The perception of two linguistic functions of prosody in Danish.
John Tøndering, David Jackson Morris · Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) · 2015
This paper examines the prosodic perceptual ability of listeners (n=22) in tasks involving global intonation contours and local voice pitch variation. The signaling of utterance type was tested with speech material that included read and non-scripted questions and statements. Local variation was tested with an identification task where the level of prominence of an anaphor signaled either the subject or non-subject of a preceding sentence. Logistic regression revealed that question and statement identification differed between read and non-scripted material and was not linked to performance on the subject/non-subject task. A response bias was also observed in the vocoded condition towards statements. W e conclude that performance differences between the two tasks may be due either to the task-related language ability of the listener or to differences in the perception of global and local prosody.