Exploring the relationship between intonation and the lexicon:
Evidence for lexicalised storage of intonation
Katrin Schweitzer, Michael Walsh, Sasha Calhoun, Hinrich Schutze, Bernd Mobius, Antje Schweitzer, Grzegorz Dogil
Speech Communication (2015)
Sheng-Fu @2014/12/18
The question
Are the choice of intonation contour and the form of the contour independent of the words used?
The assignment of intonation is autonomous from the segmental level
The separation of the lexical and the tonal level
Realization of pitch contours is determined by phonetic rules
(refering to tonal sequences and metrical organization)
At odds with the idea of storing acoustic details with lexical items
Detailed episodic storage
Frequent units lead to many exemplars
Frequent units display less variation
Current exemplar models do not take account of intonation
Frequency effects on prosody
acquisition of the prosodic word (Vigario et al., 2006)
word stress assignment (Daelemans et al., 1994)
predictability of syllable duration (Schiweitzer & Mobius, 2004)
Present study: frequency effect on PA variability
Evidence for supporting an exemplar view on word+intonation
Parametrisation of pitch accent shape
(The PaIntE model)
a1 and a2: steepness of rise and fall
Annotated part of the DIRNDL-Corpus, German radio news broadcasts (5 hours and 16 min)
The range is increased by approx. 0.89 Hz for each unit increase in logged frequency of occurrence
higher rel.freq, lower variability
higher abs.freq, higher variability
sonorant coda, lower variability
A subset of the Switchboard corpus (6 hours)
PA location and boundary location were labeled.
Relative frequency:
Variability:
Most common pattern for a word in any trigram (e.g., lot)
For each trigram with the middle word (lot), determine whether it has that common pattern
This is the binary dependent variable
Theories of episodic storage are able to explain this
linguistic units as concrete and highly specified instances, containing properties of the tonal and the lexical
Less variability with increasing relative frequency (H*L)
More variability with increasing absolute frequency
Greater absolute frequency = greater variability because tokens are coming from all contexts
As relative trigram frequency increases...
more homogeneous prosodic context (more likely to be the most common pattern)
less variability for pitch Accent realization
Evidence for cohesion between the word and its prosodic realization
Explained with the exemplar theory:
tonal events are stored with lexical sequences
words collocate together will be stored together and acquire particular phonetic characteristics
Word and PA tokens separately with co-index?
Effects too subtle?
intonational information is very uneven across the lexicon, so effects do not show well across words
This study demonstrates effects on intonation that
should be considered in exemplar-theoretic models.
Frequency of occurrence effects are
acknowledged