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The Prosody of Information Units in Spontaneous Monologue

The Prosody of Information Units in Spontaneous Monologue This article describes a perceptual evaluation of the prosodic structure of a spontaneously produced monologue. It was found that the speaker studied demarcates larger-scale topical units in spoken discourse by means of intonation (use of melodic boundary markers, scaling of maxima in pitchmovements, general decline in average pitch) and by the use of pauses with variable durations. In a perception test, it was examined to what extent these prosodic devices may be important to listeners. Subjects were confronted with three unintelligible (band-pass-filtered) versions of a fragment of the elicited monologue: (1) with the original prosody unchanged; (2) with constant pause duration and the original speech melody; (3) with monotonous pitch and the original pause structure. They were instructed to indicate the boundaries of the larger-scale topical units in the three versions. Subjects were able to detect correctly the major discourse boundaries in all three filtered versions in a significant number of cases. They performed best when confronted with version 1. Versions 1 and 2, in their turn, did better than version 3, which suggests that, in the performance of this speaker, intonation is a perceptually more important factor than pause for the clarification of the topical make-up of a text, though the latter dimension is certainly not negligible. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Phonetica Karger

The Prosody of Information Units in Spontaneous Monologue

Swerts, Marc; Geluykens, Ronald
Phonetica , Volume 50 (3): 8 – Jan 1, 1993
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Publisher
Karger
Copyright
© 1993 S. Karger AG, Basel
ISSN
0031-8388
eISSN
1423-0321
DOI
10.1159/000261939
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article describes a perceptual evaluation of the prosodic structure of a spontaneously produced monologue. It was found that the speaker studied demarcates larger-scale topical units in spoken discourse by means of intonation (use of melodic boundary markers, scaling of maxima in pitchmovements, general decline in average pitch) and by the use of pauses with variable durations. In a perception test, it was examined to what extent these prosodic devices may be important to listeners. Subjects were confronted with three unintelligible (band-pass-filtered) versions of a fragment of the elicited monologue: (1) with the original prosody unchanged; (2) with constant pause duration and the original speech melody; (3) with monotonous pitch and the original pause structure. They were instructed to indicate the boundaries of the larger-scale topical units in the three versions. Subjects were able to detect correctly the major discourse boundaries in all three filtered versions in a significant number of cases. They performed best when confronted with version 1. Versions 1 and 2, in their turn, did better than version 3, which suggests that, in the performance of this speaker, intonation is a perceptually more important factor than pause for the clarification of the topical make-up of a text, though the latter dimension is certainly not negligible.

Journal

Phonetica – Karger

Published: Jan 1, 1993

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