Palestra 02
- Título
- Prosody perception in spontaneous speech: What we can learn from annotators and imitators
- Palestrante
- Dra. Jennifer Cole (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EUA)
- Resumo
- As in other areas of linguistic inquiry, most of what we know about prosodic form comes from the study of prosody production, yet the broad goal of understanding how prosody functions to communicate meaning requires examining the behavior of both the speaker and the hearer. Studying prosody perception poses many challenges. Traditional methods for studying speech perception, based on linguistic criteria of semantic differentiation, are not readily applied to the phenomenon of prosody. More critically, the reliance on short, experimenter-controlled utterances as stimuli in prosody perception studies limits the scope of the research. Effects on prosody due to speech planning, or arising from the meaningful interaction between interlocutors are not well represented in laboratory speech data, and such materials may not reveal the prosodic patterns speakers realize with utterances of their own design. My ongoing research uses annotation and imitation as methods for investigating prosody perception with spontaneous, conversational speech. One study uses Rapid Prosody Transcription, a method where ordinary listeners who perform real-time prosody annotation with long excerpts of spontaneous speech. Transcripts are pooled across listeners to yield probabilistic prosodic features marking prominences and boundaries on each word. Statistical analyses relate the perceived prosodic properties of the utterance to acoustic cues present in the signal, to its lexical and syntactic content, and to its status in conveying semantic, pragmatic and discourse meaning, revealing bottom-up and top- down influences in prosody perception for American English (Buckeye Corpus). The recent application of RPT to French (Smith 2009) and Korean (You 2012), languages with typologically distinct prosodic systems, will be discussed. A second study uses prosody imitation to investigate the nature of prosody perception at the level of the phonological encoding and in its detailed phonetic expression. Together, these studies reveal listener sensitivity to speaker-dependent acoustic prosodic detail, but with priority assigned to the coarse-grained phonological prosodic form in memory representation. Implications of these findings for theories of prosody in speech processing and the cognitive representation of prosody will be discussed.
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