title: Prosody Improves Detection of Spoonerisms Versus Both Sensible and Nonsense Phrases.
abstract: Prosody is the pattern of inflection, pitch, and intensity that communicates emotional meaning above and beyond the individual meanings of lexical items and gestures during spoken language. Research has often addressed prosody extending most clearly across multiple speech chunks and carrying properties specific to individual speakers and individual intents. However, prosody exerts effects on intended meaning even for relatively brief speech streams with minimal syntactic cues. The present work seeks to test whether prosody may actually clarify the intended meaning of a two-word phrase even when the basic phonemic sequence of the words is distorted. Thirty-eight undergraduate participants attempted to correctly categorize auditorily presented two-word phrases as belonging to one of three categories: nonsensical phrases; sensible phrases; and spoonerisms. Mixed Poisson modeling of cumulative accuracy found a significant positive interaction of prosody with phrase type indicating that conversational prosody made participants 8.27% more likely to accurately detect spoonerisms. Prosody makes spoken-language comprehension of two-word phrases more robust to distortions of phonemic sequence.
authors.affiliation: Grinnell College, USA.
authors.forename: Damian G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Kelty-Stephen
authors.affiliation: Grinnell College, USA.
authors.forename: Erik P
authors.initials: EP
authors.lastname: Raymakers
authors.affiliation: Grinnell College, USA.
authors.forename: Krista M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Matthews-Saugstad
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010507:Periodicity; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011930:Reaction Time; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Phonemes; prosody; spoonerisms