Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian (original) (raw)
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One of the main uses of intonation form is to signal pragmatic information. Recent research on intonational meaning has shown that epistemic information about propositional content of utterances within a discourse can also be tonally encoded. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether speaker certainty about the answer to a polar question can be recovered by listeners of Salerno Italian and whether identification is affected by tune type. In an online perception survey, three similarly frequent polar question tunes were rated according to degree of perceived speaker certainty relative to the question response. Results support the hypothesis that tune type affects degree of certainty perception. The study also supports the hypothesis that additional factors – both sociophonetic (i.e., living abroad) and idiosyncratic – might affect variability in intonation perception within a language community.
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The present study investigates the interplay between proficiency and empathy in the development of second language (L2) prosody by analyzing the perception and processing of intonation in questions and statements in L2 Spanish. A total of 225 adult L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) from the Northeastern United States completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task in which they listened to four utterance types and categorized them as either questions or statements. We used Bayesian multilevel regression and Drift Diffusion modeling to analyze the 2AFC data as a function of proficiency level and empathy scores for each utterance type. We show that learner response accuracy and sensitivity to intonation is positively correlated with proficiency, and this association is affected by individual empathy levels in both response accuracy and sentence processing. Higher empathic individuals, in comparison with lower empathic individuals, appear to be more sensitive to intonation cues in...
Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation
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Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their pitch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later peak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala's Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous
Memory & Cognition
This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.
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A Crosslinguistic Study of the Perception of Emotional Intonation
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Pitch perception plays a more important role in emotional communication in English than in Korean. Interpreting the semantic aspects of pitch levels therefore presents a challenge for Korean learners of English. This study investigated how 49 Korean learners of English perceived 20 English emotional utterances. Participants were asked to complete a congruency task in which they indicated whether the category of the semantic valence was congruent with the intonation type. They also described each emotional utterance by providing an adjective. The task results of Korean participants were compared with those of a control group of 49 Anglo-American students. Statistical analyses revealed that the incongruence between the semantic meaning and the intonation type interfered with American participants’ performance more than Korean participants. The adjective task results also showed that American participants were more attuned to the interplay between the semantic meaning and the intonatio...
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There is a consensus in psycholinguistic research that listening to unfamiliar speech constitutes a challenging listening situation. In this commentary, we explore the problems with the construct of non-native and ask whether using this construct in research is useful, specifically to shift the communicative burden from the language learner to the perceiver, who often occupies a position of power. We examine what factors affect perception of non-native talkers. We frame this question by addressing the observation that not all “difficult” listening conditions provide equal challenges. Given this, we ask how cognitive and social factors impact perception of unfamiliar accents and ask what our psycholinguistic measurements are capturing. We close by making recommendations for future work. We propose that the issue is less with the terminology of native versus non-native, but rather how our unexamined biases affect the methodological assumptions that we make. We propose that we can use ...
Language and Speech, 2012
Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kügler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for European Portuguese; Vanrell, Mascaró, Prieto, & Torres-Tamarit, 2010, for Catalan). However, all these studies have relied on production experiments and little is known about the perceptual relevance of these intonational cues. This paper explores whether Majorcan Catalan listeners distinguish information- and confirmation-seeking questions by means of two distinct nuclear falling pitch accents. Three behavioral tasks were conducted with 20 Majorcan Catalan subjects, namely a semantic congruity test, a rating test, and a classical categorical perception identification/discrimination test. The results show that a difference in pitch scaling on t...
Attitudinal Intonation and the Inferential Process
2002
The role of prosody in conveying affective meaning is complex. The complexity is reflected to some extent in the many labels used to describe 'ways of speaking' that could generally be described as affectively coloured. The search for prosodic correlates of emotional speech, however, is more successful for some labels than for others. I argue that some labels refer not to the affective prosody itself, but to the meanings implied by or inferred from utterances in a given interactional context. These meanings, particularly those suggestive of attitude or interpersonal stance, may, of course, arise in part from a perceived affective colouring of the voice such as sadness or anger. Some, on the other hand, may be generated by the strategic use of prosodic patterns that are not inherently 'attitudinal', but are in some way incongruent with the text or context, and set in train the process of interpretation of speaker meaning. The notion of incongruence, however, presupposes the notion of congruence, and I argue that if we are to fully understand the contribution of prosody to speaker meaning, the search for emotion in the voice should be complemented by the study of 'normative' use of prosody in interaction.