Prosodic Similarity – Evidence from an Imitation Study

Unlike audio recording devices, a human speaker imitating a heard utterance or reading a sentence aloud must formulate a cognitive representation of the linguistic object to guide the phonology and phonetics of the spoken output. The current study used two different production tasks to explore the prosodic aspect of these representations: an imitation experiment in which speakers heard and then imitated spontaneous utterances from a Maptask corpus, and a read enactment task in which speakers read the same sentences aloud from a video display. For each task, the resulting utterances were compared for similarity a) to the original Maptask utterance and b) to each other. Similarity measures included perceptual accent and boundary labels and syllable durations, as well as Fujisaki model-based F0 parameters. For the imitations, agreement in phonological structure (perceptually labeled accents and boundaries) was generally higher than agreement with respect to phonetic realizations (syllable durations and F0 parameters). Furthermore, agreement between imitated utterances and the original spoken stimulus was higher than between different imitations. Finally, read and enacted utterances were substantially different from the original spoken stimulus, both in terms of their phonology and their phonetics. These results are consistent with the view that listeners extract the prosodic form from a heard utterance in terms of abstract phonological features, but reproduce that prosodic form using their own idiosyncratic phonetic patterns, and that the lexical and syntactic structure of a written sentence can support a variety of prosodic interpretations, presumably in line with a variety of potential pragmatic contexts envisioned by the reader.