Matalon Nadav, Weinreb Eyal, Freche Dominik, Volk Erez, Biron Tirza, Moses Elisha, Biron David
Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
Department of Linguistics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Apr 29;122(17):e2403262122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2403262122. Epub 2025 Apr 21.
Prosody, the musical facet of speech, is pivotal in human communication, and its structure and meaning remain subjects of ongoing research. In this study, we introduce a data-driven model for English prosody, based on large-scale analysis of spontaneous conversations. As a first step, we identify approximately 200 discernible prosodic patterns-which we view as building blocks of the prosodic vocabulary-and outline their properties and range of meanings. Next, we reveal a Markovian logic, akin to a syntax, for concatenating these elementary building blocks into coherent utterances. We identify distinct compound functions associated with pairs of consecutive patterns and show that the Markovian syntax is more prevalent in spontaneous prosody, as compared to scripted speech. These findings offer invaluable insights into the underlying mechanisms of conversational prosody: They empirically inform and refine existing theoretical concepts. The methodology we present, combining unsupervised analysis of large datasets of spontaneous speech with manual sampling of the results, could guide future research aimed at refining our model and expanding it to other languages.
韵律，即言语的音乐层面，在人类交流中至关重要，其结构和意义仍是正在进行研究的课题。在本研究中，我们基于对自发对话的大规模分析，引入了一种用于英语韵律的数据驱动模型。第一步，我们识别出大约200种可辨别的韵律模式——我们将其视为韵律词汇的构建块——并概述它们的属性和意义范围。接下来，我们揭示一种类似于句法的马尔可夫逻辑，用于将这些基本构建块连接成连贯的话语。我们识别出与连续模式对相关的不同复合功能，并表明与脚本化言语相比，马尔可夫句法在自发韵律中更为普遍。这些发现为对话韵律的潜在机制提供了宝贵的见解：它们以实证方式为现有理论概念提供信息并加以完善。我们提出的方法，将对自发言语的大型数据集进行无监督分析与对结果进行人工抽样相结合，可以指导未来旨在完善我们的模型并将其扩展到其他语言的研究。
