This paper presents a preliminary study whose main aim is to characterize four distinct speaking styles according to a limited set of prosodic features, including the length of prosodic phrases (AP and IP), the distribution of stressed syllables, pitch register span, the duration of silent pauses, etc. The analysis was performed using semi-automatic procedures on a corpus consisting of 30 minut...

Cross-situational learning and social pragmatic theories are prominent mechanisms for learning word meanings (i.e., word-object pairs). In this paper, the role of reinforcement is investigated for early word-learning by an artificial agent. When exposed to a group of speakers, the agent comes to understand an initial set of vocabulary items belonging to the language used by the group. Both cros...

This study investigates for the first time comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they not used to request information, but express speaker’s belief that answer is already obvious. special pragmatic meaning often arises by means specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have acquire concept ...

We examined whether infants use function words for phrasal parsing and how functors and prosody interact for parsing. In a preferential looking procedure Frenchlearning 8and 11-month-olds were familiarized with sentences with the subject-NP+VP structure. The VP began with a functor (va, “will”) in half of the sentences (e.g., [Le niveau imposant] va gâcher l’enquête des jeunes. – “The imposing ...

Abstract This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates processing German accusative case markers. Two groups third semester L1 English learners L2 completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in PI+P group heard sentences that included focused cues; PI monotone prosody. The effects training were assessed through an offline comprehens...

The study discusses the role of prosodic grouping in the Mandarin Relative Clause attachment disambiguation. The grouping effect is explored under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) from four aspects of sentence processing experiments: default production, contrast production, online processing, as well as offline processing. It is found that (1) the length of RC greatly impacts ambiguity res...

We review psycholinguistic research on the use of intonation in dialogue, focusing on our own recent work. In experiments using complex real-world tasks and naïve speakers and listeners, we show that speakers reliably specific prosodic cues to signal their intensions, and that listeners use these cues to recognize syntactic and pragmatic aspects of discourse meaning.

This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). The words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating inform...

The perception of prosodic prominence is influenced by different sources like different acoustic cues, linguistic expectations and context. We use a generalized additive model and a random forest to model the perceived prominence on a corpus of spoken German. Both models are able to explain over 80% of the variance. While the random forests give us some insights on the relative importance of th...