Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Janice Fon (2002)

A Cross-Linguistic Study on Syntactic and Discourse Boundary Cues in Spontaneous Speech

Advisor: Keith Johnson

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Abstract:

This study focuses on the relationship between discourse and syntactic boundaries and acoustic and prosodic cues in divergent languages-English, Guoyu, Putonghua, and Japanese. Speech was elicited by having talkers describe the events in The Pear Story film. Recorded data were transcribed and segmented into discourse and syntactic units while measurements of F0, syllable duration, syllable onset intervals (SOIs) and peak syllable RMS amplitude were taken. Prosody was partially labeled following Tones and Break Indices conventions of each language. A comparison of different dimensions-discourse/syntax, acoustics, and intonation, was made in order to examine boundary and hierarchy cues in speech.

Results showed that both language-universal and language-specific cues exist. Final lengthening and initial strengthening are the most universal cues for signaling boundary. Pitch reset is also prevalent and is found in all languages but English. However, there are also language-specific cues. Final strengthening exists in English and Japanese while final weakening is found in Guoyu and Putonghua. English also has an initial lengthening effect, but for pitch-accented syllables. Mandarin is interesting in that it starts the final lengthening process early. Instead of focusing only on the final boundary syllable, penultimate boundary syllable is also lengthened. Prosodically, Mandarin is also different in that boundary breaks beyond the prosodic word level can occur at the boundary position while in English and Japanese, only breaks of intonation phrase level are possible.

Boundary cues are often modulated by hierarchy, although modulation differs with cues across languages. Syllable duration reflects discourse boundary strength in English, Guoyu, and Japanese, but not Putonghua. Utterance-initial syllable duration correlates positively with hierarchy in English while utterance-final syllables correlate negatively in Guoyu and Japanese. In all four languages, boundary SOI is lengthened as boundary strength increases and is considered the most universal cue. In terms of peak syllable RMS amplitude, English, Guoyu, and Putonghua correlate initial amplitude patterning with hierarchy positively while Guoyu, Putonghua, and Japanese correlate final amplitude patterning in a negative fashion. In Guoyu, Putonghua, and Japanese, the magnitude of pitch reset is reflective of hierarchy in a positive manner. Prosodically, English uses intermediate and intonation phrase boundary breaks to indicate higher levels of disjuncture while Guoyu, Putonghua, and Japanese only use intonation phrase boundaries to indicate such.