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In the Korean Tones and Break Indices (K-ToBI) system, Intonational Phrase (IP) final f0 contours are represented using tones at two levels, Low and High. However, functional analyses have shown the need for two additional levels, Mid and Top. These four levels are also used in some speech synthesis applications. This paper uses hierarchical clustering to investigate the f0 contours on IP final syllables in spontaneous dialogues. Our aim is to develop a classification scheme for analysing surface-level intonational variation in Korean. The clustering results show differences in register for the IP final f0 contours, supporting the usefulness of a phonetic analysis with more than two levels. The IP’s position in a sentence seems to affect the IP boundary tone; the low boundary tone for the sentence-medial IP may not be as low as that for the sentence-final IP. The mapping between meaning and boundary tones is not straightforward, and the effect of post-positional particles must be considered when investigating intonational meanings in Korean. Given the variability related to morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic factors, implementing a fine-grained classification scheme that goes beyond two levels is desirable for further exploration of large corpora.

Previous research has shown that listeners’ perception of pitch peaks and valleys is asymmetrical. Their ability to discriminate pitch height and integrate temporal and pitch information is reduced for valleys compared to peaks. Further, listeners are more likely to associate high pitch and pitch peaks with prominence compared to low pitch and valleys. However, it is unclear whether the perceptual asymmetry is influenced by listeners’ linguistic experience. The present study examined the perception by native speakers of English in England, Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Glasgow (Scotland). These varieties were chosen because unlike Standard British English where prominent syllables are typically associated with a pitch rise and high pitch, Belfast and Glaswegian varieties often associate prominent syllables with low pitch. The experimental results showed an effect of listeners’ language variety on their discrimination of both pitch height and prominence. In particular, Belfast and Glasgow listeners’ prominence discrimination was reduced compared to listeners in England for both peaks and valleys. This result may be linked to the shallow ‘prominence gradients’ in their languages and the phonetic details of low accents.

The perception of dynamic – constantly changing – pitch in speech has been extensively studied in psychoacoustics and linguistics. In psychoacoustic studies, listeners are usually presented with short stimuli such as vowels or syllables, and their ability to discriminate a pair of stimuli is assessed. On the other hand, linguistic studies concern intonation over an utterance. Intonation entails not only acoustic prominence realised by pitch, duration, and loudness, but also listeners’ knowledge about the relative prominence between syllables or between words in their language. This paper discusses a series of speech perception experiments using both psychoacoustic and linguistic tasks. Participants judged either relative pitch height or prominence between two pitch peaks or valleys in an utterance. Native English speakers in different age and dialectal groups were tested. The results showed that, first, listeners’ pitch height discrimination in the utterance context seems to be more accurate than previously reported. Second, there is a robust perceptual asymmetry between pitch peaks and valleys, the valleys posing significant challenges in perception. Third, listeners’ perception of pitch height and prominence is disassociated. The findings taken together suggest an intricate interaction between the physical properties of the stimuli and listeners’ top-down knowledge in the perception of speech intonation.

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In this study, we gave the same speech-production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting in substantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further found little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise, or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system, and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions.

In the past decades, most research on question intonation has relied on controlled experimental tasks for the production and perception of syntactically well-formed, pragmatically or syntactically ambiguous, unbiased and genuine requests for new information. The exploration of a real-life interaction in East Midlands British English shows that such questions are neither frequent nor typical. Prosodic information does undoubtedly contribute to the identification of questions, as shown by comparing questionhood ratings, based on either audio recordings or orthographic transcriptions only. However, compared to the role of syntactic, lexical, contextual, sequential, and interactional information, the role of speech prosody is shown to be marginal. These findings suggest that prosodic information is difficult to isolate or to manipulate independently. Therefore, question intonation can only be adequately studied by taking into account naturalistic, context-rich, spontaneous behaviour.

This paper qualitatively investigates the benefits of explicit instructions on rhythm in foreign language teaching. The study involves teaching Italian to 60+ years old native English speakers. The effects of explicit instructions using musical activities, syllable cards, and body synchronisation on learners’ experience were examined. The study was designed around a series of novel educational interventions with regular semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants, in addition to their regular Italian lessons. Participants reported benefits of the novel approaches in supporting their learning. The present study forms a basis of further empirical investigation on pedagogical development.

This paper explores prosodic marking of narrow (corrective) focus in Seoul Korean. Korean lacks lexical stress and it has a phonologized association between the Accentual Phrase (AP) initial segment and intonation. In the experiment, four speakers read sentences including a two-item list which were designed to elicit either an L or H AP-initial tone. The durational variations, the pitch events at prosodic boundaries, and F0 span in 32 sentences read neutrally and 64 sentences read with one of the items under focus were analysed. The results show that the focused constituent consistently initiates a new prosodic phrase. In comparison to the neutrally spoken or defocused counterpart, the focused constituent was more likely to be realised as an Intonational Phrase (IP) in some contexts. Bitonal IP boundary tones were more likely to occur under focus than monotonal tones. In addition, in focused constituents, durational expansion particularly at the phrase-edges, expansion in F0 span, and raising of the phrase-initial pitch were observed. On the other hand, defocused constituents were not phonetically reduced compared to the neutral counterparts. The results imply that the phonetic cues spreading over the focused constituent complement the exaggerated prosodic boundaries.

A word-spotting experiment was conducted to investigate whether rhythmic consistency and phrase-final lengthening facilitate performance in Korean. Listeners had to spot disyllabic and trisyllabic words in nonsense strings organized in phrases with either the same or variable syllable count; phrase-final lengthening was absent, or occurring either in all phrases or only in the phrase immediately preceding the target. The results show that, for disyllabic targets, inconsistent syllable count and lengthening before the target led to fewer errors. For trisyllabic targets, accuracy was at ceiling, but final lengthening in all phrases reduced reaction times. The results imply that both rhythmic consistency (i.e. regular syllable count) and phrase-final lengthening play a role in word-spotting and, by extension, in speech processing in Korean, as in other languages. However, the results also reflect the language specific role of prosodic cues. First, the cues here were used primarily with disyllabic targets, which were cognitively more demanding to process partly due to their high phonological neighborhood density. Second, the facilitating effect of rhythmic consistency was weak, possibly because strict consistency is not present in spoken Korean. Overall, rhythmic consistency facilitated spotting when targets mapped onto phrases, confirming the importance of phrasal organization in Korean speech processing.

The iambic-trochaic law (ITL) states that a louder sound signals the beginning of a group, while a longer sound signals its end. Although the ITL has been empirically supported in experiments with a variety of stimuli, it is not clear whether it is due to universal cognitive mechanisms or the outcome of language-specific prosodic properties. We tested the law with speakers of English, Greek and Korean who heard sequences of tones varied in duration and/or intensity. The results revealed neither significant differences among languages nor a strong bias shared by speakers of all languages. Significantly, listeners� grouping preferences were influenced by the duration of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI), with longer ISI resulting in stronger trochaic preferences, indicating that specific experimental conditions may be responsible for differences in listener responses across experiments testing the ITL.

This paper reports an experiment which investigated the perception of prosody in Korean or non-word utterances by native Korean speakers and English learners of Korean. Listeners rated the degrees of positivity and excitement of resynthesized utterances with different pitch ranges and durations. The results revealed no significant differences between the two groups of listeners. The variations in pitch range and duration had systematic effects on the ratings. However, the interactions between various factors suggest that the mapping between prosodic shapes and their paralinguistic meaning is not straightforward.

This paper reports two experiments in which listeners detected prosodic group boundaries in Seoul Korean speech, investigating how pitch and timing cues collaborate or compete with each other. Two types of timing cues, compensatory lengthening and group-final lengthening, were employed. The results show that both pitch and timing have demarcative functions which are exploited by listeners. However, listeners relied more on timing than pitch and this may be because in the experiments the pitch contour variations were limited to a small number of phonological categories, whereas temporal variations were more gradient. In addition, group-final lengthening was a more robust cue to the prosodic boundary than compensatory lengthening, and the integration of pitch and timing cues seems to be context-dependent. The results highlight the significance of local information in the universal grouping process and that the precise nature of the cues affect the way they integrate in perception.

Pairs of phonemically identical utterances with different location of an Accentual Phrase boundary were presented to listeners. When duration and/or F0 were swapped between the utterances within a pair, only F0 change elicited changes in listeners’ responses. This effect was found regardless of the distribution of strong consonants which raise Accentual Phrase initial F0. On the other hand, listeners seemed to be sensitive to a few cases with segmental-prosodic mismatches.