Sicoli Mark A, Stivers Tanya, Enfield N J, Levinson Stephen C
Lang Speech. 2015 Jun;58(Pt 2):204-23. doi: 10.1177/0023830914529247.
In conversation, the initial pitch of an utterance can provide an early phonetic cue of the communicative function, the speech act, or the social action being implemented. We conducted quantitative acoustic measurements and statistical analyses of pitch in over 10,000 utterances, including 2512 questions, their responses, and about 5000 other utterances by 180 total speakers from a corpus of 70 natural conversations in 10 languages. We measured pitch at first prominence in a speaker's utterance and discriminated utterances by language, speaker, gender, question form, and what social action is achieved by the speaker's turn. Through applying multivariate logistic regression we found that initial pitch that significantly deviated from the speaker's median pitch level was predictive of the social action of the question. In questions designed to solicit agreement with an evaluation rather than information, pitch was divergent from a speaker's median predictably in the top 10% of a speakers range. This latter finding reveals a kind of iconicity in the relationship between prosody and social action in which a marked pitch correlates with a marked social action. Thus, we argue that speakers rely on pitch to provide an early signal for recipients that the question is not to be interpreted through its literal semantics but rather through an inference.
在对话中，话语的初始音高可以为正在实施的交际功能、言语行为或社会行为提供早期语音线索。我们对10000多个话语进行了音高的定量声学测量和统计分析，这些话语包括2512个问题、它们的回答，以及来自10种语言的70段自然对话语料库中的180位发言者的约5000个其他话语。我们测量了发言者话语中第一个重读音节的音高，并根据语言、发言者、性别、问题形式以及发言者的话轮所实现的社会行为来区分话语。通过应用多元逻辑回归，我们发现，显著偏离发言者中位数音高的初始音高可以预测问题的社会行为。在旨在征求对评价而非信息的认同的问题中，音高可预测地偏离发言者中位数，处于发言者音高范围的前10%。后一项发现揭示了韵律与社会行为之间关系中的一种象似性，即显著的音高与显著的社会行为相关。因此，我们认为，发言者依靠音高为接受者提供一个早期信号，表明这个问题不应从其字面语义来解释，而应通过推理来解释。
