TY - JOUR
T1 - Sound, structure and meaning
T2 - The bases of prominence ratings in English, French and Spanish
AU - Cole, Jennifer
AU - Hualde, José I.
AU - Smith, Caroline L.
AU - Eager, Christopher
AU - Mahrt, Timothy
AU - Napoleão de Souza, Ricardo
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by a grant to Jennifer Cole, José I. Hualde and Caroline Smith from the US National Science Foundation, USA [BCS-1251343 and BCS-1251134]. We thank Joseph Roy and Suyeon Im at the University of Illinois for help with data analysis, and David Escudero and Valentín Cardeñoso at the University of Valladolid for offering lab space and assistance with recruiting participants for our experiment in Valladolid, Spain. Caroline Smith thanks the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage for assistance of various kinds during her working visits to Lyon. We thank the Guest Editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions, and audiences at the Speech Prosody 8 and Laboratory Phonology 14 conferences, and at the University of Cologne and the University of Illinois for comments on earlier presentations of this research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Authors
PY - 2019/7
Y1 - 2019/7
N2 - This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners’ perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure—English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors in predicting binary prominence ratings of individual listeners. In all three languages we find similar effects of prosodic phrase structure and acoustic cues (F0, intensity, phone-rate) on prominence ratings, and differences in the effect of word frequency and instruction. In English, where phrasal prominence is used to convey meaning related to information structure, acoustic and meaning criteria converge on very similar prominence ratings. In French and Spanish, where prominence plays a lesser role in signaling information structure, phrasal prominence is perceived more narrowly on structural and acoustic grounds. Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels for each language. Distinctions in ToBI pitch accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, unaccented) are reflected in empirical and model-predicted prominence ratings. In addition, words with a ToBI pitch accent type that is typically associated with contrastive focus are more likely to be rated as prominent in Spanish and English, but no such effect is found for French. These findings are discussed in relation to probabilistic models of prominence production and perception.
AB - This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners’ perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure—English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors in predicting binary prominence ratings of individual listeners. In all three languages we find similar effects of prosodic phrase structure and acoustic cues (F0, intensity, phone-rate) on prominence ratings, and differences in the effect of word frequency and instruction. In English, where phrasal prominence is used to convey meaning related to information structure, acoustic and meaning criteria converge on very similar prominence ratings. In French and Spanish, where prominence plays a lesser role in signaling information structure, phrasal prominence is perceived more narrowly on structural and acoustic grounds. Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels for each language. Distinctions in ToBI pitch accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, unaccented) are reflected in empirical and model-predicted prominence ratings. In addition, words with a ToBI pitch accent type that is typically associated with contrastive focus are more likely to be rated as prominent in Spanish and English, but no such effect is found for French. These findings are discussed in relation to probabilistic models of prominence production and perception.
KW - Intonation
KW - Pitch accent
KW - Prominence
KW - Prosodic annotation
KW - Prosody
KW - Prosody perception
KW - Stress
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U2 - 10.1016/j.wocn.2019.05.002
DO - 10.1016/j.wocn.2019.05.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85067555553
VL - 75
SP - 113
EP - 147
JO - Journal of Phonetics
JF - Journal of Phonetics
SN - 0095-4470
ER -