Elisa German

International audienceTraditional accounts of the semantics of intonational contours assume compositionality, such that the meaning of a given contour depends on the combined functions of pitch accents and boundary tones [1]. This framework, however, has yet to incorporate recent research showing that affective meaning may influence the judgement of speech act (e.g., statement vs. question [2]), that the speaker may choose different tunes (e.g., for requests and offers) according to their familiarity with the listener [3], or that perlocutionary meaning is a function of both sentence type and tune [4]. The present research explores how perlocutionary meaning is influenced by tune (rising vs. falling) for two distinct, yet comparable illocutionary acts: requests and offers (e.g., Can [you/I] bring [me/you] some water?). A perceptual rating task elicited participants' responses along three scales: speaker MOOD, SINCERITY, and AUTHORITY (cf. [5]). In line with [4], we expected the ...

<h3>Introduction</h3></br> <p>Columbia Games Corpus was developed by the <a href="http://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/index.cgi">Spoken Language Group, Columbia University </a> and the <a href="https://linguistics.northwestern.edu/">Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University</a>. It consists of approximately 10 hours of spontaneous English conversation along with corresponding orthographic transcripts and annotation. Speech recordings are comprised of two subjects playing a series of computer games requiring verbal communication to achieve joint goals of identifying and moving images on the screen to reach a combined number of points.</p></br> <p>Each player used a separate laptop computer and could not see the screen of the other player. Participants played two games: the Cards Game and the Objects Game. In the Cards Game, one participant described a card and depending on the task in the game, the second participant searched for the described card or tried to match it from cards shown on their screen. In the Objects Game, each player's screen displayed 5-7 objects, one of which was the target object. One player described the target object's location on their screen, and the other player tried to move that object to the same position on their screen.</p></br> <h3>Data</h3></br> <p>Over 12 sessions conducted in 2004, 13 subjects (six female, seven male) participated in the collection. Sessions contained an average of 45 minutes of dialogue.</p></br> <p>Each recording has corresponding manually time-aligned orthographic transcripts, affirmative cue words discourse annotation, and turn-taking annotation. Annotation guidelines are included in this release. Task files for each game are also included for each recording.</p></br> <p>Audio data was recorded at a sample rate of 48kHz with 16-bit precision, and later converted to 16kHz, single channel FLAC compressed WAV. All text data is encoded in UTF-8.</p></br> <h3>Samples</h3></br> <p>Please view these samples:</p></br> <ul></br> <li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC202 [...]

Participating in a dialogic conversation requires complex skills for inter- and intra-personal coordination. During turn-taking, for instance, conversational partners have to rapidly agree on who speaks next and when. This requires that they start planning their utterances already when listening to their interlocutors. The present study investigates speech planning in French dialogues, by determining whether the size of the planning unit depends on speakers’ cognitive abilities. Cognitive constraints are investigated by looking at the effects of working memory capacity in healthy adults and in individuals with cognitive disorders, i.e., with patients affected by multiple sclerosis (MS). An interactive card game was created, in which cognitive load was manipulated by requiring the conversational partners (8 pairs of healthy-healthy speakers vs. 8 pairs of healthy-MS speakers) to recall the images displayed on the cards while talking. A battery of neuropsychological tests allowed asse...

A growing body of evidence reveals that tune meaning is multidimensional and flexible, with the choice of a tune depending both on linguistic and metalinguistic purposes. This study explores how perlocutionary meaning is influenced by tune for requests and offers. Two female speakers of American English produced 96 request-offer pairs in the form of polar questions with both rising and falling tunes. Using an online survey system, participants' ratings of speaker authority were elicited. Falling tunes raised speaker authority to a greater degree for requests than for offers. Speaker 2, who had generally larger f0 movements than Speaker 1, was rated as more authoritative. Hence, different intonational tunes are assessed along with their metalinguistic and social dimensions, with individual differences in tune implementation also modulating listeners' judgments.

Traditional accounts of the semantics of intonational contours assume compositionality, such that the meaning of a given contour depends on the combined functions of pitch accents and boundary tones [1]. This framework, however, has yet to incorporate recent research showing that affective meaning may influence the judgement of speech act (e.g., statement vs. question [2]), that the speaker may choose different tunes (e.g., for requests and offers) according to their familiarity with the listener [3], or that perlocutionary meaning is a function of both sentence type and tune [4]. The present research explores how perlocutionary meaning is influenced by tune (rising vs. falling) for two distinct, yet comparable illocutionary acts: requests and offers (e.g., Can [you/I] bring [me/you] some water?). A perceptual rating task elicited participants' responses along three scales: speaker MOOD, SINCERITY, and AUTHORITY (cf. [5]). In line with [4], we expected the combination of falling...

In an empirical study participants were asked to rate the per- ceived degree of certainty of utterances that contained either the modal would or main verb be (e.g. That would be me vs. That's me), and which were also variously produced with one of three intonational contours (downstepped, declarative, and yes-no- question). We found that both downstepped contour and epis-