Lexical Prosody Research Articles

Lexical and Affective Prosody in Children With High-Functioning Autism

To investigate the perception and production of lexical stress and processing of affective prosody in adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA). We hypothesized preserved processing of lexical and affective prosody but atypical lexical prosody production. Sixteen children with HFA and 15 typically developing (TD) peers participated in 3 experiments that examined the following: (a) perception of affective prosody (Experiment 1), (b) lexical stress perception (Experiment 2), and (c) lexical stress production (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, participants labeled sad, happy, and neutral spoken sentences that were low-pass filtered, to eliminate verbal content. In Experiment 2, participants disambiguated word meanings based on lexical stress (HOTdog vs. hot DOG). In Experiment 3, participants produced these words in a sentence completion task. Productions were analyzed with acoustic measures. Accuracy levels showed no group differences. Participants with HFA could determine affect from filtered sentences and disambiguate words on the basis of lexical stress. They produced appropriately differentiated lexical stress patterns but demonstrated atypically long productions, indicating reduced ability in natural prosody production. Children with HFA were as capable as their TD peers in receptive tasks of lexical stress and affective prosody. Prosody productions were atypically long, despite accurate differentiation of lexical stress patterns. Future research should use larger samples and spontaneous versus elicited productions.

Mandarin Lexical Tone Recognition: The Gating Paradigm

Research on spoken word recognition in Indo-European languages often does not incorporate prosody. In Mandarin Chinese, however, lexical prosody is used extensively and has been shown to affect word processing in previous studies. The present study uses the gating paradigm to investigate the processing of the four Mandarin tones as well as the role of the initial segment in processing. Duration-blocked gates generated from eight monosyllabic quadruplets with matching frequencies of occurrence were used as stimuli. To evaluate the effect of the initial segment, the initial consonant of each syllable always formed the first gate, with later gates formed by 40ms increments. Results showed that Tone 1 has a significantly earlier Isolation Point (IP) than Tone 4, which has an earlier IP than Tones 2 and 3. Sonorant-initial syllables have an earlier IP than obstruent-initial syllables, but further analyses of covariance indicated that IP covariates with the duration of the initial consonant. The tone responses proposed by the participants before reaching the IP were cross-examined with the acoustic features of the four tones. The results indicated that high register cues are more prominent than low register cues, as high tones were never misidentified as low tones. Moreover, contour information outweighs low register cues, as low-onset tones were sometimes misidentified as high-onset tones with which they share similar contours. These results provide more detailed temporal information about tone processing for Mandarin.

The where and when of linguistic word-level prosody

Despite its presence in all natural languages prosodic processing remains under-researched in cognitive science. Hemispheric specialisation for linguistic word-level prosody, specifically, sensitivity to stress typicality was examined using dichotic listening. In Experiment 1, participants named targets and in Experiment 2 participants classified targets as nouns or verbs. In both studies stress typicality effects emerged in the left hemisphere only. These results suggest that: (1) the left hemisphere may be responsible for conveying accurate stress patterns prior to lexical access, (2) supra-segmental information reduces the set of potential candidates during lexical access, and (3) prosody and grammatical category interact in the language processing system.

Effects of Lexical Prosody and Word Familiarity on Lexical Access of Spoken Japanese Words

Lexical prosody (e.g., stress and pitch accent) has been shown to constrain lexical activation of spoken words in various languages. In the present study, whether or not the constraint of lexical prosody is affected by word familiarity in lexical access of Japanese words was examined using a cross-modal priming task. The stimuli were pairs of prosodically different homophones (minimal accent pairs). When the targets were more familiar members of minimal accent pairs, the responses were facilitated by prior presentations of primes that were prosodically different homophones of the targets, suggesting that lexical prosody did not constrain lexical activation. In contrast, when less familiar members of minimal accent pairs were used as the targets, the prosodically different homophones did not facilitate the responses to the targets. These results suggest that the constraint of lexical prosody is not so strong but is affected by the factor of word relative familiarity.

Perception of lexical stress by brain-damaged individuals: Effects on lexical–semantic activation

A semantic priming, lexical-decision study was conducted to examine the ability of left- and right-brain damaged individuals to perceive lexical-stress cues and map them onto lexical–semantic representations. Correctly and incorrectly stressed primes were paired with related and unrelated target words to tap implicit processing of lexical prosody. Results conformed with previous studies involving implicit perception of lexical stress, in that the left-hemisphere damaged individuals showed preserved sensitivity to lexical stress patterns as indicated by priming patterns mirroring those of the normal controls. An increased sensitivity to the varying stress patterns of the primes was demonstrated by the right-hemisphere damaged patient group, however. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of prosodic lateralization, with a particular focus on the nature of task demands in lexical stress perception studies.

Elicitation of N400m in sentence comprehension due to lexical prosody incongruity.

The role of lexical prosody in the semantic integration of spoken sentences consisting of a quiz stem and an answer word was investigated analyzing the event-related magnetic response, N400m. Three conditions regarding the relations between the quiz and the answer word were prepared: pitch-accent violation, phonemic violation and no violation. Both the pitch-accent and phonemic violations elicited significant N400m without any significant differences in the peak latency and magnitude of the equivalent current dipoles, suggesting that the role of pitch-accent in semantic integration is equivalent to that of phonemes. However, the rate of violation detection and the successful N400m source estimation were lower for the pitch-accent violation than for the phonemic violation, suggesting differential neural processes for the phonemic and prosodic cues.

Voornaam is not (really) a homophone: Lexical prosody and lexical access in Dutch.

Four experiments examined Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables excised from minimal stress pairs such as VOORnaam/voorNAAM could be reliably assigned to their source words. In lexical decision, no priming was observed from one member of minimal stress pairs to the other, suggesting that the pairs' segmental ambiguity was removed by suprasegmental information. Words embedded in nonsense strings were harder to detect if the nonsense string itself formed the beginning of a competing word, but a suprasegmental mismatch to the competing word significantly reduced this inhibition. The same nonsense strings facilitated recognition of the longer words of which they constituted the beginning, but again the facilitation was significantly reduced by suprasegmental mismatch. Together these results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. Nonetheless, suprasegmental mismatch appears to be somewhat less effective in constraining activation than segmental mismatch.

The Use of Lexical Prosody for Lexical Access of the Japanese Language

It has been suggested that English listeners do not use lexical prosody for lexical access in word recognition. The present study was designed to examine whether this argument could be generalized to the Japanese language. Two experiments using a cross-modal priming task were conducted. The participants made a lexical decision regarding a visual target following an auditory prime that was either the prosodically congruent or incongruent homophone of the target. In experiment 1, the primes were presented as complete words, and in experiment 2, they were presented as word fragments. In both experiments, the priming effects were observed only in the congruent condition. These results suggest that the prime activated only the representations of prosodically congruent words. We therefore concluded that Japanese listeners use lexical prosody for lexical access of their language and that the role of lexical prosody is determined language-specifically.

Forbear is a Homophone: Lexical Prosody Does Not Constrain Lexical Access

Because stress can occur in any position within an English word, lexical prosody could serve as a minimal distinguishing feature between pairs of words. However, most pairs of English words with stress pattern opposition also differ vocalically: OBject and obJECT, CONtent and conTENT have different vowels in their first syllables as well as different stress patterns. To test whether prosodic information is made use of in auditory word recognition independently of segmental phonetic information, it is necessary to examine pairs like FORbear — forBEAR or TRUSty — trusTEE, semantically unrelated words which exhibit stress pattern opposition but no segmental difference. In a cross-modal priming task, such words produce the priming effects characteristic of homophones, indicating that lexical prosody is not used in the same way as segmental structure to constrain lexical access.

Otomi Parables, Folktales, and Jokes. H. Russell Bernard , Jesús Salinas Pedraza

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and ReviewsOtomi Parables, Folktales, and Jokes. H. Russell Bernard , Jesús Salinas Pedraza Doris A. BartholomewDoris A. Bartholomew Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 45, Number 1Jan., 1979 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/465579 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1979 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Rory Turnbull The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 47, no.33 (Oct 2016): 251–282.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100316000384