Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Abstract

This paper is an introductory investigation, comparing the intonation of Persian declaratives in read and spontaneous speech styles. The results indicate that 32% of the 254 spontaneous declaratives studied show one or more of the following intonational differences: a high or downstepped high tone at Intonational Phrase end, marking the incompleteness of the message; the existence of more pauses leading to a greater number of Intonational Phrases, pre-pause vowel lengthening, and pitch reset; a flatter contour and less pitch variation caused by a speaker's boredom or givenness of the information content; an initial high boundary tone resulted from a low degree of assertiveness.Keywords: intonation, prosody, Persian, read speech, spontaneous speech, pitch track IntroductionThis research reports some preliminary observations regarding the differences between the intonational properties of read and spontaneous speech in Persian. In studies that make use of read speech (also known as lab speech), the speaker is provided with the written version of the test materials and is possibly given some instructions as to how to read them. This type of speech is usually elicited in a laboratory setting and done for a specific linguistic purpose. Spontaneous speech refers to utterances produced without any external stimulus, e.g., a natural conversation carried out between two interlocutors. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the intonational differences between the two styles. The research on Persian intonation done in the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonation (Bruce, 1977;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Ladd, 2008) has so far implemented controlled speech (Mahjani, 2003;Jun, et al., 2003;Sadat-Tehrani, 2007;Taheri and Xu, 2012;Hosseini, 2014;and Rahmani, Rietveld, and Gussenhoven, 2016), and to the best of my knowledge, there has not been any documentation on the distinguishing characteristics of read and spontaneous speech. This paper is an initial investigation of this issue.The present paper does not intend to argue for the use of spontaneous over read data; although the use of read speech has been criticized as unnatural and unrepresentative of real speech, it has its own merit. For instance, in a laboratory setting, the researcher has full control over many variables and determines their effect on intonation patterns, which is not the case when studying unscripted speech. Also, spontaneous data may not always contain all the structures that the researcher plans to investigate -for more arguments in favour of lab speech see Xu (2010). The view here, in line with that in Wagner, Trouvain, and Zimmerer (2015), is that making use of Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 2:06 PM

Downstepped High Tone in Persian Spontaneous Speech Intonation

“…This investigation has examined the existence of a DS boundary tone in a corpus of spontaneous phone conversations. A DS boundary tone was first observed in non‐finally stressed APs in Persian spontaneous declaratives (Sadat‐Tehrani ), and this paper has further detected the instantiations of such a tone in spontaneous YNQs and declaratives.…”

“…Having looked at YNQs, we now further explore the occurrence of a DS tone in declaratives. As mentioned earlier, a DS tone has been observed to exist in Persian declaratives in non‐finally stressed APs (Sadat‐Tehrani ). In the next study, the occurrence of the DS tone in finally stressed APs was checked.…”

“…A DS tone in Persian has been detected in Sadat‐Tehrani (). This work studied the differences between read and spontaneous Persian declaratives.…”

“…Downstep in the spontaneous declarative [æ′mæl‐ɛ sisɛk′ʃɛn daʃt‐æm] ‘I had a C‐section’, from Sadat‐Tehrani (:6)…”

“…Here, there is no DS and the utterance ends high. While the high and the downstepped high endings both give the utterance a continuation‐seeking and floor‐holding nature, the downstepped version is characterized by final lengthening and a following pause (Sadat‐Tehrani ).…”