2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Problems with Transcription of English Intonation and Their Solutions
| Project/Area Number |
16520301
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Takasaki City University of Economics |
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Principal Investigator |
YUZAWA Nobuo Takasaki City University of Economics, Department of Economics, 経済学部, 助教授 (00220525)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2005
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| Keywords | English / intonation / prosody / transcription / perception / tone-unit / tonic syllable / tone type |
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| Research Abstract |
This research examines how native speakers of English perceive English intonation, focusing on three major elements of intonation: tone-unit boundary, tonic syllable site and tone pattern. To achieve this purpose, five professional English-speaking phoneticians participated in this research and their ways of perception were acoustically compared.
It was discovered that they do not always perceive in the same way, especially when punctuation marks are missing sentence-medially. There are some criteria for marking tone-unit boundaries, but they do not always seem to be useful for authentic examples. Minor prosodic changes tend to be perceived differently, which exerts a great influence on the phoneticians in determining where the tonic syllable is located and which tone pattern it belongs to. One phonetician particularly perceives tone-units in much bigger chunks than the others. It seems that relatively static pitch movements are sometimes perceived as a level tone or a head, i.e. as ton
… More
ic or non-tonic. When part of an utterance is divided into two tone-units・the former ending with a fall and the latter beginning in a higher pitch on a stressed syllable・some phoneticians perceive the tone pattern of the tonic syllable in the former tone-unit as a fall-rise, not a fall. This may be a good example showing that human perception does not always accord with physical reality or that people do not always perceive intonation exactly with the passage of time. The basic difference in perception of intonation is fall vs. rise, but this polarity is not always guaranteed. There are also cases of obvious misinterpretation.
One probable reason for such perceptual differences is that unlike speech patterns used in phonetic textbooks in which professional phoneticians read sentences in accordance with prosodic transcription, people, including professional newsreaders, do not always speak as described in theory. Linguistically, it may be enough to analyze why English intonation is perceived differently, but pedagogically, it may be necessary to establish another transcription system in which perceptual differences are less likely to happen. Less
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Research Products
(2 results)
