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The present study investigated the perception of phrase-level prosodic prominence in American English, using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) task. We had two basic goals. First, we sought to examine how listeners’ subjective impressions of prominence relate to phonology, defined in terms of Autosegmental-Metrical distinctions in (a) pitch acc...
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Context 1
... one exception to this classification involved H* and L+H*, which, again, due to L+H*'s association with raised F0, were kept distinct from each other. While our analyses center on these pitch accent level distinctions, we report in Table 6 the proportion of prominence judgments for each individual pitch accent, as well as the number of observations for each. 9 Considering first the differences in perceived prominence associated with the categories themselves, Table 7 displays the proportion of words judged as prominent by RPT listeners for each accent level, broken down by accent status. ...Context 2
... one exception to this classification involved H* and L+H*, which, again, due to L+H*'s association with raised F0, were kept distinct from each other. While our analyses center on these pitch accent level distinctions, we report in Table 6 the proportion of prominence judgments for each individual pitch accent, as well as the number of observations for each. 9 Considering first the differences in perceived prominence associated with the categories themselves, Table 7 displays the proportion of words judged as prominent by RPT listeners for each accent level, broken down by accent status. ...Similar publications
Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) is a neurodegenerative language disorder primarily characterized by impaired phonological processing. Sentence repetition and comprehension deficits are observed in lvPPA and linked to impaired phonological working memory, but recent evidence also implicates impaired speech perception. Currently...
Citations
... In subsequent work, the AQ communication subscale and measures closely related to it-such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron- Cohen et al., 2001a). The pragmatic language subscale of the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (Hurley et al., 2007)-have also been shown to predict sensitivity to prominence patterns in tasks in which listeners must explicitly rate or identify prominence in auditory stimuli (Bishop, 2016;Bishop et al., 2020) or use it to recover information structure for sentence completion (Hurley and Bishop, 2016). Notably, listeners exhibit differential sensitivity depending on social cognition measures, pointing to the role of social cognition abilities in discourse management. ...
... Most of these case studies utilize only a single psychometric measure to link a specific cognitive construct to discourse management. For instance, the Nelson Denny Test in Çokal and Sturt (2017) assesses reading skills, the Reading Span Task in Nieuwland and Van Berkum (2006) measures WMC, while socio-cognitive measures -such as the AQ (Bishop, 2012;Bishop, 2017) and the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (Bishop, 2016;Bishop et al., 2020)-examine social cognition capacities. The use of a single psychometric measure in these studies minimizes the risk of overlapping variance between multiple predictors within the same analysis, thereby simplifying interpretability and reducing concerns about inter-correlation and multicollinearity. ...
... In turn, it should be noted that sample size and amount of variation in the data could critically influence the validity of the case studies discussed above. For instance, prosody studies we reported above involve sample sizes ranging between 84 and 160 participants (e.g., Bishop, 2012;Bishop, 2016;Bishop et al., 2020;Hurley and Bishop, 2016;Bishop, 2015a, 2015b). Lab-based experiments, such as those utilizing EEG or eye-tracking, often include smaller sample sizes, ranging from 31 to 40 participants (e.g., Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006;Çokal and Sturt, 2017), with exceptions such as Arnold et al. (2018) involving 72 and 60 participants, and Torregrossa et al. (2021), which examined 125 bilingual Greek children. ...
Every utterance in discourse we produce arises from the interaction of numerous cognitive functions, such as semantic memory, where we store the meanings of words, executive function and working memory as required for maintenance of a discourse goal, and social cognitive abilities, such as mind-reading capacity as required for tuning what we say to what others know or believe. In this way, a single utterance potentially integrates very different cognitive capacities into a basic discourse processing unit. This suggests that discourse processing and management is a very rich phenomenon that requires a multidimensional approach. We propose that a model of discourse management is comprised of three primary components that interact synergistically: (i) dynamicity, (ii) predictability, and (iii) meta-representationality. Cognitive functions play a pivotal role in the underlying processes, contributing to the development and unfolding of discourse. Understanding the correspondence between individual differences in discourse management (i.e., discourse perception and production) and cognitive functions can shed light on the intricate relationship between language and cognition in discourse management, as well as the appropriate psychometric measures to address this complex interaction. This narrative review presents aspects of discourse management, psychometric measures to comprehensively address these aspects. We close with a discussion of challenges and open questions.
... Autistic-like traits in neurotypical adults have also been linked to the processing of phonetic cues, in that more autistic-like traits correlate with weaker integration between phonetic cues and higher-order information (Stewart & Ota, 2008;Yu & Zellou, 2019). As Bishop et al. (2020) show, this sensitivity extends to prosody, in that individuals with fewer autistic-like traits are more attuned to the prosody-meaning mapping. Finally, more empathetic individuals show higher sensitivity toward pragmatic information, most likely as a result of their greater ability to understand what other people feel or think (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). ...
... These results echo Baumann and Winter (2018) who found that some participants relied more on prosody and others on morphosyntactic properties when assessing prominence. Evidence for individual variability during RPT has also been reported by Bishop et al. (2020), who connected these differences to cognitive styles. This is explored in the second study. ...
... The AQ has been used to examine individual variation connected to both phonetics (e.g., Stewart & Ota, 2008;Yu, 2010;Yu et al., 2013) and pragmatics (e.g., Bishop, 2016;Yang et al., 2018). Some studies have relied on AQ subscales; e.g., Yu et al. (2013) analyzed each subscale separately, while Bishop (2016) and Bishop et al. (2020) used only AQ-Communication. Others have used the aggregate score for their main hypotheses, reporting information about the subscales, to variable extent, as a post-hoc analysis (e.g., Stewart & Ota, 2008;Yang et al., 2018;Yu, 2010). ...
The H* ~ L + H* pitch accent contrast in English has been a matter of lengthy debate, with some arguing that L + H* is an emphatic version of H* and others that the accents are phonetically and pragmatically distinct. Empirical evidence is inconclusive, possibly because studies do not consider dialectal variation and individual variability. We focused on Standard Southern British English (SSBE), which has not been extensively investigated with respect to this contrast, and used Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to examine differences in prominence based on accent form and function. L + H*s were rated more prominent than H*s but only when the former were used for contrast and the latter were not, indicating that participants had expectations about the form–function connection. However, they also differed substantially in which they considered primary (form or function). We replicated both the general findings and the patterns of individual variability with a second RPT study which also showed that the relative prioritization of form or function related to participant differences in empathy, musicality and autistic-like traits. In conclusion, the two accents are used to encode different pragmatics, though the form–function mapping is not clear-cut, suggesting a marginal contrast that not every SSBE speaker shares and attends to.
... In pitch accenting languages, including Russian and English, focal information tends to be prosodically distinct due to relative prosodic augmentation of the sentence focus in combination with partial reduction of prominence of non-focal, given information. Extensive foundational research on spoken English has established a clear link between heightened information emphasis, often attributed to focal status, and prosodic prominence (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986;Selkirk, 1995;Ladd, 2008;Büring, 2009;Wagner et al., 2010;Cole, 2015;Bishop et al., 2020). ...
... Sentence focus frequently exhibits a distinct prosodic expression, thus rendering it prosodically prominent, as discussed in the works of Selkirk (1995), Ladd (2008), Büring (2009), Calhoun (2010), and Bishop et al. (2020). In English, focus prominence results from distinctive pitch accenting patterns linked to the relative information prominence of a Frontiers in Psychology 03 frontiersin.org ...
... When a word holds focal status, it is assigned a nuclear pitch accent, effectively linked to the most perceptually salient prosodic event within a larger domain, such as an phrase or IP. The form of the pitch contour indicating focus or discourse-new information status is informed by the specific pitch accent type, such as H* (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, 1990;Beckman et al., 2005). 2 Perception-production studies by Gussenhoven and Rietveld (1988), Xu and Xu (2005), Breen et al. (2010), and Bishop et al. (2020) reported significant contribution of the local pitch maxima, the speed of pitch rise and the size of pitch excursion over the focused word to acoustic-prosodic expression of focus in English. In perceptual terms, the augmented prosodic expression translates into heightened prosodic prominence of the focal material (Xu and Xu, 2005;Cole, 2015), which may further translate into variable degrees of perceived information prominence by linguistically naïve listeners . ...
This study investigates the acquisition of sentence focus in Russian by adult English-Russian bilinguals, while paying special attention to the relative contribution of constituent order and prosodic expression. It aims to understand how these factors influence perceived word-level prominence and focus assignment during listening.
We present results of two listening tasks designed to examine the influence of pitch cues and constituent order on perceived word prominence (Experiment 1) and focus assignment (Experiment 2) during the auditory comprehension of SV[O]F and OV[S]F sentences in Russian. Our findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: monolingual speakers, as a baseline, tend to perceive the nuclear pitch-accented object as more prominent, particularly in the SVO order, whereas bilinguals appear to be less sensitive to the constituent order distinction.
Additionally, baseline speakers consistently assign focus to the sentence-final nuclear pitch-accented noun regardless of constituent order. In contrast, bilinguals demonstrate a preference for assigning focus to the sentence-final nuclear-accented object, rather than the sentence-final nuclear-accented subject. A proficiency effect emerged indicative of a more target-like performance among bilinguals with greater proficiency in Russian.
... Previous studies found that words or syllables in phrase final positions are perceived as perceptually more prominent than in phrase internal positions (Bishop et al., 2020;Cole et al., 2010;Jagdfeld & Baumann, 2011). Similarly, production results in this study also showed both the focused names and the pre-boundary names have longer duration. ...
The prosody of an utterance encodes multiple types of information simultaneously, including information status of constituents—for example, by modulations in prosodic prominence to encode focus—and information about syntactic constituent structure—by modulations of prosodic phrasing. According to many prosodic theories, however, focus and constituent structure interact with each in their effects on prominence and phrasing respectively. Focus early in an utterance is sometimes assumed to preempt the realization of tonal events later in the utterance, thus neutralizing syntactically-motivated phrasing distinctions. Other accounts assume that focus and constituent structure exert their effects on prominence and phrasing in an additive way. The current study compares English and Mandarin and investigates to what extent the correlates of focus and constituency interact with each other in shaping the prosody in production. The results show that syntax-induced phrasing distinctions are still encoded post-focally in both languages, providing new evidence for the view that different functions can be encoded orthogonally in prosody. Additionally, we found that while the two languages realize phrasing in roughly same way, they differ in their acoustic realization of focus. Mandarin relies more on F0 modulation than English, and Mandarin lexical tones interact with focus realization.
... Since, according to Trofimovich and Baker (2006), the effect of additional suprasegmental training is dependent on the particular suprasegmental feature under discussion, a decision was made to narrow the scope of the present study to the perception of English prominence and boundaries by Czech learners of English. Apart from the widely recognized importance of prominence on language intelligibility, prominence is crucial to us in the way that it combines two levels of auditors' perception: 'down-up' -the acoustic cues of the speech signaland 'top-down' -the linguistic context of the utterance (Bishop et al. 2020). In their recommendations for prosody studies, Cole et al. (2017: 310) make a list of the acoustic and contextual factors potentially affecting prominence perception ( Figure 1). ...
... The total number of spotted prominences in the research corpus was only 57 per cent (mean) of those identified by the control group (the native speakers). The detailed analysis of prominence categories revealed that identifying nuclear prominences, as Bishop (2020) predicted, was less problematic for Czech speakers than pre-nuclear prominence identification (Table 6). ...
The study posits that mid-sized groups of phonologically trained non-native speakers of English can collect prosodic data that are equivalent to English native-speakers’ annotations. The hypothesis is supported by the results of a classroom experimentinvolving an experimental group of English-proficient Czech (L1) learners annotating prominence and boundaries in English monological texts before and after additional phonological training aided by Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT). The annotationresults received before the experimental group had the training demonstrate deficiencies of their prosodic annotation occurring under the probable influence of the learners’ mother tongue (Czech). The analysis of disagreements between the experimental group’s and the control group’s (native speakers) annotations demonstrates that non-native listeners rely on slightly different cues when identifying the prosodic structure of an English utterance. Thus, it is concluded that Czech (L1) speakers of English require mandatory annotation practice focused on the differences between their mother tongue and English to perform annotation tasks successfully. The experimental group’s RPT annotations, conducted after a learning intervention, produced much better results and were recognized as statistically equivalent to native speakers’ RPT annotations. The high alignment of the readings obtained by the experimental and control groups on key prosodic parameters demonstrates that crowdsourcing prosodic information from phonologically trained non-native speakers with the help of the RPT method can be employed as an alternative means of validating intonation research when attracting native speakers to research participation is problematic.
... Autistic listeners have been reported to take pitch accents into account to a lesser extent than control persons when judging the givenness of a word, i.e., judging whether the object it denotes is known to the interlocutors in a given context or has not been previously introduced (Grice et al., 2016). Findings from the general population show that an attenuated sensitivity to pitch accent types is associated with poor pragmatic skills, i.e., the appropriate use of language in social situations (Bishop, 2016;Hurley and Bishop, 2016;Bishop et al., 2020). ...
Although mentalizing abilities in autistic adults without intelligence deficits are similar to those of control participants in tasks relying on verbal information, they are dissimilar in tasks relying on non-verbal information. The current study aims to investigate mentalizing behavior in autism in a paradigm involving two important nonverbal means to communicate mental states: eye gaze and speech intonation. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants with ASD and a control group watched videos showing a virtual character gazing at objects while an utterance was presented auditorily. We varied the virtual character's gaze duration toward the object (600 or 1800 ms) and the height of the pitch peak on the accented syllable of the word denoting the object. Pitch height on the accented syllable was varied by 45 Hz, leading to high or low prosodic emphasis. Participants were asked to rate the importance of the given object for the virtual character. At the end of the experiment, we assessed how well participants recognized the objects they were presented with in a recognition task. Both longer gaze duration and higher pitch height increased the importance ratings of the object for the virtual character overall. Compared to the control group, ratings of the autistic group were lower for short gaze, but higher when gaze was long but pitch was low. Regardless of an ASD diagnosis, participants clustered into three behaviorally different subgroups, representing individuals whose ratings were influenced (1) predominantly by gaze duration, (2) predominantly by pitch height, or (3) by neither, accordingly labelled "Lookers," "Listeners" and "Neithers" in our study. "Lookers" spent more time fixating the virtual character's eye region than "Listeners," while both "Listeners" and "Neithers" spent more time fixating the object than "Lookers." Object recognition was independent of the virtual character's gaze duration towards the object and pitch height. It was also independent of an ASD diagnosis. Our results show that gaze duration and intonation are effectively used by autistic persons for inferring the importance of an object for a virtual character. Notably, compared to the control group, autistic participants were influenced more strongly by gaze duration than by pitch height.
... However, prosodic phrase boundaries, especially IP boundaries, appear to be relatively easy to perceive in continuous speech streams, compared to the perception of prosodic prominence associated with pitch accent. This has been shown to be the case of both linguistically trained adult listeners (e.g., Grice et al., 1996, on German;Jun et al., 2000, on Korean;Escudero et al., 2012, on Catalan) and naïve adult listeners with no prior linguistic knowledge presented with an unfamiliar language for the first time (Cole and Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016;Cole et al., 2017;Bishop et al., 2020). Development literature suggests a very early ability to perceive and process prosodic phrase boundaries. ...
Introduction
Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults.
Methods
Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years.
Results
We found that the children varied prosodic boundaries to distinguish narrow focus from pre-focus and broad focus in a largely adult-like manner at the age of 4 to 5; at this age, they did not distinguish narrow focus from post-focus or contrastive focus using prosodic boundaries, similar to the adults. Their use of the prosodic boundaries in distinguishing the focus conditions was not fully adult-like in terms of frequency until the age of 10 to 11.
Discussion
In conjunction with the findings of previous studies on the acquisition of focus marking in Germanic languages, performed using a similar experimental method, our findings suggest that Seoul Korean-speaking children acquire the use of prosodic phrasing earlier than Dutch-speaking children acquiring the use of pitch accent but slightly later than Stockholm Swedish-speaking children acquiring the use of a prominence-marking high tone. These findings imply that the rate of focus-marking acquisition depends on the transparency of the form-meaning mapping between the phonological cue and focus.
... Although several studies have taken note of inter-individual differences, few production studies investigate reasons behind this variability. Previous perception experiments, however, have found a correlation between the processing of prosodic prominence and communicative skill (e.g., [9,10]). In [9], American English listeners with higher communicative skill were found to perform better in a prominence rating task than listeners with lower communicative skill. ...
... Previous perception experiments, however, have found a correlation between the processing of prosodic prominence and communicative skill (e.g., [9,10]). In [9], American English listeners with higher communicative skill were found to perform better in a prominence rating task than listeners with lower communicative skill. Similarly, in [10], listeners with higher communicative skill more successfully distinguished between H* and L+H* accents. ...
... One reason for such different individual strategies that has been considered in prominence perception studies is communicative skill. Generally, listeners with higher communicative skill are more adept at perceiving prominence differences than listeners with lower communicative skill [9,10]. In our production data, we observe contrasting trends for the mediating effect of communicative skill on the encoding of lexical and referential givenness. ...
... Listeners are capable of processing speech information from the prominent words with these acoustic signals. In English, words can be made prominent to convey information such as contrast, focus and information status [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22]. Prominence thus can function as an auditory marker of emphatic or contrastive focus (i.e., narrow focus). ...
... A number of studies in recent years have investigated the properties that make some words stand out compared to others. These studies have shown that various factors contribute to prominence assessment: acoustic cues (e.g., F0, duration, and amplitude), phonological properties (e.g., presence and type of pitch accent), semantic-pragmatic information (e.g., information structure), lexical factors (e.g., part of speech, lexical frequency), and syntactic factors (e.g., canonical vs. cleft sentences); among others, see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], and [6]. ...
... This ultimately affects our understanding of prominence, a point we return to in §4. For example, some studies show that changes in F0 are strongly related to prominence [2], [3], while others have reported a weaker relation between the two [1], [7]. Some of these inconclusive results may be linked to methods used to study prominence. ...
... Specifically, we argue that differences like the F0 effect in our two tasks are directly related to task demands: a higher number of predictors is likely to be statistically significant when participants are asked to select more words; this is because allowing them to select more words implicitly allows them to rely on more criteria. In turn, this runs the risk of one study claiming F0 to be a predictor of prominence in a given language, [2], [3], while another argues for the opposite, [1], [7]. ...
