Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries at evenly spaced intervals. In order to evaluate these proposals, we elicited naïve speakers’ productions of sentences systematically varying in the length of three postverbal constituents: a direct object, an indirect object (a prepositional phrase), and a verb phrase modifier, as in the sentence, The teacher assigned the chapter (on local history) to the students (of social science) yesterday/before the first midterm exam. Mixed-effects modelling was used to analyse the pattern of prosodic boundaries in these sentences, where boundaries were defined either in terms of acoustic measures (word duration and silence) or following the ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) prosodic annotation scheme. Watson and Gibson's (2004) meaning-based proposal, with the additional constraint that boundary predictions are evaluated with respect to local sentence context rather than the entire sentence, significantly outperformed the balancing alternatives.

[1]  I. Lehiste,et al.  Role of duration in disambiguating syntactically ambiguous sentences , 1975 .

[2]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Evaluation of prosodic transcription labeling reliability in the tobi framework , 1994, ICSLP.

[3]  R. J. Lickley,et al.  Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. , 1992 .

[4]  I. Lehiste.  Phonetic Disambiguation of Syntactic Ambiguity , 1973 .

[5]  Masako Hirotani,et al.  Prosody and LF interpretation: Processing Japanese wh -questions , 2005 .

[6]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production , 2004 .

[7]  Philip R. Cohen,et al.  Referring as a Collaborative Process , 2003 .

[8]  F. Ferreira.  Prosody and performance in language production , 2007 .

[9]  Nicole Dehé,et al.  Particle Verbs in English: Syntax, information structure and intonation , 2002 .

[10]  A J Schafer,et al.  Intonational Disambiguation in Sentence Production and Comprehension , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[11]  F. Ferreira.  Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation times for prepared utterances , 1991 .

[12]  Fernanda Ferreira.  Creation of prosody during sentence production. , 1993 .

[13]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[14]  Alice Turk,et al.  Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: a practical guide , 2006 .

[15]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  The role of syntactic obligatoriness in the production of intonational boundaries. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[16]  William E. Cooper,et al.  Syntax and Speech , 1980 .

[17]  Eileen Fitzpatrick,et al.  A Computational Grammar of Discourse-Neutral Prosodic Phrasing in English , 1990, Comput. Linguistics.

[18]  J. Pierrehumbert.  The phonology and phonetics of English intonation , 1987 .

[19]  Jean E. Fox Tree,et al.  Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking , 1997, Cognition.

[20]  Maria Fernanda Ferreira,et al.  Planning and timing in sentence production : the syntax-to-phonology conversion : a dissertation , 1988 .

[21]  J. Trueswell,et al.  Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context , 2003 .

[22]  Edward Gibson,et al.  The Processing and Acquisition of Reference , 2011 .

[23]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Inter-transcriber reliability for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch) , 2012 .

[24]  D. Klatt.  Vowel Lengthening is Syntactically Determined in a Connected Discourse. , 1975 .

[25]  Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,et al.  The Use of Prosody in Syntactic Disambiguation , 1991, HLT.

[26]  E. Gibson,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article Language and Cognitive Processes Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure , 2022 .

[27]  Colin W. Wightman,et al.  Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[28]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Watching the eyes when talking about size: An investigation of message formulation and utterance planning , 2006 .

[29]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Disfluency effects in comprehension: How new information can become accessible , 2011 .

[30]  F. Ferreira.  Creation of prosody during sentence production. , 1993, Psychological review.

[31]  Eric Sanders,et al.  Using Statistical Models to Predict Phrase Boundaries for Speech Synthesis , 1995 .

[32]  Edward Gibson,et al.  A comparison of inter-transcriber reliability for two systems of prosodic annotation: rap (rhythm and pitch) and toBI (tones and break indices) , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[33]  Harlan Lane,et al.  The patterns of silence: Performance structures in sentence production , 1979, Cognitive Psychology.

[34]  R. Ratcliff,et al.  Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[35]  L. Wheeldon,et al.  Planning scope in spoken sentence production: the role of grammatical units. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[36]  Janet Dean Fodor,et al.  Learning To Parse? , 1998 .

[37]  L. Streeter.  Acoustic determinants of phrase boundary perception. , 1978, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[38]  P. Boersma.  Praat : doing phonetics by computer (version 5.1.05) , 2009 .

[39]  Sarah Brown-Schmidt,et al.  Little houses and casas pequeñas: Message formulation and syntactic form in unscripted speech with speakers of English and Spanish , 2008, Cognition.

[40]  T. Jaeger,et al.  Categorical Data Analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards Logit Mixed Models. , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[41]  S. Brennan,et al.  Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or for the addressee? , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.

[42]  A. Bell.  Language style as audience design , 1984, Language in Society.

[43]  F. Ferreira,et al.  How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums , 2002 .

[44]  Mari Ostendorf,et al.  TOBI: a standard for labeling English prosody , 1992, ICSLP.

[45]  M. Garrett.  Levels of processing in sentence production , 1980 .

[46]  James Paul Gee,et al.  Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[47]  Eric S Solomon,et al.  Semantic integration and syntactic planning in language production , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[48]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Automatic classification of intonational phrase boundaries , 1992 .

[49]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Repeating Words in Spontaneous Speech , 1998, Cognitive Psychology.