TY - JOUR A1 - van Ommen, Sandrien A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Larraza, Saioa A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language-specific prosodic acquisition BT - a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants JF - Journal of memory and language: JML N2 - This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception. KW - Prosody KW - Acquisition KW - Language-specific KW - Perception KW - Infant KW - Prosodic boundaries Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104108 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 112 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pfeiffer, Martin A1 - Weiss, Clarissa T1 - Reenactments during tellings BT - using gaze for initiating reenactments, switching roles and representing events JF - Journal of pragmatics : an interdisciplinary journal of language studies N2 - In this paper, we draw on German dyadic face-to-face conversations among friends in order to examine the interactional functions of gaze in reenactments, i.e. "re-presentations or depictions" (Sidnell, 2006: 377) of previously experienced or imagined events. Firstly, we show that reenactors use several different gaze patterns depending on whether the depicted original event is dialogic or non-dialogic. Secondly, we compare the use of different resources for initiating reenactments and switching roles during reenactments with regard to the interactional function of the different alternatives. Specifically, we describe a multimodal practice for switching characters during reenactments that are designed to invite laughter. In sum, the findings add to our knowledge about the various communicative functions of gaze in social interaction. KW - Gaze KW - Gesture KW - Prosody KW - Quotative KW - Reenactment KW - Storytelling Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.11.017 SN - 0378-2166 SN - 1879-1387 VL - 189 SP - 92 EP - 113 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marimon Tarter, Mireia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Langus, Alan T1 - Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants JF - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science N2 - Young infants can segment continuous speech with statistical as well as prosodic cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. Here we investigate how German-speaking adults and 9-month-old German-learning infants weigh statistical and prosodic cues when segmenting continuous speech. We measured participants' pupil size while they were familiarized with a continuous speech stream where prosodic cues were pitted off against transitional probabilities. Adult participants' changes in pupil size synchronized with the occurrence of prosodic words during the familiarization and the temporal alignment of these pupillary changes was predictive of adult participants' performance at test. Further, 9-month-olds as a group failed to consistently segment the familiarization stream with prosodic or statistical cues. However, the variability in temporal alignment of the pupillary changes at word frequency showed that prosodic and statistical cues compete for dominance when segmenting continuous speech. A followup language development questionnaire at 40 months of age suggested that infants who entrained to prosodic words performed better on a vocabulary task and those infants who relied more on statistical cues performed better on grammatical tasks. Together these results suggest that statistics and prosody may serve different roles in speech segmentation in infancy. KW - Language acquisition KW - Transitional probabilities KW - Prosody KW - Cue weighting Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105054 SN - 0010-0277 SN - 1873-7838 VL - 224 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - THES A1 - Chen, Hui Ching T1 - Acquisition of focus - in a cross-linguistic perspective T1 - Spracherwerb im Fokus - eine sprachübergreifende Perspektive N2 - In dieser Dissertation untersuchen wir, wie chinesischen Muttersprachler und deutschen Muttersprachler, sowohl die Erwachsenen als auch die Kinder, verschiedene linguistische Mittel, wie z. B. Wortstellungsinformationen, prosodische und lexikalische Mittel im Sprachverständnis korrekt interpretieren. N2 - Successful communication is often explored by people throughout their life courses. To effectively transfer one’s own information to others, people employ various linguistic tools, such as word order information, prosodic cues, and lexical choices. The exploration of these linguistic cues is known as the study of information structure (IS). Moreover, an important issue in the language acquisition of children is the investigation of how they acquire IS. This thesis seeks to improve our understanding of how children acquire different tools (i.e., prosodical cues, syntactical cues, and the focus particle only) of focus marking in a cross linguistic perspective. In the first study, following Szendrői and her colleagues (2017)- the sentence-picture verification task- was performed to investigate whether three- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children as well as Mandarin-speaking adults could apply prosodic information to recognize focus in sentences. More, in the second study, not only Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children but also German-speaking adults and German-speaking children were included to confirm the assumption that children could have adult-like performance in understanding sentence focus by identifying language specific cues in their mother tongue from early onwards. In this study, the same paradigm- the sentence-picture verification task- as in the first study was employed together with the eye-tracking method. Finally, in the last study, an issue of whether five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence was carried out and again whether prosodic information would help them to better understand this kind of sentences. The overall results seem to suggest that Mandarin-speaking children from early onwards could make use of the specific linguistic cues in their ambient language. That is, in Mandarin, a Topic-prominent and tone language, the word order information plays a more important rule than the prosodic information and even three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could follow the word order information. More, although it seems that German-speaking children could follow the prosodic information, they did not have the adult-like performance in the object-accented condition. A feasible reason for this result is that there are more possibilities of marking focus in German, such as flexible word order, prosodic information, focus particles, and thus it would take longer time for German-speaking children to manage these linguistic tools. Another important empirical finding regarding the syntactically-marked focus in German is that it seems that the cleft construction is not a valid focus construction and this result corroborates with the previous observations (Dufter, 2009). Further, eye-tracking method did help to uncover how the parser direct their attention for recognizing focus. In the final study, it is showed that with explicit verbal context Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence and the study brought a better understanding of the acquisition of the focus particle- only with the Mandarin-speaking children. KW - information structure KW - language acquisition KW - Mandarin KW - German KW - Prosody KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Spracherwerb KW - Deutsch KW - Mandarin KW - Prosodie Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-553458 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Chen, Hui-Ching A1 - Szendroi, Krizsta A1 - Crain, Stephen A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese BT - Data from Children and Adults JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research N2 - This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and Chen in Prosodic focus marking in Chinese four-and eight-year-olds, 2014). However, while prosodic focus marking did not seem to affect sentence comprehension in adults Mandarin-speaking children showed enhanced sentence comprehension when the sentence focus was marked by prosodic information in a previous study (Chen in Appl Psycholinguist 19(4):553-582, 1998). The present study revisited this difference between Mandarin speaking adults and children by applying a newly designed task that tested the use of prosodic information to identify the sentence focus. No evidence was obtained that Mandarin-speaking children (as young as 3years of age) adhered more strongly to prosodic information than adults but that word order was the strongest cue for their focus interpretation. Our findings support the view that children attune to the specific means of information structure marking in their ambient language at an early age. KW - Focus KW - Prosody KW - Language acquisition KW - Mandarin Chinese KW - Information structure Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9580-9 SN - 0090-6905 SN - 1573-6555 VL - 48 IS - 1 SP - 19 EP - 32 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Genzel, Susanne A1 - Ishihara, Shinichiro A1 - Suranyi, Balazs T1 - The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined. The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Hungarian KW - Prosody KW - Focus KW - Background KW - Givenness KW - Contrast Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.010 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 165 SP - 183 EP - 204 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ward, Nigel G. A1 - Vega, Alejandro A1 - Baumann, Timo T1 - Prosodic and temporal features for language modeling for dialog JF - Speech communication N2 - If we can model the cognitive and communicative processes underlying speech, we should be able to better predict what a speaker will do. With this idea as inspiration, we examine a number of prosodic and timing features as potential sources of information on what words the speaker is likely to say next. In spontaneous dialog we find that word probabilities do vary with such features. Using perplexity as the metric, the most informative of these included recent speaking rate, volume, and pitch, and time until end of utterance. Using simple combinations of such features to augment trigram language models gave up to a 8.4% perplexity benefit on the Switchboard corpus, and up to a 1.0% relative reduction in word error rate (0.3% absolute) on the Verbmobil II corpus. KW - Dialog dynamics KW - Dialog state KW - Prosody KW - Interlocutor behavior KW - Word probabilities KW - Prediction KW - Perplexity KW - Speech recognition KW - Switchboard corpus KW - Verbmobil corpus Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2011.07.009 SN - 0167-6393 VL - 54 IS - 2 SP - 161 EP - 174 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Stavropoulou, Pepi T1 - On the status of contrast : evidence from the prosodic domain N2 - Recent models of Information Structure (IS) identify a low level contrast feature that functions within the topic and focus of the utterance. This study investigates the exact nature of this feature based on empirical evidence from a controlled read speech experiment on the prosodic realization of different levels of contrast in Modern Greek. Results indicate that only correction is truly contrastive, and that it is similarly realized in both topic and focus, suggesting that contrast is an independent IS dimension. Non default focus position is further identified as a parameter that triggers a prosodically marked rendition, similar to correction. KW - Information Structure KW - Prosody KW - Contrast KW - Correction KW - Markedness Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-66066 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Drenhaus, Heiner T1 - Single prosodic phrase sentences N2 - A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results. KW - Prosody KW - experimental linguistics Y1 - 2008 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19371 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Asher, Nicholas A1 - Reese, Brian T1 - Intonation and discourse BT - biased questions N2 - This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse. KW - Bias KW - Intonation KW - Prosody KW - Complex Speech Acts KW - Negative KW - Polar Questions KW - Tag Questions KW - SDRT Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19399 ER -