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Prosody (linguistics)

 

 
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In linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, prosody (from Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 p??s?d?a, prosoidía) is the rhythm
Rhythm

Rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events....
, stress
Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables....
, and intonation
Intonation (linguistics)

In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody ....
 of connected speech (as opposed to smaller elements like syllables or words). Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast, and focus
Focus (linguistics)

Focus is a concept in linguistics theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguist....
; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or choice of vocabulary.

lass="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m3467385",this)' onMouseout='hide("m3467385")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Acoustics">Acoustically
Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of sound, ultrasound and infrasound . A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician....
, the prosodics of oral languages involve variation in syllable length, loudness
Loudness

Loudness is the quality of a sound that is the primary psychological correlate of physical strength .Loudness, a subjective measure, is often confused with objective measures of sound pressure such as decibels or sound intensity....
, pitch
Pitch (music)

Pitch represents the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. It is one of the three major auditory system attributes of sounds along with loudness and timbre....
, and the formant
Formant

A formant is a peak in the frequency spectrum of a sound caused by Acoustics resonance. In phonetics, the word refers to sounds produced by the vocal tract....
 frequencies of speech sounds.






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In linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, prosody (from Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 p??s?d?a, prosoidía) is the rhythm
Rhythm

Rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events....
, stress
Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables....
, and intonation
Intonation (linguistics)

In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody ....
 of connected speech (as opposed to smaller elements like syllables or words). Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast, and focus
Focus (linguistics)

Focus is a concept in linguistics theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguist....
; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or choice of vocabulary.

Acoustic attributes of prosody

Acoustically
Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of sound, ultrasound and infrasound . A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician....
, the prosodics of oral languages involve variation in syllable length, loudness
Loudness

Loudness is the quality of a sound that is the primary psychological correlate of physical strength .Loudness, a subjective measure, is often confused with objective measures of sound pressure such as decibels or sound intensity....
, pitch
Pitch (music)

Pitch represents the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. It is one of the three major auditory system attributes of sounds along with loudness and timbre....
, and the formant
Formant

A formant is a peak in the frequency spectrum of a sound caused by Acoustics resonance. In phonetics, the word refers to sounds produced by the vocal tract....
 frequencies of speech sounds. In cued speech
Cued speech

Cued speech is a system of communication used with and among deaf or hard of hearing people. It makes traditionally spoken languages accessible by using a small number of handshapes in different locations near the mouth , as a supplement to lipreading....
 and sign languages, prosody involves the rhythm, length, and tenseness of gestures, along with mouthing and facial expressions. Prosody is absent in writing, which is one reason emails, for example, may notoriously be misunderstood. Orthographic
Orthographic

Orthographic may refer to:* Orthographic projection** Orthographic projection ** Orthographic projection * Orthography...
 conventions to mark or substitute for prosody include punctuation
Punctuation

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks , Interword separation and indentation....
 (commas, exclamation marks, question marks, scare quotes, and ellipses
Ellipsis

Ellipsis in printing and writing refers to a mark or series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word or a phrase from the original text....
), typographic styling for emphasis
Emphasis (typography)

In typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasise them....
 (italic, bold, and underlined text), and emoticons.

The details of a language's prosody depend upon its phonology
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
. For instance, in a language with phonemic vowel length
Vowel length

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English....
, this must be marked separately from prosodic syllable length. Similarly, prosodic pitch must not obscure tone
Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning?that is, to distinguish or inflection words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation , but not all languages use tones to distingu...
 in a tone language if the result is to be intelligible. Although tone languages such as Mandarin
Mandarin (linguistics)

Mandarin , is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more native speakers than any other language....
 have prosodic pitch variations in the course of a sentence, such variations are long and smooth contours, on which the short and sharp lexical tones are superimposed. If pitch can be compared to ocean waves, the swells are the prosody, and the wind-blown ripples in their surface are the lexical tones, as with stress in English. The word dessert has greater stress on the second syllable, compared to desert which has greater stress on the first; but this distinction is not obscured when the entire word is stressed by a child demanding "Give me dessert!" Vowels in many languages are likewise pronounced differently (typically less central
Mid central vowel

The mid central vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is @....
ly) in a careful rhythm or when a word is emphasized, but not so much as to overlap with the formant
Formant

A formant is a peak in the frequency spectrum of a sound caused by Acoustics resonance. In phonetics, the word refers to sounds produced by the vocal tract....
 structure of a different vowel. Both lexical and prosodic information are encoded in rhythm, loudness, pitch, and vowel formants.

The prosodic domain


Prosodic features are suprasegmental. They are not confined to any one segment
Segment (linguistics)

In linguistics , the term segment may be defined as "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech."...
, but occur in some higher level of an utterance. These prosodic unit
Prosodic unit

In linguistics, a prosody unit, often called an intonation unit or intonational phrase, is a segment of speech that occurs with a single Prosody ....
s are the actual phonetic "spurts", or chunks of speech. They need not correspond to grammatical units such as phrases and clauses, though they may; and these facts suggest insights into how the brain processes speech.

Prosodic units are marked by phonetic cues, such as a coherent pitch contour
Pitch contour

In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time....
 – or the gradual decline in pitch and lengthening of vowels over the duration of the unit, until the pitch and speed are reset to begin the next unit. Breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, only seems to occur at these boundaries where the prosody resets.

Prosody and emotion

Emotional prosody is the expression of feelings using prosodic elements of speech. It was recognized by Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin Royal Society was an English people natural history who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolution over time from common descent, through the process he called natural selection....
 in The Descent of Man as predating the evolution of human language
Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origin of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces....
: "Even monkeys express strong feelings in different tones – anger and impatience by low, – fear and pain by high notes." Native speakers
First language

A first language is the language a human being learns from birth. A person's first language is a basis for sociolinguistic identity....
 listening to actors reading emotionally neutral text while projecting emotions correctly recognized happiness 62% of the time, anger 95%, surprise 91%, sadness 81%, and neutral tone 76%. When a database of this speech was processed by computer, segmental features allowed better than 90% recognition of happiness and anger, while suprasegmental prosodic features allowed only 44%–49% recognition. The reverse was true for surprise, which was recognized only 69% of the time by segmental features and 96% of the time by suprasegmental prosody.

Brain location of prosody

An aprosodia
Aprosodia

An aprosodia is an acquired or developmental condition marked by an impaired ability to comprehend or generate the emotion conveyed in spoken language....
 is an acquired or developmental impairment in comprehending or generating the emotion conveyed in spoken language.

Producing these nonverbal elements requires intact motor areas of the face, mouth, tongue, and throat. This area is associated with Brodmann areas 44 and 45 (Broca's area
Broca's area

Broca's area is a region of the brain responsible for speech production.The importance of Broca?s area in producing language has been recognized since Paul Pierre Broca reported impairments in two patients he encountered....
) of the left frontal lobe
Frontal lobe

The frontal lobe is an area in the brain of mammals. It is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere and positioned anterior to the parietal lobes and above and anterior to the temporal lobes....
. Damage to areas 44/45 produces motor aprosodia, with the nonverbal elements of speech being disturbed (facial expression, tone, rhythm of voice).

Understanding these nonverbal elements requires an intact and properly functioning Brodmann area 22 (Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area

Wernicke's area is a part of the human brain that forms part of the Cerebral cortex , on the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus, encircling the auditory cortex, on the Sylvian fissure ....
) in the right hemisphere. Right-hemispheric area 22 aids in the interpretation of prosody, and damage causes sensory aprosodia, with the patient unable to comprehend changes in voice and body language.

See also

  • Intonation
    Intonation (linguistics)

    In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody ....
  • Phonological hierarchy
    Phonological hierarchy

    Phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a Phonology utterance. From larger to smaller units, it is as follows:...
  • Prosody (poetry)