Joan Borràs-Comes

The role of pitch range in establishing intonational contrasts

In Catalan, the same rising nuclear pitch accent L+H* is used in three different sentence-types, namely statements, contrastive foci, and echo questions. Since the peak height of the rising pitch accent seems to indicate sentence type, we hypothesized that these three pragmatic meanings would be differentiated by pitch accent range. We undertook two identification tasks and analyzed the patterns of responses found as well as reaction times (RTs). The results of the identification tasks show that there is a contrast between the statement interpretation on the one hand (L+H*) and the contrastive foci and echo question interpretation on the other (L+iH*). However, RTs clearly show that while there is a categorical difference between the statement interpretation (L+H*) and the echo question interpretation (L+iH*), the difference between a statement interpretation and a contrastive focus interpretation is gradient. This represents further evidence that pitch range can be used to make phonological distinctions between a variety of pragmatic meanings, and strengthens the argument that this needs to be represented descriptively at the phonological level.

Vocative Intonation Preferences Are Sensitive to Politeness Factors

Although intonation has been traditionally associated with the expression of attitudes and intentions on the part of the speaker, little is known about whether sociopragmatic factors, such as power or social distance, or situational ones, like physical distance or insistence, can constrain the use and felicity of pitch contours. This article investigates the felicity conditions underlying the choice of three vocative pitch contours in Central Catalan by means of two experiments, namely a production experiment based on the Discourse Completion Task (320 vocative contours produced by 20 speakers), and an acceptability judgment task in which 72 listeners were asked to rate the appropriateness match between a set of vocative contours and a previous discourse context (3,456 responses). The results from the two experiments show that both situational and social politeness factors govern the choice of vocative intonation. Finally, the results are discussed in line with the traditional classification of politeness strategies defined by Brown and Levinson, in the sense that the three intonation contours can be linked to negative, positive, and bald on-record politeness strategies.

Exploring the contribution of prosody and gesture to the perception of focus using an animated agent

Speech prosody has traditionally been analyzed in terms of acoustic features. Although visual features have been shown to enhance linguistic processing, the conventional view is that facial and body gesture information in oral (non-signed) languages tends to be redundant and has the role of helping the hearer recover the meaning of an utterance. Though prosodic information in face-to-face communication is produced with concurrent visual information, little is known about their audiovisual multisensory interactions. We conducted two perception experiments modeled after the McGurk paradigm with a 3D animated character, in which varying degrees of discordance between auditory and visual information were created to investigate two related questions regarding the detection of contrastive-corrective focus: (a) how important are gestural cues with respect to auditory cues and (b) what is the relevance of the different gestural movements involved (i.e., head nodding, eyebrow raising)? Participants were presented with combinations of auditory and visual cues for both information and Contrastive Focus Statements (Experiment 1, with the corresponding unimodal control experiments) or combinations of two visual cues (namely combinations of competing eyebrow and head movements) without auditory information (Experiment 2), and were asked to identify whether the utterance presented was a statement or a correction. Results of Experiment 1 showed that (a) the presence of either acoustic or gestural features of contrastive focus were key in guiding the listener towards one interpretation or another, and (b) listeners were more sensitive to one of the modalities when the other was weaker. Results of Experiment 2 showed that (a) both types of visual cues (head and eyebrow movements) contributed individually to the perception of contrastive focus, and (b) head nods were more informative than eyebrow movements for focus identification. Overall, our findings suggest that prosodic and visual information work in a complementary fashion and are not integrated in the same way as auditory and visual information during segmental perception.

Communicating Epistemic Stance: How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality.

This study investigates how epistemic stance is encoded and perceived in face-to-face communication when language is regarded as comprised by speech and gesture. Two studies were conducted with this goal in mind. The first study consisted of a production task in which participants performed opinion reports. Results showed that speakers communicate epistemic stance both verbally and non-verbally, and that specific prosodic and gestural patterns are used to express different epistemic and evidential meanings. The second study consisted of a rating task in which listeners rated the degree of certainty expressed by the opinion reports. Results showed that the number of gestural high certainty markers used by a speaker was a good predictor of the perception of epistemic high certainty. We thus claim that prosodic and gestural markers can be regarded as overt manifestations of epistemicity and evidentiality, and they appear to be especially effective in the communication of epistemic stance.

Double Negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction Between Syntax and Prosody

This study focuses on the interaction between prosody and syntax in the interpretation of single negation and Double Negation in two Negative Concord languages, namely Catalan and Spanish. By means of two perception experiments, we investigate the role of two major formal conditions in the interpretation of Double Negation in Catalan and Spanish answers to negative wh-questions: (a) their intonation; and (b) their syntactic structure, which contain n-words such as Catalan ningu ‘nobody’ or Spanish nada ‘nothing’. The results reveal that (i) syntax and prosody interact: prosodic contours enhance processing of syntactic structures; (ii) isolated and preverbal n-words may convey DN interpretations when associated with a special intonation; and (iii) Catalan and Spanish hearers show form-meaning preferences between syntactic forms and prosodic contours: interestingly, hearers do not reject marked forms that should be discarded by a theory of grammar that only takes into account syntactic constituents and their merging possibilities according to their formal features, but they interpret them in the only way they can be interpreted, as a presupposition denial.

Specific neural traces for intonational discourse categories as revealed by human-evoked potentials

The neural representation of segmental and tonal phonological distinctions has been shown by means of the MMN ERP, yet this is not the case for intonational discourse contrasts. In Catalan, a rising–falling intonational sequence can be perceived as a statement or as a counterexpectational question, depending exclusively on the size of the pitch range interval of the rising movement. We tested here, using the MMN, whether such categorical distinctions elicited distinct neurophysiological patterns of activity, supporting their specific neural representation. From a behavioral identification experiment, we set the boundary between the two categories and defined four stimuli across the continuum. Although the physical distance between each pair of stimuli was kept constant, the central pair represented an across-category contrast, whereas the other pairs represented within-category contrasts. These four auditory stimuli were contrasted by pairs in three different oddball blocks. The mean amplitude of the MMN was larger for the across-category contrast, suggesting that intonational contrasts in the target language can be encoded automatically in the auditory cortex. These results are in line with recent findings in other fields of linguistics, showing that, when a boundary between categories is crossed, the MMN response is not just larger but rather includes a separate subcomponent.

The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: Effects of prominence and frequency of exposure

Abstract One of the challenges of child language research is to identify the relevant factors that play a role in the acquisition course of a particular linguistic feature. This article analyzes the role of stress, word position, and word length in the acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children. The fact that the two languages differ substantially in their coda distribution (e.g., stressed word-final codas are more frequent in Catalan than in Spanish) will allow us to test the potential effects of coda distribution in the target language on early coda production. Sixteen Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant two-year-olds from the Barcelona area participated in two elicitation tasks with both novel and familiar words of different phonological shapes. Coda productions were assessed in stressed vs. unstressed syllables, in word-medial vs. word-final syllables, and in monosyllables vs. polysyllables. Results showed that the distributional difference between coda consonants in the two languages has crucial effects on the childrens coda production. That is, Catalan-dominant children produce significantly more stressed word-final codas than Spanish-dominant children. This result lends support to the idea that when prominence is held equal, as in a controlled experiment, there are still crosslinguistic differences in coda production that are consistent with the frequency distribution of coda consonants in the respective languages, which means that children are very closely attuned to the frequency patterns of prosodic structure in the input language and are aware of their specific distributions across the lexicon.

The timing of head movements: The role of prosodic heads and edges

This study examines the influence of the position of prosodic heads (accented syllables) and prosodic edges (prosodic word and intonational phrase boundaries) on the timing of head movements. Gesture movements and prosodic events tend to be temporally aligned in the discourse, the most prominent part of gestures typically being aligned with prosodically prominent syllables in speech. However, little is known about the impact of the position of intonational phrase boundaries on gesture-speech alignment patterns. Twenty-four Catalan speakers produced spontaneous (experiment 1) and semi-spontaneous head gestures with a confirmatory function (experiment 2), along with phrase-final focused words in different prosodic conditions (stress-initial, stress-medial, and stress-final). Results showed (a) that the scope of head movements is the associated focused prosodic word, (b) that the left edge of the focused prosodic word determines where the interval of gesture prominence starts, and (c) that the speech-anchoring site for the gesture peak (or apex) depends both on the location of the accented syllable and the distance to the upcoming intonational phrase boundary. These results demonstrate that prosodic heads and edges have an impact on the timing of head movements, and therefore that prosodic structure plays a central role in the timing of co-speech gestures.

Prosodic mitigation characterizes Catalan formal speech: The Frequency Code reassessed

Abstract Research in the past few decades has claimed that high or rising fundamental frequency (F0) signals a set of meanings related to the expression of politeness (e.g., deference, submission or lack of confidence (Gussenhoven, 2004; Ohala, 1984)). In this regard, the Frequency Code has been proposed to explain the universal tendency for high pitch to be interpreted as related to politeness and other sociopragmatic meanings (Gussenhoven, 2004; Gussenhoven, Chen, & Rietveld, 2002; Ohala, 1984). Recently, however, some experimental research has questioned the universality of the Frequency Code and pointed to the importance of taking other prosodic parameters into account (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987; Grawunder, Oertel, & Schwarze, 2014; Winter & Grawunder, 2012). Clearly, further work is needed before the question of universal tendencies in the prosodic encoding of politeness can be conclusively settled. The present study attempts to help fill that gap. Twenty Catalan speakers participated in an oral discourse elicitation task designed to investigate the prosodic components of politeness in requests in formal register speech compared to informal speech by not only analysing F0 parameters but also taking into account other prosodic parameters such as duration, voice quality and intensity, and controlling for the use of phonological intonational patterns. Results showed that subjects exhibited a slower speech rate, a lower mean pitch, less intensity, less shimmer and less jitter and an increase in H1–H2 in the formal condition. Thus, contrary to previous claims, the Frequency Code appears not to hold for this language. Rather, our results support the idea that Catalan speakers use a phonetic mitigation strategy involving various prosodic correlates. After comparing our findings with the results reported in previous literature for other languages, we entertain the hypothesis that prosodic mitigation may well play a strong role in marking politeness cross-linguistically.

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

Abstract This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011; Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan- and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development.