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Related Experiment Video

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

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The Processing of Linguistic Prominence.

Heather Kember^1,2, Jiyoun Choi^2,3, Jenny Yu

¹The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Language and Speech

|October 22, 2019

Summary

Prominence in speech aids memory recall. While both English and Korean speakers benefit, Korean listeners gain more from word position, and English speakers from prosody and syntax.

Keywords:

English Korean positional prominence prominence prosodic prominence

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Prominence, or informational weight, is signaled by prosody (head-prominence) or position (edge-prominence).
Prominence enhances information processing and memory recall.
Cross-linguistic differences in prominence signaling exist, such as in English vs. Korean.

Purpose of the Study:

To compare the processing of prominence in English and Korean.
To investigate how prosodic and positional prominence affect recognition memory.
To determine the relative contributions of different prominence cues across languages.

Main Methods:

Recognition memory task with target words in sentences.
Manipulation of prominence through prosody and position in English and Korean.
Experiment included semantic and phonological foils to test processing depth.

Main Results:

Prominence consistently yielded a recall advantage in both languages.
Korean listeners showed a greater advantage from positional prominence.
English listeners exhibited equivalent and additive effects from prosodic and syntactic prominence.

Conclusions:

Prominence processing is influenced by universal information structure effects.
Language-specific experiences shape the relative advantages of different prominence cues.
Prominence enhances memory representation accuracy and accessibility, increasing processing efficiency.