Prosody Research Research Articles

Prosody in linguistic journals: a bibliometric analysis

The present study provides a systematic review of prosody research in linguistic journals through a bibliometric analysis. Using the bibliographic data from 2001 to 2021 in key linguistic journals that publish prosody-related research, this study adopted co-citation analysis and keyword analysis to investigate the state of the intellectual structure and the emerging trends of research on prosody in linguistics over the past 21 years. Additionally, this study identified the highly cited authors, articles and journals in the field of prosody. The results offer a better understanding of how research in this area has evolved and where the boundaries of prosody research might be pushed in the future.

Prominence and focus: The tension between acoustic cues and phonological structure

Across many languages, prosodic prominence signals focus. For example, “Does SHE like it?” has different implications to “Does she LIKE it?” (capitals indicate prominence), as the prominence marks focus and therefore a different implied contrast (with she versus like). In prosody research, there has always been a tension in the extent to which prominence is marked directly by psychoacoustic cues (higher pitch, loudness, length, etc.), which may be universal across languages, versus prominence being part of phonological structure, and therefore language-specific (e.g., Ladd, 2008). I review my research on the production and perception of focus in the understudied Polynesian languages Samoan and te reo Māori (Calhoun, 2015, 2016; Calhoun et al., 2021, 2023, in press), as well as other diverse languages (e.g. see Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). This research shows very clearly that cues to prominence vary substantially across languages and must be related to the phonological system of a given language. Nonetheless, questions about whether psychoacoustic cues directly signal focus, or its pragmatic sister, (paralinguistic) emphasis, alongside or within phonological structure, remain unresolved (e.g., Ladd and Arvaniti, 2023). I consider recent research offering new approaches to resolving this tension in relation to results from understudied languages.

Using a forced aligner for prosody research

Forced alignment is a speech technique that can automatically align audio files with transcripts. With the help of forced alignment tools, annotating audio files and creating annotated speech databases have become much more accessible and efficient. Researchers have recently started to evaluate the benefits and accuracy of forced aligners in speech research and have provided insightful suggestions for improvement. However, current work has so far paid little attention to evaluating forced aligners in prosody research, which focuses on suprasegmental features. In this paper, we take ambiguous sentence-level audio input in Mandarin Chinese, which can be disambiguated prosodically, to evaluate the alignment accuracy of the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA). With a satisfactory result for syllable-by-syllable alignment, we further explore the possibility and benefits of using the forced alignment tool to generate phrase-by-phrase alignment. This topic has barely been studied in previous research on forced alignment. Our paper demonstrates that the forced alignment tool can effectively generate accurate alignment at both syllable and phrase levels for tonal languages, such as Mandarin. We found that the average differences between human annotators and MFA were smaller than the gold standard, indicating a satisfactory level of performance by the tool. Moreover, the MFA-assisted annotation rate by human transcribers was at least 20 times faster than previously reported manual annotation efficiency, providing significant time and resource savings for prosody researchers. Our results also suggest that phrase-level alignment accuracy of MFA can be affected by the quality of the recording, calling prosody researchers’ attention to controlling the audio quality in the recording. The finding that de-stressed words/phrases pose challenges for MFA also provides a reference for improving forced aligners.

Affective prosody disorders in adults with neurological conditions: A scoping review.

Individuals with affective-prosodic deficits have difficulty understanding or expressing emotions and attitudes through prosody. Affective prosody disorders can occur in multiple neurological conditions, but the limited knowledge about the clinical groups prone to deficits complicates their identification in clinical settings. Additionally, the nature of the disturbance underlying affective prosody disorder observed in different neurological conditions remains poorly understood. To bridge these knowledge gaps and provide relevant information to speech-language pathologists for the management of affective prosody disorders, this study provides an overview of research findings on affective-prosodic deficits in adults with neurological conditions by answering two questions: (1) Which clinical groups present with acquired affective prosodic impairments following brain damage? (2) Which aspects of affective prosody comprehension and production are negatively affected in these neurological conditions? We conducted a scoping review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. A literature search was undertaken in five electronic databases (MEDLINE, PsycINFO, EMBASE, CINAHL and Linguistics, and Language Behavior Abstracts) to identify primary studies reporting affective prosody disorders in adults with neurological impairments. We extracted data on clinical groups and characterised their deficits based on the assessment task used. The review of 98 studies identified affective-prosodic deficits in 17 neurological conditions. The task paradigms typically used in affective prosody research (discrimination, recognition, cross-modal integration, production on request, imitation and spontaneous production) do not target the processes underlying affective prosody comprehension and production. Therefore, based on the current state of knowledge, it is not possible to establish the level of processing at which impairment occurs in clinical groups. Nevertheless, deficits in the comprehension of affective prosody are observed in 14 clinical groups (mainly recognition deficits) and deficits in the production of affective prosody (either on request or spontaneously) in 10 clinical groups. Neurological conditions and types of deficits that have not been investigated in many studies are highlighted. The aim of this scoping review was to provide an overview on acquired affective prosody disorders and to identify gaps in knowledge that warrant further investigation. Deficits in the comprehension or production of affective prosody are common to numerous clinical groups with various neurological conditions. However, the underlying cause of affective prosody disorders across them is still unknown. Future studies should implement standardised assessment methods with specific tasks based on a cognitive model to identify the underlying deficits of affective prosody disorders. What is already known on the subject What is already known on the subjectAffective prosody is used to share emotions and attitudes through speech and plays a fundamental role in communication and social interactions. Affective prosody disorders can occur in various neurological conditions, but the limited knowledge about the clinical groups prone to affective-prosodic deficits and about the characteristics of different phenotypes of affective prosody disorders complicates their identification in clinical settings. Distinct abilities underlying the comprehension and production of affective prosody can be selectively impaired by brain damage, but the nature of the disturbance underlying affective prosody disorders in different neurological conditions remains unclear. What this study adds Affective-prosodic deficits are reported in 17 neurological conditions, despite being recognised as a core feature of the clinical profile in only a few of them. The assessment tasks typically used in affective prosody research do not provide accurate information about the specific neurocognitive processes impaired in the comprehension or production of affective prosody. Future studies should implement assessment methods based on a cognitive approach to identify underlying deficits. The assessment of cognitive/executive dysfunctions, motor speech impairment and aphasia might be important for distinguishing primary affective prosodic dysfunctions from those secondarily impacting affective prosody. What are the potential clinical implications of this study? Raising awareness about the possible presence of affective-prosodic disorders in numerous clinical groups will facilitate their recognition by speech-language pathologists and, consequently, their management in clinical settings. A comprehensive assessment covering multiple affective-prosodic skills could highlight specific aspects of affective prosody that warrant clinical intervention.

A Review on the Studies of Shanghai Pragmatic Prosody

The unique charm of the study on Shanghai pragmatic prosody lies both in the fact that Shanghai culture is a melting pot culture where maritime and immigrant cultures meet and rub shoulders, and in the prosodic variation in the rapid development of the city. The following features of Shanghai pragmatic prosody research are evident: 1) The predominance of individual pragmatic prosody. The study of Shanghai pragmatic prosody focuses on individual linguistic phenomena, and does not systematically investigate pragmatic prosody as a single object. 2) The pragmatic prosody contexts are usually divided into greetings and farewells, invitations, suggestions, refusals, and complaints. 3) Mostly descriptive. That is, the existing Shanghai dialect pragmatics research is dominated by descriptive pragmatics and focuses on recording pragmatic phenomena.

EmoLexPros: A database of prosodically incongruent emotional words in European Portuguese

In this study, we validated a set of audio stimuli addressing emotional lexico-prosodic congruence. Positive, neutral and negative words classified as such in European Portuguese lexical databases were recorded with matching and mismatching emotional prosodic patterns (positive, neutral and negative). The produced set was submitted to behavioral validation, where each utterance was rated for lexico-prosodic match. Word pairs showing maximal differences across match and mismatch versions were selected (n=55) and subjected to prosody-related acoustic validation. The three types of prosodic patterns, positive, negative and neutral, differenced in F0, amplitude, duration and timbral parameters. Finally, items were catalogued for their psycholinguistic properties. The present validated set may be used for emotional prosody research in European Portuguese. Since it is compatible with passive listening tasks, it is particularly relevant to research and clinical practice engaging populations who are limited in their ability to provide explicit responses.

Speech Prosody in Mental Disorders

In response to uncovering brain mechanisms underlying vocal communication and searching for biomarkers for mental illnesses, speech prosody has been increasingly studied in recent years in multiple disciplines, including psycholinguistics. In this article, we provide an up-to-date synthesis of the theoretical foundation and empirical evidence to profile linguistic and emotional prosody in the proper characterization of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and depression. Our review reveals a need to develop theoretically motivated and methodologically integrated approaches to the study of context-driven comprehension and expression of pragmatic-affective prosody, which will help elucidate the core features of socio-communicative problems in individuals with mental disorders. We propose that comprehensive models within and across the conventional cognition-emotion-language trichotomy need to be developed to integrate current findings and guide future research. In particular, there needs to be due emphasis on investigating multisensory and cross-modal effects in normal and pathological prosody research. Our review calls for multidisciplinary efforts to address the challenging issues to inform and inspire the advancement of linguistic theories and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.

Sociolectal and Dialectal Variation in Prosody.

As in many linguistics subfields, studies of prosody have mainly focused on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in social structures. The goal of this Special Issue is to diversify prosody research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The Special Issue brings together prosody researchers and researchers exploring sociological variation in prosody, with a focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and on prosodic differences based on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this volume don't just advance our understanding of critical issues in sociolinguistics, but they also challenge some of the received wisdom in the exploration of sociolinguistic influences on prosody. Not only does this collection highlight the value of this work to informing theories of prosodic variation and change, but the collected papers also provide examples of methodological innovations in the field that will be valuable for all prosody researchers.

Analysis of the Artistic Elements of Broadcast Hosting Based on Media Speech Corpus

Whether it is speech synthesis research or speech recognition research, it depends on the construction of excellent speech corpus at the back end to some extent. The phonetic corpus includes three forms: text database, phonetic database and acoustic parameter database. Based on phonetic facts, it serves the basic research of language and the processing of language modernization technology through the functions of natural phonetic collection, phonetic annotation, retrieval and statistics. The purpose of the construction of the media corpus is to serve the research of the audio language of the media, especially the prosody research of the host language. Broadcasting and hosting is an important part of radio and television, and the diversity and richness of modern radio and television programs also put forward new requirements for broadcasting and hosting. Broadcasting determines the basic style, purpose and orientation of radio and television news programs. In the media industry, the status of broadcasting and hosting art is gradually highlighted. Under the background of media convergence, broadcasting and hosting art needs to be developed in more advanced technical fields, and the media voice corpus is an important product created by the development of science and technology.

Reading Warm-Up, Reading Skill, and Reading Prosody When Reading the My Grandfather Passage: An Exploratory Study Born Out of the Motor Planning Theory of Prosody and Reading Prosody Research.

The Motor Planning Theory of Prosody and reading prosody research indicate that "out of the blue" oral reading, as practiced in clinical and research settings, invokes surface rather than covert prosody, particularly when readers are recorded, less skilled, and/or speech impaired. Warm-up is not considered in passage reading for motor-speech assessment. We report on a preliminary study aimed to investigate the effect of warm-up on reading prosody in two conditions: silent reading alone and reading "out of the blue" followed by silent reading. A secondary aim of the study was to examine the effect of reading skill on reading prosody. Twenty-one monolingual, English-speaking volunteers were recorded reading the My Grandfather Passage (GP) while their eye movements were tracked. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two reading conditions: (a) silent-oral (SO) and (b) oral-silent-oral (OSO). In the SO condition, participants read the GP silently as a warm-up for the subsequent oral reading. In the OSO condition, participants first read the GP aloud ("out of the blue") and then read the same passage silently with the instruction to do this in preparation for a second oral reading. Reading skill was quantified using eye-voice span and Wide Range Achievement Test-Fourth Edition testing. Reading prosody was evaluated using pause indexes, the Acoustic Multidimensional Prosody Index, and speech rate. One oral reading before a silent reading but not a silent reading alone before oral reading was shown to affect reading prosody. In terms of reading skill, results indicate that predictive associations patterned differently in the reading conditions explored, suggesting different underlying skill sets.

To Re-present a Nobel Prize Winner. Interpreting a Public Literary Conversation

AbstractThis article examines the unfolding of interaction in a growing and, so far, scarcely examined social and cultural practice – interpreter-mediated public literary conversations. In this context, the activity of interpreters, although indispensable when authors and audiences do not share a common language, is sometimes regarded as a “necessary evil” that allegedly causes delays and information loss. Exploring an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation with Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich as a case in point, the focus of this article is rather on what the presence of an interpreter might add to the shared performance on stage. Attention is drawn to the temporal evolvement of the interlocutor’s communicative resources, evident within narrative sequences, drawing on prosody research and research on gestures. The study suggests that, apart from keeping the non-Russian speaking audience updated on content, the interpreter’s rhythmically calibrated performance adds an energizing asset to the event as a whole. The notion of the “coupled turn”, internally hosting gestural and prosodic coherence across topical boundaries and language frame shifts, emerges as a usable unit for the analysis.

Intonazione e significato: l’esempio dell’italiano regionale di Bergamo

Abstract In this paper we present a selection of preliminary results of our research project “Intonation and Meaning”, in which we compare recurrent intonation contours in German and Italian regional varieties. We apply the method of German Interactional Prosody Research (Interaktionale Prosodieforschung), which in turn is based on Conversation Analysis, to a sample of selfcollected empirical data. Our aim is to show the value of intonation as a resource to contextualize speech activities and to point out form-function relationships between intonation patterns and speech act types. In this respect, we observe the usage of intonation contours with rising accent (L*H) and with falling accent (H*L) in the utterance of question activities, and provide evidence for the fact that the latter represent a distinctive type of questions with epistemic presupposition, whereas L*H correlates rather with default, modally unmarked questions.

Prosody: Information Structure, Grammar, Interaction

This special issue of Linguistik Online collects four articles by researchers whose contribution to prosody research has been seminal. The main aims of the issue are to introduce the reader to some leading approaches to prosody and to increase discussion between scholars working within different frameworks. The main focus of the contributing authors’ work has been prosodic aspects of Italian and German, and their articles make particular reference to these languages. However, neither research in English, nor English as an object language, can or should be ignored when working on prosody, as substantial theories on it – and especially on intonation – were first developed for British English and American English. We believe that the four articles all address crucial issues, including the role of prosody in linguistic description and its place in a general theory of language.

Crowd-sourcing prosodic annotation

Much of what is known about prosody is based on native speaker intuitions of idealized speech, or on prosodic annotations from trained annotators whose auditory impressions are augmented by visual evidence from speech waveforms, spectrograms and pitch tracks. Expanding the prosodic data currently available to cover more languages, and to cover a broader range of unscripted speech styles, is prohibitive due to the time, money and human expertise needed for prosodic annotation. We describe an alternative approach to prosodic data collection, with coarse-grained annotations from a cohort of untrained annotators performing rapid prosody transcription (RPT) using LMEDS, an open-source software tool we developed to enable large-scale, crowd-sourced data collection with RPT. Results from three RPT experiments are reported. The reliability of RPT is analysed comparing kappa statistics for lab-based and crowd-sourced annotations for American English, comparing annotators from the same (US) versus different (Indian) dialect groups, and comparing each RPT annotator with a ToBI annotation. Results show better reliability for same-dialect annotators (US), and the best overall reliability from crowd-sourced US annotators, though lab-based annotations are the most similar to ToBI annotations. A generalized additive mixed model is used to test differences among annotator groups in the factors that predict prosodic annotation. Results show that a common set of acoustic and contextual factors predict prosodic labels for all annotator groups, with only small differences among the RPT groups, but with larger effects on prosodic marking for ToBI annotators. The findings suggest methods for optimizing the efficiency of RPT annotations. Overall, crowd-sourced prosodic annotation is shown to be efficient, and to rely on established cues to prosody, supporting its use for prosody research across languages, dialects, speaker populations, and speech genres.

Introduction: Prosody in the Nordic languages

The initiative for this special issue on prosody in the Nordic languages developed in connection with an international symposium on prosody which took place in Lund on 2–3 June 2014 (http://konferens.ht.lu.se/en/bruce-2014/). The symposium commemorated the life and work of Gösta Bruce (1947–2010), our friend, teacher, mentor, and colleague during many years. Gösta's contributions to the field of prosody have been of utmost significance to the development of prosody research, in particular his work on modelling the structure and function of Swedish word accents ‘in sentence perspective’.

The Adaptation of the ToBI System for Lithuanian Pitch Change

Prosody (intonation) is one of the most complicated phenomena of a spoken language. The most convenient tool for this type of research can be at least minimally annotated speech corpus and properly prepared speech labeling system based on common methodology widely used by foreign researchers. One of the most popular standards for annotation and transcription of prosodic events is ToBI (an acronym for Tones and Break Indices). The transcription system of an utterance consists minimally of a recording of the speech, its fundamental frequency contour, and (in the transcription proper) symbolic labels for prosodic events. The transcription proper is usually arranged in four time-aligned parallel horizontal tiers: the Tone tier, the Orthographic tier, the Break-Index tier and the Miscellaneous tier, for recording additional observations. The main aim of this paper is the following: to outline the use of ToBI transcription system for the transcription of Lithuanian intonation and to reveal the future research in the area of prosody. Therefore the main task of this paper was to make a wide – range investigation of ToBi transcription system in order to present the process of creating transcription system for intonation in Lithuanian. It was investigated, that ToBI transcription proper is applicable for the prosodic annotation of Lithuanian intonation and is the most convenient tool for prosody research of this type.

A possible functional localiser for identifying brain regions sensitive to sentence-level prosody

Investigations of how we produce and perceive prosodic patterns are not only interesting in their own right but can inform fundamental questions in language research. We here argue that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in general – and the functional localisation approach in particular – has the potential to help address open research questions in prosody research and at the intersection of prosody and other domains. Critically, this approach can go beyond questions like ‘where in the brain does mental process x produce activation’ and towards questions that probe the nature of the representations and computations that subserve different mental abilities. We describe one way to functionally define regions sensitive to sentence-level prosody in individual subjects. This or similar ‘localiser’ contrasts can be used in future studies to test the hypotheses about the precise contributions of prosody-sensitive brain regions to prosodic processing and cognition more broadly

Exploring Interactional Features with Prosodic Patterns

This study adopts a multiple-methods approach to the investigation of prosody, drawing on insights from a quantitative methodology (experimental prosody research) as well as a qualitative one (conversation analysis). We use a k-means cluster analysis to investigate prosodic patterns in conversational sequences involving lexico-semantic contrastive structures. This combined methodology demonstrates that quantitative/statistical methods are a valuable tool for making relatively objective characterizations of acoustic features of speech, while qualitative methods are essential for interpreting the quantitative results. We find that in sequences that maintain global prosodic characteristics across contrastive structures, participants orient to interactional problems, such as determining who has the right to the floor, or avoiding disruption of an ongoing interaction. On the other hand, in sequences in which the global prosody is different across contrastive structures, participants do not generally appear to be orienting to such problems of alignment. Our findings expand the interpretation of “contrastive prosody” that is commonly used in experimental prosody approaches, while providing a way for conversation-analytic research to improve quantification and generalizability of findings.

The Research of the Relationship between Perceived Stress Level and Times of Vibration of Vocal Folds

Whether a syllable is perceived as stressed or not and whether the stress is strong or weak are hot issues in speech prosody research and speech recognition. A focus of the stress study is on the investigation of the acoustic factors which contribute to the perception of stress level. This study examined all possible acoustic/physiological cues to stress based on data from Annotated Chinese Speech Corpus and proposed that times of vibration of vocal folds (TVVF) reflects stress level best. It is traditionally held that pitch and duration are the most important acoustic parameters to stress. But for Chinese which is a tone language and features special strong-weak pattern in prosody, these two parameters might not be the best ones to represent stress degree. This paper proposed that TVVF, reflected as the number of wave pulses of the vocalic part of a syllable, is the ideal parameter to stress level. Since number of pulses is the integral of pitch and duration (Pulse=?f(pitch)dt), TVVF can embody the effect of stress on both pitch and duration. The analyses revealed that TVVF is most correlated with the grades of stress. Therefore, it can be a more effective parameter indicating stress level.

Speech prosody

This critical review is mainly concerned with methodological issues in prosody research, with the aim to highlight progress toward developing predictive knowledge about prosody. The review shows that there has been a steady progression in terms of methodological rigor as the field goes through major methodological trends that can be described as analysis-by-introspection, analysis-by-transcription, analysis-by-hypothesis-testing and analysis-by-modeling. All the major methodologies currently still co-exist and each still has it own merit. But all of them are evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in establishing knowledge that is generalizable. Finally, an emphasis will be made on the need to have much more linking and integration between different subareas of prosody research.