Sound Patterns and Linguistic Structures at the Transition Space in Conversation

对话中过渡空间的声音模式和语言结构

• 批准号: 444631148
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Margaret Zellers
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Abteilung für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2019-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/444631148?language=en
• 关键词: Sound; Patterns; Linguistic; Structures; Transition

Interaction is fundamental to social behavior, and turn-taking is an essential component of interaction. Human interaction is unique in that it makes use of language as a medium, most notably in everyday conversation. Turn-taking in conversation may be easily taken for granted, but it has a complex systematic organization, and people who are participating in conversations are able to start speaking quickly when other speakers finish—so quickly that human cognitive abilities could not achieve such speed unless people are able make predictions about when and how other people’s conversational turns will end. The proposed research investigates at what times during conversation these predictions become relevant—that is, when a possible “turn-transition space” arises during a given speaker’s turn—and what kinds of linguistic information listeners use in order to make such predictions. In particular, we focus on prosodic variation: sound characteristics such as how loud or fast, or with what kinds of melodic patterns, words or sentences are spoken. The first portion of the project investigates prosodic variation in audio recordings of conversations, investigating different locations where transition space prediction could begin, and comparing findings in German and Swedish. The second portion tests these results in perception experiments, studying how people listening to conversations respond to different types of sound patterns, and in particular, how listeners from different languages interpret similar sound patterns. The results of the project will highlight ways in which different languages achieve similar communicative goals, and will give valuable insight into processes of human cognition for communication and interaction.

互动是社会行为的基础，轮流是互动的重要组成部分。人类互动的独特之处在于，它将语言作为一种媒介，尤其是在日常对话中。谈话中轮流进行可能很容易被认为是理所当然的，但它有一个复杂的系统组织，参与谈话的人能够在其他人结束时迅速开始说话——如此之快，以至于人类的认知能力无法达到这样的速度，除非人们能够预测别人的谈话何时以及如何结束。这项提议的研究调查了这些预测在对话中的什么时候变得相关——也就是说，在给定的说话者的回合中，当一个可能的“回合转换空间”出现时——以及听众使用什么样的语言信息来做出这样的预测。我们特别关注韵律变化：声音特征，比如声音有多大声或多快，或者用什么样的旋律模式、单词或句子说话。该项目的第一部分调查了对话录音中的韵律变化，调查了可以开始转换空间预测的不同位置，并比较了德语和瑞典语的研究结果。第二部分在感知实验中测试这些结果，研究人们听对话时对不同类型的声音模式的反应，特别是来自不同语言的听众如何解释相似的声音模式。该项目的结果将突出不同语言实现相似交际目标的方式，并将为人类对交流和互动的认知过程提供有价值的见解。