Lecture | SMILE series
SMILE Kick-off Session - POSTPONED
- Date
- Friday 6 June 2025
- Time
- Series
- SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
The kick-off session has been postponed till the beginning of the next academic year.
This is the kick-off session of the Speech and Mx in Leiden (SMILE) talk series. Please join us!
| Time | Speakers |
| 15:15 - 16:15 |
Carlos Gussenhoven (Radboud University) The Rise and Fall of the Limburgish tone |
|
16:30 - 17:30 |
Hatice Zora (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) Understanding the role of prosody at multiple levels of linguistic organization: Experimental and crosslinguistic insights |
Abstracts
A unique feature of tonal Limburgish dialects is that the tone contrast is embedded in the intonation system. Unlike the tones of Mandarin or Yoruba for instance, the Limburgish tone catogories cannot be given invariant phonetic descriptions, as these depend on the melodic and pitch-accentual conditions of the sentence. A typologically more usual feature is that the contrast is binary and privative, such that approximately half the vocabulary has a lexical tone (‘accent 2’), while the other half lacks it (‘accent 1’), whereby the contrast is restricted to the final or penultimate stressed syllable of non-compound words.
I defined seven typological features on the basis of published prosodic accounts of nine dialects. These data not only largely confirm the dialect zones as established with segmental features, but also suggest a developmental history of the tone contrast from its genesis in Cologne some 750 years ago. These variable features are (i) the number of nuclear intonation melodies, (ii) the value of the lexical tone, (iii) the nature of the Tone Bearing Unit (mora or syllable), (iv) the sequencing of the intonation and lexical tones within a syllable, (v) the contrast on monomoraic sonorant syllables, (vi) the contrast on syllables without intonational tone, and (vii) the number of phonological interactions between lexical and intonational tones.
A full reconstruction of these prosodic systems requires data which are more difficult to harvest than segmental data, since they require targeted corpora of recorded spoken data. Because tone is recessive in the area, research on the many undescribed Franconian dialects is urgent.
Prosody is crucial for transmitting information that cannot be inferred from words and grammar alone, and plays a key role in encoding functions at different levels of linguistic organization. Prosodic cues, for instance, not only distinguish lexical meaning as in the Swedish words ánden ‘the duck’ versus а̀nden ‘the spirit’, but also underpins information packaging by highlighting the most relevant constituent of the discourse, namely focus information. Despite the growing number of studies in the cognitive neuroscience of language, neural underpinnings of these prosodic functions and their interactions are not well understood. Further, there is a paucity of experimental paradigms to operationalize them in a dynamic communicative situation. In a recent series of experiments, we have aimed to contribute to the field by investigating the relevance of prosody for spoken communication at the lexical and discourse levels i) separately and concurrently ii) using psychometric and electrophysiological (EEG) measures, iii) employing typologically distinct languages, and iv) adopting ecologically valid contexts. In this talk, I will focus on two studies, in Turkish and Swedish, examining how listeners judge prosodic violations, leading to lexical and discourse level anomalies, both actively and passively. The psychometric and EEG data show that prosodic violations are judged as incorrect by the listeners both at the lexical and discourse levels. There is, however, a difference in the perceived correctness of prosodic violations depending on the level at which they occur, indicating that the language comprehension system reveals different sensitivities to prosodic violations at different levels of linguistic organization. Notably, these sensitivities are subject to cross-linguistic variation. This pattern of results suggests that the brain not only extracts prosodic cues of different origins, but also weighs them according to their relevance in a communicative context and the relative functional load of prosody in a given language.