Papers by Mariapaola D'Imperio
The development of prosodic and gesture cues to focus in French preschoolers
Journal of Laboratory Phonology vol. 7 (1), 4 - Advancing Prosodic Transcription, Special Collection
This special collection consists of papers inspired by topics covered in two different workshops ... more This special collection consists of papers inspired by topics covered in two different workshops addressing the challenge of prosodic transcription for research in spoken language sciences and for the development of computer speech technologies. At the heart of this collection are discussions of the phonological assumptions behind current approaches to prosodic transcription, the choice of discrete units and their granularity, the consequences of adopting a phonetically transparent transcription system, and the challenges of transcribing under-described languages. This collection of papers aims to foster further discussion on cross-linguistic prosodic transcription and the levels of linguistic analysis required by this enterprise.
Developmental Science, 2021
Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informat... more Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alternatives. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audiovisually recorded while playing in a semi-spontaneous but controlled production task, to elicit target words in the context of broad focus, contrastive focus, or corrective focus utterances. We analysed the acoustic features of the target words (syllable duration and word-level pitch range), as well as the head gesture features accompanying these target words (head gesture type, alignment patterns with speech). We found that children's production of head gestures, but not their use of either syllable duration or word-level pitch range, was affected by focus condition. Children mostly aligned head gestures with relevant speech units, especially when the target word was in phrase-final position. Moreover, the presence of a head gesture was linked to greater syllable duration patterns in all focus conditions. Our results show that (a) 4-and 5-year-old French-speaking children use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to mark the informational status of discourse referents, (b) the use of head gestures may gradually entrain the production of adult-like prosodic features, and that (c) head gestures with no referential relation with speech may serve a linguistic structuring function in communication, at least during language development.
Speech Prosody 2018, 2018
Based on the theory biological codes [1], the Frequency code [2] claims that pitch height is a un... more Based on the theory biological codes [1], the Frequency code [2] claims that pitch height is a universal correlate of politeness. Other frameworks, while taking a pragmatic approach, [3], [4] claim that high pitch can be employed in both polite and impolite contours and argue for the importance of socio-pragmatic variables in the expression of politeness. Work on Russian prosody suggests though that the degree of politeness decreases with higher f0 of falling contours in imperatives [5], [6], [7]. The present study investigates the relationship between f0 height, pitch accent type and conveyed attitude in Russian imperatives when social distance (power relationship) is manipulated. A discourse completion task, in which both speakers' power and attitude were manipulated, was carried out to test our hypotheses. Our results show that higher f0 values are found for both rising and falling polite imperatives, except for downstepped pitch accents. Moreover, speakers' social power did not show a significant effect. Our findings underline the need to take into account pitch accent type and speech act to predict fundamental frequency values in polite contexts.
Similar use of intonation structure in early implanted children and hearing children: The case of Italian
First Language, 2021
This work presents an analysis of the intonation competence in a group of Italian children with c... more This work presents an analysis of the intonation competence in a group of Italian children with cochlear implant (CI). Early cochlear implantation plays a crucial role in language development for children who were born deaf in that it favours the acquisition of complex aspects of language, such as the intonation structure. A story-generation task, the Narrative Competence Task, was used to elicit children’s stories. Narrations produced by 8 early implanted children and by 16 children with typically hearing (TH) (8 one-to-one matched considering the chronological age, TH-CA, and 8 considering the hearing age, TH-HA) were analysed considering intonation features (pitch accent distribution, edge tones and inner breaks). Results show that children with CI produce intonation patterns that are similar to those of both TH-CA and TH-HA control groups. Few significant differences were found only between children with CI and children matched for TH-HA in the use of rising edge tones. These re...
Interspeech 2018, 2018
Cochlear implanted (CI) children display an array of speech production and perception problems. N... more Cochlear implanted (CI) children display an array of speech production and perception problems. No study has evaluated the specific use of prosody regarding information structure in the discourse, in French speaking early CI children. This study aims to evaluate prosody production in these children, to determine whether they show prosodic effect on word duration. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 10 prelingually hearing impaired French speaking children (4-7 years old), without comorbidities, CI before the age of 18 months between 2009 and 2012. The speech production task consisted in playing a computer-based semi-structured game, where children interacted with their caregiver. Results were interpreted according to both chronological age and hearing age (HA). In our series, 6-and 7-year old children (HA<6.2 years) showed stronger lengthening of the focused word in the corrective narrow focus condition than in the contrastive narrow focus which in turn was stronger than in broad focus condition. Only 7-year old children adopted a strategy similar to that of adults, lengthening the end-phrase adjective to preserve the typical phrasing pattern of French. This study shows for the first time that early CI children are able to acquire important intonation structure features comparable to adult patterns.
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2007
One of the main uses of intonation form is to signal pragmatic information. Recent research on in... more One of the main uses of intonation form is to signal pragmatic information. Recent research on intonational meaning has shown that epistemic information about propositional content of utterances within a discourse can also be tonally encoded. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether speaker certainty about the answer to a polar question can be recovered by listeners of Salerno Italian and whether identification is affected by tune type. In an online perception survey, three similarly frequent polar question tunes were rated according to degree of perceived speaker certainty relative to the question response. Results support the hypothesis that tune type affects degree of certainty perception. The study also supports the hypothesis that additional factors – both sociophonetic (i.e., living abroad) and idiosyncratic – might affect variability in intonation perception within a language community.
Speakers are able to adjust their prosodic patterns to approximate those of a different dialect, ... more Speakers are able to adjust their prosodic patterns to approximate those of a different dialect, at least when the dialects involved are phonologically similar [6, 7]. Our study explores imitation across two dialects of English (Singaporean and American) whose prosodic systems are phonologically very distinct. Singaporean speakers were recorded both in their native dialect and while attempting to imitate sentences produced by an American English speaker. Our results show that in spite of the structural differences, speakers of Singapore English are able to rapidly adapt and shift from an edge-based system to an accentual system within the time of the experiment, as well as to finely tune the phonetic detail of their intonation patterns in a way that closely tracked that of the American English model speaker. We further show that the degree of variability in successfully reproducing the target values is dependent on amount of exposure to the non-native dialect.
Previous research on the development of children's marking of new referents in speech has tra... more Previous research on the development of children's marking of new referents in speech has traditionally neglected one source of relevant information: visual cues to prosodic structure. In light of previous findings showing that prosody allies with non-referential body movements in the expression of information structure, we explore whether pre-schoolers mark focused information in the discourse gesturally and/or prosodically. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audiovisually recorded while producing semi-spontaneous utterances in 3 focus conditions (broad focus; contrastive narrow focus; corrective narrow focus). The acoustic (duration and pitch range at the word level) and visual (head gestures) analyses showed a higher rate of head gesturing in the narrow focus conditions (corrective>contrastive>broad), but no effect of focus condition on word duration nor on pitch range values. These results indicate that French pre-schoolers use visual prosody to highlight ne...
Mapping Syntax onto Prosodic Structure: Evidences for the Intermediate Phrase in French
Enhanced neural and behavioural processing of a nonnative phonemic contrast in professional musicians
The European journal of neuroscience, 2018
Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign languag... more Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign language perception and learning, we examined the impact of musical expertise on the categorisation of syllables including phonemes that did (/p/, /b/) or did not (/p /) belong to the French repertoire by analysing both behaviour (error rates and reaction times) and Event-Related brain Potentials (N200 and P300 components). Professional musicians and nonmusicians categorised syllables either as /ba/ or /pa/ (voicing task), or as /pa/ or /p a/ with /p / being a nonnative phoneme for French speakers (aspiration task). In line with our hypotheses, results showed that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. Moreover, the difference between the native (/p/) and the nonnative phoneme (/p /), as reflected in N200 and P300 amplitudes, was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. These results show that b...
Prosodies
This work investigates the role of syntactic branchingness and constituent length in determining ... more This work investigates the role of syntactic branchingness and constituent length in determining phrasing within a corpus of read utterances. Specifically, a corpus of four Romance languages, i.e., Catalan, European Portuguese (both Northern European Portuguese, NEP, and Standard European Portuguese, SEP), Italian and Spanish, was collected in which either the subject and/or the object could be branching or non-branching. We also tested the importance of number of syllables within the subject and object, which was orthogonal to syntactic complexity. The database contained only SVO sentences consisting of exhaustive combinations of the two constituent length conditions (short=3 syllables vs. long=5 syllables) and the 2 syntactic branching conditions, for a total of 76 utterances. While constituent length is an active phrasing constraint in Catalan and SEP, only syntactic complexity matters for Spanish. In Italian and NEP both factors seem to play a role, though in Italian the length effect is present only for one speaker (and only for branching objects) and the branchingness effect is true only for the Subject constituent. Moreover, only Catalan appears to have a strong tendency to produce (SV)O phrasings, while all the other languages/varieties appear to privilege either (SVO) or (S)VO phrasings. Finally, since all branching constituents contained at least two words, a parallel corpus with non-branching constituents containing two prosodic words was analyzed.
BMJ Open, 2016
Introduction: Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voic... more Introduction: Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, 3 major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the neurodegenerative processes; (2) effects of the pharmacological treatment, which vary according to the disease stage; and (3) particular speech modifications that may be language-specific, that is, dependent on the language spoken by the patients. The main objective of the FraLusoPark project is to provide a thorough evaluation of changes in PD speech as a result of pharmacological treatment and disease duration in 2 different languages (French vs European Portuguese). Methods and analysis: Individuals with PD are enrolled in the study in France (N=60) and Portugal (N=60). Their global motor disability and orofacial motor functions is assessed with specific clinical rating scales, without (OFF) and with (ON) pharmacological treatment. 2 groups of 60 healthy age-matched volunteers provide the reference for between-group comparisons. Along with the clinical examinations, several speech tasks are recorded to obtain acoustic and perceptual measures. Patient-reported outcome measures are used to assess the psychosocial impact of dysarthria on quality of life. Ethics and dissemination: The study has been approved by the local responsible committees on human experimentation and is conducted in accordance with the ethical standards. A valuable largescale database of speech recordings and metadata from patients with PD in France and Portugal will be constructed. Results will be disseminated in several articles in peer-reviewed journals and in conference presentations. Recommendations on how to assess speech and voice disorders in individuals with PD to monitor the progression and management of symptoms will be provided.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience, Jan 17, 2016
On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspe... more On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspects of speech perception and cognition, the aim of this series of experiments was to test the hypothesis that adult professional musicians would learn the meaning of novel words through picture-word associations more efficiently than controls without music training (i.e., fewer errors and faster RTs). We also expected musicians to show faster changes in brain electrical activity than controls, in particular regarding the N400 component that develops with word learning. In line with these hypotheses, musicians outperformed controls in the most difficult semantic task. Moreover, although a frontally distributed N400 component developed in both groups of participants after only a few minutes of novel word learning, in musicians this frontal distribution rapidly shifted to parietal scalp sites, as typically found for the N400 elicited by known words. Finally, musicians showed evidence for be...
Disentangling and Connecting Different Perspectives on Prosodic Prominence
Sentence modality and tempo in Neapolitan Italian
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2015
This paper addresses the problem of the perception of two different pitch accents in Italian whic... more This paper addresses the problem of the perception of two different pitch accents in Italian which signal two utterance types (interrogative and declarative). The questions asked concern whether the major perceptual cue to this category distinction involves only the temporal alignment of the high level target with the syllable or if the category percept also depends on the presence of a rising or falling melodic movement within the syllable nucleus. The results show that the primary perceptual cue for questions is a rise through the vowel, while the primary cue for statements is a fall through the vowel. The results bear upon a general theory of intonation and our understanding of intonation in Italian as well as on current models of tonal perception in speech.
Unlike in languages such as English and Standard Italian, the Italian spoken in Naples shares wit... more Unlike in languages such as English and Standard Italian, the Italian spoken in Naples shares with other Southern varieties the use of a very similar rising-falling (LHL) tune for both yes/no questions and narrow focus statements (D'Imperio, 2001; Grice et al., to appear). However, it has been claimed that the temporal alignment of the accent peak is later in the pitch accent of yes/no questions (L*+H) than in that of statements (L+H*) and that this alignment difference is employed by native speakers to perceptually identify the two tunes (D'Imperio and House, 1997). This study acoustically tested the hypothesis that all three tonal targets of the rise-fall are timed and scaled differently in questions and statements. Moreover, slope differences for both rise and fall were also tested by employing logistic regression modeling. Two speakers of Neapolitan Italian produced utterances whose target words differed in question/statement modality, syllable structure and segmental environment. The results show that all three targets within the rise-fall are timed later in questions than in statements. By contrast, no systematic difference was found for the slope of the rise nor for the slope of the fall. The exact contribution of F 0 height to signaling the contrast could not be determined, though. In fact, while one speaker marked the difference by producing higher peaks for statements, the other did not produce any difference.
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Papers by Mariapaola D'Imperio