scholarly journals Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Manami HIRAYAMA ◽  
Laura COLANTONI ◽  
Ana Teresa PÉREZ-LEROUX
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Lexical Prosody

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children had acquired the lexical prosody (contrast between accented and unaccented words), a pre-requisite for downstep realization. While downstep, the prosodic phrasing involved in the complex NPs in this study, was established, children showed interspeaker variation with the metrical boost, a feature that distinguishes recursively embedded NPs from non-recursive NPs. However, variability was also found in adults, indicating that, in contrast to previous results, prosodic encoding of syntax is generally unreliable in adult speech. Finally, the magnitude of metrical boost was not correlated to children's ability to produce recursive possessives, suggesting that prosody does not help bootstrap Japanese children's recursive phrases.

Situationally independent prosodic phrasing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari R. Speer ◽  
Paul Warren ◽  
Amy J. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
The Impact

AbstractA series of speech production and categorization experiments demonstrates that naïve speakers and listeners reliably use correspondences between prosodic phrasing and syntactic constituent structure to resolve standing and temporary ambiguity. Materials obtained from a co-operative gameboard task show that prosodic phrasing effects (e.g., the location of the strongest break in an utterance) are independent of discourse factors that might be expected to influence the impact of syntactic ambiguity, including the availability of visual referents for the meanings of ambiguous utterances and the use of utterances as instructions versus confirmations of instructions. These effects hold across two dialects of English, spoken in the American Midwest, and New Zealand. Results from PP-attachment and verb transitivity ambiguities indicate clearly that the production of prosody-syntax correspondences is not conditional upon situational disambiguation of syntactic structure, but is rather more directly tied to grammatical constraints on the production of prosodic and syntactic form. Differences between our results and those reported elsewhere are best explained in terms of differences in task demands.

scholarly journals Impaired Recognition of Metrical and Syntactic Boundaries in Children with Developmental Language Disorders

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Richards ◽  
Usha Goswami
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Speech Rhythm ◽  
Developmental Language Disorders ◽  
Acoustic Stress ◽  
Acoustic Processing ◽  
Syntactic Boundaries ◽  
Stress Patterns

In oral language, syntactic structure is cued in part by phrasal metrical hierarchies of acoustic stress patterns. For example, many children’s texts use prosodic phrasing comprising tightly integrated hierarchies of metre and syntax to highlight the phonological and syntactic structure of language. Children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) are relatively insensitive to acoustic stress. Here, we disrupted the coincidence of metrical and syntactic boundaries as cued by stress patterns in children’s texts so that metrical and/or syntactic phrasing conflicted. We tested three groups of children: children with DLD, age-matched typically developing controls (AMC) and younger language-matched controls (YLC). Children with DLDs and younger, language-matched controls were poor at spotting both metrical and syntactic disruptions. The data are interpreted within a prosodic phrasing hypothesis of DLD based on impaired acoustic processing of speech rhythm.

Center-Embedded Sentences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Dean Fodor ◽  
Stefanie Nickels ◽  
Esther Schott
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Sentence Type ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Tree Structure ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Flat Structure ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
Alignment Problem

Doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions such as “The rat that the cat that the dog chased killed ate the malt” are notoriously difficult to parse. Many explanations have been offered. This chapter proposes a novel one: an alignment problem at the syntax-prosody interface, consisting of a mismatch between the heavily nested syntactic structure and the flat structure required by prosodic phrasing. Selective shrinking and lengthening of phrases within the sentence can coax the prosodic processor into creating rhythmic packages that fit well with the nested syntactic tree structure. Long outer phrases and short inner ones help with that, while short outer phrases and long inner ones hinder it. The chapter discusses two experiments—reading aloud with facilitation; reading aloud followed by grammaticality judgment—that provide evidence that produced prosody is the causal link between phrase lengths and ease of processing, though not exhibiting a “missing-VP effect” for either sentence type.

A Comparison of Four Informal Methods of Language Evaluation

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fujiki ◽  
Mary Louise Willbrand
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Application ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Variable Pattern ◽  
Evaluation Procedures ◽  
Language Sampling ◽  
Language Problems ◽  
Grammatical Judgment

Four informal methods of language evaluation were compared: spontaneous language sampling, elicited imitation, sentence completion, and grammatical judgment. Thirty children from two age levels (4–5 and 6–7 years) with diagnosed language problems were tested with each of these evaluation procedures. Overall comparisons between tasks revealed significant correlations between spontaneous sampling, elicited imitation, and sentence completion. However, when these tasks were examined with regard to individual syntactic structure, a highly variable pattern of comparability was observed. None of the task comparisons involving grammatical judgment reached statistical significance. The implications of these findings for the clinical application of the four evaluation procedures are discussed.

Differences in prosodic phrasing in marking syntax vs. focus: Data from Yanbian Korean

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-150
Author(s):  
Sun-Ah Jun ◽  
Xiannu Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Northeastern Part ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Word Prosody ◽  
Prosodic Boundary

Abstract In studying the effect of syntax and focus on prosodic phrasing, the main issue of investigation has been to explain and predict the location of a prosodic boundary, and not much attention has been given to the nature of prosodic phrasing. In this paper, we offer evidence from intonation patterns of utterances that prosodic phrasing can be formed differently phonologically and phonetically due to its function of marking syntactic structure vs. focus (prominence) in Yanbian Korean, a lexical pitch accent dialect of Korean spoken in the northeastern part of China, just above North Korea. We show that the location of a H tone in syntax-marking Accentual Phrase (AP) is determined by the type of syntactic head, noun or verb (a VP is marked by an AP-initial H while an NP is marked by an AP-final H), while prominence-marking accentual phrasing is cued by AP-initial H. The difference in prosodic phrasing due to its dual function in Yanbian Korean is compared with that of Seoul Korean, and a prediction is made on the possibility of finding such difference in other languages based on the prosodic typology proposed in (Jun, Sun-Ah. 2014b. Prosodic typology: by prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic Typology II: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. 520–539. Oxford: Oxford University Press).

On defining the intonational phrase: evidence from Slave

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold M. Zwicky ◽  
Ellen M. Kaisse ◽  
Keren D. Rice
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
The Relationship

Syntactic juncture has been a topic of interest in phonological theory in recent years. One major issue addressed in the study of syntactic juncture is how to predict from syntactic structure the domains of phrase-level rules of the phonology, or prosodic structure. Many, including Selkirk (1978, 1984, 1986), Nespor & Vogel (1982) and Hayes (1984), propose that utterances are organised in a prosodic hierarchy, determined by but not isomorphic to syntactic structure. In work by these authors, algorithms for determining the relationship between syntactic structure and prosodic structure have been proposed, leading to a deeper understanding of prosodic phrasing.

scholarly journals On relative clauses and prosodic phrasing in Ciwandya

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Al Mtenje
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Prosodic Phrase ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Restrictive Relatives

The interaction between Syntax and Phonology has been one area of interesting empirical research and theoretical debate in recent years, particularly the question of the extent to which syntactic structure influences phonological phrasing. It has generally been observed that the edges of the major syntactic constituents (XPs) tend to coincide with prosodic phrase boundaries thus resulting in XPs like subject NPs, object NPs, Topic NPs, VPs etc. forming separate phonological phrases. Within Optimality Theoretic (OT) accounts, this fact has been attributed to a number of well-motivated general alignment constraints. Studies on relative clauses in Bantu and other languages have significantly contributed to this area of research inquiry where a number of parametric variations have been observed with regard to prosodic phrasing. In some languages, XPs which are heads of relatives form separate phonological phrases while in others they phrase with the relative clauses. This paper makes a contribution to this topic by discussing the phrasing of relatives in Ciwandya (a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and Tanzania). It shows that XPs which are heads of restrictive relative clauses phrase with their relative verbs, regardless of whether they are subjects, objects or other adjuncts. A variety of syntactic constructions are used to illustrate this fact. The discussion also confirms what has been generally observed in other Bantu languages concerning restrictive relatives with clefts and non-restrictive relative clauses. In both cases, the heads of the relatives phrase separately. The paper adopts an OT analysis which has been well articulated and defended in Cheng & Downing (2007, 2010, to appear) Downing & Mtenje (2010, 2011) to account for these phenomena in Ciwandya.  

Postfocal Downstep in German

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Kügler ◽  
Caroline Féry
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
German Journal ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Role Of Information

This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680–703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.

The Elicited Language Analysis Procedure

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Larry J. Mattes
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Tool ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Quality Measures ◽  
Analysis Procedure ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Response Quality ◽  
Semantic Relationships ◽  
Language Analysis

Elicited imitation tasks are frequently used as a diagnostic tool in evaluating children with communication handicaps. This article presents a scoring procedure that can be used to obtain an in-depth descriptive analysis of responses produced on elicited imitation tasks. The Elicited Language Analysis Procedure makes it possible to systematically evaluate responses in terms of both their syntactic and semantic relationships to the stimulus sentences presented by the examiner. Response quality measures are also included in the analysis procedure.

Towards the Use of a Tree Branching Logic in the Environment of a Hospital Information System

1980 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
J.-Ph. Berney ◽  
R. Baud ◽  
J.-R. Scherrer
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Selection System ◽  
Frame Selection ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Medical Language ◽  
Selection Systems ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Man Machine Dialogue ◽  
Oriented System

It is well known that Frame Selection Systems (FFS) have proved both popular and effective in physician-machine and patient-machine dialogue. A formal algorithm for definition of a Frame Selection System for handling man-machine dialogue is presented here. Besides, it is shown how the natural medical language can be handled using the approach of a tree branching logic. This logic appears to be based upon ordered series of selections which enclose a syntactic structure. The external specifications are discussed with regard to convenience and efficiency. Knowing that all communication between the user and the application programmes is handled only by FSS software, FSS contributes to achieving modularity and, therefore, also maintainability in a transaction-oriented system with a large data base and concurrent accesses.

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