What makes a word prominent? Predicting untrained German listeners' perceptual judgments
What makes a word prominent? Predicting untrained German listeners' perceptual judgments
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DOI：
10.1016/j.wocn.2018.05.004
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发表时间：
2018-09-01
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
Winter, Bodo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Baumann, Stefan;Winter, Bodo
语言交际的一个重要特征是话语的某些部分比其他部分更加突出。突显作为口语的一种感知特征，受到许多不同的语言变量的影响，但这些变量在感知中如何相互作用，以及哪些变量对突显的决定最为重要，目前尚不清楚。我们报告的结果从韵律转录任务，评估如何未经训练的德国听众同时受到梯度信号为基础的因素，如音高，强度和持续时间，以及离散韵律因素（音高口音类型和位置）和非韵律因素（语义，句法，词汇）。测试的所有17个语言变量都与听众的突出判断可靠相关。我们使用随机森林，一种数据挖掘算法，揭示哪些变量是最重要的，在确定显着性的判断。这项分析表明，与语调音系学相关的离散韵律变量，特别是音高重音的类型及其位置，最能预测突出度。与此同时，显著性判断的特点是大的个体差异。一个探索性的聚类分析表明，一些听众更注意音高相关的变量，但语义，句法和词汇变量，而另一些人做相反的。我们的研究结果描绘了一幅复杂的画面，突出感知是高度可变的听众，但确保强大的通信突出信息，通过同时感知提示许多不同的语言变量。(c)2018爱思唯尔有限公司版权所有
One important feature of linguistic communication is that some parts of utterances are more prominent than others. Prominence as a perceptual feature of spoken language is influenced by many different linguistic variables, but it is not clear how these variables interact in perception and which variables are most important for determining prominence. We report results from a prosody transcription task which assessed how untrained German listeners are simultaneously affected by gradient signal-based factors such as pitch, intensity and duration, as well as discrete prosodic factors (pitch accent type and placement) and non-prosodic factors (semantic-syntactic, lexical). All 17 linguistic variables tested were reliably associated with listeners' prominence judgments. We used random forests, a data mining algorithm, to uncover which variables are most important in determining the prominence judgments. This analysis showed that discrete prosodic variables relating to intonational phonology, specifically the type of pitch accent and its position, were most predictive of prominence. At the same time, prominence judgments were characterized by large individual differences. An exploratory cluster analysis suggests that some listeners pay more attention to pitch-related variables but less to semantic-syntactic and lexical variables, while others do the reverse. Our results paint a complex picture of prominence perception that is highly variable across listeners, but that assures robust communication of prominence information through the simultaneous perceptual cueing of many different linguistic variables. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.