Speech, variation, and meaning : the effects of emotional prosody on word recognition
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation investigates the effect of phonetically cued emotional information (i.e., emotional prosody) on spoken word recognition. Even words whose meanings are not emotionally laden (e.g., pineapple) can be uttered in a way that conveys anger, happiness, or sadness through phonetic modulation, and the current work investigates how this phonetic variation in the speech signal affects the way spoken words are perceived, recognized, and ultimately understood. Based on the results from five cross-modal priming experiments, I claim that social information from speech is available early and influences spoken word recognition, that all linguistic experience is not equal in that two atypical forms prompt different listener behavior, and that a full explanation of spoken language understanding must include an attentional mechanism. I argue for a new approach to spoken word understanding based on a recent proposal made by my colleagues and me (Sumner, Kim, King and McGowan, 2014). This approach is grounded in existing theories of exemplar dynamics, but expands on the notions of socioacoustic encoding and social weighting. The speech signal is simultaneously mapped to social representations (via socioacoustic encoding) and linguistic representations. The socioacoustic encoding activates social features and categories (e.g., information about the speaker's age, gender, and emotional state) from the speech signal early in lexical processing. Once activated, the social features and categories interact with other social or linguistic representations and they modulate the allocation of cognitive resources (i.e., attention) to the linguistic signal, effectively weighting the significance of each linguistic experience differently (social weighting). This dissertation significantly broadens the current understanding of spoken word recognition by demonstrating the crucial influence of phonetically cued emotional information, offering a new approach that embraces the rich informational contribution contained in phonetic variation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kim, Seung Kyung |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics. |
| Primary advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Thesis advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Podesva, Robert |
| Advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Advisor | Podesva, Robert |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Seung Kyung Kim. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Seung Kyung Kim
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...