TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ots, Nele
T1  - Cognitive constraints on advance planning of sentence intonation
T2  - PLOS ONE
N2  - Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.
KW  - Linguistic morphology
KW  - Speech
KW  - Cognition
KW  - Sentence processing
KW  - Phonology
KW  - Syntax
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Asses
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62712
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627124
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Publication of data.
All data except the speech recordings will be made available on the Open Science Foundation’s data sharing platform. As the voice characteristics constitute identifying data, the speech recordings will remain unpublished. Nevertheless, the database will provide the records of eye movements (raw and processed), TextGrids with acoustic analyses, tables with F0 samples, spreadsheets with the linguistic parameters of elicited sentences and the analysis scripts
N1  - Funding: Nele Ots - holding a grant “Planning sentences and sentence intonation cross-linguisticially” funded by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (10.18.2.040SL). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” This statement is fully correct for my submission.
VL  - 16
IS  - 11, art. e0259343
SP  - 1
EP  - 22
PB  - PLOS
CY  - San Francisco, California, US
ER  -