An examination of prosody and second language sentence processing through pause insertion

Objectives: Research on second language (L2) sentence comprehension often has examined reliance on semantic and syntactic information but has left aside for the most part the role of prosodic cues. In the present study, we compare less- and more-proficient L2 learners’ integration of prosody and syntax structure during auditory L2 sentence comprehension. Design: Two group Chinese learners of L2 English learners (A2 and C1 levels) participated in an auditory comprehension task, which included sentences that had artificial pauses inserted either between or within syntactic boundaries. After hearing each sentence, learners were asked to judge the translation as ‘identical’ or ‘not identical’ on the keyboard. Data Analysis: We conducted t-tests and an analysis of variance to examine prosodic effects among the two learner groups. Findings: The results showed that both A2 and C1 learners were sensitive to pauses. However, the direction and magnitude of this sensitivity was significantly different for the two groups. A2 learners were faster to respond to auditory sentences in which a brief pause was placed within syntactic phrases. Contrarily, C1 learners responded faster when the brief pause was placed between syntactic phrases. Originality: Unique to the present study is the inclusion of the pause-insertion paradigm to examine the role of prosody in L2 auditory sentence processing. Implications: The results imply that the two groups of learners do not rely on prosodic and syntactic cues in the same manner when processing L2 sentences. We argue that the processing mechanisms involved in L2 sentence comprehension evolve hand-in-hand with L2 proficiency development. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research.

Modular Clause Composition in Plautus

The iambic trimeters of Plautus are analyzed by syntactic boundaries and shown to be composed in a very narrow range of clause-measures using regular termini points in trimeters—line-end and the two caesuras. The five most frequently used syntactic measures account for half of trimeter composition. Plautus composed in modular units of syntax. This paper demonstrates: 1) the most frequent clause-type in Plautus’ trimeters is a trimeter in length, 2) the most frequent clause-type involving enjambment is exactly two trimeters in length, 3) certain clause-types appear with greater frequency in certain plays of Plautus, 4) clause-types can be shown to have distinctive, rhythmic cadences associated with each type. This modular method of clause composition must have been the product of its functional service to the playwright as he generated plays, to the actors who memorized them, and to the audience who heard discourse delivered in regular clause-packets.

The role of linguistic prosody in the responses to recited poetry

Psychological studies of poetry have focused on the responses to written text, and little is known on how choices made by reciters affect listeners’ responses. We hypothesized that syntax-compatible prosodic cues – pauses and pitch breaks – would increase preference by increasing comprehension. Participants rated different declamations of the same poem for preference and comprehension. The match between syntactic boundaries and linguistic prosody cues was quantified in each version, and then we tested how this match predicted listeners’ responses. Unlike our predictions, linguistic prosody had opposite effects on comprehension vs. preference: Comprehension was enhanced by using both sentence pauses and clause pitch breaks, while avoiding clause pauses. When controlling for comprehension, preference was enhanced by clause pauses but hampered by clause breaks and sentence pauses. Results are consistent with the possibility that listeners enjoyed losing track of syntactic boundaries, in line with the idea that deviation may lead to pleasure.

The Impact of Parkinson's Disease on Breath Pauses and Their Relationship to Speech Impairment: A Longitudinal Study

Purpose The purposes of this longitudinal study were to (a) examine the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) progression on breath pause patterns and speech and linguistic errors and (b) determine the extent to which breath pauses and speech and linguistic errors contribute to speech impairment. Method Eight individuals with PD and eight age- and sex-matched control participants produced a reading passage on two occasions (Time 1 and Time 2) 3 years and 7 months apart on average. Two speech-language pathologists rated the severity of speech impairment for all participants at each time. Dependent variables included the location of each breath pause relative to syntax and punctuation as well as the number of disfluencies and mazes. Results At Time 1, there were no significant differences between the groups regarding breath pause patterns. At Time 2, individuals with PD produced significantly fewer breath pauses at major syntactic boundaries and periods as well as significantly more breath pauses at locations with no punctuation than control participants. Individuals with PD produced a significantly greater number of disfluencies than control participants at both time points. There were no significant differences between the groups in the number of mazes produced at either time point. Together, the number of mazes and the percentage of breath pauses at locations with no punctuation explained 50% of the variance associated with the ratings of severity of speech impairment. Conclusion These results highlight the importance of targeting both respiratory physiological and cognitive–linguistic systems in order to improve speech production in individuals with PD.

Effect of Clear Speech on the Duration of Silent Intervals at Syntactic and Phonemic Boundaries in the Speech of Individuals With Parkinson Disease

Purpose The purpose of the current investigation was to determine the extent to which individuals with and without Parkinson disease (PD) modified silent interval durations when using a clear speaking style. Method Ten individuals with idiopathic PD and 10 older adult control speakers produced a reading passage using both habitual and clear speaking styles. Silent intervals lasting 15 ms and longer were identified and extracted. Each silent interval was categorized according to the surrounding syntactic context of the reading passage. In addition, voiceless stop gaps that occurred within words, phrases, or clauses were categorized by the preceding phonemic context. Results Statistical analyses revealed that all participants increased silent interval duration with a clear speaking style at inter-sentence and intra-sentence syntactic boundaries. Compared to controls, individuals with PD exhibited significantly less increase in silent interval durations at these syntactic boundaries. Control speakers also increased silent stop gap durations in the clear speaking style regardless of preceding phonemic context. Individuals with PD, however, only increased stop gap duration when the silent interval was preceded by a sonorant. Conclusion These findings suggest that speakers with PD exhibit less clarity-related increase in silent interval duration than control speakers. In addition, speakers with PD exhibited significant increases in silent interval duration that coincided with syntactic boundaries of the reading passage but little to no clarity-related modulation of stop gap intervals. Therefore, these data suggest that speakers with PD exhibited changes in silent interval durations that were more so associated with modulation of speech prosody than articulation when using a clearer speaking style.

Relative Clause and Downstep in Japanese

It has been proposed that Japanese downstep, in which the pitch register is lowered after an accented phrase, is sensitive to certain syntactic boundaries. In this paper, we investigate whether downstep is blocked at the relative clause boundary in a production experiment with ten speakers. The results suggest that it does not block downstep. On the other hand, there is a difference between adjectives and verbs when they are used attributively with a head noun: Downstep is observed robustly in the verb condition, whereas there is much inter-speaker variation in the adjective condition. Taken together with the results of past research, we propose that the different patterns found by syntactic category, in particular, adjectives, verbs, and nouns, may be explained by assuming speakers’ knowledge of the behavior of these categories that is activated when they pronounce the phrase. Nouns and verbs are readily available as a combined concept in Japanese and thus downstep is not blocked, whereas combinations of adjectives are not so readily available, and thus speakers may insert a boundary, breaking up a phrase that would otherwise constitute a single domain for downstep.

Impaired Recognition of Metrical and Syntactic Boundaries in Children with Developmental Language Disorders

In oral language, syntactic structure is cued in part by phrasal metrical hierarchies of acoustic stress patterns. For example, many children’s texts use prosodic phrasing comprising tightly integrated hierarchies of metre and syntax to highlight the phonological and syntactic structure of language. Children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) are relatively insensitive to acoustic stress. Here, we disrupted the coincidence of metrical and syntactic boundaries as cued by stress patterns in children’s texts so that metrical and/or syntactic phrasing conflicted. We tested three groups of children: children with DLD, age-matched typically developing controls (AMC) and younger language-matched controls (YLC). Children with DLDs and younger, language-matched controls were poor at spotting both metrical and syntactic disruptions. The data are interpreted within a prosodic phrasing hypothesis of DLD based on impaired acoustic processing of speech rhythm.

When grammaticalization does not occur

Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in grammaticalization. In this paper, however, we are not concerned with reaching a better understanding of the nature of grammaticalization phenomena or their triggering factors, but we ask under what circumstances grammaticalization does not take place, even if it would have seemed likely to – a topic that has scarcely been addressed in the literature. Based on a comparative investigation of the historical development of a class of Indo-European spatial adverbs, we argue that mismatches between layers of linguistic structure present one type of situation in which grammaticalization may be blocked. For grammaticalization to occur, the outer semantic-syntactic boundaries of the potentially grammaticalizing construction must be matched by prosodic boundaries. If prosodic chunking is shifted in relation to semantic-syntactic chunking, grammaticalization may be prevented.

Detection of Sentence Boundaries in Polish Based on Acoustic Cues

In this article the authors investigated and presented the experiments on the sentence boundaries annotation from Polish speech using acoustic cues as a source of information. The main result of the investigation is an algorithm for detection of the syntactic boundaries appearing in the places of punctuation marks. In the first stage, the algorithm detects pauses and divides a speech signal into segments. In the second stage, it verifies the configuration of acoustic features and puts hypotheses of the positions of punctuation marks. Classification is performed with parameters describing phone duration and energy, speaking rate, fundamental frequency contours and frequency bands. The best results were achieved for Naive Bayes classifier. The efficiency of the algorithm is 52% precision and 98% recall. Another significant outcome of the research is statistical models of acoustic cues correlated with punctuation in spoken Polish.