The phonology and phonetics of perceived prosody: What do listeners imitate?

Jennifer Cole; Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2011-395

The phonology and phonetics of perceived prosody: What do listeners imitate?

Jennifer Cole^*, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

^*Corresponding author for this work

Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Conference article › peer-review

22 Scopus citations

Abstract

An imitation experiment tests the hypothesis that when asked to reproduce a spontaneously-spoken utterance that they hear, speakers imitate the prosody of the stimulus in its phonological structure more accurately than the phonetic details. Results suggest that speakers rarely distort the presence of a pitch accent or an intonational phrase boundary, but more often change the nature of the phonetic cues, e.g. the duration of a pause or the occurrence of irregular pitch periods associated with boundaries and accents in American English. These findings argue for an encoding of phonological prosodic structure that is separate from the phonetic cues that signal that structure.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	969-972
Number of pages	4
Journal	Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2011-395
State	Published - 2011
Event	12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2011 - Florence, Italy Duration: Aug 27 2011 → Aug 31 2011

Keywords

Phonetics and phonology
Prosody
Spoken imitation
Spontaneous speech

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
Software
Modeling and Simulation

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10.21437/interspeech.2011-395

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title = "The phonology and phonetics of perceived prosody: What do listeners imitate?",

abstract = "An imitation experiment tests the hypothesis that when asked to reproduce a spontaneously-spoken utterance that they hear, speakers imitate the prosody of the stimulus in its phonological structure more accurately than the phonetic details. Results suggest that speakers rarely distort the presence of a pitch accent or an intonational phrase boundary, but more often change the nature of the phonetic cues, e.g. the duration of a pause or the occurrence of irregular pitch periods associated with boundaries and accents in American English. These findings argue for an encoding of phonological prosodic structure that is separate from the phonetic cues that signal that structure.",

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AB - An imitation experiment tests the hypothesis that when asked to reproduce a spontaneously-spoken utterance that they hear, speakers imitate the prosody of the stimulus in its phonological structure more accurately than the phonetic details. Results suggest that speakers rarely distort the presence of a pitch accent or an intonational phrase boundary, but more often change the nature of the phonetic cues, e.g. the duration of a pause or the occurrence of irregular pitch periods associated with boundaries and accents in American English. These findings argue for an encoding of phonological prosodic structure that is separate from the phonetic cues that signal that structure.

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KW - Spontaneous speech

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The phonology and phonetics of perceived prosody: What do listeners imitate?

Abstract

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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