Sentence Prosody Research Articles

Recognition of Emotional Prosody in Mandarin-Speaking Children: Effects of Age, Noise, and Working Memory.

Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model, this study aimed to explore the effects of age, babble noise, and working memory on Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of emotional prosody. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight years and 20 Mandarin-speaking adults participated in this study. They were asked to recognize the happy or sad prosody of short sentences with different semantics (negative, neutral, or positive) produced by a male speaker. The results revealed that the prosody-semantics congruity played a bigger role in children than in adults for accurate recognition of emotional prosody in quiet, but a less important role in children compared with adults in noise. Furthermore, concerning the recognition accuracy of emotional prosody, the effect of working memory on children was trivial despite the listening conditions. But for adults, it was very prominent in babble noise. The findings partially supported the tectonic theory of Stroop effects which highlights the perceptual enhancement generated by cross-channel congruity, and the ELU model which underlines the importance of working memory in speech processing in noise. These results suggested that the development of emotional prosody recognition is a complex process influenced by the interplay among age, background noise, and working memory.

L1–L2 Influence in Intonation: A Case of Russophone Immigrants in Brazil

This paper is devoted to the features of sentence prosody (intonation) in Brazilian Portuguese spoken by immigrants whose first language is Russian, and explores the consequences that L1–L2 influence in intonation may have for communication. The study addressed four research questions: (1) Do Brazilian Portuguese L2 speakers with Russian L1 always succeed in producing the correct utterance type? (2) Can L1–L2 influence lead to misunderstanding of connotations? (3) Is it possible that sometimes L1–L2 influence leads to being perceived as too emotional or not emotional enough? (4) Can L1–L2 influence in intonation be a significant factor in the perception of accent? In a perceptual experiment, productions of four target utterances in Brazilian Portuguese by Russian L1 and Brazilian Portuguese L1 speakers were evaluated by 124 Brazilian listeners in terms of sentence type, possible connotations, accent and arousal. The target utterances included three questions of different types and an exclamation. The findings revealed that the speaker’s L1 influenced the perception of prosodic meanings by Brazilian listeners. In some cases, interference from Russian melodic contours caused the incorrect identification of the sentence type in Brazilian Portuguese. However, even when sentence type was perceived correctly, differences could be found regarding the perception of arousal or accent.

The prosody of theme, rheme and focus in Egyptian Arabic: A quantitative investigation of tunes, configurations and speaker variability

This paper investigates the prosody of sentences elicited in three Information Structure (IS) conditions: all-new, theme-rheme and rhematic focus-background. The sentences were produced by 18 speakers of Egyptian Arabic (EA). This is the first quantitative study to provide a comprehensive analysis of holistic f0 contours (by means of GAMM) and configurations of f0, duration and intensity (by means of FPCA) associated with the three IS conditions, both across and within speakers. A significant difference between focus-background and the other information structure conditions was found, but also strong inter-speaker variation in terms of strategies and the degree to which these strategies were applied. The results suggest that post-focus register lowering and the duration of the stressed syllables of the focused and the utterance-final word are more consistent cues to focus than a higher peak of the focus accent. In addition, some independence of duration and intensity from f0 could be identified. These results thus support the assumption that, when focus is marked prosodically in EA, it is marked by prominence. Nevertheless, the fact that a considerable number of EA speakers did not apply prosodic marking and the fact that prosodic focus marking was gradient rather than categorical suggest that EA does not have a fully conventionalized prosodic focus construction.

Congruent Prosody Reduces Cognitive Effort in Memory for Spoken Sentences: A Pupillometric Study with Young and Older Adults

ABSTRACTBackgroundIn spite of declines in working memory and other processes, older adults generally maintain good ability to understand and remember spoken sentences. In part this is due to preserved knowledge of linguistic rules and their implementation. Largely overlooked, however, is the support older adults may gain from the presence of sentence prosody (pitch contour, lexical stress, intra-and inter-word timing) as an aid to detecting the structure of a heard sentence.MethodsTwenty-four young and 24 older adults recalled recorded sentences in which the sentence prosody corresponded to the clausal structure of the sentence, when the prosody was in conflict with this structure, or when there was reduced prosody uninformative with regard to the clausal structure. Pupil size was concurrently recorded as a measure of processing effort.ResultsBoth young and older adults’ recall accuracy was superior for sentences heard with supportive prosody than for sentences with uninformative prosody or for sentences in which the prosodic marking and causal structure were in conflict. The measurement of pupil dilation suggested that the task was generally more effortful for the older adults, but with both groups showing a similar pattern of effort-reducing effects of supportive prosody.ConclusionsResults demonstrate the influence of prosody on young and older adults’ ability to recall accurately multi-clause sentences, and the significant role effective prosody may play in preserving processing effort.

Perception of Linguistic and Affective Prosody in Individuals with Aphasia

The current study was carried out with the aim of testing the perception of linguistic and affective prosody in individuals with aphasia. Convenient sampling was followed for the recruitment of participants. Comparative group design was used. The participants were divided into two groups. The first group comprised of 10 individuals with aphasia while the second group comprised of 10 neurologically healthy individuals. The study was carried out in native and non-native languages of the participants. Based on this premise, two tasks were configured. The first task required the participants to judge the prosody of sentences in native language and the second task required the participants to judge the sentences based on the prosody in the non-native language. Mann Whitney U test was used to compare the performance of the two groups. Statistically significant difference between the two groups was found on both the tasks. The theoretical premise suggests that the linguistic prosody is affected in left brain damaged adults however, the affective prosody is spared in this population. The findings of the current study contradicted this result as perception of linguistic and affective prosody was found to be affected in persons with aphasia.

Successful lexical tone production of Mandarin Chinese autistic children with intellectual impairment.

Atypical speech prosody has been commonly found among autistic children. Yet it remains unknown whether prosody impairment originates from poor pitch ability in general or whether it is the result of the difficulty in understanding and using prosody for communicative purposes. To investigate whether native Mandarin Chinese-speaking autistic children with intellectual impairment were able to accurately produce native lexical tones, which are pitch patterns that distinguish word meaning lexically and serve little social purpose. Using a picture-naming task, thirteen 8-13-year-old Mandarin Chinese-speaking autistic children with intellectual impairment were tested on their production of Chinese lexical tones. Chronical age-matched typically developing (TD) children were included as the control group. Perceptual assessment and phonetic analyses were conducted with the produced lexical tones. The majority of the lexical tones produced by the autistic children were perceived as accurate by adult judges. Phonetic analysis of the pitch contours found no significant difference between the two groups, and the autistic children and TD children used the phonetic features in comparable ways when differentiating the lexical tones. However, the lexical tone accuracy rate was lower among the autistic children than among the TDs, and the larger individual difference was observed among the autistic children than the TD children. These results indicate that autistic children are able to produce the global contours of the lexical tones, and pitch deficits do not seem to qualify as a core feature of autism. What is already known on the subject Atypical prosody has been considered a maker of the speech of autistic children, and meta-analysis found a significant difference in mean pitch and pitch range between TD children and autistic children. Yet it remains unknown whether the pitch deficits are the result of impaired perceptual-motoric ability or if they reflect failure in learning sentential prosody, which requires an understanding of the interlocutors' mind. In addition, research on pitch ability of autistic children with intellectual disabilities has been scarce, and whether these children are able to produce pitch variation is largely unknown. What this paper adds to existing knowledge We tested native Mandarin Chinese autistic children with intellectual impairment on their production of native lexical tones. The lexical tones in Chinese are pitch variations realized on individual syllables that distinguish lexical meaning, but they do not serve social pragmatic purposes. We found that although these autistic children had only developed limited spoken language, the majority of their lexical tones were perceived as accurate. They were able to use the phonetic features in comparable ways with the TD children when distinguishing the lexical tones. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? It seems unlikely that pitch processing at the lexical level is fundamentally impaired in autistic children, and pitch deficits do not seem to qualify for a core feature of their speech. Practitioners should be cautious when using pitch production as a clinical marker for autistic children.

The Development of Left Hemisphere Lateralization for Sentence-Level Prosodic Processing.

The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or right-lateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization. Furthermore, it is virtually unknown how prosody develops neurologically among children with cochlear implants (CIs). Normal-hearing (NH) children ages 6-12 years and NH adults ages 18-28 years completed a functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging task, during which they heard sentence pairs and judged whether the sentences did or did not differ in their overall prosody (declarative, question, with or without narrow focus). Children also completed standard measures of expressive and receptive language. Age group differences emerged; children exhibited stronger bilateral temporoparietal activity but reduced left frontal activation. Furthermore, children's performance on a nonword repetition test was significantly associated with activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus-an area that was generally more activated in adults than in children. The prosody-related findings are generally consistent with prior neurodevelopmental works on sentence comprehension, especially those involving syntax and semantics, which have also noted a developmental shift from bilateral temporal to left inferior frontal regions typically associated with increased sensitivity to sentence structure. The findings thus inform theoretical perspectives on brain and language development and have implications for studying the effects of CIs on neurodevelopmental processes for sentence prosody. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22255996.

Text Implicates Prosodic Ambiguity: A Corpus for Intention Identification of the Korean Spoken Language

Phonetic features are indispensable in understanding the spoken language. Especially in Korean, which is wh-in-situ and head-final, the addressee of spoken language sometimes finds it hard to discern the speaker’s original intention if not provided with the sentence prosody. However, acoustic information may not be guaranteed for all spoken language processing, due to the difficulty of managing and computing speech data. This article suggests a corpus that aims to distinguish utterances with ambiguous intention from clear-cut ones, utilizing the prosodic ambiguity of the text input. In detail, the resulting classification system decides whether the given text input is one of fragment, statement, question, command, rhetorical question/command, or indecisive, taking into account the intonation-dependency of the text. Based on an intuitive understanding of the Korean language engaged in the data annotation, we construct a corpus with seven intention categories, train classification systems, and validate the utility of our dataset with quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the English Prosodic Phonology Processing Test (EPPPT): A Multi-Trait Multimethod Approach

Most of the prosody perception tests do not capture how listeners perceive and interpret stress, tone, and intonation in the process of listening comprehension. The current study developed the English Prosodic Phonology Processing Test (EPPPT). A sample of 240 Luo speaking high school students were tested using Confirmatory Factory Analysis (CFA) in a multi-trait multimethod matrix. Four traits were measured including word prosody, sentence prosody, juncture, and discourse prosody. Three methods were used including the picture selection task, stress assignment task, and chunking task. CFA confirmed the current taxonomy of the diverse traits of English prosodic phonology: word stress, sentence stress, open and closed junctures, and discourse. The methods yielded statistically significant differences among the discriminant validity of these traits. The model fit was better when the different prosodic traits were specified (convergent validity), while the methods of testing yielded distinguishable, unique types of information about prosodic phonology processing. Using a battery of five tests, the results of EPPPT showed that the traits are quite independent of each other and the method effect is not significant.
 Keywords: reliability, validity, EPPPT, Prosody, MTMM

Sentence Prosody and Register Variation in Arabic

Diglossia in Arabic differs from bilingualism in functional differentiation and mode of acquisition of the two registers used by all speakers raised in an Arabic-speaking environment. The ‘low’ (L) regional spoken dialect is acquired naturally and used in daily life, but the ‘high’ (H) variety, Modern Standard Arabic, is learned and used in formal settings. Register variation between the two ends of this H–L continuum is ubiquitous in everyday interaction, such that authors have proposed distinct intermediate register levels, despite evidence of mixing of H and L features, within and between utterances, at all linguistic levels. The role of sentence prosody in register variation in Arabic is uninvestigated to date. The present study examines three variables (F0 variation, intonational choices and post-lexical utterance-final laryngealization) in 400+ turns at talk produced by one speaker of San’ani Arabic in a 20 min sociolinguistic interview, coded for register on three levels: formal (fusħa), ‘middle’ (wusṭaː) and dialect (ʕaːmijja). The results reveal a picture of key shared features across all register levels, alongside distinct properties which serve to differentiate the registers at each end of the continuum, at least some of which appear to be under the speaker’s control.

On the prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani 2000; Jackendoff 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation— with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan 2005; Syrett, Simon & Nisula 2014). Our results reveal that the NC readings feature a focused subject and a post-focally more compressed object, in contrast to the DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses broad implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

Adults with cochlear implants can use prosody to determine the clausal structure of spoken sentences.

Speech prosody, including pitch contour, word stress, pauses, and vowel lengthening, can aid the detection of the clausal structure of a multi-clause sentence and this, in turn, can help listeners determine the meaning. However, for cochlear implant (CI) users, the reduced acoustic richness of the signal raises the question of whether CI users may have difficulty using sentence prosody to detect syntactic clause boundaries within sentences or whether this ability is rescued by the redundancy of the prosodic features that normally co-occur at clause boundaries. Twenty-two CI users, ranging in age from 19 to 77 years old, recalled three types of sentences: sentences in which the prosodic pattern was appropriate to the location of a clause boundary within the sentence (congruent prosody), sentences with reduced prosodic information, or sentences in which the location of the clause boundary and the prosodic marking of a clause boundary were placed in conflict. The results showed the presence of congruent prosody to be associated with superior sentence recall and a reduced processing effort as indexed by the pupil dilation. The individual differences in a standard test of word recognition (consonant-nucleus-consonant score) were related to the recall accuracy as well as the processing effort. The outcomes are discussed in terms of the redundancy of the prosodic features, which normally accompany a clause boundary and processing effort.

Accent discrimination abilities during the first days of life: An fNIRS study

Humans are biologically endowed with the faculty of language. However, the way neonates can crack this complex communicative code is yet not totally understood. While phonetic discrimination has been widely investigated in neonates, less is known about the role of supra-segments patterns in the recognition of native language. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate accent discrimination abilities in newborns in a sentential prosody paradigm. We used near-infared spectroscopy to investigate accent discrimination in 21 full-term born infants within the first days of life. Sentential prosody was used to investigate: (a) native accent, (b) foreign accent, and (c) flattened accent. Neonates revealed a significantly smaller hemodynamic response to native accent compared to flattened accent and foreign accent, respectively. Cluster-based permutation analysis revealed two clusters with a significant difference between the two conditions native accent and foreign accent. The first cluster covered the middle and superior frontal, middle and superior temporal, central, and parietal areas within the left hemisphere. The second cluster, located in the right hemisphere, covered inferior, middle, and superior frontal, central, middle and superior temporal areas. We therefore conclude that neonates can differentiate prosodic features like accents within the same language a few days after birth.

Processing similarities between native speakers and non-balanced bilinguals

Aims and objectives: The study investigates human sentence processing and argues that information from multiple sources is considered equally in native and non-native languages. Non-syntactic information does not overrule the parsing decisions prompted by syntactic cues. Methodology: The experiment used ambiguous relative clauses (RC) in a self-paced reading task with 20 native and 45 non-native adult speakers of English and Russian. The software Linger recorded participants’ answers to comprehension questions and the time they spent reading each word. Data and analysis: Mixed linear analysis performed in R checked for the effect of a matrix verb, RC length, social conventions, the native language and the language of testing on RC processing and interpretation. Findings: Both native and non-native speakers followed social conventions in deciding on the interpretation of the RC. However, this information never overruled the attachment decision prompted by the matrix predicate or by the length of the RC which entails certain sentence prosody. Originality: The study is innovative in investigating the extent to which each factor affected RC processing. It shows that social conventions enhance processing when they conspire with the structural parse prompted by linguistic cues. When they do not, syntactic information governs sentence parsing in both L1 and L2. Significance/implications: The study provides evidence that sentence processing uses linguistic structure as a first parsing hypothesis, which can then be adjusted to incorporate the incoming information from multiple sources. Limitations: The findings need further support from testing L2 learners of Russian in various socio-cultural contexts.

Synthesis of Emotional Speech by Prosody Modification of Vowel Segments of Neutral Speech

Background: Emotional speech synthesis is the process of synthesising emotions in a neutral speech – potentially generated by a text-to-speech system – to make an artificial humanmachine interaction human-like. It typically involves analysis and modification of speech parameters. Existing work on speech synthesis involving modification of prosody parameters does so at sentence, word, and syllable level. However, further fine-grained modification at vowel level has not been explored yet, thereby motivating our work. Objective: To explore prosody parameters at vowel level for emotion synthesis. Methods: Our work modifies prosody features (duration, pitch, and intensity) for emotion synthesis. Specifically, it modifies the duration parameter of vowel-like and pause regions and the pitch and intensity parameters of only vowel-like regions. The modification is gender specific using emotional speech templates stored in a database and done using Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add (PSOLA) method. Results: Comparison was done with the existing work on prosody modification at sentence, word and syllable label on IITKGP-SEHSC database. Improvements of 8.14%, 13.56%, and 2.80% for emotions angry, happy, and fear respectively were obtained for the relative mean opinion score. This was due to: (1) prosody modification at vowel-level being more fine-grained than sentence, word, or syllable level and (2) prosody patterns not being generated for consonant regions because vocal cords do not vibrate during consonant production. Conclusion: Our proposed work shows that an emotional speech generated using prosody modification at vowel-level is more convincible than prosody modification at sentence, word and syllable level.

Linguistic Structure and Meaning Organize Neural Oscillations into a Content-Specific Hierarchy.

Neural oscillations track linguistic information during speech comprehension (Ding et al., 2016; Keitel et al., 2018), and are known to be modulated by acoustic landmarks and speech intelligibility (Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015). However, studies investigating linguistic tracking have either relied on non-naturalistic isochronous stimuli or failed to fully control for prosody. Therefore, it is still unclear whether low-frequency activity tracks linguistic structure during natural speech, where linguistic structure does not follow such a palpable temporal pattern. Here, we measured electroencephalography (EEG) and manipulated the presence of semantic and syntactic information apart from the timescale of their occurrence, while carefully controlling for the acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information in the signal. EEG was recorded while 29 adult native speakers (22 women, 7 men) listened to naturally spoken Dutch sentences, jabberwocky controls with morphemes and sentential prosody, word lists with lexical content but no phrase structure, and backward acoustically matched controls. Mutual information (MI) analysis revealed sensitivity to linguistic content: MI was highest for sentences at the phrasal (0.8-1.1 Hz) and lexical (1.9-2.8 Hz) timescales, suggesting that the delta-band is modulated by lexically driven combinatorial processing beyond prosody, and that linguistic content (i.e., structure and meaning) organizes neural oscillations beyond the timescale and rhythmicity of the stimulus. This pattern is consistent with neurophysiologically inspired models of language comprehension (Martin, 2016, 2020; Martin and Doumas, 2017) where oscillations encode endogenously generated linguistic content over and above exogenous or stimulus-driven timing and rhythm information.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Biological systems like the brain encode their environment not only by reacting in a series of stimulus-driven responses, but by combining stimulus-driven information with endogenous, internally generated, inferential knowledge and meaning. Understanding language from speech is the human benchmark for this. Much research focuses on the purely stimulus-driven response, but here, we focus on the goal of language behavior: conveying structure and meaning. To that end, we use naturalistic stimuli that contrast acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information to show that, during spoken language comprehension, oscillatory modulations reflect computations related to inferring structure and meaning from the acoustic signal. Our experiment provides the first evidence to date that compositional structure and meaning organize the oscillatory response, above and beyond prosodic and lexical controls.

Linguistic predictability influences auditory stimulus classification within two concurrent speech streams.

Acoustic predictability has been shown to affect auditory stream segregation, while linguistic predictability is known to be an important factor in speech comprehension. We tested the effects of linguistic predictability on auditory stream segregation and target detection by assessing the event-related potentials elicited by targets and distractors in participants presented with two concurrent speech streams. The linguistic cues of predictability varied over four levels. In the three real speech conditions, natural speech was presented with intact phonotactics and sentence prosody: normal speech, word-salad (randomized word order within each sentence), and pseudo-words (randomized syllable order within each sentence). The fourth (control) condition delivered a spectrally rotated version of the normal speech condition. Participants were instructed to attend one stream and respond to the natural cough sounds embedded in it. Coughs were present in both streams, serving as targets in the attended and as distractors in the unattended stream. We expected improved target detection with increasing linguistic predictability. The target-related N2b component's amplitude monotonically increased from the pseudo-word to the word-salad and normal speech condition, while no predictability effects were observed for the P3b amplitude or for behavioral responses. The dissociation between the N2b and P3b/behavioral effect suggests that while linguistic predictability enhanced the process of classifying stimuli as potential targets, this did not affect their detection. Furthermore, the observed nonmonotonic distractor N2 (probably MMN) amplitude increase with increasing linguistic predictability is compatible with the notion that linguistic predictability can modulate auditory stream segregation and/or stream selection.

Effects of prosody on the cognitive and neural resources supporting sentence comprehension: A behavioral and lesion-symptom mapping study

Non-canonical sentence comprehension impairments are well-documented in aphasia. Studies of neurotypical controls indicate that prosody can aid comprehension by facilitating attention towards critical pitch inflections and phrase boundaries. However, no studies have examined how prosody may engage specific cognitive and neural resources during non-canonical sentence comprehension in persons with left hemisphere damage. Experiment 1 examines the relationship between comprehension of non-canonical sentences spoken with typical and atypical prosody and several cognitive measures in 25 persons with chronic left hemisphere stroke and 20 matched controls. Experiment 2 explores the neural resources critical for non-canonical sentence comprehension with each prosody type using region-of-interest-based multiple regressions. Lower orienting attention abilities and greater inferior frontal and parietal damage predicted lower comprehension, but only for sentences with typical prosody. Our results suggest that typical sentence prosody may engage attention resources to support non-canonical sentence comprehension, and this relationship may be disrupted following left hemisphere stroke.

ПРОСОДИЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ПОВТОРЕННЯ ЯК РИТОРИЧНИЙ ПРИЙОМ У ПУБЛІЧНІЙ ПРОМОВІ

The article deals with the peculiarities of the intonation design of certain elements of such rhetorical reception as a repetition on the material of audio recordings of Shakespeare's plays in chronology, namely rhetorical questions related to expressions of a peculiar interogative modality. The article deals with the results of the study of the invariant features of the prosody of the interrogative sentences in dramatic discourse in chronological terms. Repetition as a means of emotional enhancement is considered. In public speaking, repetition serves as a means of expressing a specific function of information - convincing which adds a rich emotional and intonational content. Through repetition, the speaker deepens the semantic side of speech and heightens emotional impact. Syntactic concurrency, which is realized in the combination of repetitions of syntactic constructions and various intensifiers, has been analyzed, which is perceived as rhythmicality. The syntactical parallelism of identical questions or sentences is amplified and correlated with the identical prosodic contour of intonation groups. To achieve an emotional effect, when presenting syntactically parallel interrogative constructions of the second and third questions, actors can violate the rule of normative intonation of a question, using a gradually ascending scale. Or, on the contrary, to adhere to the normative intonation contours, and design them according to the canonical rule.

Phonetic effects of grammatical category: How category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency impact the duration of nouns and verbs

This paper is concerned with phonetic correlates of grammatical category, specifically the finding that nouns are pronounced with greater duration than verbs in discourse. Most previous research has attributed this difference to the sentence positions that the two grammatical categories occupy and concomitant prosodic effects. Based on previous findings, we test two further effects, namely a category-specific effect on prosodic phrasing, which leads to stronger prosodic boundaries after nouns than verbs even in maximally similar syntactic contexts, and a reductive effect of lexical frequency leading to shorter durations of the more frequent word. These effects are tested in a production study investigating durational differences of twelve noun–verb homophone pairs in English in two clause-medial contexts. We find evidence for both effects: prosodic boundaries are stronger after nouns than verbs across all conditions, resulting in greater durations of nouns due to pre-boundary lengthening. Furthermore, differences in frequency result in a reduced duration of the homophone of the pair which has the greater frequency. We propose an explanation in which phonetic effects of grammatical category are caused by the interplay of sentence prosody, category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency.