Intonational Focus in Spontaneous Japanese and English Dialogue

当人们相互交谈时，他们传达的信息有很大一部分是通过韵律，也就是“讲话的旋律”来传达的。韵律包括我们说话的速度、音量以及短语的节奏和调子的变化。比方说，韵律可以把组成英语单词三角龙的一串语音变成三个截然不同的单词‘Try，Sarah，TOPSOIL’，甚至变成四个单词‘TICE，AIR，TOP，SOIL’。在国家科学基金会的支持下，Shari Speer博士和Kiwako Ito博士将探索说话者和听话者如何使用韵律在英语和日语的自发对话中进行交流。跨语言比较解决的问题是，韵律在旋律截然不同的语言中是否具有相同的交际功能。旋律的哪些方面对语言理解最重要，这些在语言中是共同的吗？说话者发出某些旋律是因为它们对听众有帮助，还是他们主要专注于自己对信息的解释？这些问题是由一个更基本的问题引起的：韵律在人类对话中的普遍性是什么，它如何反映语言使用过程中认知功能的结构？

When people engage each other in conversation, a substantial part of their message is conveyed by prosody, or 'the melody of speech.' Prosody includes variation in the rate at which we speak, the volume of our voices, and the rhythm and tune of our phrases. For example, prosody can change the string of speech sounds that make up the two English words 'triceratops oil' into three quite different words 'Try, Sarah, topsoil,' or even four words 'Trice, air, atop, soil.' With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Shari Speer and Dr. Kiwako Ito will explore the way speakers and listeners use prosody to communicate in spontaneous dialogues in English and Japanese. The cross-linguistic comparison addresses the question of whether prosody has the same kind of communicative function in languages that are melodically very different. What aspects of the melodies are most important for language understanding, and are these common across languages? Do speakers pronounce certain melodies because they will be helpful for listeners, or do they focus primarily on their own interpretation of a message? These questions are motivated by a more basic one: What is universal about prosody in human conversation, and how does it reflect the structure of cognitive function during language use?