Prosodic Cues Research Articles

Modelling representations in speech normalization of prosodic cues

The lack of invariance problem in speech perception refers to a fundamental problem of how listeners deal with differences of speech sounds produced by various speakers. The current study is the first to test the contributions of mentally stored distributional information in normalization of prosodic cues. This study starts out by modelling distributions of acoustic cues from a speech corpus. We proceeded to conduct three experiments using both naturally produced lexical tones with estimated distributions and manipulated lexical tones with f0 values generated from simulated distributions. State of the art statistical techniques have been used to examine the effects of distribution parameters in normalization and identification curves with respect to each parameter. Based on the significant effects of distribution parameters, we proposed a probabilistic parametric representation (PPR), integrating knowledge from previously established distributions of speakers with their indexical information. PPR is still accessed during speech perception even when contextual information is present. We also discussed the procedure of normalization of speech signals produced by unfamiliar talker with and without contexts and the access of long-term stored representations.

Vocal reaction times to speech offsets: Implications for processing models of conversational turn-taking

Everyday conversation is characterized by a rapid alternation of turns among successive speakers. We investigate vocal reaction times to speech offsets in order to shed light on the limits of reactive behavior in conversational turn-taking. Twenty-three speakers of Dutch produced a prepared response ([ja], ‘yes’) as fast as possible in response to (a) the onset of a pure tone preceded by a variable amount of silence, and (b) the offset of several types of speech-like auditory stimuli varying in duration, prosodic characteristics, and speech rate. Reactions to the offset of stimuli lacking final prosodic cues were significantly longer than reactions to stimulus onsets (283 vs. 215 ms on average), and were rare below 200 ms (3%). Speaking latencies decreased as prosodic cues appeared further away from the stimulus end. Slowing down the speech rate produced an entrainment effect (i.e. slower responses) for stimuli lacking prosodic cues vs. a facilitatory effect (i.e. faster responses) when prosodic cues were present. These findings suggest that smooth turn transitions taking less than 200 ms are unlikely to involve reactions to silence at the end of a turn, but that they can be achieved when turn-final prosodic cues are available.

Prosody in recognizing dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. Evidence from Polish

In this paper we evaluate the role of prosodic information in inferring dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. We report the results of an empirical study in which participants are exposed to recordings of certain utterances and, next, asked to recognize discursive contexts from which the heard utterances may come. The recorded utterances are quotations: staged utterances produced by speakers asked to read aloud dialogues specially constructed for the study. We analyse prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers and argue that they play a key role in depicting demonstrated target utterance. We assume that participants’ decisions manifest their implicit understanding of dialogue-specific functions of target utterances. The empirical part of our study shows that the efficiency rate of the prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers is 76%. We use the results of our prosodic analysis of recorded utterances to account for some cases of incorrect interpretations reported in the study.

Communication Misperceptions: Mispredicting the Outcomes of Interpersonal Interactions

We communicate with others constantly: in our work life, our family life, and beyond. However, emerging research suggests that these ubiquitous interpersonal communications are fraught with misperceptions. This symposium brings together novel research papers identifying communication misperceptions across various domains that are critical to interpersonal and organizational success such as interviews, conversations, contracts, and negotiations. We discuss the extent to which people rely on uninformative cues, and the misperceptions that arise when people attempt to reach agreements. In particular, the papers presented will show that people (1) overlook social forces such as responsiveness that promote connection in conversation, causing them to undervalue communication media that entail dialogue for connecting with others; (2) overestimate how helpful communication cues are for evaluating speakers’ abilities; (3) overestimate recipients’ subjective feeling of consent to undesirable agreements, which undermines their trust and organizational commitment; and (4) underestimate the normativity of negotiations and have exaggerated concerns about jeopardizing an agreement. Moreover, this set of papers shows the detrimental consequences of communication misperceptions, particularly for missed opportunities: We miss opportunities to form new and better connections, accurately evaluate others, as well as negotiate better terms and empower consent. Taken together, this symposium highlights the fraught nature of interpersonal communication, and points to avenues for improving communications. These papers underscore the importance of understanding and correcting these communication misperceptions in interpersonal and organizational contexts. People are insensitive to social forces that promote connection in conversation Presenter: Michael Kardas; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Presenter: Nicholas Epley; U. Of Chicago How verbal, nonverbal, and prosodic cues mislead interpersonal inferences Presenter: Nicole Abi-Esber; Harvard Business School Presenter: Adam Mastroianni; Columbia Business School Presenter: Alison Wood Brooks; Harvard U. You knew what you were getting into, Honesty increases perceptions, but not feelings, of consent Presenter: Rachel Schlund; Cornell U. Presenter: Vanessa Bohns; Cornell U. I avoid because I care, Negotiation avoidance due to (inflated) concern about jeopardizing a deal Presenter: Einav Hart; George Mason U. Presenter: Julia Bear; Stony Brook U.-State U. of New York

WDSAE-DNDT BASED SPEECH FLUENCY DISORDER CLASSIFICATION

In this paper, Weight Decorrelated Stacked Autoencoder-Deep Neural Decision Trees (WDSAE-DNDT), a novel hybrid model is proposed for automating the assessment of children’s speech fluency disorders by discerning their disfluencies. In fluency disorder classification, it is imperative to know how each feature contributes to the disorder classification rather than the diagnosis itself and so the depth modified DNDT acts as the best discriminator since it is interpretable by its very nature. The WDSAE presents DNDT with a high-level latent representation of the disfluent speech. A fusion feature vector was built by combining the prosodic cues from disfluent speech segments combined with the WDSAE-based Bottleneck features. The proposed hybrid model was compared with the performance of the experimented baseline models. Further analysis was carried out to check the impact of tree cut points for each feature and epochs on the accuracy of prediction of the hybrid model. The proposed hybrid model when trained on the fusion feature set has shown appreciable improvement in the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve, classification accuracy, Kappa statistical value, and Jaccard similarity index. The WDSAE-DNDT demonstrates high precision than the baseline models in setting clinical benchmark to distinguish subjects with dysphemia from those with Specific Language Impairment.

Tracking transitional probabilities and segmenting auditory sequences are dissociable processes in adults and neonates.

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit to four syllables, and its automaticity by testing asleep neonates. Using markers of statistical learning in neonates' EEG, compared to adult behavioral performances in the same task, we confirmed that statistical learning is automatic enough to be efficient even in sleeping neonates. We also revealed that: (1) Successfully tracking transition probabilities (TP) in a sequence is not sufficient to segment it. (2) Prosodic cues, as subtle as subliminal pauses, enable to recover words segmenting capacities. (3) Adults' and neonates' capacities to segment streams seem remarkably similar despite the difference of maturation and expertise. Finally, we observed that learning increased the overall similarity of neural responses across infants during exposure to the stream, providing a novel neural marker to monitor learning. Thus, from birth, infants are equipped with adult-like tools, allowing them to extract small coherent word-like units from auditory streams, based on the combination of statistical analyses and auditory parsing cues. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Successfully tracking transitional probabilities in a sequence is not always sufficient to segment it. Word segmentation solely based on transitional probability is limited to bi- or tri-syllabic elements. Prosodic cues, as subtle as subliminal pauses, enable to recover chunking capacities in sleeping neonates and awake adults for quadriplets.

The interaction of discourse markers and prosody in rhetorical questions in German

Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

Makkan Arabic does not have post-focus compression: a production and perception study.

Post-focus compression (PFC), in which words following focus are compressed in F 0 and intensity, is recently found to be effective in encoding focus. Recent studies find that PFC is present in Egyptian, Hijazi and Lebanese Arabic, and hence they are classified as +PFC languages. However, there are languages from the same family language which differ mainly in terms of the presence and absence of PFC. The current study investigated the production and perception of prosodic focus marking in Makkan Arabic, an under-researched Arabic dialect. Systematic acoustic analyses and statistical tests show that (a)the on-focus word is realized by expanding the excursion size, increasing the F 0 and strengthening the intensity of its stressed syllable, (b)information and contrastive focus are not prosodically distinguishable, (c) Makkan Arabic lacks PFC, and (d)focus recognition is low compared to Hijazi Arabic (+PFC), Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin (other-PFC languages). The new findings, taken together with recent findings, suggest that (1) the prosodic encoding of focus is different across Arabic dialects productively and perceptually, and (2) the on-focus raising is not a sufficient factor in recognizing prosodic cues to focus. These results contribute to broadening our understanding of different prosodic focus markings cross-linguistically and cross-dialectally.

Acoustic cues associated with Korean sarcastic utterances produced by right- and left-hemisphere damaged individuals

PurposeSarcasm, prevalent in everyday conversation, refers to the use of words that express negative attitudes toward persons or events. Acoustic cues associated with sarcasm have been reported to vary across studies and the relative importance of particular acoustic parameters for signaling sarcasm has not been fully determined. The hemispheric specialization for the production of acoustic cues has been a matter of controversy. This study investigated the possible prosodic cues associated with Korean sarcastic utterances and the differential effect of left hemisphere damage (LHD) or right hemisphere damage (RHD) on the production of acoustic features of Korean sarcastic utterances. MethodTwenty one native speakers of Korean (7 individuals with LHD, 7 individuals with RHD, and 7 healthy controls (HC)) produced six Korean utterances in two different modes: sarcastic and literal. Utterances validated by sarcasm ratings by native listeners were analyzed acoustically utilizing durational and fundamental frequency (F0) measures. ResultsListeners’ ratings and acoustic analyses indicated that sarcastic utterances in Korean were produced with a combination of multiple acoustic cues. Discriminant function analyses and multiple linear regression showed that LHD and RHD differentially affected the production of acoustic cues associated with sarcasm. ConclusionLHD negatively affects the production of durational cues, while RHD negatively affects the production of F0 cues.

Prosodic characteristics of prepausal words produced by patients with neurodegenerative disease.

Prosody of patients with neurodegenerative disease is often impaired. We investigated changes to two prosodic cues in patients: the pitch contour and the duration of prepausal words. We analyzed recordings of picture descriptions produced by patients with neurodegenerative conditions that included either cognitive (n=223), motor (n=68), or mixed cognitive and motor impairments (n=109), and by healthy controls (n=28; HC). A speech activity detector identified pauses. Words were aligned to the acoustic signal; pitch values were normalized in scale and duration. Analyses of pitch showed that the ending (90th-100th percentile) of prepausal words had a lower pitch in the mixed and motor groups than the cognitive group and HC. The pitch contour from the midpoint of words to the end showed a steep rising slope for HC, but patients showed a gentle rising or flat slope. This suggests that HC signaled the continuation of their description after the pause with rising contour; patients either failed to keep describing the picture due to cognitive impairment or could not raise pitch due to motor impairments. Prepausal words showed longer duration relative to non-prepausal words with no significant differences between the groups. This suggests that prepausal lengthening is preserved in patients.

The additive use of prosody and morphosyntax in L2 German

AbstractThis study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in the PI group heard sentences with monotone prosody. The effects of training were assessed through an offline comprehension task, a written production task, and an online self-paced reading (SPR) task. The results for the offline tasks showed that the groups were similar with respect to their offline comprehension and production. The SPR task showed that both groups used case markers to interpret word order online to some extent; however, only the PI+P group did so in all conditions. These results suggest that prosody does play a role in (morpho)syntactic processing, and that covert activation of prosodic structures can facilitate processing during online reading tasks.

Perception of prosodic cues to correct mistakes, in listeners with normal hearing and with cochlear implants

Prosody is used to mark important information in speech yet is not an integral part of speech recognition testing among people with hearing difficulty. While a listener may correctly perceive words spoken, they may not perceive meaningful emphasis on a certain word, which could be critically important in a variety of everyday situations. This study introduces a new paradigm for assessing perception of prosodic cues in listeners with normal hearing and with cochlear implants, who have notorious difficulty perceiving pitch. Stimuli consisted of spoken sentences where one word (in various sentence positions) was emphasized in a manner that indicated that a prior statement was incorrect in a specific way. Participants used a visual analog scale to mark the timing and degree of emphasis aligned with the target words. Here, the perceptual data are linked with acoustic measures of voice pitch contour, intensity, duration, and vocal quality to characterize how contrastive stress cues are recovered by listeners with and without hearing impairment.

Perception of Prosodic and Aspectual Cues to Politeness in Teacher Directives in L1 and L2 Russian

Background: Several studies in interlanguage pragmatics have reported Russian directive speech acts to take a particular position within the dimensions of linguistic politeness and (in)directness, when compared to some Germanic and Romance languages extensively studied in this framework.Purpose of the study: The present paper aimed to investigate the role of language specific cues to politeness in Russian requests by examining their perception by native speakers and L2 learners in a scenario of teacher-student interaction.Methods: An experiment was conducted in which L1 and L2 groups rated the politeness of teacher directives in Russian on a discrete 7-point scale. Three variables were controlled for in the experimental design: the directness of the speech act (manifested in the choice between an imperative or an interrogative construction), verbal aspect, and the type of nuclear pitch accent.Findings: The obtained data generally corroborate existing studies, demonstrating that both native Russian speakers and learners of Russian with Chinese L1 do not judge as impolite direct imperative strategies employed in teacher requests. Though both groups of participants similarly relied on intonational cues in their judgements, the L2 learners did not perform target-like in evaluating the pragmatics of verbal aspect. Within the native group, the usage of imperfective verbs both in direct and conventionally indirect constructions was perceived as a highly salient indicator of impoliteness. Conversely, the size of this effect in L2 judgements did not reach a significance level, implying that this language specific cue is not acquired through incidental learning at pre-intermediate or intermediate proficiency levels.Conclusions: Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of explicit pragmatic instruction even for students who have sufficient experience studying abroad; furthermore, they outline new directions for empirical studies in Russian from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics.

Attention to audiovisual speech does not facilitate language acquisition in infants with familial history of autism.

Due to familial liability, siblings of children with ASD exhibit elevated risk for language delays. The processes contributing to language delays in this population remain unclear. Considering well-established links between attention to dynamic audiovisual cues inherent in a speaker's face and speech processing, we investigated if attention to a speaker's face and mouth differs in 12-month-old infants at high familial risk for ASD but without ASD diagnosis (hr-sib; n = 91) and in infants at low familial risk (lr-sib; n = 62) for ASD and whether attention at 12 months predicts language outcomes at 18 months. At 12 months, hr-sib and lr-sib infants did not differ in attention to face (p = .14), mouth preference (p = .30), or in receptive and expressive language scores (p = .36, p = .33). At 18 months, the hr-sib infants had lower receptive (p = .01) but not expressive (p = .84) language scores than the lr-sib infants. In the lr-sib infants, greater attention to the face (p = .022) and a mouth preference (p = .025) contributed to better language outcomes at 18 months. In the hr-sib infants, neither attention to the face nor a mouth preference was associated with language outcomes at 18 months. Unlike low-risk infants, high-risk infants do not appear to benefit from audiovisual prosodic and speech cues in the service of language acquisition despite intact attention to these cues. We propose that impaired processing of audiovisual cues may constitute the link between genetic risk factors and poor language outcomes observed across the autism risk spectrum and may represent a promising endophenotype in autism.

Prosody perception in older adults

<p id=C9><italic>Prosody</italic>, which is defined as the variance in loudness or volume, changes in tempo or timing, and movement in pitch and intonation, plays an essential role in speech communication. The ability of speech communication, however, changes across the life span. It has been found that while word knowledge and syntactic processing during comprehension are largely preserved with aging, older individuals have deficits processing multiple acoustic cues about the intention and emotion of speakers, which can interfere with their perception of linguistic and affective prosodic cues, resulting in poor speech comprehension. <p id=C10>Older individuals have a diminished ability to decode linguistic prosody. They have difficulty processing pitch contour, word stress, intonation, and speeded utterances. Recent fMRI, ERPs, and EEG studies have demonstrated that younger and older individuals activate different brain regions or neural sensitivity in linguistic prosody perception. Furthermore, aging impairs older adults’ abilities to process affective prosody, particularly for the speech conveying negative emotions. Age has tremendous effects on the automatic encoding of emotional prosody, and there is a general decline in emotion recognition with aging. <p id=C11>Moreover, age-related diseases could have specific pathologic effects on prosody processing. Age-associated progressive deterioration of neuronal and physical functions affects older adults’ abilities to process time-frequency signals, especially for those with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and tinnitus. Studies on older individuals with age-related diseases have obtained significant findings regarding the brain regions involved in prosody processing. It has been observed that the superior temporal gyrus in the right hemisphere is predominantly linked to the processing of affective prosodic cues and that damage to the left hemisphere can result in similar deficits. <p id=C12>Overall, current studies have carried out extensive explorations on prosody perception by older individuals, with considerable attention to the effects of different first languages and complex auditory environments. However, we thought that more in-depth studies should be conducted on the following topics. First, further explorations are needed to examine prosody processing in older adults with Mandarin and other dialect backgrounds. Specifically, given that Chinese is a tonal language with many dialects, it is unknown whether differences in tone and dialect can influence older adults’ linguistic and affective prosody perception. Secondly, more studies might be carried out to clarify the effects of complex auditory environments on prosody perception in older individuals. Previous studies have examined the impact of several noise types, which are merely part of the challenging conditions in daily communication. It is important to reveal older individuals’ prosody perception in specific situations of context, such as doctor-patient scenarios and family scenarios that they constantly experience. Thirdly, it is imperative to deepen our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying perceptual performance in complex prosodic tasks. Considering that there has been a multitude of neurological research on older adults with age-related diseases, more attention needs to be paid to the neurological performance of their healthy counterparts. Fourthly, further studies might also focus on prosody processing difficulties associated with age-related diseases, as it is still difficult to determine to what extent impairments of prosody perception in daily communication can predict age-related diseases. Finally, special attention needs to be drawn to the early intervention and the rehabilitation of prosody perception impairments in older individuals. It is still uncertain to what extent older adults, especially those with age-related diseases, can maintain or recover their abilities for prosody perception. A corresponding key issue is how to develop effective training methods for Chinese prosody perception rehabilitation. To sum up, future studies are expected to apply interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to explore prosody perception in older adults, which is of both theoretical and practical significance.

Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants

Young infants can segment continuous speech with statistical as well as prosodic cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. Here we investigate how German-speaking adults and 9-month-old German-learning infants weigh statistical and prosodic cues when segmenting continuous speech. We measured participants' pupil size while they were familiarized with a continuous speech stream where prosodic cues were pitted off against transitional probabilities. Adult participants' changes in pupil size synchronized with the occurrence of prosodic words during the familiarization and the temporal alignment of these pupillary changes was predictive of adult participants' performance at test. Further, 9-month-olds as a group failed to consistently segment the familiarization stream with prosodic or statistical cues. However, the variability in temporal alignment of the pupillary changes at word frequency showed that prosodic and statistical cues compete for dominance when segmenting continuous speech. A follow-up language development questionnaire at 40 months of age suggested that infants who entrained to prosodic words performed better on a vocabulary task and those infants who relied more on statistical cues performed better on grammatical tasks. Together these results suggest that statistics and prosody may serve different roles in speech segmentation in infancy.

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Emotion in Emotional Speech: The Effects of Semantics and Prosody

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the effects of semantics and prosody.Methods: Thirty-two young adults and 32 elderly adults participated in this study. We implemented the test for rating of emotions in speech. The participants were presented with spoken sentences, which consisted of four emotional categories (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) in terms of prosody and semantics. In the general rating tasks, the participants were asked to listen to the sentences and rated the degree of the speaker’s emotions. In the attention rating tasks, the participants were asked to focus on only one cue (prosody and semantics) and to rate how much they agree with the speaker’s emotion.Results: The young group scored significantly higher than the elderly group on the general rating tasks and attention rating tasks. The elderly group scored higher on the semantic tasks than on the prosodic tasks, while the young group scored similarly on the semantic and prosodic tasks.Conclusion: The elderly adults have lower abilities to perceive emotion in speech than the young adults. They have difficulty in using the prosodic cues of emotional speech. In addition, the elderly adults try to use the semantic cues of emotional speech in order to compensate for their poor abilities to process the prosodic cues.

How poetry evokes emotions

Poetry evokes emotions. It does so, according to the theory we present, from three sorts of simulation. They each can prompt emotions, which are communications both within the brain and among people. First, models of a poem's semantic contents can evoke emotions as do models that occur in depictions of all kinds, from novels to perceptions. Second, mimetic simulations of prosodic cues, such as meter, rhythm, and rhyme, yield particular emotional states. Third, people's simulations of themselves enable them to know that they are engaged with a poem, and an aesthetic emotion can occur as a result. The three simulations predict certain sorts of emotion, e.g., prosodic cues can evoke basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety. Empirical evidence corroborates the theory, which we relate to other accounts of poetic emotions.

More Than Words: the Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics in the Perception of Emotions in Spoken Language by Postlingual Cochlear Implant Users.

The processing of emotional speech calls for the perception and integration of semantic and prosodic cues. Although cochlear implants allow for significant auditory improvements, they are limited in the transmission of spectro-temporal fine-structure information that may not support the processing of voice pitch cues. The goal of the current study is to compare the performance of postlingual cochlear implant (CI) users and a matched control group on perception, selective attention, and integration of emotional semantics and prosody. Fifteen CI users and 15 normal hearing (NH) peers (age range, 18-65 years) 1istened to spoken sentences composed of different combinations of four discrete emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutrality) presented in prosodic and semantic channels-T-RES: Test for Rating Emotions in Speech. In three separate tasks, listeners were asked to attend to the sentence as a whole, thus integrating both speech channels (integration), or to focus on one channel only (rating of target emotion) and ignore the other (selective attention). Their task was to rate how much they agreed that the sentence conveyed each of the predefined emotions. In addition, all participants performed standard tests of speech perception. When asked to focus on one channel, semantics or prosody, both groups rated emotions similarly with comparable levels of selective attention. When the task was called for channel integration, group differences were found. CI users appeared to use semantic emotional information more than did their NH peers. CI users assigned higher ratings than did their NH peers to sentences that did not present the target emotion, indicating some degree of confusion. In addition, for CI users, individual differences in speech comprehension over the phone and identification of intonation were significantly related to emotional semantic and prosodic ratings, respectively. CI users and NH controls did not differ in perception of prosodic and semantic emotions and in auditory selective attention. However, when the task called for integration of prosody and semantics, CI users overused the semantic information (as compared with NH). We suggest that as CI users adopt diverse cue weighting strategies with device experience, their weighting of prosody and semantics differs from those used by NH. Finally, CI users may benefit from rehabilitation strategies that strengthen perception of prosodic information to better understand emotional speech.

Prosodic cue weighting in the processing of ambiguous sentences by native English listeners and Korean listeners of English.

Differences in the perception of segmental contrasts by native and non-native listeners have been analyzed as the results of language-specific weightings of acoustic cues in their perception grammar [e.g., Escudero and Boersma, Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 26, 551-585 (2004)]. However, less attention has been paid to the weighting of prosodic cues. This study investigated the relative importance of four prosodic cues-word duration, pauses, pitch, and intensity-in the resolution of English syntactic ambiguity by native English listeners and Korean learners of English. In a forced-choice processing task, English listeners' disambiguation relied most heavily on pitch, followed by pause and intensity cues, whereas pauses were the only heavily weighted cue for Korean listeners, indicating an influence from their native language. Moreover, Korean listeners' use of prosody for disambiguation was found to be influenced by their age of English acquisition and English proficiency.