scholarly journals On the Relationship between Prosodic Features and the Lexical Content of Speech

1964 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 1048-1048
Author(s):  
Henry I. Soron
2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKE BEHRENS ◽  
ULRIKE GUT

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, ‘real’ two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2;0 and 2;3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of multiword utterances become prosodically fluent at different points in time. Second, the variability of prosodic features such as pauses and stress pattern is very high at the onset of combinatorial speech. Consequently, fluency or disfluency of individual examples should not be used as a reliable criterion for their syntactic status and we recommend caution when taking prosody as a cue for syntactic development.


2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
MICHAEL D. KLIFFER

This paper deals with the relationship between rules and conventionality, as reflected in a case study of the two structures N1de N2 and N1du N2. Most occurrences of these can be explained via two rules which evoke ease of referent identification and are a subset of the principles governing the ± definiteness opposition in French. Via dictionaries and Google searches, however, we detect variation that our rules cannot predict, typically when N2 is non-countable and abstract. Local semantic contrasts, i.e. dependent on the lexical content of N1 or N2, further complicate the picture. We conclude that Coseriu's Norm, alias conventionality, must be recognized as a factor coexisting with the rules.


Virittäjä ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 125 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Wiklund ◽  
Salla Kurhila

Koodinvaihdolla tarkoitetaan kielen tai kielimuodon vaihtumista toiseksi samassa puhetilanteessa tai tekstissä. Koodinvaihtoja on tutkittu paljon, mutta niiden prosodisten piirteiden käsittely on jäänyt lähinnä maininnan tasolle. Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee lähemmin koodinvaihtojen prosodiaa. Tavoitteena on koodinvaihtoja sisältävää keskusteluaineistoa analysoimalla valottaa prosodian osuutta koodinvaihtojen merkitysten tulkinnassa. Tutkimuksen aineistona on puolen tunnin puhelinkeskustelu, jossa Suomessa syntynyt mutta pitkään Kanadassa asunut nainen keskustelee Suomessa asuvan siskonpoikansa kanssa. Aineistossa on yhteensä 73 koodinvaihtoesiintymää, joissa keskustelun kieli vaihtuu hetkellisesti suomesta englanniksi. Menetelmällisesti tutkimus nojautuu keskustelunanalyysiin. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että useimmiten koodinvaihtoihin liittyy sävelkorkeuden ja intensiteetin nousu. Tyypillisiä koodinvaihtotapauksia, joissa sävelkorkeus ja intensiteetti nousevat, ovat lainasanat ja referointi. Lainasanoissa nousulla ohjataan vastaanottajan huomiota ja haetaan hänen reaktiotaan sanoihin, jotka ovat olennaisia vuoron sisällön tai kertomuksen kannalta mutta joiden tunnistamisessa saattaisi olla ongelmia. Referoinnissa sen sijaan prosodiset muutokset auttavat luomaan ”toisen äänen”. Tällöin sävelkorkeuden ja intensiteetin nousemiseen voi liittyä myös värittynyt äänenlaatu. Molemmissa tapauksissa prosodinen kohosteisuus koodinvaihdossa kutsuu vastaanottajaa terästämään huomiotaan kyseisiin sanoihin tai ilmauksiin. Nousevan sävelkorkeuden lisäksi aineistossa esiintyy myös jonkin verran ympäristöä matalammalta sävelkorkeudelta ja hiljaisemmalla äänellä lausuttuja koodinvaihtoilmauksia. Tällöin koodinvaihdot ovat pikemmin vuorovaikutusta jäsentäviä ilmauksia kuin kertomuksen kannalta olennaisia sisältösanoja ja enemmän puhujalle itselleen kuin vastaanottajalle suunnattua puhetta. Prosodian vaihtelulla voidaan siis säädellä vastaanottajuuden astetta ja merkitä käytössä olevien kielten suhdetta toisiinsa.   Code-switching and prosody: A case study of the speech of an expatriate Finn living in Canada Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages or language varieties in the same conversation or text. As a phenomenon, code-switching has been investigated fairly extensively, but the prosodic features that characterise many of the switches have not gained much attention in previous studies. This article examines the prosody of code-switching instances in more detail. By analysing naturally occurring conversational data, the article sheds light on the role that prosody plays in the interpretation of code-switching instances. The data consists of a 30-minute telephone conversation in which a lady, who was born in Finland but has lived in Canada for a long time, talks with her nephew, who lives in Finland. The conversation features 73 occurrences of code-switching in which the language of the conversation changes momentarily from Finnish to English. The method of our study is that of Conversation Analysis. The results of the study show that the instances of code-switching are usually produced with raised levels of pitch and intensity. Speakers typically use higher pitch and intensity when uttering loanwords or reported speech. As for loanwords, such prosodic marking invites the recipient to pay attention to the word that carries the rise in order to elicit a reaction to words whose recognition might be problematic. In the case of reported speech, however, prosodic features help to create a “second voice”. In addition to changes of pitch and intensity, the quality of voice can be marked in reported speech. In both these cases the prosodic marking carried by the code-switching invites the recipient to pay attention to the words or expressions in question. In addition to raised pitch and intensity, the data also includes several instances in which the code-switching is marked with lowered levels of pitch and intensity. In these cases, the code-switching typically consists of expressions that structure the interaction rather than constitute important content words as regards the ongoing narration. Furthermore, these instances are also more directed towards the speaker herself than to the recipient. Thus, prosodic changes can be used to regulate the degree of recipiency and to indicate the relationship between the languages being used.  


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Σίμος Ζένιου

This article argues that Romos Philyras adopts the persona of the Pierrot in the work of Romos Philyras in order to critically appropriate the romantic topos of the poet as prophet. Whereas many symbolist and modernist poets have resource to the figure of the pierrot precisely in order to oppose and demystify high romanticist ideology, I demonstrate that Philyras conjoins the two personae —prophet and pierrot. Employing methodological insights from phenomenological approaches to lyric poetry and enriching them with emphasis on formal and prosodic features, I propose a reading of Philyras’s “Pierrot” (1922) that argues against an anthropomorphizing understanding of the relationship between lyric I and the puppet-pierrot. I highlight instead that for Philyras it is precisely the lack of self-consciousness and self-reflective discourse that is the shared ground between the two personae. Contextualizing my reading with pertinent texts from the European tradition (Heinrich von Kleist, Henri-Louis Bergson), I pursue the relationship between anti-humanism and poetic prophecy in Philyras’s prose work in order to throw in relief the forceful and violent character of the visionary experience.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 800-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean QUIGLEY ◽  
Elizabeth NIXON ◽  
Sarah LAWSON

AbstractThe objective of this study was to examine the links between prosodic features of paternal Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and child characteristics. Pitch variability measures were extracted from the speech samples of 50 fathers during unstructured play with their two-year-old children. Evidence for a link between child receptive language ability (measured by the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III) and fathers’ pitch variability was obtained from Multiple Hierarchical Regression. Findings support the hypothesis that fathers tailor their speech to their children. This is one of the few studies to examine the relationship between fathers’ IDS and child language ability.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shizuka Nakamura ◽  
Ryosuke Nakanishi ◽  
Katsuya Takanashi ◽  
Tatsuya Kawahara

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>


Author(s):  
Mary Dalrymple ◽  
John J. Lowe ◽  
Louise Mycock

This chapter investigates the relationship between the phonological or prosodic structure of a spoken utterance and its syntactic, semantic, and information structural analysis. A full theory of the form-meaning correspondence must account for the effect of prosodic features such as intonation patterns on interpretation. In line with other work in LFG that is concerned with the contribution made by phonology or prosody to grammatical structure and interpretation, the existence of a separate level of prosodic structure or p-structure within the projection architecture is assumed. The chapter reviews previous LFG approaches to prosody and the place of prosodic structure within the grammar (Section 11.3), before presenting the approach that is adopted which relies on analyzing a string as having two distinct aspects: one syntactic, the s-string, the other phonological/ prosodic, the p-string (Section 11.4). This approach is exemplified with an account of declarative questions and prosodic focus marking.


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