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Updated: Feb 27, 2026
09:09
Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
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Accents, Not Just Prosodic Boundaries, Influence Syntactic Attachment
Katy Carlson1, Joseph C Tyler1
1Morehead State University, USA.
Language and Speech
|July 8, 2017
Summary
Pitch accents, which highlight specific words, influence how sentence parts connect syntactically. This study shows focused words draw upcoming sentence elements, impacting syntactic structure.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Syntactic Theory
- Phonetics
Background:
- Prosody, including pitch accents and prosodic boundaries, traditionally informs sentence information structure and word grouping.
- Syntactic attachment, how phrases connect within a sentence, is influenced by prosodic boundaries.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of pitch accents on syntactic attachment ambiguities.
- To determine if pitch accents, independent of prosodic boundaries, influence phrase attachment.
Main Methods:
- Four auditory experiments using questionnaires with ambiguous sentences.
- Sentences featured ambiguous attachment sites for adverbial and prepositional phrases.
- Pitch accents were manipulated on specific verbs or nouns.
Main Results:
- Accenting specific verbs or nouns increased the likelihood of final phrases attaching to the accented element.
- Accent effects were small but consistent across different sentence types.
- Attachment effects were observed independently of prosodic boundaries.
Conclusions:
- Pitch accents play a role in syntactic attachment, influencing how sentence elements connect.
- Focused elements, highlighted by pitch accents, attract subsequent syntactic material.
- Both pitch accents and prosodic phrasing can shape syntactic structure.
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