Funded by NIH grant RO1 HD-4152 to J. Arnold and NSF BCS-0318456 to Z. Griffin

1. Cognitive Effort Influences Acoustic Prominence: The Impact of Memory Resources Jennifer E. Arnold and Zenzi M. Griffin UNC Chapel Hill Georgia Tech • Story-telling experiment • Subject sees panel 1 andhears sentence • Subject sees panel 2, repeats sentence 1and adds a line to thestory Concurrent Digit load How acoustically prominent is the reference to the main character? • The main character (Here Mickey) is larger / more interesting  start of response • Only names included (pronouns excluded) • Only two-character conditions included (“single char” condition yielded pronouns) • Results: Longer Duration Under Memory Load • Multilevel model (SAS proc mixed) of log duration: • significant effects:not significant effects in model ( = marginal): • load (0, 2, or 3 digits) p < .02) condition • target word (p < .05) digit span • utterance length (p < .05) number digits remembered • continuation (p < .05) disfluency • control variables (List, load order, block, list order) • Load also decreased frequency of pronoun use • Why do speakers modulate acoustic prominence? • Listener-oriented explanation: • Acoustic prominence (duration, pitch movement, high pitch, intensity) communicates something to the listener • the referent is discourse-new / not-salient (Brown, 1983) • contrast (Terken & Hirschberg, 1994) • informativeness (Bolinger, 1986) • accent signals the focus structure (Selkirk, 1996) • provides additional information in the case of low predictability words • duration shorter when predictable (Jurafsky et al., 2001; Gahl & Garnsey 2004) • words less intelligible when predictable (Fowler & Housum, 1987, Bard & Aylett, 2004) • Speaker-internal effort also increases acoustic prominence: • Speaker disfluency correlates with characteristics of acoustic prominence • longer duration (Bell et al., 2003) • higher pitch (Christodoulou & Arnold, Prosody08 poster) • Bard & Aylett (2004): intelligibility loss for repeated words occurs even with a new addressee • Higher pitch, longer duration, more pauses for unpredictable game moves (Watson, Arnold, & Tanenhaus, 2008) Mickey first: Mickey did some tricks with Daisy at the Western theme park. OR Mickey second: Daisy did some tricks with Mickey at the Western theme park. Mickey did some tricks with Daisy at the Western theme park. . . . . Mickey was good with the rope. No load 2 5 3 9 6 • Research Question • Does nonlinguistic, task-unrelated effort also increase acoustic prominence? • Test case: Memory Load Converging Evidence: Babwah (2008) Instructions to given or new entities Secondary, nonlinguistic task (responding to beeps) can distract speaker Distraction also decreased pronoun use • References • Babwah, L. (2008). Distraction and Reference in Discourse. Honors Thesis, UNC Chapel Hill. • Bard, E. G., & Aylett, M. P. (2004). Referential form, word duration, and modeling the listener in spoken dialogue. In J. C. Trueswell & M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions (pp. 173-191). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Bell, A., Jurafsky, D., et al.. (2003). Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. JASA, 113(2), 1001-1024. • Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and its parts melody in spoken English. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. • Brown, G. (1983). Prosodic structure and the given/new distinction. In A. Cutler & D. R. Ladd (Eds.), Prosody, models, and measurements. New York: Springer-Verlag. • Christodoulou, A., & Arnold, J. E. (2008). Effects of production difficulty on prosody. Poster; Prosody08. • Fowler, C. A., & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers’ signaling of ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘old’’ words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. JML, 26, 489–504. • Gahl, S. & Garnsey, S. M. (2004). Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language, 80, 748-775 • Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M., & Raymond, W. (2001). Probabilistic relations between words... In J. Bybee & P. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 229-254). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. • Selkirk, E. O. (1996). Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress and phrasing. In J. A. Goldsmith (Ed.), The handbook of phonological theory (pp. 550–569). Cambridge, Mass, USA: Blackwell. • Terken, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1994). Deaccentuation of words representing ‘given’ information…. Language and Speech, 37, 125-145. • Watson, D., Arnold, J.E., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2008). Tic tac TOE: Effects of predictability and importance on acoustic prominence in language production. Cognition, 106, 1548-1557. • Conclusions • Nonlinguistic task demands increase acoustic prominence • Memory task: effort affects duration • Distraction task: effort affects pitch • Production-internal load decreases both acoustic and lexical attenuation • The semantic/ pragmatic functions of acoustic prominence may partly reflect associated speaker-internal cognitive demands Click on the cow. (beep! beep!) Now move the carrot to the circle. Funded by NIH grant RO1 HD-4152 to J. Arnold and NSF BCS-0318456 to Z. Griffin