Language-Specificity in the Perception of Paralinguistic Intonational Meaning

Chen, Aoju; Gussenhoven, Carlos; Rietveld, Toni

doi:10.1177/00238309040470040101

Cited by 117 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Generally, friendliness or social interest are two closely related attitudes that seem to be marked by a phrase-final high or rise. These results are generally consistent with results for friendliness obtained for English and Dutch by Chen et al (2001) where higher F0 range and a final rising contour elicited more responses for friendliness.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Phrase-final rises as a prosodic feature in wh-questions in Swedish human–machine dialogue

House¹

2005

Speech Communication

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This paper examines the extent to which optional final rises occur in a set of 200 wh-questions extracted from a large corpus of computer-directed spontaneous speech in Swedish and discusses the function these rises may have in signalling dialogue acts and speaker attitude over and beyond an information question. Final rises occurred in 22% of the utterances, primarily in conjunction with final focal accent. Children exhibited the largest percentage of final rises (32%), with women second (27%) and men lowest (17%). The distribution of the rises in the material is examined and evidence relating to the final rise as a signal of a social interaction oriented dialogue act is gathered from the distribution. Two separate perception tests were carried out to test the hypothesis that high and late focal accent peaks in a wh-question are perceived as friendlier and more socially interested than low and early peaks. Generally, the results were consistent with these hypotheses when the late peaks were in phrase-final position. Finally, the results of this study are discussed in terms of pragmatic and attitudinal meanings and biological codes.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Phrase-final rises as a prosodic feature in wh-questions in Swedish human–machine dialogue

House¹

2005

Speech Communication

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“…Cruz-Ferreira (1989), for instance, asked Portuguese learners of English and English learners of Portuguese to indicate meaning differences in intonational minimal pairs (e.g., She gave her dog biscuits*in which either the dog or the person gets biscuits) and reported three strategies: transfer of L1, usage of universal codes (e.g., high pitch for nonfinality, see also Chen, Gussenhoven, & Rietveld, 2004), and choice of the more neutral meaning. Niioka et al (2005) (Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002;Ito & Speer, 2008;Weber, Braun, & Crocker, 2006).…”

Section: Interpreting Intonational Meaning In L2 225mentioning

confidence: 99%

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

Braun

Tagliapietra

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral for Dutch, and as contrastive for German. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance realised with a double peak pattern. In particular, this study showed shorter lexical decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., PELIKAAN, “pelican”) following a contrastively related prime (e.g., flamingo, “flamingo”) only when the primes were embedded in sentences with a contrastive double peak contour, not in sentences with a neutral hat pattern. The present study replicates Experiment 1a of Braun and Tagliapietra (2009) with German learners of Dutch. Highly proficient learners of Dutch differed from Dutch natives in that they showed reliable priming effects for both intonation contours. Thus, the interpretation of intonational meaning in L2 appears to be fast, automatic, and driven by the associations learned in the native language

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“…It was first identified in Brown and Levinson (1987) as a possible way to increase perceived politeness and has subsequently been followed up in the literature. For example, an increase in peak height can lead to higher levels of perceived friendliness in Dutch and English (Chen et al 2004); yet Nadeu and Prieto (2011) showed that in Catalan an increase in the final pitch height of yes-no questions led to more impoliteness ratings unless sentences were accompanied by a smiling face. Politeness can also be achieved through accommodation to the interlocutor's pitch range (Lin et al 2006) and speech rate (Ofuka et al 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness

McKinnon¹,

Prieto²

2014

Journal of Politeness Research

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Within the impoliteness literature, an important distinction has been made between genuine and mock (or non-genuine) impoliteness (Culpeper 1996(Culpeper , 2011 Bernal 2008, among others). Even though mock impoliteness has generally been analyzed within an impoliteness framework, recent proposals suggest that it is an essentially different pragmatic phenomenon that requires a continuous conversational evaluation (Haugh and Bousfield 2012). The present study had the goal of assessing the offline evaluation process of target genuine vs. mock impoliteness utterances, specifically the role the situational/ discourse contexts, as well as prosodic and gestural patterns, play in their interpretation. A total of 97 participants were either asked to rate the degree of impoliteness of target genuine and mock impoliteness utterances in isolation (Experiment 1), or to rate the same utterances preceded with a set of matched and mismatched situational/discourse contexts which favored either a genuine or a mock impoliteness interpretation (Experiment 2). The results of the two experiments show that (a) evaluations of intended mock impoliteness utterances generate more uncertainty in listeners than intended genuine impolite utterances; and (b) mock impoliteness evaluations are characterized by a more active use of gestural cues. These results provide evidence that mock impoliteness triggers a more complex evaluation procedure of a phenomenon that lies on the boundary between polite and impolite behavior.

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Language-Specificity in the Perception of Paralinguistic Intonational Meaning

Cited by 117 publications

References 30 publications

Phrase-final rises as a prosodic feature in wh-questions in Swedish human–machine dialogue

Phrase-final rises as a prosodic feature in wh-questions in Swedish human–machine dialogue

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness

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