SPEAK aims to establish the intonation unit as a basic unit of organization of spoken discourse. It does so by exploring the nature of the relationship between intonation units, syntactic constituents, and communicative units in Kazakh and Italian conversation. To achieve this goal, the project combines corpus analysis and experimental methods that approach the main question from the point of view of both production and perception.
Research Objectives
The project is composed of three Research Objectives (RO):
- RO1 explores intonation units from the point of view of production by observing naturally occurring linguistic behavior in order to identify the points of convergence and mismatch between intonation units, syntactic units, and interactional moves in Kazakh and Italian conversation. To achieve this goal, we will annotate 20 hours of conversation per language at three levels: prosodic (intonation unit boundaries and intonation contours), syntactic (parts of speech), and interactional (interactional moves). We then apply statistical modeling to identify the cases where these units are mismatched and the possible causes behind this mismatch.
- RO2 explores IUs from the point of view of perception through a perceptual experimental task testing the performance of participants in identifying IU boundaries in conversational excerpts in their native language and in a language they have never heard before. We expect that knowledge of syntax will be the main factor misleading native speakers in the placement of IU boundaries. We then compare the results from RO2 to the behavior observed in RO1 to identify how the factors influencing perception are handled in production.
- RO3 investigates the primary level of metalinguistic representation of listeners by zooming into the comparison between syntax-identified units (sentences) and prosody-identified units (intonation units). Participants will perform a memory task on conversational chunks segmented in IUs and sentences. We hypothesize that chunks of discourse segmented into IUs will be remembered more often and more accurately than discourse presented segmented into sentences.
Areas of innovation
This project builds on a wealth of research on intonation units produced in the fields of typology, discourse and grammar, cognitive linguistics, and interactional linguistics and it introduces several aspects of innovation:
- Research on IUs tends to focus either on the side of speakers (production) or listeners (perception). Functional linguistics employs conversational data to investigate syntactic and interactional constraints on IU production. Experimental linguistics focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying perception. SPEAK subscribes to the converging evidence paradigm, integrating methods and findings from these disciplines to explore both production and perception.
- Intonation units are believed to be constrained by universal factors, but studies that explicitly compare their functioning across languages are scarce. Typologically diverse languages are claimed to display differences in the size and preferred content of IUs, but comparative analysis is hindered by a lack of comparable methodologies and datasets. To disentangle language-specific from universal factors, SPEAK builds an explicit comparison between two typologically different languages: Kazakh (Turkic, agglutinative) and Italian (Indo-European, fusional).
- Research on IU perception tends to focus on monologic, non-interactional data. Though this choice makes for robust experimental protocols, it makes it impossible to evaluate the contribution of interactional factors to IU perception and it restricts the study of the phenomenon to a rather artificial linguistic environment. Children develop the capacity for language production and comprehension alongside the acquisition of the social, cultural, and interactional practices governing conversational exchanges within their community. To account for the fact that production and perception of IUs is acquired through social interaction, SPEAK uses conversational data in each of the research objectives.
Follow the project on CORDIS.