Memory and context effects on representations of variation in phrasal intonation

记忆和语境对短语语调变化表征的影响

• 批准号: 1944773
• 负责人: Jennifer Cole
• 金额: $ 41.48万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-03-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1944773&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Memory; context; effects; representations; variation; Memory; context; effects; representations; variation

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Meaning is communicated in spoken language through words and their arrangement in sentences, and also through the way the words and sentences are said — their intonation. In English, intonation conveys discourse meaning, marking the distinction between a question and a statement, expressing the speaker's uncertainty or surprise, or highlighting informative words. These meanings are conveyed through complex patterns in pitch and other acoustic features, across the words in the sentence. Understanding how an intonation system works requires a detailed description of the intonation patterns that speakers produce, and an account of the elements that are perceptually salient: Is the pitch pattern of every word in a sentence potentially meaningful, and if not, which intonational features and which regions of the sentence are more (or less) critical for conveying discourse meaning? A further question is whether listeners pay attention to subtle variation in intonational features as marking corresponding distinctions in broad categories like 'question' or 'information focus', or alternatively, whether they attend to coarse-grained distinctions in intonation as cues to the broad meaning categories, while perceiving fine-grained variation as cues to speaker identity or psychological state. Understanding the mapping between intonation and meaning is important for theories of speech communication, cognition, the brain, and language learning. It has applications in clinical domains related to speech, hearing, and the brain, and for enhanced computer speech technologies that can process expressive spoken language.The goal of this project is to identify the elements of phrasal intonation that are perceived in heard speech and encoded in long-term memory representations. These representations are tapped through tasks where listeners reproduce the intonation of a heard utterance. Experiments will test 24 distinct intonational "tunes" proposed for English in the Autosegmental-Metrical theory of English intonation. In eight experiments, the participant's task of reproducing intonation is manipulated in three ways: using model sentences with more complex intonational patterns and variable lexical and syntactic content; introducing a time delay or an intervening speech task between hearing the model sentence and reproducing the intonation pattern; with information about the immediately preceding discourse and social context that support the interpretation of intonational meaning. Analyses of dynamic acoustic measures will test the similarity of reproduced intonation patterns to corresponding stimuli, revealing the phonetic granularity of intonational representations along dimensions related to pitch, loudness, tempo, and voice quality, and whether individuals vary in the intonational features they reproduce. The findings will resolve long-standing questions about intonational representation, informing linguistic theories of intonation and its meaning, and advancing intonation research with a novel experimental paradigm that can be used in studies of other languages, with no requirements on written language or the explicit definition of intonational meaning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项是根据2021年《美国救援计划法》的全部或部分资助的（公共法117-2）。通过言语及其在句子中的安排以及通过说单词和句子的方式来传达语言的含义。用英语，语调传达了话语的含义，标志着问题和陈述之间的障碍，表达了说话者的不确定性或惊喜，或者突出显示信息丰富的词语。这些含义是通过音高和其他声学特征的复杂模式在句子中传达的。了解语调系统的工作原理需要详细描述说话者产生的语调模式，以及对感知上显着的元素的描述：句子中每个单词的音调模式是否可能有意义，如果没有，则是哪些语言特征，哪些句子的特征以及句子的哪些区域更重要（或更少）（或更少）（或更少）对于传达讨论意义？另一个问题是，听众是否关注独立特征的细微差异，因为它标记了“问题”或“信息焦点”等广泛类别中的相应区分，或者，他们是否会在语调中介绍粗粒的区分，作为对广泛意义类别的提示，同时将精细的变化视为对说话者身份或心理学状态的提示。了解语调和意义之间的映射对于语音交流，认知，大脑和语言学习的理论很重要。它在与语音，听力和大脑有关的临床领域中具有应用，以及可以处理能够处理表达性辐条语言的计算机语音技术。该项目的目的是确定在听力语音中感知并在长期记忆中编码的短语语调的要素。这些表示是通过侦听者重现听话的语调的任务来利用的。实验将测试24个在英语语调的自动段性学理论中为英语提出的24个不同的独立“曲调”。在八个实验中，参与者的重现语调的任务以三种方式进行操纵：使用具有更复杂的语言模式以及可变词汇和句法内容的模型句子；在听取模型句子和重现语调模式之间引入时间延迟或中间语音任务；借助有关支持独立意义的解释的直接话语和社会环境的信息。对动态声学措施的分析将测试复制的教导模式的相似性以相应的刺激，从而揭示了与音高，响度，速度，速度和语音质量相关的维度的语音粒度，并且个人是否在其繁殖的原性特征上有所不同。这些发现将解决有关独立表示形式的长期问题，告知语言理论及其含义，并通过一个新的实验范式来推进语调研究，该范式可以用于其他语言的研究中，而没有书面语言的研究要求，而对内在含义的良好及其奖励的良好态度及其始终如一地影响了NSF的良好依据。 标准。