Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation
By Nigel G. Ward. 2019
87 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Beyond words, spoken language involves prosody: intonation, loudness, timing, and the like. In conversation prosody is vital: it enables people to mark things as important or incidental, show interest in something or change the topic, be sympathetic or business-like, and so on. Without prosody, conversations would be just alternating short speeches: the human element would be lost. This book explains how speakers of American English use prosody to accomplish things in conversation. While native speakers do this without conscious awareness, that does not mean it is simple. Attempts to pin down the details have faced many challenges, but now, in a remarkable convergence, researchers in diverse traditions – experimental phonetics, formal phonology, conversation analysis, and signal processing – have independently begun using compatible styles of description. The shared core is the notion of prosodic construction. Prosodic constructions are recurring temporal patterns of prosodic features that express specific meanings and functions. These typically involve not only intonation but also energy, speaking rate, timing, and articulation properties, often with synchronized contributions by two participants. For example, consider one that is common in active listening. A listener can show interest and engagement by periodically nodding or saying uh-huh or the like, but this is not done at random. Example 1 illustrates.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling (2022, background): “Decades-long research on conversation analysis (Duncan, 1972; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2000; Gravano and Hirschberg, 2011; Levinson and Torreira, 2015; Ward, 2019) has shown that human turn-taking relies on a variety of complex signals, or cues, including prosodic cues, linguistic cues, and ev”