03 Jul 2007

Conference preparation talks

The notion that all foci are theoretically contrastive, i.e. they contrast with a contextually available set of alternatives, is now widely accepted in discourse semantics theory (after Rooth, 1992). Focus is usually taken to be marked in English by a pitch accent on the focussed word. In Calhoun 2006, it is shown that, rather, foci align probabilistically with nuclear prominence. This account raises many questions about what leads to words being perceived as contrastive, in the pragmatic sense of actively contrasting with something else in the context. This talk therefore looks at the question of what makes a word contrastive from prosodic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Using a portion of the Switchboard corpus annotated for contrast and prosodic prominence (Calhoun et al 2005), we present both results of contrast prediction models and in-depth analysis of utterances taken from the corpus. (To be presented at the Pragmatics Conference.)

Expressive prosody is thought to be disordered in autism, and this study sets out to evaluate one aspect (prosodic boundary) to investigate a) how naïve judges rate utterances for atypicality; b) whether pitch and duration measurements in those utterances differ from those of typically-developing children; and c) whether children with autism can use prosodic boundary in speech for linguistic distinctions. Samples were drawn from children aged between 5 and 13 years; 31 with language-delayed high-functioning autism (LD-HFA), 40 with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and 119 with typical development (TD). Results showed that naïve judges perceived children with LD-HFA as sounding more atypical than those with AS, who in turn were marginally more atypical than those with TD. Measurements suggested those with LD-HFA had wider pitch-span than those with TD. The groups did not differ on linguistic functionality, and it is possible that factors other than prosody contributed to the perception of atypicality. (To be presented at the ICPhS.)

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