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Phenomena

What intonational phenomena are we investigating in SPRINT?

Final Rises in English

​Final pitch rises  are found at the end of polar questions and are also used to signal the speaker’s intention to continue holding the floor.

 

Perhaps the best known use of rises is uptalk, rises at the end of statements where one would normally expect a fall. Such rises are expected to be meaningful, e.g. adding pragmatic nuance to a statement. It is unclear, however, whether differences between rises used for different purposes are gradient or categorial.

 

Pitch rises are investigated in SPRINT with data from Southern Standard British English (SSBE), where uptalk is said to be an innovation. Our data so far show that younger speakers use uptalk extensively and in a consistent manner, differentiating between questions, listing, and what we can call "uptalk proper", viz. rises at the ends of statements. The stability of these patterns relative to the variability documented in earlier work, coupled with a lack of gender-related differences, suggests that uptalk is now well established in SSBE.​​​​​​

Question Tunes in Greek

In Athenian Greek polar questions have a distinctive tune, as shown in earlier work, while wh-questions are typically expressed using one of two tunes, (informally) a rise-fall and a rise-fall rise.

 

In SPRINT we investigate variability within the characteristic polar-question tune, as well as the use of additional tunes for polar questions and their pragmatic fuctions in conversation.​ We are conducting a similar investigation on tunes used with wh-questions.​​​​

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So far, our results from production and eye-tracking confirm that tunes are best treated as compositional, while their pragmatic interpretation is strongly affected by pragmatic context and prior knowledge.

High Accents in English

Despite extensive work on the high pitch accents of English, H* and L+H*, there is at present no consensus regarding their number, representation, and meaning. 

 

Our data from scripted and unscripted speech, on the one hand, and speech perception, on the other, indicate that H* and L+H* probably form a marginal contrast in English (while, by comparison, they remain clearly distinct in Greek, both in terms of shape and in terms of fuction). Our results indicate that whether a speaker of English acquires the distinction between H* and L+H* may be closely linked to their personal cognitive characteristics, such as their level of empathy (which sensitizes them to pragmatic distinctions), and their musicality and autistic-like traits (which sensitize them to acoustic differences).

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High Accents in Greek

According to GRToBI, Greek uses three pitch accents with declaratives: H* is used for new information, LH* for contrastive information, and H*L introduces new information that the speaker believes should have already been in the common ground.

 

In SPRINT we investigate this description of the accents using scripted and unscripted data and examining individual variability in the realization of the tunes. Our results show that the accents involve several redundant cues that are in cue-trading with the main F0 cues. Comparison with the English data indicates differences in the realization of these accents and in their pragmatic uses.

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SPRINT

SPRINT is the acronym of grant ERC-ADG-835263 titled "Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication". SPRINT is a 5-year (2019-2024) €2,481,196 research program funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Amalia Arvaniti is the Principal Investigator. SPRINT is based at Radboud University.

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