Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-97
V. Silber-Varod, Ella Alfon, N. Amir
In this study we examine the perceptual strength of prosodic boundaries in Hebrew speech. The stimuli consisted of 28 sequences of two inter-pausal units (IPUs) taken from the Map Task recordings in Hebrew. Listeners were exposed only to the silent pause following the first IPU (hence, Explicit pauses) while the second pause was omitted (hence, Implicit pauses) thus creating a stimulus model of IPU-pause-IPU. Ten female listeners labeled the strength of each break between adjacent words on a scale from 1 (no break) to 5 (strong break). Higher average scores were assigned to the implicit pauses as compared to the explicit ones, however scores for explicit pauses received higher agreement between raters. Moreover, we found only borderline significant influence of the explicit pause duration on the raters' scores. Looking at gender differences, the results suggest that raters' scores were higher when the speakers were females. Further, an interaction was found between the gender of the speaker and the gender of the recipient (i.e., the interlocutor). In particular, female speakers received a higher score overall, and for male speakers the rating was higher when they spoke to males than to females.
{"title":"Perception of the strength of prosodic breaks in three conditions: Explicit pause, implicit pause, and no pause","authors":"V. Silber-Varod, Ella Alfon, N. Amir","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-97","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-97","url":null,"abstract":"In this study we examine the perceptual strength of prosodic boundaries in Hebrew speech. The stimuli consisted of 28 sequences of two inter-pausal units (IPUs) taken from the Map Task recordings in Hebrew. Listeners were exposed only to the silent pause following the first IPU (hence, Explicit pauses) while the second pause was omitted (hence, Implicit pauses) thus creating a stimulus model of IPU-pause-IPU. Ten female listeners labeled the strength of each break between adjacent words on a scale from 1 (no break) to 5 (strong break). Higher average scores were assigned to the implicit pauses as compared to the explicit ones, however scores for explicit pauses received higher agreement between raters. Moreover, we found only borderline significant influence of the explicit pause duration on the raters' scores. Looking at gender differences, the results suggest that raters' scores were higher when the speakers were females. Further, an interaction was found between the gender of the speaker and the gender of the recipient (i.e., the interlocutor). In particular, female speakers received a higher score overall, and for male speakers the rating was higher when they spoke to males than to females.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121425357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-1
J. M. Toro
Prosody is a major source of information that both adults and infants use to organize the speech signal, from segmenting words to inferring syntactic structures. Here, I will explore the extent to which the ability to take advantage of prosodic cues that we observe in humans might emerge from sensibilities already present in other species. I will review recent studies along 2 lines of research. The first one covers research into how listeners follow the principles described by the Iambic-Trochaic Law to group sounds. The second one explores how they take advantage of sonority differences and natural prosodic contours to better identify words. Together, the evidence gathered so far suggests that, similarly to humans, non-human animals use certain acoustic cues present in the signal to extract difficult-to-find regularities. More broadly, they provide support to the idea that general perceptual biases that form the bases for prosodic bootstrapping are already present in other animals. Importantly, in humans but not in other animals, such biases are combined with domain-specific representations that guide the discovery of linguistic structures.
{"title":"Using prosody to organize the signal: Sensitivities across species set the stage for prosodic bootstrapping","authors":"J. M. Toro","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-1","url":null,"abstract":"Prosody is a major source of information that both adults and infants use to organize the speech signal, from segmenting words to inferring syntactic structures. Here, I will explore the extent to which the ability to take advantage of prosodic cues that we observe in humans might emerge from sensibilities already present in other species. I will review recent studies along 2 lines of research. The first one covers research into how listeners follow the principles described by the Iambic-Trochaic Law to group sounds. The second one explores how they take advantage of sonority differences and natural prosodic contours to better identify words. Together, the evidence gathered so far suggests that, similarly to humans, non-human animals use certain acoustic cues present in the signal to extract difficult-to-find regularities. More broadly, they provide support to the idea that general perceptual biases that form the bases for prosodic bootstrapping are already present in other animals. Importantly, in humans but not in other animals, such biases are combined with domain-specific representations that guide the discovery of linguistic structures.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114708590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-107
Andy Murphy, Irena Yanushevskaya, A. N. Chasaide, C. Gobl
This paper explores how the acoustic characteristics of the voice signal affect. It considers the proposition that the cueing of affect relies on variations in voice source parameters (includ-ing f 0 ) that involve both global, uniform shifts across an utterance, and local, within-utterance changes, at prosodically rele-vant points. To test this, a perception test was conducted with stimuli where modifications were made to voice source parameters of a synthesised baseline utterance, to target angry and sad renditions. The baseline utterance was generated with the ABAIR Irish TTS system, for one male and one female voice. The voice parameter manipulations drew on earlier production and perception experiments, and involved three stimulus series: those with global, local and a combination of global and local adjustments. 65 listeners judged the stimuli as one of the fol-lowing: angry, interested, no emotion, relaxed and sad , and in-dicated how strongly any affect was perceived. Results broadly support the initial proposition, in that the most effective signalling of both angry and sad affect tended to involve those stimuli which combined global and local adjustments. However, results for stimuli targeting angry were often judged as interested , in-dicating that the negative valence is not consistently cued by the manipulations in these stimuli.
{"title":"Affect Expression: Global and Local Control of Voice Source Parameters","authors":"Andy Murphy, Irena Yanushevskaya, A. N. Chasaide, C. Gobl","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-107","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores how the acoustic characteristics of the voice signal affect. It considers the proposition that the cueing of affect relies on variations in voice source parameters (includ-ing f 0 ) that involve both global, uniform shifts across an utterance, and local, within-utterance changes, at prosodically rele-vant points. To test this, a perception test was conducted with stimuli where modifications were made to voice source parameters of a synthesised baseline utterance, to target angry and sad renditions. The baseline utterance was generated with the ABAIR Irish TTS system, for one male and one female voice. The voice parameter manipulations drew on earlier production and perception experiments, and involved three stimulus series: those with global, local and a combination of global and local adjustments. 65 listeners judged the stimuli as one of the fol-lowing: angry, interested, no emotion, relaxed and sad , and in-dicated how strongly any affect was perceived. Results broadly support the initial proposition, in that the most effective signalling of both angry and sad affect tended to involve those stimuli which combined global and local adjustments. However, results for stimuli targeting angry were often judged as interested , in-dicating that the negative valence is not consistently cued by the manipulations in these stimuli.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114853924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-126
S. Verheul, Adriana Hartman, Roselinde Supheert, Aoju Chen
Speakers use both speech prosody and visual prosody (facial expressions, gestures, body postures) to express emotion. Receivers register and recognise emotion via both types of prosodic cues. In this study, we examined gender differences in both recognition of type of emotion (e.g. anger vs. joy) and perceived emotionality (e.g. the degree of anger) expressed via speech prosody and visual prosody in a second language (L2). In a perception experiment using film scenes, proficient Dutch learners of English rated the emotionality of each protagonist and identified the specific type of emotion expressed by each protagonist in each scene in both the visual-only and audio-only modality. We have found no evidence for gender-related differences in perceived emotionality, possibly due to potential difficulty of participants in identifying with the protagonists portrayed in a different society. However, the female Dutch learners of English were more accurate in recognising type of emotion than the male Dutch learners of English from both speech prosody and visual prosody. These findings suggest that there is transfer of learners’ ability in recognising type of emotion in the native language to L2 and that female L2 learners may be better at learning cues in speech prosody to emotion in L2.
{"title":"Gender effects on perception of emotional speech- and visual-prosody in a second language: Emotion recognition in English-speaking films","authors":"S. Verheul, Adriana Hartman, Roselinde Supheert, Aoju Chen","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-126","url":null,"abstract":"Speakers use both speech prosody and visual prosody (facial expressions, gestures, body postures) to express emotion. Receivers register and recognise emotion via both types of prosodic cues. In this study, we examined gender differences in both recognition of type of emotion (e.g. anger vs. joy) and perceived emotionality (e.g. the degree of anger) expressed via speech prosody and visual prosody in a second language (L2). In a perception experiment using film scenes, proficient Dutch learners of English rated the emotionality of each protagonist and identified the specific type of emotion expressed by each protagonist in each scene in both the visual-only and audio-only modality. We have found no evidence for gender-related differences in perceived emotionality, possibly due to potential difficulty of participants in identifying with the protagonists portrayed in a different society. However, the female Dutch learners of English were more accurate in recognising type of emotion than the male Dutch learners of English from both speech prosody and visual prosody. These findings suggest that there is transfer of learners’ ability in recognising type of emotion in the native language to L2 and that female L2 learners may be better at learning cues in speech prosody to emotion in L2.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124444798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-65
Jinyu Li, L. Lancia
Speakers usually respond to time-delayed auditory feedback (DAF) by decreasing their speech rate (i.e., lengthening syllables). However, the syllable position in prosodic structure may affect syllabic prominence and duration. In the present study, we investigated whether the lengthening effect of DAF on syllables could depend on their position in French utterance. We analyzed recordings of several repetitions of three five-syllables French sentences from 10 French speakers under three conditions of DAF (0, 60, 120ms). The results suggest that the duration of syllables is generally longer when DAF is present, and it increases with the increasing DAF level. Accented vowels are more lengthened by DAF in relation to nonaccented vowels in the same accentual group. Final sentence vowels, which bear the nuclear pitch accent and may be additionally affected by final lengthening, could even be more lengthened by DAF. Given that the extent of lengthening effect is not correlated with the original syllabic duration, we assume that the greater lengthening effect on accented vowels could not be due to the longer duration of these vowels in general. Overall, our results suggest that speakers’ responses to DAF depend on the syllabic status in the prosodic hierarchy.
{"title":"Effects of delayed auditory feedback interacting with prosodic structure","authors":"Jinyu Li, L. Lancia","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-65","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-65","url":null,"abstract":"Speakers usually respond to time-delayed auditory feedback (DAF) by decreasing their speech rate (i.e., lengthening syllables). However, the syllable position in prosodic structure may affect syllabic prominence and duration. In the present study, we investigated whether the lengthening effect of DAF on syllables could depend on their position in French utterance. We analyzed recordings of several repetitions of three five-syllables French sentences from 10 French speakers under three conditions of DAF (0, 60, 120ms). The results suggest that the duration of syllables is generally longer when DAF is present, and it increases with the increasing DAF level. Accented vowels are more lengthened by DAF in relation to nonaccented vowels in the same accentual group. Final sentence vowels, which bear the nuclear pitch accent and may be additionally affected by final lengthening, could even be more lengthened by DAF. Given that the extent of lengthening effect is not correlated with the original syllabic duration, we assume that the greater lengthening effect on accented vowels could not be due to the longer duration of these vowels in general. Overall, our results suggest that speakers’ responses to DAF depend on the syllabic status in the prosodic hierarchy.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125454004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-57
G. Severijnen, H. Bosker, J. McQueen
The present study examined two acoustic cues in the production of lexical stress in Dutch: spectral tilt and overall intensity. Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996) reported that spectral tilt is a more reliable cue to stress than intensity. However, that study included only a small number of talkers (10) and only syllables with the vowels /a ː / and / ɔ /. The present study re-examined this issue in a larger and more variable dataset. We recorded 38 native speakers of Dutch (20 females) producing 744 tokens of Dutch segmentally overlapping words (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM, “first name” vs. “respectable”), targeting 10 different vowels, in variable sentence contexts. For each syllable, we measured overall intensity and spectral tilt following Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996). Results from Linear Discriminant Analyses showed that, for the vowel /a ː / alone, spectral tilt showed an advantage over intensity, as evidenced by higher stressed/unstressed syllable classification accuracy scores for spectral tilt. However, when all vowels were included in the analysis, the advantage disappeared. These findings confirm that spectral tilt plays a larger role in signaling stress in Dutch /a ː / but show that, for a larger sample of Dutch vowels, overall intensity and spectral tilt are equally important.
{"title":"Acoustic correlates of Dutch lexical stress re-examined: Spectral tilt is not always more reliable than intensity","authors":"G. Severijnen, H. Bosker, J. McQueen","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-57","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-57","url":null,"abstract":"The present study examined two acoustic cues in the production of lexical stress in Dutch: spectral tilt and overall intensity. Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996) reported that spectral tilt is a more reliable cue to stress than intensity. However, that study included only a small number of talkers (10) and only syllables with the vowels /a ː / and / ɔ /. The present study re-examined this issue in a larger and more variable dataset. We recorded 38 native speakers of Dutch (20 females) producing 744 tokens of Dutch segmentally overlapping words (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM, “first name” vs. “respectable”), targeting 10 different vowels, in variable sentence contexts. For each syllable, we measured overall intensity and spectral tilt following Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996). Results from Linear Discriminant Analyses showed that, for the vowel /a ː / alone, spectral tilt showed an advantage over intensity, as evidenced by higher stressed/unstressed syllable classification accuracy scores for spectral tilt. However, when all vowels were included in the analysis, the advantage disappeared. These findings confirm that spectral tilt plays a larger role in signaling stress in Dutch /a ː / but show that, for a larger sample of Dutch vowels, overall intensity and spectral tilt are equally important.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"45 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131771021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-93
Tatiana V. Kachkovskaia, A. Menshikova, D. Kocharov, Pavel Kholiavin, Anna Mamushina
The acoustic features of the speaker’s voice in dialogues are li-able to change due to various situational factors, such as success of communication, social distance between the interlocutors, conversational roles etc. This paper presents an analysis of variation in the basic prosodic features—pitch, intensity, and speech tempo—across speakers’ gender, conversational role (informa-tion leader vs. follower), and social distance. The research is based on the SibLing speech corpus where five degrees of social distance between the interlocutors are presented: there are dialogues between same-gender siblings, same-gender friends, same-gender and opposite-gender strangers, strangers of different age and social status. Each pair of interlocutors played a card-matching game and performed a classical map task. The factor of conversational role revealed a significant influence on all the analysed speech features: pitch, intensity, and speech tempo. Gender was not found to influence speech tempo, unlike pitch and loudness. Social distance was shown to play a significant role for speech tempo (e.g., it tends to be lower in dialogues with strangers of different age and social sta-tus), and also, in interaction with other factors, for pitch and loudness. There was also a significant influence of the type of task: card-matching game vs. map task.
{"title":"Social and situational factors of speaker variability in collaborative dialogues","authors":"Tatiana V. Kachkovskaia, A. Menshikova, D. Kocharov, Pavel Kholiavin, Anna Mamushina","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-93","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-93","url":null,"abstract":"The acoustic features of the speaker’s voice in dialogues are li-able to change due to various situational factors, such as success of communication, social distance between the interlocutors, conversational roles etc. This paper presents an analysis of variation in the basic prosodic features—pitch, intensity, and speech tempo—across speakers’ gender, conversational role (informa-tion leader vs. follower), and social distance. The research is based on the SibLing speech corpus where five degrees of social distance between the interlocutors are presented: there are dialogues between same-gender siblings, same-gender friends, same-gender and opposite-gender strangers, strangers of different age and social status. Each pair of interlocutors played a card-matching game and performed a classical map task. The factor of conversational role revealed a significant influence on all the analysed speech features: pitch, intensity, and speech tempo. Gender was not found to influence speech tempo, unlike pitch and loudness. Social distance was shown to play a significant role for speech tempo (e.g., it tends to be lower in dialogues with strangers of different age and social sta-tus), and also, in interaction with other factors, for pitch and loudness. There was also a significant influence of the type of task: card-matching game vs. map task.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130795676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-4
E. Strickland, Anne Lacheret-Dujour, C. Simard
{"title":"Prosody and cognitive accessibility in left-detached topics: lessons from Nigerian Pidgin","authors":"E. Strickland, Anne Lacheret-Dujour, C. Simard","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133193603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-22
Tingbo Wang, Heng Ding
Atypical pitch production and perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported mainly from non-tonal language backgrounds. In tonal languages such as Mandarin, the changes of pitch not only signal prosody at a sentence level but also contrast word meanings known as tones at a lexical level. It remains unclear whether children with ASD from tonal language backgrounds show a deficit in the use of pitch at both levels. Therefore, the current study aims to exploit whether Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibit atypical lexical pitch production and whether their performance is influenced by semantic information in a disyllabic true and pseudo-words imitation task. Results from acoustic analysis demonstrated significant differences in pitch and duration measures between both subject groups and word types.
{"title":"Mandarin Disyllabic Word Imitation in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder","authors":"Tingbo Wang, Heng Ding","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-22","url":null,"abstract":"Atypical pitch production and perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported mainly from non-tonal language backgrounds. In tonal languages such as Mandarin, the changes of pitch not only signal prosody at a sentence level but also contrast word meanings known as tones at a lexical level. It remains unclear whether children with ASD from tonal language backgrounds show a deficit in the use of pitch at both levels. Therefore, the current study aims to exploit whether Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibit atypical lexical pitch production and whether their performance is influenced by semantic information in a disyllabic true and pseudo-words imitation task. Results from acoustic analysis demonstrated significant differences in pitch and duration measures between both subject groups and word types.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133792102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-23DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-7
Yujia Song, Cynthia G. Clopper, Laura Wagner
Uptalk refers to the use of rising intonation on declarative utterances. Previous research has shown that, at age 6 years, children use rising contours with declaratives more frequently than adults, and this pattern appears to persist until 14 years of age. However, it is unclear why such a trend persists. To gain a clearer developmental picture of uptalk, the present study analyzed the form and function of uptalk produced by children aged 6 to 7 and 10 to 11 years from the American Midwest, using a storytelling task. Contrary to previous findings, the results indicate that children of both age groups use uptalk in an adult-like way: they overwhelmingly favor L-H% over H-H% boundary tones, and most strongly associate the contour with continuation. The lack of age differences suggests that children’s use of uptalk is comparable to that of adults by the age of 6, at least in certain narrative contexts. The use of a familiar storytelling task in the current study may explain the greater success observed for children than in previous studies, suggesting the relative importance of the elicitation task in the investigation of child speech.
{"title":"Children’s Use of Uptalk in Narratives","authors":"Yujia Song, Cynthia G. Clopper, Laura Wagner","doi":"10.21437/speechprosody.2022-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21437/speechprosody.2022-7","url":null,"abstract":"Uptalk refers to the use of rising intonation on declarative utterances. Previous research has shown that, at age 6 years, children use rising contours with declaratives more frequently than adults, and this pattern appears to persist until 14 years of age. However, it is unclear why such a trend persists. To gain a clearer developmental picture of uptalk, the present study analyzed the form and function of uptalk produced by children aged 6 to 7 and 10 to 11 years from the American Midwest, using a storytelling task. Contrary to previous findings, the results indicate that children of both age groups use uptalk in an adult-like way: they overwhelmingly favor L-H% over H-H% boundary tones, and most strongly associate the contour with continuation. The lack of age differences suggests that children’s use of uptalk is comparable to that of adults by the age of 6, at least in certain narrative contexts. The use of a familiar storytelling task in the current study may explain the greater success observed for children than in previous studies, suggesting the relative importance of the elicitation task in the investigation of child speech.","PeriodicalId":442842,"journal":{"name":"Speech Prosody 2022","volume":"125 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115509686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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