Phon Talk: Aoju Chen

Speaker: Aoju Chen (UU)

Title: The categoricality of intonational events

Date/time: Thursday 18 June, 15:00-16:00

Place: Drift 6, room 0.07

Abstract

When listening to speech, we readily distinguish sounds such as /b/ and /p/, and speakers of tone languages categorise lexical tones. But what about intonation in non-tone languages, e.g., the rises and falls in pitch that convey a wide range of meanings (e.g., focus, illocutionary force)?  Are they represented as speech categories in the same way as phonemes and lexical tones? This question is central to theories of intonational phonology. It has inspired much empirical work over the past decades but remains unresolved.

Previous research has primarily studied categoricality of intonational events through intonation boundary effects in the classical categorical perception paradigm. However, boundary effects are not necessarily indicative of categoricality of speech. In this talk, I present evidence from three perception experiments with native speakers of Dutch that revisit this issue from a new perspective. Rather than focusing on category boundaries, we examine whether pitch accents (i.e., the pitch movements associated with lexically stressed syllable of certain words in an utterance) show the internal structure characteristic of cognitive and speech categories, i.e. higher goodness ratings for exemplars near a category prototype and reduced discrimination sensitivity around that prototype.

Our results provide the first evidence that pitch accents possess such internal structure, resembling categories such as colors and phonemes. At the same time, the observed effects are weaker and less stable than those reported for phonemes and lexical tones. Together, these findings suggest that pitch accents are represented categorically but occupy a less strongly categorical position within the landscape of speech categories.