Temporal coordination between focus prosody and pointing gestures in Cantonese

Fung, Holly Sze Ho; Mok, Peggy

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2018.07.006

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Specifically, the authors found a preference for stressed syllables to co-occur with preparations and gesture strokes but showed that holds and even retractions could co-occur with stressed syllables. Similarly, a study by Fung and Mok (2018) described a speaker who regularly showed a lag between the apex of their deictic gestures and prominent syllables. The authors suggest that there might be individual by-speaker variation in terms of strategies to achieve gesture-speech synchrony, and that the speaker may have been aligning the movement phase of the stroke with the stressed syllable, as opposed to the apex.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Visualizing Prosodic Structure: Manual Gestures as Highlighters of Prosodic Heads and Edges in English Academic Discourses

Rohrer

Delais-Roussarie²,

Prieto

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Visualizing Prosodic Structure: Manual Gestures as Highlighters of Prosodic Heads and Edges in English Academic Discourses

Rohrer

Delais-Roussarie²,

Prieto

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Cantonese does not have lexical stress but does mark focal prominence at the utterance level. Cantonese focus prominence is primarily marked by an increase in duration and intensity ( Wu and Xu, 2010 ; Fung and Mok, 2014 , 2018 ). With regard to f0, narrow focus can trigger on-focus f0 expansion but the expansion is influenced by the lexical tones of the on-focus components ( Gu and Lee, 2007 ; Wu and Xu, 2010 ), while whether there is a notable post-focus compression in Cantonese remains controversial (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wu and Xu, 2010 ; Wu and Chung, 2011 ). Perceptually, an increase in duration has been found to be the primary cue to focus, while the roles pitch movements play are specific to the lexical tones carried by the components on focus ( Leemann et al, 2016 ; Fung and Mok, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual-auditory perception of prosodic focus in Japanese by native and non-native speakers

Zhang,

Chen,

Chen

et al. 2023

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

IntroductionSpeech communication is multi-sensory in nature. Seeing a speaker’s head and face movements may significantly influence the listeners’ speech processing, especially when the auditory information is not clear enough. However, research on the visual-auditory integration speech processing has left prosodic perception less well investigated than segmental perception. Furthermore, while native Japanese speakers tend to use less visual cues in segmental perception than in other western languages, to what extent the visual cues are used in Japanese focus perception by the native and non-native listeners remains unknown. To fill in these gaps, we test focus perception in Japanese among native Japanese speakers and Cantonese speakers who learn Japanese, using auditory-only and auditory-visual sentences as stimuli.MethodologyThirty native Tokyo Japanese speakers and thirty Cantonese-speaking Japanese learners who had passed the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test with level N2 or N3 were asked to judge the naturalness of 28 question-answer pairs made up of broad focus eliciting questions and three-word answers carrying broad focus, or contrastive or non-contrastive narrow focus on the middle object words. Question-answer pairs were presented in two sensory modalities, auditory-only and visual-auditory modalities in two separate experimental sessions.ResultsBoth the Japanese and Cantonese groups showed weak integration of visual cues in the judgement of naturalness. Visual-auditory modality only significantly influenced Japanese participants’ perception when the questions and answers were mismatched, but when the answers carried non-contrastive narrow focus, the visual cues impeded rather than facilitated their judgement. Also, the influences of specific visual cues like the displacement of eyebrows or head movements of both Japanese and Cantonese participants’ responses were only significant when the questions and answers were mismatched. While Japanese participants consistently relied on the left eyebrow for focus perception, the Cantonese participants referred to head movements more often.DiscussionThe lack of visual-auditory integration in Japanese speaking population found in segmental perception also exist in prosodic perception of focus. Not much foreign language effects has been found among the Cantonese-speaking learners either, suggesting a limited use of facial expressions in focus marking by native and non-native Japanese speakers. Overall, the present findings indicate that the integration of visual cues in perception of focus may be specific to languages rather than universal, adding to our understanding of multisensory speech perception.

show abstract

“…Despite growing research on the effects of prosodic boundary cues on word learning and segmentation across various languages and age groups [e.g., 2,3,4,5,6,7], there is much less research on how listeners use prosodic focus cues to learn words in real time [c.f., 8,9]. This is a major shortcoming because language learning is intricately tied to the discourse structure [10], and across many languages, prosody is the medium through which this discourse structure is expressed, albeit in many different ways (e.g., increased F0 range, duration, and intensity in English and Mandarin [11,12], only duration increase in Cantonese [13], accentual phrases in Korean [14]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody-to-Focus Mapping and Alternative Processing in Word Learning

Ip¹,

Carvalho²,

Trueswell³

2022

Speech Prosody 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present experiment examined two issues concerning the role of prosody in word learning. First, we explored whether learners use prosodic focus to map words produced with contrastive stress onto contextually new visual referents. Second, we asked whether prosodic focus facilitates better memory for focused words and their contextual alternatives. In an eyetracking task, 48 monolingual English-speaking adults (18-40 yrs-old) were familiarized with videos of different people doing different actions. At test, participants saw two side-by-side videos, one showing a novel person performing a familiar action, and the other a familiar person performing a novel action. Participants then heard an utterance with prosodic focus on the noun or the verb (e.g., "Now JOHNNY is blicking!" vs. "Now Johnny is BLICKING!"). As predicted, participants paired the prosodically focused word with the contextually novel referent; participants who heard name-focused sentences looked longer at the novel person, while those who heard verbfocused sentences looked longer to the novel action. However, verb-focused sentences during word learning led to better recall of people's names than name-focused sentences. Further, eyegaze turns to alternative events during word learning led to better recall, indicating that eye movements during word learning support and reflect alternative processing.

show abstract

Temporal coordination between focus prosody and pointing gestures in Cantonese

Cited by 13 publications

References 12 publications

Visualizing Prosodic Structure: Manual Gestures as Highlighters of Prosodic Heads and Edges in English Academic Discourses

Visualizing Prosodic Structure: Manual Gestures as Highlighters of Prosodic Heads and Edges in English Academic Discourses

Visual-auditory perception of prosodic focus in Japanese by native and non-native speakers

Prosody-to-Focus Mapping and Alternative Processing in Word Learning

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About