Towards a hybrid model of speech prosody

Kimball, Amelia E.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/101291 Copy

Description

Title

Towards a hybrid model of speech prosody

Author(s)

Kimball, Amelia E.

Issue Date

2018-04-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Cole, Jennifer S.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Cole, Jennifer S.

Committee Member(s)

• Dell, Gary
• Hualde, José Ignacio
• Watson, Duane

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Linguistics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• prosody
• linguistics
• exemplar memory
• episodic memory
• Autosegmental Metrical Model
• hybrid memory model
• memory
• language
• intonation

Abstract

Speech is conveyed through a richly detailed acoustic signal, and each spoken instance of a word varies. Yet humans recognize words quickly, with few errors and typically with no conscious effort. Linguists hypothesize that abstract categories aid the process of speech comprehension because complex details can be mapped to a category, after which the detail of an instance can be forgotten. At the same time, research shows acoustic detail guides comprehension in real time and is retained in implicit memory. This dissertation addresses language processing for speech prosody. This study consists of five perception experiments that test the representation of pitch accents in memory, and directly compares memory for pitch accents to memory for phonemes. Results show that (1) explicit memory for prosody is more accurate for categorical differences, rather than equivalently large within-category differences, and (2) that, unlike phoneme categories, listeners are able to explicitly remember within-category detail for pitch accents, but that this memory decays quickly. Based on these results, I propose a hybrid model of comprehension of prosody that involves activating both previously proposed abstract categories and gradient detail.

Graduation Semester

2018-05

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101291

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2018 Amelia Kimball

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