1. Studying Intonation
Julia Hirschberg
CS 4706
9/21/2018

2. Today Approaches to studying contour meaning Questions people ask
Does contour X convey a different meaning from contour Y?
Is contour X used more often in context Z than contour Y
Despite what people say/think, not all phenomena X are uttered with contour Y
What kind of evidence could we get?
Found data
Laboratory experiments: production, perception
Corpus collection
9/21/2018

3. What features can we look at and how do we obtain them?
Intonation labeling by hand
Acoustic/prosodic analysis by automatic methods
Pitch tracking, pause detection, intensity, duration, speaking rate extraction
Computational linguistic techniques to extract transcript-based (text) features
Part-of-speech
Sentence length, …
What techniques do we use for analysis?
Statistical methods (Splus, Matlab)
Machine learning techniques
9/21/2018

4. Some Sample Approaches
Natural Corpus: Hedberg & Sosa 2002
Introspective, observational: Wilson 1993, Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990/2
Laboratory -- Production/Perception: Syrdal & Jilka 2004
Laboratory – Brain Imaging (e.g. fMRI): Doherty et al
9/21/2018

5. A Prescriptive Approach: Wilson 1993
Declarative statements fall and yes-no-questions rise?
Wh-questions fall?
Small final rise signals ‘more to come’?
9/21/2018

6. Corpus Studies of Questions: Hedberg & Sosa 2002
How are yes-no and wh-questions uttered and how might we explain differences?
Where is the nuclear stress?
Where is the semantic ‘focus’? What is the ‘topic’?
Are the ‘wh words’ accented or not?
Corpus: 73 questions
Who saw John?/Who didn’t see John?
Did John leave?/Didn’t John leave?
35 whq’s and 38 ynq’s from the McLaughlin Group and Washington Week
9/21/2018

7. Intonational labeling (ToBI) from pitch tracks Topic/focus coding
Analysis
Intonational labeling (ToBI) from pitch tracks
Topic/focus coding
Frequency distributions of features with question categories
Prosody of ‘locus of interrogation’
Wh word in wh-questions
Fronted auxiliary in yes-no questions
Results
Ynq’s generally uttered w/ falling or level intonation, not rising (69%)
Wh-q’s most often uttered with falling (80%)
9/21/2018

8. Conclusions/open questions:
Wh-words (60%) in all wh-questions and neg aux in negative ynq’s (89%) most often uttered with L+H* accent (‘contrastive’ accent) -- why?
Aux in positive ynq’s often deaccented (41%) or realized with L* (17%) accent – why?
Conclusions/open questions:
Why do ynq’s and wh-q’s sometimes rise and sometimes fall?
Locus of interrogation is accented in wh-q’s and in negative ynq’s to “signal interrogative status of sentence” – but not in positive ynq’s “due to need to highlight a following element”
9/21/2018

9. Critique Is this a good corpus for this investigation? Size Genre
What about the speakers?
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10. Syrdal & Jilka 2004
How are whq’s and ynq’s produced most naturally (for TTS)?
Same initial hypothesis: whq’s fall and ynq’s rise in American English
Different approach: production and perception studies
Production:
8 (professional) speakers (5F, 3M)
Read transcripts of actual dialogues
9/21/2018

11. Intonational (ToBI) labeling from pitch tracks of extracted questions
Analysis:
Intonational (ToBI) labeling from pitch tracks of extracted questions
Results:
Ynq’s rose in 83% of cases for females and 53% for males
Wh-q’s always fell for females and fell 79% of time for male speakers; wh-q’s and statements generally fell
Nuclear accents in ynq’s: majority L*
9/21/2018

12. Perception studies: acceptability judgments
Forced choice, 12 listeners
Stimuli: Pairs of ynq and whq’s with same voice/different intonation
17 natural (9 ynq’s, 8 whq’s)
12 synthesized
12 subjects (6 and 6)
Judgments:
Ynq:
Natural speech: people preferred standard rise (L* H- H%)
Synthetic speech: no results
Whq:
Natural speech: people preferred falling contours (L- L%) to rising (H-H%) and slightly to ‘continuation rise’ (L- H%)
Synthetic: no preference
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13. Critique How many questions were produced?
Are professional speakers a good choice?
Read vs. spontaneous speech? For TTS?
Why no results for synthetic speech?
Comparison to Hedberg and Sosa
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14. Doherty et al 2004
How do people process intonation, e.g., in rising questions vs. falling statements vs. falling questions?
She was talking to her father?
She was talking to her father.
Was she talking to her father.
Research questions:
Where is the ‘prosody’ portion of the brain?
What other sectors is it ‘close’ to and what is their function?
Do particular contours have particular locations?
9/21/2018

15. Note experimental condition!
Method: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of subjects presented with digitized recordings
11 subjects (4M, 7F)
Note experimental condition!
150 triples, of which each subjects heard only 1 version
She was talking to her father?
Was she talking to her father.
She was talking to her father.
Monitoring task: Is this a question or a statement?
Press one key for question, another for statement
9/21/2018

16. Interpreting the rising contour as a question?
Results: Increase in activation when subjects made judgments about tokens w/ rising intonation -- but not falling, whether syntactic question or syntactic statement
Why?
Semantic processing? No – illocutionary force is same in rising and falling questions
Acoustic processing? Maybe…
Interpreting the rising contour as a question?
Check lesion studies to see if people with damage in these areas can interpret rising contours…
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17. Critique
No rising inverted questions? “Was she talking to her father?”
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18. Next Class
How do we represent intonational variation?
9/21/2018