韵律特征研究

介绍从知觉、认知和语料库分析角度对汉语韵律特征进行的一系列研究。（1）韵律特征知觉：用实验心理学和知觉标注的语料库分析方法,研究汉语语调和音高下倾与降阶问题,语句和语篇中知觉可以区分的韵律层级及相关的声学线索。研究结果支持汉语语调的双线模型理论和语句音高下倾的存在;证明语篇中知觉可以区分的韵律边界是小句、句子和段落,及其知觉相关的声学线索。（2）韵律特征与其他语言学结构的关系：在标注的语料库的基础上,用常规统计方法研究语句常规重音分布规律、语篇信息结构与重音的关系、并用决策树方法研究根据文本信息确定韵律短语边界和焦点的规则。（3）韵律特征在语篇理解中的作用：用实验心理学方法和脑电指标研究韵律对语篇信息整合和指代理解的影响,揭示其作用的认知和神经机制。讨论了这些研究结果对语音工程、语音学理论和心理语言学研究的实践和理论意义     

Markers of Topical Discourse in Child‐Directed Speech

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence‐internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to build up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child–caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver–child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child‐directed speech.     

Making Sense of the Hands and Mouth: The Role of “Secondary” Cues to Meaning in British Sign Language and English

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands and the mouth in accessing meaning. We created congruent and incongruent combinations of BSL manual signs and mouthings and English speech and gesture by video manipulation and asked participants to carry out a picture-matching task. When participants were instructed to pay attention only to the primary channel, incongruent “secondary” cues still affected performance, showing that these are reliably used for comprehension. When both cues were relevant, the languages diverged: Hand gestures continued to be used in English, but mouth movements did not in BSL. Moreover, non-fluent speakers and signers varied in the use of these cues: Gestures were found to be more important for non-native than native speakers; mouth movements were found to be less important for non-fluent signers. We discuss the results in terms of the information provided by different communicative channels, which combine to provide meaningful information.     

On the lateralization of emotional prosody: an event-related functional MR investigation

In order to investigate the lateralization of emotional speech we recorded the brain responses to three emotional intonations in two conditions, i.e., "normal" speech and "prosodic" speech (i.e., speech with no linguistic meaning, but retaining the 'slow prosodic modulations' of speech). Participants listened to semantically neutral sentences spoken with a positive, neutral, or negative intonation in both conditions and judged how positive, negative, or neutral the intonation was on a five-point scale. Core peri-sylvian language areas, as well as some frontal and subcortical areas were activated bilaterally in the normal speech condition. In contrast, a bilateral fronto-opercular region was active when participants listened to prosodic speech. Positive and negative intonations elicited a bilateral fronto-temporal and subcortical pattern in the normal speech condition, and more frontal activation in the prosodic speech condition. The current results call into question an exclusive right hemisphere lateralization of emotional prosody and expand patient data on the functional role of the basal ganglia during the perception of emotional prosody.     

Moving to the speed of sound: context modulation of the effect of acoustic properties of speech

Suprasegmental acoustic patterns in speech can convey meaningful information and affect listeners' interpretation in various ways, including through systematic analog mapping of message-relevant information onto prosody. We examined whether the effect of analog acoustic variation is governed by the acoustic properties themselves. For example, fast speech may always prime the concept of speed or a faster response. Alternatively, the effect may be modulated by the context-dependent interpretation of those properties; the effect of rate may depend on how listeners construe its meaning in the immediate linguistic or communicative context. In two experiments, participants read short scenarios that implied, or did not imply, urgency. Scenarios were followed by recorded instructions, spoken at varying rates. The results show that speech rate had an effect on listeners' response speed; however, this effect was modulated by discourse context. Speech rate affected response speed following contexts that emphasized speed, but not without such contextual information.     

Facial Affect and Verbal Context in Conversation

This study examines affective facial expression in conversation. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the accuracy of affect-identification for conversational facial expressions generally is no better than chance. The explanation explored by Experiment 2 is that many conversational facial expressions operate as nonverbal interjections. Thus, much like verbal interjections (“gosh,”“really,”“oh please,”“jeez,” etc.), the attribution of affect for certain conversational facial expressions should depend on their verbal context. Experiment 2 supports the notion of facial expression as interjection by demonstrating that most any conversational facial expression, regardless of Us true source emotion or of the affect it signals in isolation, tends to be interpreted according to the affect associated with the verbal context in which it occurs. In addition to the identification of context-dependent interjection as yet another function of facial expression, the study suggests a pressing need for further investigation of nonverbal behavior in natural-conversation settings.     

Perceptual and affective mechanisms in facial expression recognition: An integrative review

Facial expressions of emotion involve a physical component of morphological changes in a face and an affective component conveying information about the expresser’s internal feelings. It remains unresolved how much recognition and discrimination of expressions rely on the perception of morphological patterns or the processing of affective content. This review of research on the role of visual and emotional factors in expression recognition reached three major conclusions. First, behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational measures indicate that basic expressions are reliably recognized and discriminated from one another, albeit the effect may be inflated by the use of prototypical expression stimuli and forced-choice responses. Second, affective content along the dimensions of valence and arousal is extracted early from facial expressions, although this coarse affective representation contributes minimally to categorical recognition of specific expressions. Third, the physical configuration and visual saliency of facial features contribute significantly to expression recognition, with “emotionless” computational models being able to reproduce some of the basic phenomena demonstrated in human observers. We conclude that facial expression recognition, as it has been investigated in conventional laboratory tasks, depends to a greater extent on perceptual than affective information and mechanisms.     

Elderspeak: Speech accommodations to older adults

Ten service providers and 10 caregivers were recorded as they spoke to groups of younger or older adults. Ten-minute speech samples were analyzed for the occurrence of “elderspeak,” systematic speech accommodations directed towards older adults, using measures of syntactic complexity, verbal fluency, prepositional content, lexical choice, discourse organization, speech rate, and other stylistic markers. Both the caregivers and service providers adjusted how they spoke to different audiences: They reduced the length and complexity of their utterances, produced more lexical fillers and sentence fragments, used fewer long words of three or more syllables, more utterances per turn and per topic, and more repetitions when addressing older adults. They also spoke more slowly and paused longer when addressing older audiences. Prepositional content, type-token ratios, diminutives and tag questions, however, did not vary with audience. These findings confirm prior subjective accounts of the use of an “elderspeak” register.     

Textual Standardization and the DSM-5 “Common Language”

In February 2010, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched their DSM-5 website with details about the development of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The APA invited “the general public” to review the draft diagnostic criteria and provide written comments and suggestions. This revision marks the first time the APA has solicited public review of their diagnostic manual. This article analyzes reported speech on the DSM-5 draft diagnostic criteria for the classification Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. It demonstrates how textual standardization facilitates the cultural portability of the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria such that a community of speakers beyond the borders of the APA come to be seen as exemplary speakers, writers, and revisers of the professional style. Furthermore, analysis shows how co-authoring practices recontextualize the “voice” and persona of putative patient reported speech on Criterion D2. As a consequence of textual standardization, spoken discourse becomes recontextualized as the product of scientific inquiry and the organization of psychiatric knowledge.     

Musically tone-deaf individuals have difficulty discriminating intonation contours extracted from speech

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz & Hyde, 2003). We test this idea by presenting intonation contours for discrimination, both in the context of the original sentences in which they occur and in a “pure” form dissociated from any phonetic context. The pure form consists of gliding-pitch analogs of the original intonation contours which exactly follow their pattern of pitch and timing. If the spared intonation perception of tone-deaf individuals is due to the coarse pitch contrasts of intonation, then such individuals should discriminate the original sentences and the gliding-pitch analogs equally well. In contrast, we find that discrimination of the gliding-pitch analogs is severely degraded. Thus it appears that the dissociation between spoken and musical pitch perception in tone-deaf individuals is due to a deficit at a higher level than simple pitch-change detection.     

Spontaneous Imitation of Fundamental Frequency and Speech Rate by Nonstutterers and Stutterers

Speech can be described either in terms of acoustics, as a perceptual outcome, or as a motor event. Central to theories of speech perception and production is an attempt to describe how these aspects of speech are interrelated. The present experiment investigated how the nonstutterers' and stutterers' reproductions of acoustically presented interrogative sentences were influenced by experimental variations of intonation (sentence initial vs. sentence final) and speech rate (normal vs. time compressed). We studied the effects of these stimulus manipulations on the speech rate and fundamental frequency (F₀ ) of 10 adult German-speaking nonstutterers and seven stutterers. Experimental manipulations of intonation and speech rate significantly influenced the syllable duration and speech rate of both normal speakers and stutterers. The fundamental frequency of the subjects' responses were also significantly influenced by the intonation of the stimulus. But the stutterers' increase in F₀ for stressed syllables was generally less pronounced than that of nonstutterers. These results imply that (a) the subjects not only extract linguistic meaning from intonation but that they also store extragrammatical speech rate information, and (b) the speakers adopt these speech rate variations for their own productions. Generally, these results demonstrate that speech perception is not limited to extracting linguistically invariant information. The results show that speakers actively generate their own prosody and that this generative process is influenced by the prosodic structure of another speaker's antecedent speech. The implications of these results for theories of speech production are discussed.     

Responding to indirect speech acts

Indirect speech acts, like the request Do you know the time?, have both a literal meaning, here “I ask you whether you know the time,” and an indirect meaning “I request you to tell me the time.” In this paper I outline a model of how listeners understand such speech acts and plan responses to them. The main proposals are these. The literal meaning of indirect speech acts can be intended to be taken seriously (along with the indirect meaning) or merely pro forma. In the first case listeners are expected to respond to both meanings, as in Yes, I do—it's six, but in the second case only to the indirect meaning, as in It's six. There are at least six sources of information listeners use in judging whether the literal meaning was intended seriously or pro forma, as well as whether there was intended to be any indirect meaning. These proposals were supported in five experiments in which ordinary requests for information were made by telephone of 950 local merchants.     

The interaction of meaning and sound in spoken word recognition

Models of spoken word recognition vary in the ways in which they capture the relationship between speech input and meaning. Modular accounts prohibit a word’s meaning from affecting the computation of its form-based representation, whereas interactive models allow activation at the semantic level to affect phonological processing. We tested these competing hypotheses by manipulating word familiarity and imageability, using lexical decision and repetition tasks. Responses to high-imageability words were significantly faster than those to low-imageability words. Repetition latencies were also analyzed as a function of cohort variables, revealing a significant imageability effect only for words that were members of large cohorts, suggesting that when the mapping from phonology to semantics is difficult, semantic information can help the discrimination process. Thus, these data support interactive models of spoken word recognition.     

Brain activity varies with modulation of dynamic pitch variance in sentence melody

Fourteen native speakers of German heard normal sentences, sentences which were either lacking dynamic pitch variation (flattened speech), or comprised of intonation contour exclusively (degraded speech). Participants were to listen carefully to the sentences and to perform a rehearsal task. Passive listening to flattened speech compared to normal speech produced strong brain responses in right cortical areas, particularly in the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG). Passive listening to degraded speech compared to either normal or flattened speech particularly involved fronto-opercular and subcortical (Putamen, Caudate Nucleus) regions bilaterally. Additionally the Rolandic operculum (premotor cortex) in the right hemisphere subserved processing of neat sentence intonation. As a function of explicit rehearsing sentence intonation we found several activation foci in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area), the left inferior precentral sulcus, and the left Rolandic fissure. The data allow several suggestions: First, both flattened and degraded speech evoked differential brain responses in the pSTG, particularly in the planum temporale (PT) bilaterally indicating that this region mediates integration of slowly and rapidly changing acoustic cues during comprehension of spoken language. Second, the bilateral circuit active whilst participants receive degraded speech reflects general effort allocation. Third, the differential finding for passive perception and explicit rehearsal of intonation contour suggests a right fronto-lateral network for processing and a left fronto-lateral network for producing prosodic information. Finally, it appears that brain areas which subserve speech (frontal operculum) and premotor functions (Rolandic operculum) coincidently support the processing of intonation contour in spoken sentence comprehension.     

Presidential speechmaking style: Emotional response to micro-expressions of facial affect

Research considering the effect of Presidential speech making style shows individuals are likely to attend to and be emotionally affected by the facial expressions of leaders, especially those that are inappropriate for the context. In this study we tested how rapid and subtle expressions of facial affect (i.e., expressions of less than one-second, often termed micro-expressions) in speeches by a political leader impacts participants’ emotional state. We do this by removing seven brief expressions (less than one-second) from a nearly twelve minute televised speech by President George H. W. Bush concerning the 1990 commitment of US military in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. FACS coding identified all these expressions as containing a component of smiling (lip corner puller: AU12), in some cases with the addition of other facial movements (sometimes associated with anger and/or disgust). Experiments carried out on 206 university undergraduates showed emotional state was altered as a result of these micro-expressions when the control (unaltered speech) and experimental group (micro-expressions removed from speech) were compared. Specifically, participants who viewed the micro-expressions felt less threatened and less angry. Thus, facial expression (even very brief micro-expressions) can have a significant impact on the receiver of a political speech.

Can expressions of anger enhance creativity? A test of the emotions as social information (EASI) model

We investigated whether expressions of anger can enhance creative performance. Building on the emotions as social information (EASI) model (Van Kleef, 2009), we predicted that the interpersonal effects of anger expressions on creativity depend on the target's epistemic motivation (EM)—the desire to develop an accurate understanding of the situation (Kruglanski, 1989). Participants worked on an idea generation task in the role of “generator.” Then they received standardized feedback and tips from an “evaluator” (a trained actor) via a video setup. The feedback was delivered in an angry way or in a neutral way (via facial expressions, vocal intonation, and bodily postures). Participants with high EM exhibited greater fluency, originality, and flexibility after receiving angry rather than neutral feedback, whereas those with low EM were less creative after receiving angry feedback. These effects were mediated by task engagement and motivation, which anger increased (decreased) among high (low) EM participants.     

Visual and acoustic information supporting a happily expressed speech-in-noise advantage

There was an advantage found for recognizing happily expressed audio and audio-visual speech-in-noise relative to speech spoken with neutral or sad expressions. The advantage of happily expressed speech was explored in a set of visual and acoustic manipulations designed to isolate the potential contributions from each signal. For this research, a replication of previous research with the happily expressed speech advantage was completed with a novel inclusion of a learning paradigm. Additional experiments directly investigated the role of the fundamental frequency of the voice for affect, and the affective facial components with the eyes and mouth. We found that the happily expressed speech advantage persisted despite constraints to the amount of frequency modulation and with distortions to the talker's face. These findings seem largely attributable to the influences of affect on low-level acoustical and articulatory information, with only a very subtle role of approach/withdrawal motivation.     

Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept

Because “rape” has such a powerful appraisive meaning, how one defines the term has normative significance. Those who define rape rigidly so as to exclude contemporary feminist understandings are therefore seeking to silence some moral perspectives “by definition.” I argue that understanding rape as an essentially contested concept allows the concept sufficient flexibility to permit open moral discourse, while at the same time preserving a core meaning that can frame the discourse.     

不一致性重读对口语语篇加工中信息激活水平的影响

利用跨通道词汇再认任务,探索了口语临场加工过程中,不一致性重读对新信息以及它所标示的旧信息在语篇表征中激活的影响。结果表明：与控制条件相比,不一致性重读虽然提高了旧信息在语篇表征中的激活水平,但是同时抑制了新信息的激活;这一促进和抑制作用在关键词汇后的500 ms就已出现。从而说明,对于相对重要的新信息,不一致性重读会阻碍语篇的理解,并且会影响到语篇的临场加工过程。     

A comparison of the McGurk effect for spoken and sung syllables

The importance of visual cues in speech perception is illustrated by the McGurk effect, whereby a speaker’s facial movements affect speech perception. The goal of the present study was to evaluate whether the McGurk effect is also observed for sung syllables. Participants heard and saw sung instances of the syllables /ba/ and /ga/ and then judged the syllable they perceived. Audio-visual stimuli were congruent or incongruent (e.g., auditory /ba/ presented with visual /ga/). The stimuli were presented as spoken, sung in an ascending and descending triad (C E G G E C), and sung in an ascending and descending triad that returned to a semitone above the tonic (C E G G E C#). Results revealed no differences in the proportion of fusion responses between spoken and sung conditions confirming that cross-modal phonemic information is integrated similarly in speech and song.