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Wang BX, Chen S, Zhou F, Liu J, Xiao C, Chan A, Tang T. English Prosodic Focus Marking by Cantonese Trilingual Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2024; 67:782-801. [PMID: 38354102 DOI: 10.1044/2023_jslhr-23-00508] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/16/2024]
Abstract
PURPOSE The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. METHOD Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups (Cantonese-speaking autistic [CASD], Cantonese-speaking TD [CTD], and English-speaking TD [ETD] children), and prompt questions were designed to elicit desired focus type (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). Mean duration, mean fundamental frequency (F0), F0 range, mean intensity, and F0 curves were used as the acoustic correlates for linear mixed-effects model fitting and functional data analyses in relation to groups and focus conditions (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive pre-, on-, and post-focus). RESULTS The CTD group had post-focus compression (PFC) patterns via reducing mean duration, narrowing F0 range, and lowering mean F0, F0 curve, and mean intensity for words under both narrow and contrastive post-focus conditions, while the CASD group only had shortened mean duration and lowered F0 curves. However, neither the CTD group nor CASD group showed much of on-focus expansion (OFE) patterns. The ETD group marked OFE by increasing mean duration, mean F0, mean intensity, and higher F0 curve for words under on-focus conditions. CONCLUSIONS The CTD group utilized more acoustic cues than the CASD group when it comes to PFC. The ETD group differed from the CASD and CTD groups in the use of OFE. Furthermore, both the CASD and CTD groups showed positive first language transfer in the use of duration and intensity and, potentially, successful acquisition in the use of F0 for prosodic focus marking. Meanwhile, the differences in the use of OFE between the Cantonese-speaking and English-speaking groups, not PFC, might indicate that Cantonese-speaking children acquire PFC prior to OFE.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bruce Xiao Wang
- Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Research Institute for Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
| | - Si Chen
- Research Institute for Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- PolyU-PekingU Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
| | - Fang Zhou
- Research Institute for Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
| | - Jiang Liu
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia
| | - Cheng Xiao
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia
| | - Angel Chan
- Research Institute for Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
| | - Tempo Tang
- Research Institute for Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
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Kakouros S, Salminen N, Räsänen O. Making predictable unpredictable with style - Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the critical role of prosodic expectations in the perception of prominence in speech. Neuropsychologia 2018; 109:181-199. [PMID: 29247667 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.12.011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/22/2017] [Revised: 12/04/2017] [Accepted: 12/05/2017] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
Abstract
Perceptual prominence of linguistic units such as words has been earlier connected to the concepts of predictability and attentional orientation. One hypothesis is that low-probability prosodic or lexical content is perceived as prominent due to the surprisal and high information value associated with the stimulus. However, the existing behavioral studies have used stimulus manipulations that follow or violate typical linguistic patterns present in the listeners' native language, i.e., assuming that the listeners have already established a model for acceptable prosodic patterns in the language. In the present study, we investigated whether prosodic expectations and the resulting subjective impression of prominence is affected by brief statistical adaptation to suprasegmental acoustic features in speech, also in the case where the prosodic patterns do not necessarily follow language-typical marking for prominence. We first exposed listeners to five minutes of speech with uneven distributions of falling and rising fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories on sentence-final words, and then tested their judgments of prominence on a set of new utterances. The results show that the probability of the F0 trajectory affects the perception of prominence, a less frequent F0 trajectory making a word more prominent independently of the absolute direction of F0 change. In the second part of the study, we conducted EEG-measurements on a set of new subjects listening to similar utterances with predominantly rising or falling F0 on sentence-final words. Analysis of the resulting event-related potentials (ERP) reveals a significant difference in N200 and N400 ERP-component amplitudes between standard and deviant prosody, again independently of the F0 direction and the underlying lexical content. Since N400 has earlier been associated with semantic processing of stimuli, this suggests that listeners implicitly track probabilities at the suprasegmental level and that predictability of a prosodic pattern during a word has an impact to the semantic processing of the word. Overall, the study suggests that prosodic markers for prominence are at least partially driven by the statistical structure of recently perceived speech, and therefore prominence perception could be based on statistical learning mechanisms similar to those observed in early word learning, but in this case operating at the level of suprasegmental acoustic features.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sofoklis Kakouros
- Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland.
| | - Nelli Salminen
- Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland; Aalto Behavioral Laboratory, Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University, FI-00076, Finland.
| | - Okko Räsänen
- Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland.
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