Transcript DavidVespe.ppt

Accenting, Givenness, and
Syntactic Role
By E.G. Bard and M.P. Aylett
Presented by David Vespe
Presentation Overview
• Summary of authors’ work
• Authors’ results
• Analysis
Previous Work
• Broadcast monologues, interviews
• Elicited descriptions
• What about spontaneous speech?
Main Idea
• Compare repeated mentions:
– In single task
– Across many tasks
Test Setup
• Directions given imaginary map
• Speakers encouraged to “contribute
fully”
Characteristics Examined
• “Intelligibility Loss”
• Accent
– deaccented, reaccented
• Structure
• Conversational Move
Results
• Within a single dialogue:
– Just 18% of repeated words deaccented
• For dialogues in general:
– Second use of a word tends to be less
intelligible, regardless of accent
– Structure not significant for predicting
deaccenting
Conclusions
• Givenness does not imply deaccenting
• Introduction of a term tends to maintain
structure across dialogues; repeated
mention does not
• Controlled experiments don’t generalize
to spontaneous speech
Observations
• Results are for “Glaswegian Southern
Scottish English”
• Did their own labeling
Observations
• Directions based on imaginary map
– Everything is “new”
– Penalty for bad directions may lead to
overaccenting
• Small numbers:
– 48 cases of repetition across tasks
– 3 of these are deaccented
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