Lecture | SMILE Talks
Primacy and collapse in intonational melodies: Insights from imitation
- Date
- Friday 28 November 2025
- Time
- Series
- SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
This talk is about intonational form: what is the repertoire of intonational patterns that speakers deploy in their language, and how discrete/separable are these patterns from one another? This question is notoriously hard to answer, and remains an active one, even in the study of well-described intonational systems. I will discuss two studies which examine the question through the lens of imitation, asking how speakers’ renditions of intonational melodies give insight into their intonational systems. Testing American English speakers, two modifications to a classic imitation paradigm are presented. In the first, imitations are examined across conditions which are designed to tax short-term auditory memory for a stimulus. In the second, imitations are transposed across metrical structures, which vary the material for tunes to be realised over. Both of these are envisioned as offering more versus less ideal conditions for imitation, asking in effect what is prioritised and what is lost. Emergent distinctions are analysed in both studies, as is the relation between these emergent distinctions and speakers’ enhancement of intonational patterns. Common threads across studies are taken to suggest that certain patterns are primitive and robust while others are noisy and lost in non-ideal imitation conditions. Implications for understanding a system of intonational forms are considered.