Children's and adults' perception of questions and statements from terminal fundamental frequency contours

Saindon, Mathieu R.; Cirelli, Laura K.; Schellenberg, E. Glenn; Lieshout, Pascal van; Trehub, Sandra E.

doi:10.1121/1.4982043

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Listeners integrate information across acoustic dimensions when interpreting the location of an intonational boundary (Beach, 1991 ; de Pijper & Sanderman, 1994 ; Streeter, 1978 ), and English speakers place greater weight on the durational than the pitch cues (Jasmin et al, 2021 ). Prior evidence regarding categorical perception of phrase boundaries is mixed: Some researchers have reported a discrimination peak aligned with a category boundary (Remijsen & van Heuven, 1999 ; Saindon et al, 2017a , b ; Schneider & Lintfert, 2003 ), whereas other researchers reported finding no discrimination peak (Falé & Faria, 2006 ). Future work could investigate the existence of discrete multidimensional categories for phrase boundaries using a paradigm similar to that used in the current paper.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidence for categorical perception of suprasegmentals has been mixed. It has been reported for F0 peak alignment (Kohler, 1987 ) and high versus low boundary tones (Remijsen & van Heuven, 1999 ; Saindon et al, 2017a , b ; Schneider & Lintfert, 2003 ). However, other papers have reported finding no discrimination peak for high versus low boundary tones (Falé & Faria, 2006 ) or emphatic (vs. neutral) accents (Ladd & Morton, 1997 ).…”

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confidence: 80%

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Short-term perceptual reweighting in suprasegmental categorization

et al. 2022

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Segmental speech units such as phonemes are described as multidimensional categories whose perception involves contributions from multiple acoustic input dimensions, and the relative perceptual weights of these dimensions respond dynamically to context. For example, when speech is altered to create an “accent” in which two acoustic dimensions are correlated in a manner opposite that of long-term experience, the dimension that carries less perceptual weight is down-weighted to contribute less in category decisions. It remains unclear, however, whether this short-term reweighting extends to perception of suprasegmental features that span multiple phonemes, syllables, or words, in part because it has remained debatable whether suprasegmental features are perceived categorically. Here, we investigated the relative contribution of two acoustic dimensions to word emphasis. Participants categorized instances of a two-word phrase pronounced with typical covariation of fundamental frequency (F0) and duration, and in the context of an artificial “accent” in which F0 and duration (established in prior research on English speech as “primary” and “secondary” dimensions, respectively) covaried atypically. When categorizing “accented” speech, listeners rapidly down-weighted the secondary dimension (duration). This result indicates that listeners continually track short-term regularities across speech input and dynamically adjust the weight of acoustic evidence for suprasegmental decisions. Thus, dimension-based statistical learning appears to be a widespread phenomenon in speech perception extending to both segmental and suprasegmental categorization.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 80%

Short-term perceptual reweighting in suprasegmental categorization

et al. 2022

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“…The nonsignificant differences in pitch change across tasks and sentence types could be attributed to the fact that, in Inuktitut, tonal movements are restricted to the end of the sentence; tonal changes throughout the utterance do not encode grammatical information, this information being encoded by a rich morphology. Admittedly, tonal variations at the beginning of the utterance, albeit a cue for sentence type (see Saindon et al 2017a), are redundant in English, since grammatical (changes in word order, do-support) and tonal information (final boundary tones) provide sufficient cues. We believe, however, that it was important to begin by analyzing sentence types to establish a descriptive basis for the uses of pitch in this bilingual population.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

et al. 2022

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We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch in the first pitch accent. In a discourse-completion task, they also diverged from controls in the number of non-target-like realizations, particularly in declarative question contexts. These findings demonstrate patterns of prosodic and morphosyntactic CLI and highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information in prosodic studies. Moreover, we show that the absence of tonal variations can be transferred in a stable language contact situation. Finally, the results indicate that comprehension may be hindered for this group of bilinguals when sentence type is not redundantly marked.

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“…Contrastingly, English-speaking children acquire focus marking much earlier (by the age of five), while still lagging in comprehension (Wells, Peppé & Goulandris, 2004). Furthermore, children acquire sensitivity to the overall contours of their language early (Frota, Butler & Vigário, 2013), but only master the functions of such contours later (Ota, 2016; Saindon, Cirelli, Schellenberg, van Lieshout & Trehub, 2017).…”

Section: Children's Acquisition Of Prosodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese

2020

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Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children had acquired the lexical prosody (contrast between accented and unaccented words), a pre-requisite for downstep realization. While downstep, the prosodic phrasing involved in the complex NPs in this study, was established, children showed interspeaker variation with the metrical boost, a feature that distinguishes recursively embedded NPs from non-recursive NPs. However, variability was also found in adults, indicating that, in contrast to previous results, prosodic encoding of syntax is generally unreliable in adult speech. Finally, the magnitude of metrical boost was not correlated to children's ability to produce recursive possessives, suggesting that prosody does not help bootstrap Japanese children's recursive phrases.

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Children's and adults' perception of questions and statements from terminal fundamental frequency contours

Cited by 5 publications

References 59 publications

Short-term perceptual reweighting in suprasegmental categorization

Short-term perceptual reweighting in suprasegmental categorization

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese

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