Prosodic marking of information status in Italian

Sbranna, Simona; Ventura, Caterina; Albert, Aviad; Grice, Martine

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101212

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…We find that listeners can reliably infer focus condition. This replicates and extends prior cross-linguistic findings (Jabeen, 2022;Kügler, 2020;Kurumada & Roettger, 2021;Lee et al, 2022;Sbranna et al, 2023) by showing that listeners can distinguish between two types of narrow focus (on the subject and object) in English, a large group of untrained speakers.…”

Section: Consistent Use Of Focus Marking In Production and Perceptionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Across a variety of languages, including English, German, Neapolitan Italian, Hindi, and Japanese, listeners have been shown to weigh the prosodic cues specific to their language in order to infer the speaker's intended focus (Jabeen, 2022;Kügler, 2020;Kurumada & Roettger, 2022;A. Lee et al, 2022;Sbranna et al, 2023).…”

Section: Prosodic Prominence As a Cue To Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, we cannot be assured that all aspects of these findings generalize beyond Californian dialects of English, the English language, or Germanic language family. For instance, as evidence for dialect differences in the production of prosody, it has been reported that speakers of Neapolitan Italian prosodically mark focus whereas other studied varieties of Italian do not (Sbranna et al, 2023). Related work has shown prosodic focusmarking in Tibeto-Burman languages (e.g., Sümi in Teo & Baese-Berk, 2019; for a discussion of cross-linguistic differences in focus-marking, see (Kügler & Calhoun, 2020;Zimmermann & Onea, 2011).…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prosodic focus marking for voice-AI and human addressees

Beier,

Cohn,

Trammel

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Prosodic prominence (through increased pitch, intensity, duration) is thought to guide listeners’ attention to new information, which relies on the assumption that a rational listener will benefit from these prosodic cues. This study investigates production and perception of prosodic focus marking toward two types of addresses: a human and a voice assistant interlocutor, a potentially less-than-rational listener. Stimuli consisted of question-answer pairs, where American English speakers read identical sentences (e.g., “Jude saw the sun”) in response to interlocutors’ questions probing different foci (e.g., “Who saw the sun?”). Experiment 1 reveals consistent acoustic adjustments to mark focus on either the subject or object of a sentence: speakers increase vowel intensity and duration. In Experiment 2, we find that listeners reliably infer the intended information structure based on these acoustic adjustments. Across both experiments, we see no consistent difference in focus marking by type of interlocutor (human vs. voice assistant). However, listeners associate particular features (e.g., slower speech rate) with speech directed at voice assistants. Taken together, our findings suggest that while speakers apply communicative strategies from human-human interaction when addressing voice assistants, listeners expect a device-specific register.

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Section: Consistent Use Of Focus Marking In Production and Perceptionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Prosodic Prominence As a Cue To Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Prosodic focus marking for voice-AI and human addressees

Beier,

Cohn,

Trammel

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Finally, future research dealing with backchannel intonation could provide a more finegrained analysis to account for complex intonation contours. One such method takes periodic energy profiles and relate them to F0 (Albert, Cangemi, Ellison, & Grice, 2020;Cangemi et al, 2019, as applied in Savino, Sbranna, Ventura, Albert, and Grice, 2022and Sbranna, Ventura, Albert & Grice, 2023 providing metrics based on periodic cycles roughly corresponding to syllables. Such an analysis would require experimenters to make methodological decisions to define backchannel structure in greater detail, since the overlap between the two units can be less stable than expected in such short utterances.…”

Section: Limitations Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

A multi-dimensional analysis of backchannels in L1 German, L1 Italian and L2 German

Sbranna,

Wehrle,

Grice

2024

Preprint

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Previous research has found that vocal feedback, referred to as backchannels, has positive effects on social interaction, especially by indicating listener engagement. For second language (L2) learners, however, backchannels can be challenging, because their use is bound by cultural and language-specific conventions. This study focuses on backchannels as used in dyadic task-oriented dialogue of native speakers of German and native speakers of Italian, both in their native (L1) Italian and in their L2 German, at two proficiency levels. We provide an in-depth multidimensional analysis of backchannel rate, duration, intonation, lexical form, and turn-taking function. We found that dyad-specific behaviour generally outweighs effects of proficiency. Despite considerable variability across dyads, learners tended to reproduce behaviour from their L1 in their L2 in the form of a complex mapping between intonation, lexical form and turn-taking function.

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