addressed. We will outline the various solutions that are currently being put into place as part of the Innovalangues project, a six-year international language teaching and research project headed by Université Stendhal (Grenoble 3), France. The project has substantial funding from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and its mission is to develop innovative tools and measures to help LSP/LAP learners reach B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The languages concerned are English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and possibly French as a foreign language. Initially the project will be focusing on the needs of Grenoble’s students, but the objective is to make the tools and resources developed freely available to the wider community. Oral production and reception are at the heart of Innovalangues. We believe, along with many other researchers, that prosody is key to comprehension and to intelligibility (Kjellin 1999a, Kjellin 1999b, Munro and Derwing 2011, Saito 2012), particularly given the important differences between English and French prosody (Delattre 1965; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998; Frost 2011). In this paper, we will present the particular difficulties inherent in teaching English (and other foreign languages) in the context of ESP/EAP3 in French universities and some of the solutions that we are implementing through this project (Picavet et al., 2012; Picavet et al 2013; Picavet and Frost 2014). These include an e-learning platform for which various tools are being developed, teacher training seminars focusing on prosody and the collection of data for research.

HMM-based speech synthesis with various degrees of articulation: A perceptual study

HMM-based speech synthesis is very convenient for creating a synthesizer whose speaker characteristics and speaking styles can be easily modified. This can be obtained by adapting a source speaker's model to a target speaker's model, using intra-speaker voice adaptation techniques. In this paper, we focus on high-quality HMM-based speech synthesis integrating various degrees of articulation, and more specifically on the internal mechanisms leading to the perception of the degrees of articulation by listeners. Therefore the process of adapting a neutral speech synthesizer to generate hypo and hyperarticulated speech is broken down into four factors: cepstrum, prosody, phonetic transcription adaptation as well as the complete adaptation. The impact of these factors on the perceived degree of articulation is studied. Moreover, this study is complemented with an Absolute Category Rating (ACR) evaluation, allowing the subjective assessment of hypo/hyperarticulated speech through various dimensions: comprehension, non-monotony, fluidity and pronunciation. This paper quantifies the importance of prosody and cepstrum adaptation as well as the use of a Natural Language Processor able to generate realistic hypo and hyperarticulated phonetic transcriptions.

Prosody's Contribution to Fluency: An Examination of the Theory of Automatic Information Processing

LaBerge and Samuels’ (1974) theory of automatic information processing in reading offers a model that explains how and where the processing of information occurs and the degree to which processing of information occurs. These processes are dependent upon two criteria: accurate word decoding and automatic word recognition. However, LaBerge and Samuels’ theory does not account for a comprehensive definition of fluency that includes accurate word decoding, automatic word recognition, and prosody. This article will use empirical studies to argue that prosody is also a defining criterion of fluent reading and must be considered in LaBerge and Samuels’ theory of automaticity. The author concludes that the theory of automaticity should be amended to consider the importance of prosody as an essential element that contributes to fluent reading.

Maturation syntaxique chez le jeune enfant (9-36 mois). Continuité ou rupture?

This paper deals with an important question in the area of developmental psycholinguistics. It studies the conditions for a presyntactic utterance to become a «canonical sentence» or, better, «canonical utternance» at the stage of the two-words combinations. Two main points are highlighted: – How a prelinguistic utterance, nearly without words, between 9-12 months, can nevertheless have a linguistic modality – How this utterance becomes a syntactic-semantic-prosodic unit when lexicon is being acquired. The focus is put on the importance of prosody and on the relations between the different parameters to create the first grammatical networks. Evidence is taken from spontaneous speech recordings of a large population of children both typical and atypical for their language development; auditive, acoustical, and linguistic analyses were carried out on these data.

The role of prosody in children's inferences of ironic intent

Cues that may affect how an utterance is interpreted may arise from several sources. The importance of prosody, or vocal affect, in determining if a speaker's intent is ironic has often been assumed, but studies of the role of prosody in children's comprehension of potentially ironic utterances have yielded mixed results. The study presented here sought to examine the effects of prosodie variation on the type of inferences 6‐ and 9‐year‐old children made about a speaker's communicative intent. Sixteen children from each age group were given two‐sentence scenarios about events, in which the event outcome was not stated. Target sentences were presented in three prosodie conditions, and children were asked to infer the event outcome and the speaker's intended meaning. Results demonstrated that children's interpretations of potentially ironic utterances were influenced by prosody, and the nature of this influence differed by age (Age x Prosody interaction).

Linguistic rules for text-to-speech synthesis

Prosody plays the role in speech ot producing a spoken message meaningful to a particular circumstance, from otherwise unweighted abstract units called phonemes. In the process of message formation, phonemes are given proper acoustic characterization according to the syntactic and semantic structure of the message, the location of stress and boundaries, and surrounding phonemes. Since this process occurs at a subconscious level, it has not received attention from researchers in the language related fields until recently. The recent progress in speech-synthesis techniques has made us aware of the importance of prosody in speech communication, and has encouraged the rule formation for this process. This paper concerns work at Bell Laboratories in the area of purely automatic (i.e., nonhuman) text synthesis. It summarizes the development of related prosody rules from natural speech data.