Modeling Meaning-Bearing Configurations of Prosodic Features
Special Session at ICPhS
2019, the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences,
5-9
August 2019, Melbourne, Australia.
Languages have multistream patterns of prosodic features — such as
pitch range, pitch-movement timing, segmental lengthening, voicing
properties, loudnesss, and harmonicity — that occur in specific
temporal configurations and directly convey pragmatic or interactional
meanings. Many features of such configurations have been analyzed, but
we still lack a good understanding of their exact nature, including
phenomena of parameter timing and coupling, trade-offs, and
differences among speakers and across languages.
Organizers:
Oliver Niebuhr and Nigel Ward
Main Session (14:00-16:10 room 220, Tuesday, 6 August)
- Rise dynamics determines tune perception in French: the case of questions and continuations.
Lydia Dorokhova, Mariapaola D'Imperio
- Characterising Intonation in Plastic Mandarin Using Polynomial Modelling.
Chenzi Xu
- Variability and category overlap in the realization of intonation. Georg Lohfink, Argyro Katsika, Amalia Arvaniti.
- Focus Acoustics and Prosodic Organization in Hong Kong Cantonese and
Taiwan Mandarin. Yu-yin Hsu, Anqi Xu.
- F0 as a Cue for Irony in Spontaneous Speech. Helen Gent.
- The Role of Prosody in the Perception of Formality in Japanese. Ethan Sherr-Ziarko.
discussants: Martine Grice and Nigel Ward
Other Oral Presentations (Tuesday, 12:15 and 12:45, room 217)
- The prosodic properties of the Cantonese sentence-final particles aa1 and aa3 in rhetorical wh-questions.
Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo; Angelika Kiss; Maxime Tulling
- Production of deaccenting under repetition, entailment, and bridging: Phonetic and perceptual comparisons.
Jeffrey Geiger; Ming Xiang
Poster Presentations
Monday
- Questions as prosodic configurations: How prosody and context shape the multiparametric nature of rhetorical questions in German.
Jana Neitsch and Oliver Niebuhr
- Burmese quotation intonation. Mimi Tian, Albert Lee.
- The emphatic juncture: A novel use of the IP boundary in English.
Bethany Sturman
-
Is this in the phonology? Examining the intonational phonetics-phonology interface with American English polar questions.
Z. L. Zhou, Bryon Ahn
Tuesday
- Evidence for the compositionality of tunes and intonational meaning.
Stella Gryllia, Mary Baltazani, Amalia Arvaniti
- Toward Predictive Modelling for AM Theory of Intonation. Emily Lau, Yi Xu
Wednesday
- A prosodic configuration that conveys positive assessment in American English.
Nigel Ward
Background: We organized this special session as a venue for
researchers from any perspective to discuss how to discover,
characterize and model such prosodic constructions from perspectives
of speech production, acoustics, or perception. Papers were evaluated
by the standard ICPhS review process.
The questions that we posed were:
- How can we
specify a meaning-bearing configuration that accurately models the
components and their temporal relations?
- How can we accurately
model the prosodic variations that we can observe for these
configurations, including compensatory trade-offs between the prosodic
parameters that allow for individually different signaling strategies
that are effectively equivalent for the speech community (as when a
shorter pitch movement can be compensated for by a stronger syllable
lengthening in the identification of prominences)?
- To what extent
are these configurations and their variations related to correlations
among or mutual constraints on the movements of linked articulators?
- How do variations in the strength and alignment of these
components strengthen or weaken the percept or the conveyed meaning?
Links