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1
Freese, Jeremy, and Douglas W. Maynard. "Prosodic features of bad news and good news in conversation." Language in Society 27, no. 2 (April 1998): 195–219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500019850.
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ABSTRACTRecent work suggests the importance of integrating prosodic research with research on the sequential organization of ordinary conversation. This paper examines how interactants use prosody as a resource in the joint accomplishment of delivered news as good or bad. Analysis of approximately 100 naturally occurring conversational news deliveries reveals that both good and bad news are presented and received with characteristic prosodic features that are consistent with expression of joy and sorrow, respectively, as described in the existing literature on prosody. These prosodic features are systematically deployed in each of the four turns of the prototypical news delivery sequence. Proposals and ratifications of the valence of a delivery are often made prosodically in the initial turns of the prototypical four-turn news delivery, while lexical assessments of news are often made later. When prosody is used to propose the valence of an item of news, subsequent lexical assessments tend to be alignments with these earlier ascriptions of valence, rather than independent appraisals of the news. (Bad news, good news, conversation analysis, prosody, sequencing).
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Jones, Harrison N. "Prosody in Parkinson's Disease." Perspectives on Neurophysiology and Neurogenic Speech and Language Disorders 19, no. 3 (October 2009): 77–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/nnsld19.3.77.
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Abstract Purpose: Prosodic abnormalities are commonly recognized to be present in the speech of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) and hypokinetic dysarthria. Emerging evidence also suggests that deficits in the receptive processing of prosody are present in individuals with PD. This paper reviews aspects of prosody in PD, including the perceptual and acoustic features and their effect on communication; receptive deficits in prosodic processing; and the effects of medical, surgical, and behavioral treatments on prosody. Methods: Published reports on the above listed aspects of prosody in PD are reviewed and reported. Results and Conclusions: The perceptual and acoustic characteristics of prosodic impairments in PD are well defined. Perceptually, the principal prosodic features include monopitch, reduced stress, monoloudness, and rate abnormalities. The most common acoustic findings are decreased variability of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity. A growing literature also suggests that the basal ganglia are critical in receptively processing prosodic information, which is impaired in PD. The role of medical and surgical treatment of PD on speech prosody remains unclear but, overall, appears limited. Behavioral treatments for prosodic disturbance appear promising, though further study is required.
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Corrales-Astorgano, Mario, Pastora Martínez-Castilla, David Escudero-Mancebo, Lourdes Aguilar, César González-Ferreras, and Valentín Cardeñoso-Payo. "Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity." Applied Sciences 9, no. 7 (April 5, 2019): 1440. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app9071440.
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Prosody is a fundamental speech element responsible for communicative functions such as intonation, accent and phrasing, and prosodic impairments of individuals with intellectual disabilities reduce their communication skills. Yet, technological resources have paid little attention to prosody. This study aims to develop an automatic classifier to predict the prosodic quality of utterances produced by individuals with Down syndrome, and to analyse how inter-individual heterogeneity affects assessment results. A therapist and an expert in prosody judged the prosodic appropriateness of a corpus of Down syndrome’ utterances collected through a video game. The judgments of the expert were used to train an automatic classifier that predicts prosodic quality by using a set of fundamental frequency, duration and intensity features. The classifier accuracy was 79.3% and its true positive rate 89.9%. We analyzed how informative each of the features was for the assessment and studied relationships between participants’ developmental level and results: interspeaker variability conditioned the relative weight of prosodic features for automatic classification and participants’ developmental level was related to the prosodic quality of their productions. Therefore, since speaker variability is an intrinsic feature of individuals with Down syndrome, it should be considered to attain an effective automatic prosodic assessment system.
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Shiamizadeh, Zohreh, Johanneke Caspers, and Niels O. Schiller. "Do Persian Native Speakers Prosodically Mark Wh-in-situ Questions?" Language and Speech 62, no. 2 (February 5, 2018): 229–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0023830917753237.
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It has been shown that prosody contributes to the contrast between declarativity and interrogativity, notably in interrogative utterances lacking lexico-syntactic features of interrogativity. Accordingly, it may be proposed that prosody plays a role in marking wh-in-situ questions in which the interrogativity feature (the wh-phrase) does not move to sentence-initial position, as, for example, in Persian. This paper examines whether prosody distinguishes Persian wh-in-situ questions from declaratives in the absence of the interrogativity feature in the sentence-initial position. To answer this question, a production experiment was designed in which wh-questions and declaratives were elicited from Persian native speakers. On the basis of the results of previous studies, we hypothesize that prosodic features mark wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives at both the local (pre- and post-wh part) and global level (complete sentence). The results of the current study confirm our hypothesis that prosodic correlates mark the pre-wh part as well as the complete sentence in wh-in-situ questions. The results support theoretical concepts such as the frequency code, the universal dichotomous association between relaxation and declarativity on the one hand and tension and interrogativity on the other, the relation between prosody and pragmatics, and the relation between prosody and encoding and decoding of sentence type.
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Huhtamäki, Martina, Jan Lindström, and Anne-Marie Londen. "Other-repetition sequences in Finland Swedish: Prosody, grammar, and context in action ascription." Language in Society 49, no. 4 (March 11, 2020): 653–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404520000056.
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AbstractThis study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repetition. (Repetition, other-repetition, action ascription, prosody in conversation, repair, epistemics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, Finland Swedish)*
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Muñiz-Cachón, Carmen. "Prosody: A feature of languages or a feature of speakers?" Prosodic Issues in Language Contact Situations 16, no. 3 (December 31, 2019): 462–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sic.00047.mun.
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Abstract Social situations of language coexistence have resulted in linguistic manifestations of bilingualism and diglossia, including linguistic interference, lexical loans and code switching. What role does prosody play in social bilingualism? In other words, when contact between different languages is not restricted to the individual but affects an entire speech community, does a dominant prosody exist? Does prosody vary among different linguistic varieties? In order to find an answer to these questions, we hereby show the results of a research project on the prosodic features of Asturian and Castilian spoken in the centre of Asturias. This experimental study is based on the speech of four informants from Oviedo – two men and two women – two of which speak Castilian, while the other two speak Asturian.
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Ahrens, Barbara. "Prosodic phenomena in simultaneous interpreting." Interpreting. International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting 7, no. 1 (June 1, 2005): 51–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/intp.7.1.04ahr.
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This paper reports on an empirical study on prosody in English-German simultaneous interpreting. It discusses prosody with particular reference to its tonal, durational and dynamic features, such as intonation, pauses, rhythm and accent, as well as its main functions, i.e. structure and prominence. Following a review of previous studies on the topic, a conceptual approach for the analysis of prosody in terms of structure and prominence is developed and subsequently applied to an authentic corpus of professional simultaneous interpretation consisting of three German versions of a 72-minute English source text. Prosodic patterns in the corpus are analyzed by means of a computer-aided method using the software PRAAT. The findings confirm that prosodic features are interdependent and that those in the target texts show certain characteristics that are specific to simultaneous interpreting.
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Mirzayeva, Intizar Kahraman. "The Scopes of Experimental-phonetic Analysis." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 6, no. 10 (October 1, 2016): 1912. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0610.03.
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The article investigates the nature of prosodic features of speech. The discussed problem has always been interested the linguists for many years. The prosodic features such as length, accent and stress, tone, intonation and others are analysesd in the article. The article states that from the beginning of the investigation of these features were based primarily on segments – vowels and consonants and prosodic features were either ignored or forced into an inappropriate segmental mould. The author explains the meaning of the term of ‘prosodic means’. She writes that ‘prosodic means’ is derived from the Greek ‘prosodia’ meaning a musical term which appears to signify something like ‘song sung to music’ or ‘sung accompaniment’. It implies that prosody is the musical accompaniment to the words themselves. Recently, the term covers such things as rhythmical patterns, rhyming schemes and verse structure. It is necessary to stress that in linguistic contexts it encounters with a different meaning such as characteristics of utterances as stress and intonation.
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Popovic, Branislav, Dragan Knezevic, Milan Secujski, and Darko Pekar. "Automatic prosody generation in a text-to-speech system for Hebrew." Facta universitatis - series: Electronics and Energetics 27, no. 3 (2014): 467–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/fuee1403467p.
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The paper presents the module for automatic prosody generation within a system for automatic synthesis of high-quality speech based on arbitrary text in Hebrew. The high quality of synthesis is due to the high accuracy of automatic prosody generation, enabling the introduction of elements of natural sentence prosody of Hebrew. Automatic morphological annotation of text is based on the application of an expert algorithm relying on transformational rules. Syntactic-prosodic parsing is also rule based, while the generation of the acoustic representation of prosodic features is based on classification and regression trees. A tree structure generated during the training phase enables accurate prediction of the acoustic representatives of prosody, namely, durations of phonetic segments as well as temporal evolution of fundamental frequency and energy. Such an approach to automatic prosody generation has lead to an improvement in the quality of synthesized speech, as confirmed by listening tests.
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Myers, Brett, Miriam Lense, and Reyna Gordon. "Pushing the Envelope: Developments in Neural Entrainment to Speech and the Biological Underpinnings of Prosody Perception." Brain Sciences 9, no. 3 (March 22, 2019): 70. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9030070.
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Prosodic cues in speech are indispensable for comprehending a speaker’s message, recognizing emphasis and emotion, parsing segmental units, and disambiguating syntactic structures. While it is commonly accepted that prosody provides a fundamental service to higher-level features of speech, the neural underpinnings of prosody processing are not clearly defined in the cognitive neuroscience literature. Many recent electrophysiological studies have examined speech comprehension by measuring neural entrainment to the speech amplitude envelope, using a variety of methods including phase-locking algorithms and stimulus reconstruction. Here we review recent evidence for neural tracking of the speech envelope and demonstrate the importance of prosodic contributions to the neural tracking of speech. Prosodic cues may offer a foundation for supporting neural synchronization to the speech envelope, which scaffolds linguistic processing. We argue that prosody has an inherent role in speech perception, and future research should fill the gap in our knowledge of how prosody contributes to speech envelope entrainment.
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James, Allan. "Prosody and paralanguage in speech and the social media: The vocal and graphic realisation of affective meaning." Linguistica 57, no. 1 (December 30, 2017): 137–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.57.1.137-149.
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The study of prosody and paralanguage is in the first place concerned – unsurprisingly – with the phonetic and linguistic effects of non-segmental vocal variation expressed as values of the feature systems of pitch, volume and duration, but also of rhythm and tempo and further of voice qualities, etc. However, in more recent times the emergence of digitally mediated written communication (in the ‘new’ social media) has led attention to the role of prosody and paralanguage in defining the characteristic informal interpersonal style of this new ‘typed conversation.’ The present article reviews the formal and functional essence of prosody and paralanguage and, drawing on data from recent corpora of text messaging and microblogging, analyses the extents to which prosodic and paralinguistic features may be reflected in such discourse, in particular the ways in which affective meaning is expressed in the graphic modality of this medium.
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Berez-Kroeker, Andrea L. "Prosody as a genre-distinguishing feature in Ahtna." Functions of Language 18, no. 2 (October 12, 2011): 210–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.18.2.03ber.
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This article is a quantitative examination of the function of prosody in distinguishing between the genres of oral performance and expository discourse in Ahtna, an Athabascan language of south-central Alaska. Within the framework of the intonation unit (e.g., Chafe 1987) I examine features of prosody related to both timing (intonation unit length and duration, pause duration and distribution, and syllable pacing) and pitch (pitch reset, boundary tones, and intonational phrasing). I show to a statistically significant degree that most of the prosodic burden of distinguishing genre is carried by a particular intonation contour that is associated with Ahtna oral performance and causes several measurable distinctions between genres.
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Hernandez, Abner, Sunhee Kim, and Minhwa Chung. "Prosody-Based Measures for Automatic Severity Assessment of Dysarthric Speech." Applied Sciences 10, no. 19 (October 8, 2020): 6999. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app10196999.
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One of the first cues for many neurological disorders are impairments in speech. The traditional method of diagnosing speech disorders such as dysarthria involves a perceptual evaluation from a trained speech therapist. However, this approach is known to be difficult to use for assessing speech impairments due to the subjective nature of the task. As prosodic impairments are one of the earliest cues of dysarthria, the current study presents an automatic method of assessing dysarthria in a range of severity levels using prosody-based measures. We extract prosodic measures related to pitch, speech rate, and rhythm from speakers with dysarthria and healthy controls in English and Korean datasets, despite the fact that these two languages differ in terms of prosodic characteristics. These prosody-based measures are then used as inputs to random forest, support vector machine and neural network classifiers to automatically assess different severity levels of dysarthria. Compared to baseline MFCC features, 18.13% and 11.22% relative accuracy improvement are achieved for English and Korean datasets, respectively, when including prosody-based features. Furthermore, most improvements are obtained with a better classification of mild dysarthric utterances: a recall improvement from 42.42% to 83.34% for English speakers with mild dysarthria and a recall improvement from 36.73% to 80.00% for Korean speakers with mild dysarthria.
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Newmark, Kalina, Nacole Walker, and James Stanford. "‘The rez accent knows no borders’: Native American ethnic identity expressed through English prosody." Language in Society 45, no. 5 (September 9, 2016): 633–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404516000592.
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AbstractIn many Native American and Canadian First Nations communities, indigenous languages are important for the linguistic construction of ethnic identity. But because many younger speakers have limited access to their heritage languages, English may have an even more important role in identity construction than Native languages do. Prior literature shows distinctive local English features in particular tribes. Our study builds on this knowledge but takes a wider perspective: We hypothesize that certain features are shared across much larger distances, particularly prosody. Native cultural insiders (the first two co-authors) had a central role in this project. Our recordings of seventy-five speakers in three deliberately diverse locations (Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North/South Dakota; Northwest Territories, Canada; and diverse tribes represented at Dartmouth College) show that speakers are heteroglossically performing prosodic features to index Native ethnic identity. They have taken a ‘foreign’ language (English) and enregistered these prosodic features, creatively producing and reproducing a shared ethnic identity across great distances. (Native Americans, prosody, ethnicity, ethnic identity, English, dialects)*
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Barno Omonova Izzatullo qizi. "Synonimic features of adjectives meaning positive and their collocation forms." International Journal on Integrated Education 3, no. 8 (August 29, 2020): 163–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.31149/ijie.v3i8.557.
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Over the past two decades the concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interest since Sinclair (1991) observed that “many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment” (p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal meaning. As the first scholar introducing the term ‘semantic prosody,’ Louw (1993) claimed that the habitual collocates of a lexical item are established through the semantic consistency of its subjects. Semantic prosody has thus been closely related to collocation learning in language acquisition research. In the context of collocation learning, near-synonyms particularly pose a difficulty for most foreign language learners due to their similar denotational meanings but un-interchangeable semantic prosody (Xiao & McEnery, 2006). The present corpus-based study was designed to compare the semantic preference and semantic prosody with three synonymous adjective pairs picked up from the academic core words in COCA (Gardner & Davies, 2013). The pairs were chosen based on the following criteria: a) their meanings were checked against Collins Thesaurus Online; b) the words with more than one meaning were removed; c) the word with more than one part of speech was defined the same as its paired word. All occurrences were examined manually at the span of 4 words to both the left and right. Discussion and implications were reported.
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Yau, Edgar. "Podcaster Prosody." Lifespans and Styles 6, no. 2 (December 10, 2020): 2–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ls.v6i2.2020.5215.
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This paper addresses the style-shifting of podcast host Sarah Koenig, specifically in her use of utterance final creaky voice in different contexts. I find that Koenig uses more creaky voice on her podcast Serial than in an interview context. Additionally, her creaky voice in the interview occurs in specific contexts related to her work as a journalist. Based on analyses of how phonetic features can construct certain personae, I argue that Koenig may be designing her speech to construct a journalistic persona with her use of creaky voice.
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Capliez, Marc. "Prosody- vs. segment-based teaching." Language, Interaction and Acquisition 7, no. 2 (December 31, 2016): 212–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lia.7.2.03cap.
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English, an international language, is widely taught and learnt as a foreign language in France. However, French learners face pronunciation difficulties, as the two languages differ both on the segmental level (i.e. individual sounds) and on the suprasegmental, prosodic level (i.e. stress, rhythm, intonation). It has been argued that focus on the prosodic features of the target language (L2) would improve learners’ oral skills. Nevertheless, very few studies have brought evidence of the greater role of prosody in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. The current study seeks to address this gap by directly comparing prosody-centred and segment-centred teaching to determine whether one approach is more effective than the other in the improvement of L2 oral perception skills. The study shows that both teaching approaches enabled French EFL learners to improve their perception skills; however, neither method proved to have a stronger impact, suggesting that both segmental and suprasegmental aspects should both be addressed in L2 teaching.
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Calet, Nuria, M. Carmen Pérez-Morenilla, and Macarena De los Santos-Roig. "Overcoming reading comprehension difficulties through a prosodic reading intervention: A single-case study." Child Language Teaching and Therapy 35, no. 1 (January 30, 2019): 75–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0265659019826252.
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Apart from speed and accuracy, prosody has recently been included as another component of skilled reading, as its role in reading comprehension is being increasingly recognized. Prosodic reading refers to the use of prosodic features of language during reading, including suitable pauses, stress and intonation and appropriate phrasing. The aim of this research was to examine the impact of a prosodic reading intervention on the reading comprehension of a fourth-grade primary child with specific reading comprehension difficulties. An AB single-case design was used with baseline (A) and treatment (B) phases. The intervention, in 17 sessions, was based on repeated reading with a focus on expressiveness. Results pointed to improved reading fluency and reading comprehension scores over baseline scores. Nevertheless, more studies are needed to show conclusive evidence for improved comprehension as a result of prosody intervention. The implications of prosodic reading interventions for literacy development are discussed.
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Evina Sinambela, Seftirina. "Prosody as a Tool for Assessing Reading Fluency of Adult ESL Students." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 8, no. 6 (December 25, 2017): 83. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.6p.83.
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The prosodic features in reading aloud assignment has been associated with the students’ decoding skill. The goal of the present study is to determine the reliability of prosody for assessing reading fluency of adult ESL students in Indonesia context. The participants were all Indonesian natives, undergraduate students, adult females and males who have learned English in school (at the very least twice a week) for more than 12 years. Text reading prosody was assessed by reading aloud task and the students’ speaking manner was taped and measured by using the Multidimensional Fluency Scale, as for text comprehension was assessed with a standardized test. It was discovered by the current study that prosody is a reliable sign to determine reading fluency and also reading comprehension. The student who did not read the text prosodically (with appropriate expression) actually showed that he/she failed to comprehend the text. This study also revealed that a struggling reader was also having low comprehension capacity in listening spoken texts. The ESL students’ common problems to acquire prosodic reading skill are low exposure to the target language and do not have a good model to imitate prosodic reading.
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Weed, Ethan, and Riccardo Fusaroli. "Acoustic Measures of Prosody in Right-Hemisphere Damage: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63, no. 6 (June 22, 2020): 1762–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00241.
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Purpose The aim of the study was to use systematic review and meta-analysis to quantitatively assess the currently available acoustic evidence for prosodic production impairments as a result of right-hemisphere damage (RHD), as well as to develop methodological recommendations for future studies. Method We systematically reviewed papers reporting acoustic features of prosodic production in RHD in order to identify shortcomings in the literature and make recommendations for future studies. We estimated the meta-analytic effect size of the acoustic features. We extracted standardized mean differences from 16 papers and estimated aggregated effect sizes using hierarchical Bayesian regression models. Results RHD did present reduced fundamental frequency variation, but the trait was shared with left-hemisphere damage. RHD also presented evidence for increased pause duration. No meta-analytic evidence for an effect of prosody type (emotional vs. linguistic) was found. Conclusions Taken together, the currently available acoustic data show only a weak specific effect of RHD on prosody production. However, the results are not definitive, as more reliable analyses are hindered by small sample sizes, lack of detail on lesion location, and divergent measuring techniques. We propose recommendations to overcome these issues: Cumulative science practices (e.g., open data and code sharing), more nuanced speech signal processing techniques, and the integration of acoustic measures and perceptual judgments are recommended to more effectively investigate prosody in RHD.
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Aronsson, Berit. "Core Prosodic Features for the teaching of Spanish prosody to speakers of Swedish." Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 3, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 44–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23247797.2016.1166881.
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Jasmin, Kyle, Frederic Dick, and Adam Taylor Tierney. "The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)." Wellcome Open Research 5 (January 8, 2020): 4. http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15607.1.
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Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects, or failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Time) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 57 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.
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Lenglet, Cédric, and Christine Michaux. "The impact of simultaneous-interpreting prosody on comprehension." Interpreting. International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting 22, no. 1 (April 10, 2020): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/intp.00032.len.
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Abstract Does the particular prosody of simultaneous interpreting have an impact on comprehensibility? This paper presents an experiment that sought to answer this question. Two groups of listeners (47 with relevant contextual knowledge about the subject-matter of the speech and 40 with less contextual knowledge) listened to the interpretation into French of a 20-minute lecture in German under two conditions (the actual interpretation and a read-aloud rendition of the transcript of the interpretation by the same interpreter) and answered comprehension questions. The prosodic features of the two conditions were analysed, and differences regarding the temporal organisation of speech, disfluencies, pitch register and the interface between prosody and syntax emerged. Simultaneous interpreting was found to be more monotonous, to contain a larger number of short and long silent pauses, more hesitations (“euh”) and more non-syntactic pauses as well as to have a more irregular speech rate. The read-aloud version was livelier, with more medium-length silent pauses and almost no hesitation. Results of the comprehension questionnaire do not demonstrate that interpreting-specific prosodic features affect comprehensibility to a significant extent. This is consistent with professional norms of interpreting in specialised conferences, where verbal aspects have priority over non-verbal ones.
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Gasser, Emily, Byron Ahn, Donna Jo Napoli, and Z. L. Zhou. "Production, perception, and communicative goals of American newscaster speech." Language in Society 48, no. 2 (February 22, 2019): 233–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404518001392.
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AbstractListeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*
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Spierings, Michelle J., and Carel ten Cate. "Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features of human speech." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1787 (July 22, 2014): 20140480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.0480.
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Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra finches. Using a go/no-go procedure, subjects were trained to discriminate between speech syllables arranged in XYXY patterns with prosodic stress on the first syllable and XXYY patterns with prosodic stress on the final syllable. To systematically determine the salience of the various prosodic cues (pitch, duration and amplitude) to the zebra finches, they were subjected to five tests with different combinations of these cues. The zebra finches generalized the prosodic pattern to sequences that consisted of new syllables and used prosodic features over structural ones to discriminate between stimuli. This strong sensitivity to the prosodic pattern was maintained when only a single prosodic cue was available. The change in pitch was treated as more salient than changes in the other prosodic features. These results show that zebra finches are sensitive to the same prosodic cues known to affect human speech perception.
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Wu, Yan. "Review of Chinese English Learners’ Prosodic Acquisition." English Language Teaching 12, no. 8 (July 18, 2019): 89. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v12n8p89.
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The traditional focus of English phonetic teaching in China has consistently been on the segmental acquisition, which is mainly highlighting the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, while its suprasegmental knowledge in speech naturalness, coherence and understanding is relatively insufficient. In addition, Chinese students have a serious problem in the rhythm of English language, which is mainly influenced by the characteristics of the syllable-timed in their mother tongue rather than in a stress-timed way. This study reviews the academic works of the nearly 15 years in the development of Chinese prosodic features of English language, giving a better and deeper analysis and appreciation of the suprasegmental phoneme levels of different aspects, such as the fundamental components of English prosody such as stress, rhythm and intonation. This study is hoped to shed light on the prosodic analysis of Chinese English learners’ oral proficiency in pronunciation, finding out the insufficiency in prosody of China English, and more importantly to provide effective learning strategy for Chinese English learners and teachers in prosody acquisition, therefore, it might pave the way to the reform of oral English teaching in China.
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Bone, Daniel, Chi-Chun Lee, Matthew P. Black, Marian E. Williams, Sungbok Lee, Pat Levitt, and Shrikanth Narayanan. "The Psychologist as an Interlocutor in Autism Spectrum Disorder Assessment: Insights From a Study of Spontaneous Prosody." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 57, no. 4 (August 2014): 1162–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2014_jslhr-s-13-0062.
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PurposeThe purpose of this study was to examine relationships between prosodic speech cues and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity, hypothesizing a mutually interactive relationship between the speech characteristics of the psychologist and the child. The authors objectively quantified acoustic-prosodic cues of the psychologist and of the child with ASD during spontaneous interaction, establishing a methodology for future large-sample analysis.MethodSpeech acoustic-prosodic features were semiautomatically derived from segments of semistructured interviews (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, ADOS; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 1999; Lord et al., 2012) with 28 children who had previously been diagnosed with ASD. Prosody was quantified in terms of intonation, volume, rate, and voice quality. Research hypotheses were tested via correlation as well as hierarchical and predictive regression between ADOS severity and prosodic cues.ResultsAutomatically extracted speech features demonstrated prosodic characteristics of dyadic interactions. As rated ASD severity increased, both the psychologist and the child demonstrated effects for turn-end pitch slope, and both spoke with atypical voice quality. The psychologist's acoustic cues predicted the child's symptom severity better than did the child's acoustic cues.ConclusionThe psychologist, acting as evaluator and interlocutor, was shown to adjust his or her behavior in predictable ways based on the child's social-communicative impairments. The results support future study of speech prosody of both interaction partners during spontaneous conversation, while using automatic computational methods that allow for scalable analysis on much larger corpora.
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CRASBORN, ONNO, and ELS VAN DER KOOIJ. "The phonology of focus in Sign Language of the Netherlands." Journal of Linguistics 49, no. 3 (April 11, 2013): 515–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226713000054.
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Signed languages are similar to spoken languages in the overall organisation of their grammars, displaying a prosodic level of organisation that is not isomorphic to the syntactic organisation. Their rich inventory of manual and non-manual features allows for a prolific range of functions if used prosodically. New data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT, Nederlandse Gebarentaal) are discussed to demonstrate that focused constituents are not marked by a single prosodic feature, but rather by multiple properties that can also have other functions in the prosodic phonology of the language. These findings are integrated in an overall model of sign language prosody that emphasises the distinction between phonetic appearance and phonological representation and that allows for the interaction of linguistic and paralinguistic cues in visual communication.
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Perdereau, Xiao. "Selected prosody features in an accent learning system." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135, no. 4 (April 2014): 2297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4877552.
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Bedwell, Jeffrey S., Alex S. Cohen, Benjamin J. Trachik, Andrew E. Deptula, and Jonathan C. Mitchell. "Speech Prosody Abnormalities and Specific Dimensional Schizotypy Features." Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 202, no. 10 (October 2014): 745–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/nmd.0000000000000184.
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Applebaum, Lauren, Marie Coppola, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. "Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model." Sign Language and Linguistics 17, no. 2 (November 24, 2014): 181–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sll.17.2.02app.
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Prosody, the “music” of language, is an important aspect of all natural languages, spoken and signed. We ask here whether prosody is also robust across learning conditions. If a child were not exposed to a conventional language and had to construct his own communication system, would that system contain prosodic structure? We address this question by observing a deaf child who received no sign language input and whose hearing loss prevented him from acquiring spoken language. Despite his lack of a conventional language model, this child developed his own gestural system. In this system, features known to mark phrase and utterance boundaries in established sign languages were used to consistently mark the ends of utterances, but not to mark phrase or utterance internal boundaries. A single child can thus develop the seeds of a prosodic system, but full elaboration may require more time, more users, or even more generations to blossom.
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BEHRENS, HEIKE, and ULRIKE GUT. "The relationship between prosodic and syntactic organization in early multiword speech." Journal of Child Language 32, no. 1 (February 2005): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000904006592.
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Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, ‘real’ two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2;0 and 2;3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of multiword utterances become prosodically fluent at different points in time. Second, the variability of prosodic features such as pauses and stress pattern is very high at the onset of combinatorial speech. Consequently, fluency or disfluency of individual examples should not be used as a reliable criterion for their syntactic status and we recommend caution when taking prosody as a cue for syntactic development.
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Korolova, Tetiana, and Akkurt Vladyslava. "PERCEPTIVE PECULIARITIES OF PROSODY OF PERSUASION MODALITY IN JUDICIAL DISCOURSE." Naukovy Visnyk of South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushynsky: Linguistic Sciences 2019, no. 29 (November 2019): 135–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.24195/2616-5317-2019-29-11.
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In spite the fact that scientific researches reflect the interpretation of the modality problem by modern linguists, there can hardly be found the works devoted to the prosody aspects of modality in court discourse. The aim of the experimental analysis is a complex examination of functional, semantic and pragmatic characters of convincing attitudinal semantics in prosecutor’s speech in two languages: English and Ukrainian. The results of the research demonstrate that the attitude of convincing the listeners in court depends on extra linguistic factors (situation as well as social and status relations), structural, semantic and pragmatic peculiarities of prosecutor’s speech, on the one hand, and individual characteristics of the prosecutor’s communication, on the other. Conviction prosody in a prosecutor’s speech is the most important means that actualizes the stereotypic rules of orator’s phonetic behavior aimed at influencing the audience and combines general and creative aspects. In the speech under consideration the intellectual expressiveness is the leading character (arguments and logics). The character of prosody components interaction when exercising the attitude of conviction is similar in both languages, but the role of either component in prosodic structure differs. Thus, the rhythmic structure of English, importance of temporal parameter in the word-stress, falling character of syllabic melody (in contrast to Ukrainian), fixed position of word-stress in English and free position in Ukrainian lead to peculiarities of English and Ukrainian prosody in communication. Differences in linguistic systems of the two languages: a definite grammar structure, vocabulary peculiarities, phonological system, condition prosodic features characteristic to either of the two languages.
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Rossi, Giovanni. "The prosody of other-repetition in Italian: A system of tunes." Language in Society 49, no. 4 (July 17, 2020): 619–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404520000627.
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AbstractAs part of the project reported on in this special issue, the present study provides an overview of the types of action accomplished by other-repetition in Italian, with particular reference to the variety of the language spoken in the northeastern province of Trento. The analysis surveys actions within the domain of initiating repair, actions that extend beyond initiating repair, and actions that are alternative to initiating repair. Pitch contour emerges as a central design feature of other-repetition in Italian, with six nuclear contours associated with distinct types of action, sequential trajectories, and response patterns. The study also documents the interplay of pitch contour with other prosodic features (pitch span and register) and visible behavior (head nods, eyebrow movements). (Repetition, conversation, prosody, intonation, action, Italian)*
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Přibil, Jiří, Anna Přibilová, and Jindřich Matoušek. "Automatic statistical evaluation of quality of unit selection speech synthesis with different prosody manipulations." Journal of Electrical Engineering 71, no. 2 (April 1, 2020): 78–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/jee-2020-0012.
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AbstractQuality of speech synthesis is a crucial issue in comparison of various text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We proposed a system for automatic evaluation of speech quality by statistical analysis of temporal features (time duration, phrasing, and time structuring of an analysed sentence) together with standard spectral and prosodic features. This system was successfully tested on sentences produced by a unit selection speech synthesizer with a male as well as a female voice using two different approaches to prosody manipulation. Experiments have shown that for correct, sharp, and stable results all three types of speech features (spectral, prosodic, and temporal) are necessary. Furthermore, the number of used statistical parameters has a significant impact on the correctness and precision of the evaluated results. It was also demonstrated that the stability of the whole evaluation process is improved by enlarging the used speech material. Finally, the functionality of the proposed system was verified by comparison of the results with those of the standard listening test.
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Pan, Shimei, Kathleen McKeown, and Julia Hirschberg. "Exploring features from natural language generation for prosody modeling." Computer Speech & Language 16, no. 3-4 (July 2002): 457–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0885-2308(02)00022-0.
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Abdurahmonova Barno Muhammadjonovna. "Teaching pupils the features of rhythm in “Kutadgu Bilig”." International Journal on Integrated Education 3, no. 7 (July 30, 2020): 137–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.31149/ijie.v3i7.512.
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Stopar, Andrej. "The prosody of focus: non-contrastive, contrastive and verum focus in Slovenian, English and Russian." Linguistica 57, no. 1 (December 30, 2017): 293–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.57.1.293-312.
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The article presents an approach to information structure that marks focused or topicalized syntactic constituents with the features [foc] and [top], and assumes that the assignment of these information structure features is reflected in prosody. The experimental study measures the fundamental frequency of various Slovenian sentences to identify the characteristic contours of the non-contrastive, contrastive, and verum focus. The findings are compared to those in studies on English and Russian. The results show that the most relevant prosodic characteristics of such structures are the pitch range, the pitch changes on the focus exponent, and the duration of the focus exponent.
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Lucente, Luciana. "Editorial." Journal of Speech Sciences 5, no. 1 (June 13, 2017): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/joss.v5i1.14949.
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It is with great satisfaction that the Journal of Speech Science publishes the first volume of its fifth edition. This special edition features works presented at the 5th Brazilian Colloquium on Prosody of Speech, held in Brasília, in October 2015. The Brazilian Colloquium on Prosody of Speech, like the JoSS, are uniciatives of LBASS - Luso-Brazilian Society of Sciences of Fala, an association that has been working since 2008 to support and promote events in the area of prosody.
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Bryant, Gregory A. "Verbal irony in the wild." Pragmatics and Cognition 19, no. 2 (August 10, 2011): 291–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.19.2.06bry.
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Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the case of verbal irony, there exists some debate concerning how these prosodic features manifest themselves in conversation. A form-function approach can provide a valuable tool for understanding speakers’ varied vocal strategies in this domain. Here I describe several ways conversationalists employ prosodic contrasts, laughter, and other speech characteristics in their attempts to communicate effectively and efficiently. The presented examples, culled from spontaneous conversation recordings, reveal just a small sample of the enormous variation in delivery styles speakers adopt when communicating with ironic language.
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Shulgina, K. V., and A. V. Pasko. "Prosody of Abuse." Theory and Practice of Forensic Science 16, no. 1 (April 23, 2021): 92–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.30764/1819-2785-2021-1-92-99.
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The relevance of the study of the prosodic structure of speech acts of abuse is due to the tasks faced by an expert linguist in the study of oral discourse. The present study is experimental; in its course, for the first time, a set of universal and individual prosodic means used when pronouncing a conflict statement with signs of verbal aggression is considered. The purpose of the article is to identify the prosodic characteristics of abuse as an illocutionary act and study the features of suprasegmental units of speech containing invective elements, including those in the structure of utterances not limited by the semantics and pragmatics of abuse. An interdisciplinary approach is applied to analyzing spoken texts based on the appeal to acoustic, auditory, and linguistic analysis methods. The study’s object was unique, authentic utterances: spontaneous sounding speech qualified by the preliminary investigation authorities as a public abuse to a government official. As a result of the study, we identified suprasegmental units that characterize the speakers’ invective speech. The prosodic components of the speech act of abuse within the framework of the utterance include the ascending-descending nature of the frequency of the main tone and increased dynamic characteristics of speech. Statements containing signs of abuse are often carriers of other goals. Prosodic accents in such utterances vary and depend on the leading speech purpose of the utterance. Together with their addresser’s speech goal, the analyzed utterances’ propositional content is manifested by a particular prosodic structure. The intonational model of such statements when solving diagnostic expert problems acts as one of the indicators of a subjective negative assessment, which contributes to identifying a speech act as an abuse.
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Pruitt, Kathryn, and Floris Roelofsen. "The Interpretation of Prosody in Disjunctive Questions." Linguistic Inquiry 44, no. 4 (October 2013): 632–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00141.
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Alternative questions differ prosodically from identically worded disjunctive yes/no questions in their accentual characteristics and their final pitch contour. Alternative questions are canonically pronounced with a final fall and with pitch accents on all disjuncts, while disjunctive yes/no questions are canonically pronounced with a final rise and generally without pitch accents on every disjunct. This article presents an experiment investigating the importance of these prosodic features in disambiguation. The experiment shows that the final contour is the most informative prosodic feature. Accentual characteristics also play a significant role, but, contrary to what is often assumed in the literature, cannot force an alternative question interpretation or a yes/no question interpretation on their own. Several theories of disjunctive questions are discussed in the light of these experimental results.
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Lai, Qing, and Xia Guo. "Semantic relations and prosodic features of ranhou in spontaneous Mandarin conversation." Forum for Linguistic Studies 3, no. 1 (September 6, 2021): 67. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/fls.v3i1.1250.
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Ranhou ‘then’ is traditionally defined as a conjunction, indicating succession of two events. Adopting the methodology of Interactional Linguistics, this study explores semantic relations of ranhou in Mandarin face-to-face and telephone conversations. An examination of the data shows that besides succession, ranhou can express other nine semantic relations, including causality, progression relation, coordinating relation, adversative relation, additive relation, enumeration, hypothesis, alternative relation, concession and be no practical meaning as well. Meanwhile, prosodic features of ranhou are explored with the help of software Praat and Audacity. It is suggested that eleven semantic relations vary in mean pitch range and mean length. Although each token of ranhou differs from each other in prosody, with respect to loudness, ranhou can be stressed on ran, or hou and also be articulated without loudness. But in a whole, loudness of ranhou is mostly put on hou.
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POSPĚCHOVÁ, Zuzana. "Prosodic Transcription of Standard Chinese and its Use in Teaching." Acta Linguistica Asiatica 6, no. 1 (June 29, 2016): 35–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/ala.6.1.35-45.
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The present paper’s main aim is to introduce a method of prosodic transcription (PTR) of Standard Chinese established by Oldřich Švarný in the background of the Czech Republic. It is used to describe suprasegmental features of Standard Chinese: stress prominence and linear segmentation of sentences. PTR is applied in teaching Chinese prosody in courses in the Czech Republic. This paper also contains a short sample text, students’ opinion on PTR and an outline of the use of PTR in academic research.
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GOLOB, Nina. "Acoustic Prosodic Parameters in Japanese and Slovene: Accent and Intonation." Acta Linguistica Asiatica 1, no. 3 (January 23, 2012): 25–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/ala.1.3.25-44.
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The study investigates realizations of the three acoustic parameters, duration, fundamental frequency and intensity, in relation to accent and intonation in Japanese and Slovene. Ten native speakers of each language pronounced nonsense words of different accentual patterns placed within the declarative-interrogative intonational context. Results of the acoustic analysis reveal clear differences in behavior of the three parameters under various conditions, and suggest the following phonological differences between the two languages: 1. Prosodic features realizing accent and intonation differ, 2. Interaction between accent and intonation differs, and 3. Prosodic features function uniformly within different units of successive segments, the so-called prosodic units. However, looking into the overall characteristics of the acoustic signal, certain similarities are also observed. The study anticipates that the above phonological differences, especially those realized as phonetic similarities represent a great difficulty in acquisition of L2 prosody, and specific examples of a possible L1 interference are provided.
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Aihara, Ryo, Ryoichi Takashima, Tetsuya Takiguchi, and Yasuo Ariki. "GMM-Based Emotional Voice Conversion Using Spectrum and Prosody Features." American Journal of Signal Processing 2, no. 5 (December 1, 2012): 134–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.5923/j.ajsp.20120205.06.
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Biliuk, Julia. "DIACHRONIC ASPECT OF PECULIARITIES IN PROSODY OF NEWSREEL AUDIO RECORDINGS." PROBLEMS OF SEMANTICS, PRAGMATICS AND COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS, no. 35 (2019): 26–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2663-6530.2019.35.02.
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The article is dedicated to a diachronic research of prosodic differences in style and delivery of information of English television discourse based on the news collection from the United Kingdom. In this research tonal, temporal and pausal features of prosody in news audio materials from different periods in the history of Great Britain are being compared. The first period represents years from 1936 to 1946, whilst the second period highlights present time news, namely 2009–2019. In order to have clearer picture news whith common theme were chosen, in particular, news which are related to the Britishroyal family. Initial sentence serves as the object of the analysis as vitally important one in informative outline, since it presents the main idea of the message. For the diachronic analysis of differences in the prosody of television discourse 30 sentences of the first group and 30 sentences of the second group were selected. The tempo is taken into consideration in the first place, then the following prosodic characteristics such as the pause and frequency of the main tone are being viewed. To identify correlations between prosodic parameters, which can be traced by perceptual observation and acoustic analysis of a collection of digitally recorded samples of television discourse sentences in diachronic comparison, a software for the phonetic speech research – Praat was used. Measurements indicate significant changes in the prosodic characteristics of a selected linguistic material from different periods of time, namely, changes in pitch configurations as well as a decrease in the speech rate and in the number of pauses in selected audio recordings of present news in comparison with the newsreels from 1936–1946 s.
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Flamson, Thomas, Gregory A. Bryant, and H. Clark Barrett. "Prosody in spontaneous humor." Pragmatics and Cognition 19, no. 2 (August 10, 2011): 248–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.19.2.04fla.
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The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portuguese. Our analyses focused on humorous utterances identified by the subsequent presence of laughter. Acoustic features of these utterances were compared to non-humorous utterances by the same speakers of similar length and immediately preceding them to look for prosodic contrasts. This corpus provided a unique opportunity for examining the way people mark their humorous productions in a non-humorous environment. Contrary to the notion that speakers must mark their production of humor in order to facilitate audience understanding, no significant marking of a joking “frame” was detected across a range of acoustic dimensions. The only consistent difference — that the set-up and punch line segments were louder than baseline speech before it — does not well support a marking hypothesis and more likely reflects speaker adjustments to the acoustic conditions of the meeting hall. We present these data from the perspective of the encryption theory of humor that predicts speakers will not generally mark spontaneous, conversational humor in most contexts.
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André, Vanessa, Christine Petr, Nicolas André, Martine Hausberger, and Alban Lemasson. "Voice features of telephone operators predict auditory preferences of consumers." Interaction Studies 17, no. 1 (September 26, 2016): 77–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/is.17.1.04and.
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Abstract What makes a human voice agreeable is a matter of scientific discussion. Whereas prosody was shown to play a role regarding “male-female” attraction, the impact of frequency modulations in “non-sexual”, notably commercial, contexts has attracted little attention. Another point unaddressed in the literature is auditory sensitivity to short-term frequency modulations as current studies focus more on sentence. Thirty French female operators were recorded over the phone. All “bonjour” greeting words were classified in terms of frequency modulation linearity and orientation at the syllable and word levels. Then, the different voices were played back to students and seniors who had to rate each voice according to their degree of agreeableness. Listeners preferred non-monotonous voices. Differences between age-classes were greater than between sex-classes. Results suggest that short-term frequency changes are important for auditory evaluation of voice agreeableness. This study opens new research perspectives concerning the importance of prosody during consumer-seller interactions.
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Dahlgren, SvenOlof, Annika D. Sandberg, Sofia Strömbergsson, Lena Wenhov, Maria Råstam, and Ulrika Nettelbladt. "Prosodic traits in speech produced by children with autism spectrum disorders – Perceptual and acoustic measurements." Autism & Developmental Language Impairments 3 (January 2018): 239694151876452. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2396941518764527.
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Background Autism spectrum disorder has been associated with atypical voice characteristics and prosody. In the scientific literature, four different aspects of atypical speech production in autism spectrum disorder have been highlighted; voice quality together with the prosodic aspects pitch, duration and intensity. Studies of prosody in autism spectrum disorder have almost exclusively used perceptual methods. Recently, some studies have used acoustic analyses. In these studies, it has been pointed out that the acoustic differences found are not necessarily perceived as atypical by listeners, which is why it is important to let listeners evaluate perceptual correlates to acoustic findings. The aims of this study were to use both perceptual and acoustic analyses to study prosodic production in children with autism spectrum disorder and to examine if voice and speech characteristics could be used as clinical markers for autism spectrum disorder. Method Eleven children within normal range of intelligence diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 11 children with typical development participated. Every child was recorded telling a story elicited with the expression, reception and recall of narrative instrument. Excerpts of one minute were extracted from the audio files creating the material underlying the perceptual ratings and in the acoustic analysis. An evaluation procedure, partly based on a standardized voice evaluation procedure developed for clinical practice in Sweden, was designed for the perceptual judgments and analysis. To capture critical prosodic variables, aspects of prosody based on characteristic features of Swedish prosody, prosodic features known to cause Swedish children with language impairment particular problems and current research of prosodic impairments in children with autism, were used as rating variables. The acoustic analysis was based on the four variables fundamental frequency ( fo) average, fo range, fo variation and speech rate, together with the language production-related variable number of words per utterance. Results In the acoustic analysis, no differences were found with regards to fo-related variables or speech rate. However, the children in the autism spectrum disorder-group produced significantly more words per utterance than the typically developing children. The perceptual analysis showed no differences between the groups. Only three children with autism spectrum disorder were correctly identified as such. The narrative ability of these children, according to scores on the narrative assessment profile, was poorer than that of the other eight children. They were also more atypical in fluency and in speech rate. Given the small sample, the results should be interpreted with caution. Conclusions and implications The only difference in prosodic production discovered in the acoustic analysis, namely that children with autism spectrum disorder used more words per utterance than the children in the comparison group, was not detected in the perceptual assessment. This implies that it was not perceived as atypical by expert listeners. The results indicate difficulties in using voice and speech characteristics as markers of autism spectrum disorder in clinical settings. The correct identification of some of the children as having autism spectrum disorder or not also indicates that some children with autism spectrum disorder have a prosodic production sufficiently ‘atypical’ in combination with a limited ability to tell stories to be perceived.