Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search (original) (raw)

Evidence for attractors in English intonation

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006

Although the pitch of the human voice is continuously variable, some linguists contend that intonation in speech is restricted to a small, limited set of patterns. We test this claim by asking subjects to mimic a block of 100 randomly generated intonation contours and then to imitate themselves in several successive sessions. The produced f 0 contours gradually converge towards a limited set of distinct, previously recognized basic English intonation patterns. These patterns are 'attractors' in the space of possible intonation English contours.

Intonation and sentence processing

2003

This paper summarises recent research concerning the relationship between intonation and the syntactic analysis of sentences. After introductory comments on the nature of intonation, we discuss methodological problems in determining the relationship between syntactic and intonational structure, and the potential dangers of basing claims about this relationship on scripted readings rather than on spontaneous speech. We present some of our own speech production data from the SPOT project, and highlight the variability in the intonational realisation of that data. After discussing the broad question of whether correspondences between syntactic and intonation structure are speaker-or listener-oriented, we review experimental data on the role of intonation in sentence comprehension, and finally discuss the position of intonation in the sentence processing mechanism.

Intonation Facilitates Prediction of Focus Even in the Presence of Lexical Tones

Interspeech 2017

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. However, is this strategy universally available, even in languages with different phonological systems? In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment is also found in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where in principle the use of pitch for lexical identity may take precedence over the use of pitch cues to salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted accent on the target-bearing word. Acoustic analyses revealed greater F 0 range in the preceding intonation of the predicted-accent sentences. These findings have implications for how universal and languagespecific mechanisms interact in the processing of salience.

Intonation as a constraint on inferential processing

The proper role of intonation in utterance interpretation should be assessed in terms of the way that intonation interacts with other linguistic phenomena, notably with syntactic form and with grammatically encoded meaning, whether conceptual meaning of a compositional nature or procedural meaning that constrains the way in which an addressee will perform deductive inferences over conceptual representations in a bid to recover the contextual effects that make the utterance relevant to her or him. The intonation of a given utterance facilitates the addressee's selection of the context (= set of activated assumptions) that constrains the relevance of the utterance in a way intended by the communicator. Direct coding of conventional meaning by means of intonation plays a rather marginal role in processes of utterance interpretation. This is particularly true of a prosodic system like that of Norwegian, the language providing the data to be discussed in this paper, because in Norweg...

On the perception of intonation from sinusoidal sentences

Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 1984

Listeners can perceive the phonetic value of sinusoidal imitations of speech. These tonal replicas are made by setting time-varying sinusoids equal in frequency and amplitude to the computed peaks of the first three formants of natural utterances. Like formant frequencies, the three sinusoids composing the tonal signal are not necessarily related harmonically, and therefore are unlikely to possess a common fundamental frequency. Moreover, none of the tones falls within the frequency range typical of the fundamental frequency of phonation of the natural utterances upon which sinusoidal signals are based. Naive subjects nevertheless report that intelligible tonal replicas of sentences exhibit unusual “vocal” pitch variation, or intonation. The present study attempted to determine the acoustic basis for this apparent intonation of sinusoidal signals by employing several tests of perceived similarity. Listeners judged the tone corresponding to the first formant to be more like the intonation pattern of a sinusoidal sentence than: (1) a tone corresponding to the second or third formant; (2) a tone presenting the computed missing fundamental of the three tones; or (3) a tone following a plausible fundamental frequency contour generated from the amplitude envelope of the signal. Additionslly, the tone reproducing the first formant pattern was responsible for apparent intonation, even when it occurred in conjunction with a lower tone representing the fundamental frequency pattern of the natural utterance on which the replica was modeled. The effects were not contingent on relative tone amplitude within the sentence replica. The case of sinusoidal sentence “pitch” resembles the phenomenon ofdominance, that is, the general salience of waveform periodicity in the region of 400-1000 Hz for perception of the pitch of complex signals.

Intonation and discourse processing

2003

This paper describes intonational cues to discourse structure, and the role that intonation plays in spoken discourse processing. We begin by discussing two main structures in discourse that one must consider when doing research on discourse processing: segmentation and information status. We then review a number of key studies from the phonetics literature which have investigated the intonational marking of these structures. Next, we discuss in detail the psycholinguistic research to date which has examined the role that intonation can play in facilitating or inhibiting the processing of discourse in English and other related languages. We conclude by outlining directions for future research in the area of intonation-discourse processing.

A glimpse of the time-course of intonation processing in

We have investigated the phenomenon of prediction in speech processing through intonational contrasts in European Portuguese (EP) grammar. 20 EP subjects were presented with auditory speech stimuli gated in specific locations on a sentence which they had to classify within a category. Afterwards, they also had to rate the confidence level for each of their answers. Declarative sentences (statements) were identified at the first stressed vowel in the 5 pairs of stimuli by more than 50% of the subjects. On the other hand, interrogatives (questions) were identified later on the sentence near its end (specifically, on the last stressed vowel). These results suggest a dual approach for EP intonational data analysis: global and local. The confidence level results showed that listeners need more data to be sure about their stimulus sentence type identification. EP listeners were really attentive to phonetic detail specificities of the speech signal and started to build their internal representation of the intonation contour very early in the sentence with these data. Therefore, relevant prosodic cues must be available early in the speech signal.