Universals of listening: Equivalent prosodic entrainment in tone and non-tone languages

Ip, Martin Ho Kwan; Cutler, Anne

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104311

Cited by 20 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Interestingly, the degree to which RTs differed between predicted accented and unaccented context was the same across all of these talker-specific contexts. This is similar to our previous crosslanguage findings where both English and Mandarin listeners entrain to the preceding prosody to the same extent, even though the accented sentences in Mandarin only showed significantly greater pre-focus maximum F0 and F0 range (Ip & Cutler, 2020). From this viewpoint, prosodic entrainment may be a common strategy that is used both across different speaker-specific contexts as well as across different languages where prosody is used to express information structure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…For example, Akker and Cutler (2003) found that both speakers of British English and speakers of Dutch could use the preceding prosody to anticipate a prosodically highlighted word. Similarly, previous studies from our laboratory (Ip & Cutler, 2016, 2020) have shown that native speakers of English and Mandarin, two languages with very different intonational systems, can differ in their prosodic production, both in the preceding prosody before focus and in the on-focus cues. In extension of these findings, the current experiments show that production differences in preceding prosody not only differ across speakers of different languages, but also across speakers within a language.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

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In Search of Salience: Focus Detection in the Speech of Different Talkers

Cutler

2021

Lang Speech

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Many different prosodic cues can help listeners predict upcoming speech. However, no research to date has assessed listeners’ processing of preceding prosody from different speakers. The present experiments examine (1) whether individual speakers (of the same language variety) are likely to vary in their production of preceding prosody; (2) to the extent that there is talker variability, whether listeners are flexible enough to use any prosodic cues signaled by the individual speaker; and (3) whether types of prosodic cues (e.g., F0 versus duration) vary in informativeness. Using a phoneme-detection task, we examined whether listeners can entrain to different combinations of preceding prosodic cues to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. We used unsynthesized sentences recorded by four female native speakers of Australian English who happened to have used different preceding cues to produce sentences with prosodic focus: a combination of pre-focus overall duration cues, F0 and intensity (mean, maximum, range), and longer pre-target interval before the focused word onset (Speaker 1), only mean F0 cues, mean and maximum intensity, and longer pre-target interval (Speaker 2), only pre-target interval duration (Speaker 3), and only pre-focus overall duration and maximum intensity (Speaker 4). Listeners could entrain to almost every speaker’s cues (the exception being Speaker 4’s use of only pre-focus overall duration and maximum intensity), and could use whatever cues were available even when one of the cue sources was rendered uninformative. Our findings demonstrate both speaker variability and listener flexibility in the processing of prosodic focus.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

In Search of Salience: Focus Detection in the Speech of Different Talkers

Cutler

2021

Lang Speech

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“…Unlike production, where languages may vary in the degree to which different cues are used, listeners in both English and Mandarin may still use whatever cues are available in the signal. For example, in prosodic entrainment, where listeners entrain to prosodic contours to rapidly locate an upcoming prosodic focus, we know that listeners across different languages do not use any one single cue to predict the prosodic forms of upcoming words (e.g., Cutler, 1987;Cutler & Darwin, 1981;Ip & Cutler, 2020). Likewise, the realization of a sentence's prosodic structure may be a blend of different prosodic cues (e.g., duration, F 0 ) that all listeners may exploit (Cutler & Isard, 1980), and listeners might accordingly exploit whatever cues are available for disambiguation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

Cutler

2022

Laboratory Phonology

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How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ.

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“…English and Mandarin seem to differ on this dimension in that focus is marked by pitch accenting in English and pitch range expansion in Mandarin. However, previous perception studies (see above and Ip & Cutler, 2020;Yan et al, 2022) have shown that these are functionally equivalent in processing the focus of an utterance. Therefore, we treat these as the same phonological element: nuclear (or utterance-level) prosodic prominence, in both languages.…”

Section: L2 Learning Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Focus interpretation in L1 and L2: The role of prosodic prominence and clefting

Yan

Warren²,

Calhoun³

2022

Applied Psycholinguistics

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Although the importance of prosody in processing information structure (IS) has been shown in many languages including English and Mandarin, the interacting effects of prosody with other linguistic systems, such as syntax, are relatively under-studied, especially in L2. This paper reports two question-answer appropriateness rating experiments, investigating intermediate-to-high proficiency Mandarin listeners’ integration of prosodic prominence and clefting cues in the interpretation of focus in their L1 and L2 (English). It was found that prosodic prominence was more effective than clefting as a cue to focus in L1 Mandarin. However, clefting was as effective as prominence in L2, showing L1–L2 differences in integrating multiple cues. The findings are discussed in terms of Mennen’s L2 intonation learning theory (2015) and Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1989), which provide a framework for understanding difficulties in acquiring the use of particular cues in L2. The current study contributes to our limited knowledge of a crucial part of L2 learning: how L2 learners process IS.

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Universals of listening: Equivalent prosodic entrainment in tone and non-tone languages

Cited by 20 publications

References 100 publications

In Search of Salience: Focus Detection in the Speech of Different Talkers

In Search of Salience: Focus Detection in the Speech of Different Talkers

Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

Focus interpretation in L1 and L2: The role of prosodic prominence and clefting

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