Working memory differences in prosodic imitation

Petrone, Caterina; d'Alessandro, Daria; Falk, Simone

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101100

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…In their study, speakers primarily maintained the distinction between rising and falling contours, similar to the attractor contours in Braun et al (2006). Petrone et al (2021) showed that when working memory capacity is smaller, speakers have difficulties in reproducing contours correctly: Specifically, speakers with high working memory capacity were more accurate in the imitation of phonological events, both for obligatory events (pitch accents and boundary tones) and optional events. In sum, the harder the imitation task (due to either task demands or cognitive capacities), the smaller the set of reproduced contours.…”

Section: Modeling Intonational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Beyond tonal alignment, the shape of the contour also seems to influence the categorical perception of rising-falling contours, leading to a more or less clear-cut perception between L+H * and L * +H (Niebuhr, 2007a, for effects of peak shape and intensity transitions); see also Barnes et al (2021) for a study corroborating the relevance of the shape of the interpolation between L and H for the distinction between L+H * and L * +H in English. Another paradigm testing the distinctiveness in intonational form is imitation, which is based on the idea of a perception-production loop (e.g., Pierrehumbert and Steele, 1989;Braun et al, 2006;Dilley and Brown, 2007;Dilley, 2010;Chodroff and Cole, 2019b;Petrone et al, 2021). In imitation tasks, participants are typically presented with one stimulus at a time and have to imitate it.…”

Section: Modeling Intonational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

et al. 2022

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The intonational realization of utterances is generally characterized by regional as well as inter- and intra-speaker variability in f0. Category boundaries thus remain “fuzzy” and it is non-trivial how the (continuous) acoustic space maps onto (discrete) pitch accent categories. We focus on three types of rising-falling contours, which differ in the alignment of L(ow) and H(igh) tones with respect to the stressed syllable. Most of the intonational systems on German have described two rising accent categories, e.g., L+H* and L*+H in the German ToBI system. L+H* has a high-pitched stressed syllable and a low leading tone aligned in the pre-tonic syllable; L*+H a low-pitched stressed syllable and a high trailing tone in the post-tonic syllable. There are indications for the existence of a third category which lies between these two categories, with both L and H aligned within the stressed syllable, henceforth termed (LH)*. In the present paper, we empirically investigate the distinctiveness of three rising-falling contours [L+H*, (LH)*, and L*+H, all with a subsequent low boundary tone] in German wh-questions. We employ an approach that addresses both the form and the function of the contours, also taking regional variation into account. In Experiment 1 (form), we used a delayed imitation paradigm to test whether Northern and Southern German speakers can imitate the three rising-falling contours in wh-questions as distinct contours. In Experiment 2 (function), we used a free association task to investigate whether listeners interpret the pragmatic meaning of the three contours differently. Imitation results showed that German speakers—both from the North and the South—reproduced the three contours. There was a small but significant effect of regional variety such that contours produced by speakers from the North were slightly more distinct than those by speakers from the South. In the association task, listeners from both varieties attributed distinct meanings to the (LH)* accent as opposed to the two ToBI accents L+H* and L*+H. Combined evidence from form and function suggests that three distinct contours can be found in the acoustic and perceptual space of German rising-falling contours.

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Section: Modeling Intonational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Modeling Intonational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

et al. 2022

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“…It may well be the case that the d-dialects’ differential accent marking of compounds remains unavailable to most speakers of a dialects with a compound accent throughout adulthood. It could also be a developmental phenomenon: Petrone et al (2021) found a correlation between working memory and phonological prosodic differences in their study, thus cognitive development could also play a role, alongside input frequency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Interestingly, metalinguistic awareness of the feature in question does not seem to be a necessary condition for imitation to happen (Lin et al, 2021). Furthermore, Petrone et al (2021) found that “speakers with higher working memory capacities were more accurate in phonological imitation” (p. 1), whereas no such effect was found for phonetic imitation. Somewhat similarly, Bosma et al (2017) found a correlation between scores on verbal working memory tasks and the acquisition of cross-linguistic linguistic regularities across two closely related languages in Frisian–Dutch bilingual children (5–8 years old).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Playing With Fire Compounds: The Tonal Accents of Compounds in (North) Norwegian Preschoolers’ Role-Play Register

Strand

2023

Lang Speech

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Prosodic features are some of the most salient features of dialect variation in Norway. It is therefore no wonder that the switch in prosodic systems is what is first recognized by caretakers and scholars when Norwegian children code-switch to something resembling the dialect of the capital (henceforth Urban East Norwegian, UEN) in role-play. With a focus on the system of lexical tonal accents, this paper investigates the spontaneous speech of North Norwegian children engaging in peer social role-play. By investigating F0 contours extracted from a corpus of spontaneous peer play, and comparing them with elicited baseline reference contours, this paper makes the case that children fail to apply the target tonal accent consistent with UEN in compounds in role-play, although the production of tonal accents otherwise seems to be phonetically target like UEN. Put in other words, they perform in accordance with UEN phonetics, but not UEN morpho-phonology.

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“…Several studies have attempted to identify the causes of listener variability. They have found various factors that could result in listener variability, including listeners' cognitive resources such as working memory (Petrone, D'Alessandro, & Falk, 2021;Scholman et al, 2020), fatigue level (Deliens et al, 2015), attention, linguistic experience, autistic traits (Bishop, 2012), and also environmental factors such as noises. Among these factors, listeners' sensitivity to acoustic contrasts might have contributed to the individual variations in our data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking of causality

Hu¹

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Language users distinguish between different types of causal relations, such as those that can be directly observed from the physical world (referred to as objective causality, e.g., “My daughter had a fight with her best friend, so she cried”), and those that are constructed by people in the mental world (referred to as subjective causality, e.g., “My daughter cried, so maybe she had a fight with her best friend”). Previous research has shown that coherence markers, such as specialized causal connectives (e.g., want ‘because’ and omdat ‘because’ in Dutch), can help people determine the type of causality the speaker intends to express. This dissertation focuses on the role of prosody—variation in pitch, loudness, or timing—in communicating these two different types of causality. The dissertation first investigates the use of prosody in expressing subjective and objective causality using a dialogue task. The results show that there is a trade-off between the use of prosody and the use of specialized causal connectives in expressing those two types of causality. This dissertation then examines the effect of prosodic information on the construction of subjective and objective causality. The results obtained from a discourse completion task indicate that the prosodic features of the English connective so affect listeners’ expectations of causal relations in upcoming discourse. These results provide new insights into how different types of causality are communicated in spoken discourse by showing that not only the lexical information (connectives), but also the prosodic information plays a crucial role.

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Working memory differences in prosodic imitation

Cited by 8 publications

References 48 publications

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

Playing With Fire Compounds: The Tonal Accents of Compounds in (North) Norwegian Preschoolers’ Role-Play Register

Speaking of causality

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