The Uniqueness in Speech: Prosodic Highlights-prompted Information Content Projection in Continuous Speech Speech

The Uniqueness in Speech: Prosodic Highlights-prompted Information Content Projection in Continuous Speech Speech

Recently, it has been identified that perceived prosodic highlights in continuous speech can function alternatively as the projector of key/focal information allocation. This view provides a novel interpretation to the long-held claim that prominence is used predominantly to mark key information and alludes to the significance of information content planning prompted by perceived prominence. Exploring further information content planning and allocation prompted by prosodic highlights, this study focused on the information content planning unit—“projector” (PJR) and its respective “projection” (PJN) (henceforth PJR-PJN units)—across four diverse Mandarin speech genres. Using the corpus linguistic approach and quantitative analyses, the current study conducted acoustic correlates analyses of F0 realization and pause duration, also the calculation of emphasis-attributed weighting scores based on emphasis levels consistently annotated in the speech data. While the main goal of the study was to profile consistent acoustic realizations across the PJR-PJN units, further confirmation of the patterned deployment of information content in continuous speech was verified. Ultimately, the current results foregrounded the underlying mechanism for information prosody and features unique to speech.