Speech Prosody and Eye Movements in Processing Discourse Information: A Preliminary Study in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates variations in speech prosody and eye movements and their potential correlations in processing discourse information of map direction in Mandarin Chinese. A production experiment was conducted to collect mean duration, F0, intensity of target words in speech prosody and fixation counts and fixation duration of target areas of interest in eye movements for statistical analyses. The results show fixation counts, fixation duration, and syllable duration of the target words decreased, syllable intensity increased, but syllable pitch remained intact as the information became old to the speaker in the discourse. Prosodic reduction of duration, F0, and intensity was found in speech repetition and in the processing of old information.

[1]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  Repetition reduction: lexical repetition in the absence of referent repetition. , 2014, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[2]  K. Rayner,et al.  Contextual effects on word perception and eye movements during reading , 1981 .

[3]  Jason M. Brenier,et al.  Predictability Effects on Durations of Content and Function Words in Conversational English , 2009 .

[4]  Yi Xu.  ProsodyPro — A Tool for Large-scale Systematic Prosody Analysis , 2013 .

[5]  Aoju Chen,et al.  Pitch accent type matters for online processing of information status: Evidence from natural and synthetic speech , 2007 .

[6]  Paola E. Dussias.  Uses of Eye-Tracking Data in Second Language Sentence Processing Research , 2010, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

[7]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension , 2002 .

[8]  D. Balota,et al.  Repetition and Associative Context Effects in Speech Production , 1991, Language and speech.

[9]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[10]  Constantijn Kaland,et al.  Repetition reduction in Papuan Malay prosody , 2018, Speech Prosody 2018.

[11]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  Repetition is easy: Why repeated referents have reduced prominence , 2010, Memory & cognition.

[12]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Interpreting Pitch Accents in Online Comprehension: H* vs. L+H , 2008, Cogn. Sci..

[13]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  When overlap leads to competition: Effects of phonological encoding on word duration , 2015, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[14]  Ulrike Gut,et al.  The prosodic marking of information status in Malaysian English , 2013 .

[15]  K. Rayner,et al.  On-line perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3: evidence from eye movements. , 2013, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[16]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  Reduction in prosodic prominence predicts speakers' recall: implications for theories of prosody , 2015, Language, cognition and neuroscience.

[17]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  Why are repeated words produced with reduced durations? Evidence from inner speech and homophone production. , 2015, Journal of memory and language.

[18]  Caroline Féry,et al.  Perception of intonational contours on given and new referents : a completion study and an eye-movement experiment , 2009 .

[19]  Alexandros Christodoulou,et al.  Variation in Word Duration and Planning , 2012 .

[20]  Alexandra Jesse,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Early Use of Phonetic Information in Spoken Word Recognition: Lexical Stress Drives Eye Movements Immediately , 2022 .