Kaland Constantijn, Himmelmann Nikolaus P
Institute of Linguistics, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany.
Lang Speech. 2020 Mar;63(1):31-55. doi: 10.1177/0023830918820044. Epub 2019 Jan 8.
It has frequently been shown that speakers prosodically reduce repeated words in discourse. This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate. However, a literature review provided in this paper reveals that most evidence comes from English, where prosodic marking of information status often coincides with repetition reduction. The current study investigates to what extent repetition reduction occurs in Papuan Malay, spoken in the western part of the island of New Guinea (Indonesia). The work on Papuan Malay prosody available to date suggests fundamental differences compared to English and other Germanic languages. An acoustic analysis is carried out on repeated words in short stories produced by native Papuan Malay speakers. The results show that upon repetition, words were shortened produced with higher F0. In a subsequent word identification task, it was found that first and second mentions were equally intelligible. Conclusions partially confirm previous work and challenge theories on how the prosody and information value of a word are related.
人们经常发现，说话者在话语中会通过韵律手段减少重复词汇。这种现象据称有助于语音识别，并且具有语言普遍性。特别是，在话语语境中一个词的信息价值与其韵律突显之间的关系已被证明存在相关性。然而，本文提供的文献综述表明，大多数证据来自英语，在英语中，信息状态的韵律标记往往与重复减少同时出现。本研究调查了在新几内亚岛（印度尼西亚）西部使用的巴布亚马来语中重复减少的程度。迄今为止关于巴布亚马来语韵律的研究表明，与英语和其他日耳曼语相比存在根本差异。对以巴布亚马来语为母语的人所讲述的短篇小说中的重复词汇进行了声学分析。结果表明，重复时，单词会缩短，基频更高。在随后的单词识别任务中，发现首次提及和第二次提及的可懂度相同。研究结论部分证实了先前的研究工作，并对关于单词的韵律与信息价值如何相关的理论提出了挑战。
