Degrees of Activation and Focus-Background Structure in Spontaneous Speech - The Relation between Prosodic Marking and Syntactic and Semantic Structure Building (DASS)
Final Report Abstract
The multi-layered model of informativeness was further developed, including grammatical, referential and lexical levels, a focus level and a paralinguistic level (Goal 1). We developed fine-grained annotation conventions for the proposed levels, extending the RefLex scheme (in particular the L-level) to syntactic phrases and non-referring expressions, such as adjectives and verbs, resulting in new annotation guidelines. A novel aspect of this model of informativeness is the incorporation of non-referring expressions (Goal 3). Results from a production and a follow-up perception experiment provide evidence for the informativeness of verbs and their relevance for the prosody of information structure: Verbs serve as a source of a noun’s level of givenness and can also be assigned information status themselves. Nonetheless, verbs are not referential in the sense that they refer to a particular instance or mental representation of an entity, but their information status is relevant at the lexical level. Thus, verbs are informative and should consequently be integrated into a wider notion of information status. This model of informativeness was used to annotate read and task-oriented monologues and dialogues as well as spontaneous speech, with a view to investigating the effect of speech style on the prosody of informativeness markers in German (Goal 4). For read speech, we confirmed the relationship between information status and prosody, whilst the results were less clear in spontaneous speech. In two types of semi-spontaneous speech, namely task-oriented monologues and dialogues, we found clear evidence for the relation between levels of givenness and accent placement. Although we have found elsewhere that information status directly determines accent type, this was not the case in the monologues. In this data set, information status determines phrasing, which in turn determines the boundary tone type. Crucially, the boundary tone type affects the type of accent preceding it A further goal of the second stage of the project (Goal 5) was to relate a phonological analysis of pitch accents to a quantitative treatment of the F0 contour (onglide, alignment, peak height), with a focus on the interpretation of phonetic variability. In a perception experiment Ritter & Grice (2015) show that listeners were able to distinguish between two pragmatic meanings of a short phrase (given/non-contrastive and new/contrastive) using the pitch contour before the target on the accented syllable (onglide) as the sole acoustic cue. Thus, the tonal onglide plays a functional role in the intonation of German, and cannot be treated as merely phonetic detail. Detailed analyses of F0 contours show that some speakers’ productions of different types of focus lead to a categorical distinction (reflected in the analysis as a different pitch accent category), whereas others are more subtle (resulting in no difference in the assigned category). Importantly, regardless of the mapping onto intonational categories, all speakers show the same relative pattern with regard to the alignment of the f0 peak, the tonal onglide, and the height of the f0 target on the accented syllable. Perceptual testing on this data set by Cangemi, Krüger & Grice (2015) showed that all speakers – whether their differences in production were subtle or not – were perceived at a similar global level of accuracy. A further perception experiment on Neapolitan Italian suggests that intonational categories can only be correctly described by taking into account not only the distribution of cues across time domains larger than that covered by the pitch accent itself, but also the distribution of cues as used by different individual speakers. The case for investigating individual-specific realisations of intonational categories is strengthened in Cangemi et al. (2016) in which further methods for characterising speaker-specificity are developed. The above quantitative analyses have led to a refinement of the GToBI intonation model and have fed into the development of a consensus system for the prosodic annotation of German, DIMA (Deutsche Intonation: Modellierung und Annotation). This system integrates the analysis of discrete phonological pitch accents and the modulation of continuous phonetic parameters that characterise them.
Publications
- (2014). The effect of focus marking on supralaryngeal articulation – Is it mediated by accentuation? Journal of Phonetics, 4447-61
Mücke, D. & M. Grice
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2014.02.003) - (2015). DIMA – Annotation Guidelines for German Intonation. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhs 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Paper number 317, 1-5
Kügler, F., Smolibocki, B., Arnold, D., Baumann, S., Braun, B., Grice, M., Jannedy, S., Michalsky, J., Niebuhr, O., Peters, J., Ritter, S., Röhr, C. T., Schweitzer, A., Schweitzer, K. & P. Wagner
- (2015). Listener-specific perception of speaker-specific productions in intonation. In S. Fuchs, D. Pape, C. Petrone, & P. Perrier (eds.), Individual differences in speech production and perception, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 123-145
Cangemi, F., Krüger, M. & M. Grice
- (2015). Prosodische (De-)Kodierung des Informationsstatus im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 34 (1), 1-42
Baumann, S., Röhr, C. T. & M. Grice
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2015-0001) - (2015). The Effect of Verbs on the Prosodic Marking of Information Status: Production and Perception in German. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Paper number 384, 1-5
Röhr, C. T., Baumann S. & M. Grice
- (2015). The Role of Tonal Onglides in German Nuclear Pitch Accents. Language and Speech 58(1), 114-128
Ritter, S. & Grice, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830914565688) - (2016) Intonation in der Lautsprache: Tonale Analyse. In U. Domahs & B. Primus (eds.) Handbuch Laut, Gebärde, Buchstabe, De Gruyter, 84-105
Grice, M. & S. Baumann
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110295993) - (2016). The importance of a distributional approach to categoriality in autosegmental-metrical accounts of intonation. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 7(1):9, 1-20
Cangemi, F. & M. Grice
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.28) - (2016). The Information Status of Nominal and Verbal Expressions: Intonational Evidence from Production and Perception in German. University of Cologne: Doctoral thesis
Röhr, C. T.
