Petrone, C. , Fuchs, S. & Krivokapic, J.
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, GE; Yale University, New Haven, USA
A controversial issue in psycholinguistic research is how far ahead do speakers plan the upcoming sentence. Evidence from different kind of studies has shown indication of various levels of planning, ranging from prosodic word to the phrasal level. Since these works have offered mixed results, it has been hypothesized that the size of the planning unit is flexible, depending on both cognitive constraints and on the demands of the speaking situation. Moreover, phonetic studies discuss fundamental frequency (f0) as a potential parameter for planning, since some speakers start with higher f0 when the utterance is longer. This suggests that the f0 contour can be planned at a global level and that f0 planning is an optional mechanism.
In this study, we tested whether differences in utterance-initial f0 values depend on individual differences in working memory (WM) capacities. A prediction would be that the scope of planning is narrower in speakers with low WM span than in speakers with high WM span. As a consequence, speakers with higher WM span will start higher when producing longer utterances, since they are able to plan larger prosodic constituents.
A read speech corpus from 24 German speakers was recorded at ZAS, in Berlin. The corpus consisted of Subject-Verb-Object sentences in which the length of the constituents was modified. The target sentence was preceded by a context sentence, so that the speakers were induced to produce a pause between them. Speakers also performed a WM span task. Preliminary results show that longer Subject constituents led to a significant rising of the utterance initial f0 values. Moreover, f0 rising appears to be positively correlated with individual working memory capacities. This reconciles the contradictory results reported in the literature, the presence vs. absence of f0 rising depending on speaker-specific differences in the size of the planning unit.