Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Grice, Martine; Kügler, Frank

doi:10.1177/00238309211015768

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…the informative part of the message) prosodically prominent. This prominence is achieved through a number of cues, such as making the word longer, louder and more precisely articulated, as well as associating it with a pitch accent, involving pitch modulation on or around the lexically stressed syllable of the word (Arnhold & Kyröläinen, 2017; Cangemi & Baumann, 2020; Grice & Kügler, 2021). Pitch accents can differ in prominence, with the direction of pitch movement, pitch excursion (local pitch range) and alignment of the pitch movement with the stressed syllable all playing a role.…”

Section: Prosody and Its Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

Grice,

Wehrle,

Krüger

et al. 2023

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Linguistic prosody involves the rhythm and melody of speech. It implicitly enhances or modifies the explicit meaning of spoken words. The literature on linguistic prosody related to autism spectrum disorder deals both with the production and perception of a broad range of linguistic functions. These functions range from the formal encoding of grammatical features (e.g. lexical stress, syntactic structure) to the less formal, more intuitive signalling of pragmatic or interactional aspects (speech acts, information structure, turn‐taking in conversation). This narrative review reports mixed results from 51 studies, with tentative evidence for greater differences in the perception of intuitive functions. Apart from considerable methodological differences across the different studies, much of the variability in the results is due to the wide range of ages investigated, since difficulties encountered by autistic children do not always persist into adulthood and compensatory strategies can be learnt for using prosody in communication.

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Section: Prosody and Its Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

Grice,

Wehrle,

Krüger

et al. 2023

Language and Linguist. Compass

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…or rising ("Well?"). Prosody has various meta-propositional functions, such as the expression of emotions and attitudes [2], the indication of prominence [3], and the organisation of the conversational exchange (e.g., turn-taking) [4].…”

Section: Introduction 1context Of the Study: Multimodal Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Temporal Alignment of Speech-Accompanying Eyebrow Movement and Voice Pitch: A Study Based on Late Night Show Interviews

Gast

2023

Behavioral Sciences

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Previous research has shown that eyebrow movement during speech exhibits a systematic relationship with intonation: brow raises tend to be aligned with pitch accents, typically preceding them. The present study approaches the question of temporal alignment between brow movement and intonation from a new angle. The study makes use of footage from the Late Night Show with David Letterman, processed with 3D facial landmark detection. Pitch is modeled as a sinusoidal function whose parameters are correlated with the maximum height of the eyebrows in a brow raise. The results confirm some previous findings on audiovisual prosody but lead to new insights as well. First, the shape of the pitch signal in a region of approx. 630 ms before the brow raise is not random and tends to display a specific shape. Second, while being less informative than the post-peak pitch, the pitch signal in the pre-peak region also exhibits correlations with the magnitude of the associated brow raises. Both of these results point to early preparatory action in the speech signal, calling into question the visual-precedes-acoustic assumption. The results are interpreted as supporting a unified view of gesture/speech co-production that regards both signals as manifestations of a single communicative act.

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Auditory Processing of Intonational Rises and Falls in German: Rises Are Special in Attention Orienting

Lialiou,

Grice,

Röhr

et al. 2024

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of a MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours. Results indicate that rising intonation plays a special role in attention orienting at a pre-attentive processing stage, whereas contextual meaning (here a list of items) is essential for activating attentional resources at a conscious processing stage. This is reflected in the activation of distinct brain responses: Rising intonation evokes the largest MMN, whereas falling intonation elicits a less pronounced MMN followed by a P3 (reflecting a conscious processing stage). Subsequently, we also find a complex interplay between the phonological status (i.e., accent/head marking vs. boundary/edge marking) and the direction of pitch change in their contribution to attention orienting: Attention is not oriented necessarily toward a specific position in prosodic structure (head or edge). Rather, we find that the intonation contour itself and the appropriateness of the contour in the linguistic context are the primary cues to two core mechanisms of attention orienting, pre-attentive and conscious orientation respectively, whereas the phonological status of the pitch event plays only a supplementary role.

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Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Cited by 4 publications

References 31 publications

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

The Temporal Alignment of Speech-Accompanying Eyebrow Movement and Voice Pitch: A Study Based on Late Night Show Interviews

Auditory Processing of Intonational Rises and Falls in German: Rises Are Special in Attention Orienting

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