Studying IntonationTodaySlide 3Some Sample ApproachesA Prescriptive Approach: Wilson 1993Corpus Studies of Questions: Hedberg & Sosa 2002Slide 7Slide 8CritiqueSyrdal & Jilka 2004Slide 11Slide 12Slide 13Doherty et al 2004Slide 15Slide 16Slide 17Next Class01/14/19 1Studying IntonationJulia HirschbergCS 470601/14/19 2Today•Approaches to studying contour meaning–Questions people ask•Does contour X convey a different meaning from contour Y?•Is contour X used more often in context Z than contour Y•Despite what people say/think, not all phenomena X are uttered with contour Y–What kind of evidence could we get?•Found data•Laboratory experiments: production, perception•Corpus collection01/14/19 3–What features can we look at and how do we obtain them?•Intonation labeling by hand•Acoustic/prosodic analysis by automatic methods–Pitch tracking, pause detection, intensity, duration, speaking rate extraction•Computational linguistic techniques to extract transcript-based (text) features–Part-of-speech–Sentence length, …–What techniques do we use for analysis?•Statistical methods (Splus, Matlab)•Machine learning techniques01/14/19 4Some Sample Approaches•Natural Corpus: Hedberg & Sosa 2002•Introspective, observational: Wilson 1993, Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990/2•Laboratory -- Production/Perception: Syrdal & Jilka 2004•Laboratory – Brain Imaging (e.g. fMRI): Doherty et al01/14/19 5A Prescriptive Approach: Wilson 1993•Declarative statements fall and yes-no-questions rise?•Wh-questions fall?•Small final rise signals ‘more to come’?01/14/19 6Corpus Studies of Questions: Hedberg & Sosa 2002•How are yes-no and wh-questions uttered and how might we explain differences?–Where is the nuclear stress?–Where is the semantic ‘focus’? What is the ‘topic’?–Are the ‘wh words’ accented or not?•Corpus: 73 questionsWho saw John?/Who didn’t see John?Did John leave?/Didn’t John leave?–35 whq’s and 38 ynq’s from the McLaughlin Group and Washington Week01/14/19 7•Analysis–Intonational labeling (ToBI) from pitch tracks–Topic/focus coding–Frequency distributions of features with question categories–Prosody of ‘locus of interrogation’•Wh word in wh-questions•Fronted auxiliary in yes-no questions•Results–Ynq’s generally uttered w/ falling or level intonation, not rising (69%)–Wh-q’s most often uttered with falling (80%)01/14/19 8–Wh-words (60%) in all wh-questions and neg aux in negative ynq’s (89%) most often uttered with L+H* accent (‘contrastive’ accent) -- why?–Aux in positive ynq’s often deaccented (41%) or realized with L* (17%) accent – why?•Conclusions/open questions:–Why do ynq’s and wh-q’s sometimes rise and sometimes fall? –Locus of interrogation is accented in wh-q’s and in negative ynq’s to “signal interrogative status of sentence” – but not in positive ynq’s “due to need to highlight a following element”01/14/19 9Critique•Is this a good corpus for this investigation?–Size–Genre–What about the speakers?01/14/19 10Syrdal & Jilka 2004•How are whq’s and ynq’s produced most naturally (for TTS)?•Same initial hypothesis: whq’s fall and ynq’s rise in American English•Different approach: production and perception studies•Production:–8 (professional) speakers (5F, 3M)–Read transcripts of actual dialogues01/14/19 11•Analysis:–Intonational (ToBI) labeling from pitch tracks of extracted questions•Results:–Ynq’s rose in 83% of cases for females and 53% for males–Wh-q’s always fell for females and fell 79% of time for male speakers; wh-q’s and statements generally fell–Nuclear accents in ynq’s: majority L*01/14/19 12•Perception studies: acceptability judgments–Forced choice, 12 listeners–Stimuli: Pairs of ynq and whq’s with same voice/different intonation•17 natural (9 ynq’s, 8 whq’s)•12 synthesized–12 subjects (6 and 6)–Judgments:•Ynq:–Natural speech: people preferred standard rise (L* H- H%)–Synthetic speech: no results•Whq:–Natural speech: people preferred falling contours (L- L%) to rising (H-H%) and slightly to ‘continuation rise’ (L- H%)–Synthetic: no preference01/14/19 13Critique•How many questions were produced?•Are professional speakers a good choice?•Read vs. spontaneous speech? For TTS?•Why no results for synthetic speech?•Comparison to Hedberg and Sosa01/14/19 14Doherty et al 2004•How do people p rocess intonation, e.g., in rising questions vs. falling statements vs. falling questions?She was talking to her father?She was talking to her father.Was she talking to her father.•Research questions:–Where is the ‘prosody’ portion of the brain?–What other sectors is it ‘close’ to and what is their function?–Do particular contours have particular locations?01/14/19 15•Method: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of subjects presented with digitized recordings –11 subjects (4M, 7F) –Note experimental condition!–150 triples, of which each subjects heard only 1 version•She was talking to her father?•Was she talking to her father.•She was talking to her father.–Monitoring task: Is this a question or a statement?•Press one key for question, another for statement01/14/19 16–Results: Increase in activation when subjects made judgments about tokens w/ rising intonation -- but not falling, whether syntactic question or syntactic statement•Why?–Semantic processing? No – illocutionary force is same in rising and falling questions–Acoustic processing? Maybe…–Interpreting the rising contour as a question?•Check lesion studies to see if people with damage in these areas can interpret rising contours…01/14/19 17Critique•No rising inverted questions? “Was she talking to her father?”01/14/19 18Next Class•How do we represent intonational
View Full Document