Sequential Interpretation of Pitch Prominence as Contrastive and Syntactic Information
Contrast Comes First, but Syntax Takes Over
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10255114 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yuki Hirose (0000-0001-5577-2751, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 455-478 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language and Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0023-8309 • E-ISSN: 1756-6053 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0023830919854476 |
| PMID | 31286829 |
| OpenAlex | W2960289437 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrast-encoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation
Ambiguity · Context (archaeology · Contrast (vision · Encoding (memory · Focus (optics · Interpretation (philosophy · Intonation (linguistics · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Physics · Pitch accent · Prosody · Sentence · Sentence processing · Speech recognition · Syntax · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The organization of Japanese prosody
Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody
Smoothing Parameter and Model Selection for General Smooth Models
Anticipatory effects of intonation
Categorical data analysis
The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse
Before the beginning
Prosody in the Comprehension of Spoken Language
The Phonological Component of a Grammar of Japanese
The Effects of Parallelism and Prosody in the Processing of Gapping Structures
Japanese Tone Structure
The Phonetics and Phonology of Tone and Intonation in Japanese
Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension
Japanese focus prosody revisited
Appeals to prosody in Japanese Wh-interrogatives-Speakers' versus listeners' strategies
The Tone Pattern of Japanese
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |