LINGUIST List 23.2299
Mon May 14 2012
Diss: Cognitive Science/Discourse Analysis/Phonology/Phonetics: Tyler: 'Discourse Prosody in Production and Perception'
Editor for this issue: Xiyan Wang
<xiyanlinguistlist.org>
Date: 11-May-2012
From: Joseph Tyler <jctyler5
gmail.com>
Subject: Discourse Prosody in Production and Perception
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Institution: University of Michigan
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Joseph Tyler
Dissertation Title: Discourse Prosody in Production and Perception
Dissertation URL:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jctyler/
Linguistic Field(s):
Cognitive Science
Discourse Analysis
Philosophy of Language
Phonetics
Phonology
Pragmatics
Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Subject Language(s):
English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
Ezra Keshet
Hannah Rohde
Julie Boland
Robin Queen
Dissertation Abstract:
A well-formed discourse is more than just a series of well-formedsentences. While often left implicit, this structure to discourse issometimes overtly cued. And though most attention in this area has focusedon lexicalized cues like discourse markers, prosody can also conveyinformation about the structure of discourse. This dissertation exploresthe relationship between prosody and discourse in production andperception, helping to identify what information about the structure ofdiscourse is in speakers' prosody and what prosodic variation listeners usein discourse interpretation.
First, a production study examines prosodic correlates of discoursestructure in readings of a newspaper article. Prosodic measures of pauseduration, pitch, intensity and speech rate were correlated with discoursestructural measures of boundary size, discourse coordination/subordination,and their interaction. Results showed significant correlations between theprosodic measures and both structural measures and their interaction. Thisinteraction shows that the effect of boundary size on an utterance'sprosody often depends on whether that utterance is coordinated orsubordinated, and vice versa.
Then, a series of perception studies examine the ability of synthesizedmanipulations of prosody to bias the interpretation of ambiguous discourse.For example, the discourse "I sat in on a history class. I read abouthousing prices. And I watched a cool documentary" could be interpreted asdescribing three separate, independent events (coordinated interpretation)or that the events of the second and third sentences took place during theevent of the first (subordinated interpretation). Results show rising pitchat the end of the first sentence led to more coordinated interpretationscompared to falling pitch.
These results are taken to suggest that one meaning for rising pitch is asa marker of discourse coordination. This proposal is motivated by researchon listing intonation. The potentially contradictory claim by Pierrehumbert& Hirschberg (1990) that high terminal pitch indicates elaboration, asubordinating relation, is discussed and re-analyzed to bring their data inline with these results. Then, these results are discussed with respect toprosodic disambiguation of syntax, and comparisons are made betweenprosodic disambiguation of syntactic and discourse structures.
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