Research On The Processing And Representation Of Prosody Patterns In Immediate Memory

The representations of speech sounds have always attracted attention of many cognitive psychologists in the process of model development. (McClelland et al., 1986; 2006; Norris et al., 1994; 2000; 2003; Page, & Norris, 1998). The serial recall task has been commonly used to explore the roles of vowels played in speech perception. A Precategorical Acoustic Storage (PAS) has been proposed (Crowder, 1969) in order to interpret perceptual representations of speech sounds. PAS is a limited capacity buffer store in which traces are overwritten by successive auditory events. Moreover, many subsequent researchers have verified the existence of PAS. The evidence for a PAS is mostly interpreted by vowels and consonants in non-tonal language, especially English, but not from any tonal languages. In other words, whether the lexical tones exist in PAS is still unknown. The goal of this study is to use the serial recall task to explore the processing and representation of pitch patterns such as lexical tones and emotional prosody in Chinese.The thesis includes two studies, and each study has two experiments. The logic of the studies is as follows: If lexical tones and emotional prosody induce auditory recency effect and suffix effect, then lexical tones and emotional prosody are stored in PAS.The first study contains Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Experiment 1 was designed to investigate whether lexical tones induce recency effect. 20 undergraduates were required to listen to a serial of lexical tones and then immediately verbally reported the items. Results showed that lexical tones gave rise to primacy and recency effects. Experiment 2 was designed to see whether lexical tones induce suffix effect. Another 20 undergraduates were told to listen to a serial of lexical tones, with a suffix at the end of each serial. Participants were asked to verbally report the serial as soon as the suffix disappeared. Considering lexical tones have close relationship with vowels, four types of suffixes were prepared at the end of each serial. The first type of suffix shared lexical tones with the final items; the second type shared vowels with the final items; the third type rhymed with the final item; and the forth type was irrelevant to the final item. The four types of suffixes were compared with the results of Experiment 1, respectively. Results suggested that lexical tones had suffix effects under different conditions. The results of the two experiments showed that lexical tones had both recency effect and suffix effect. The results verified that the lexical tones are stored in PAS. Whatever the type of suffix, the recall of the final items got worse, which suggested that the representation of lexical tones are weaker than other speech units in short-term memory, since previous research did not find suffix effects in /ba//da//ga/ and/∫a//ma//ga/ (Crowder, 1971; Darwin, & Baddeley, 1974).The second study aimed at investigating whether emotional prosody exists in PAS. The study consisted of Experiments 3 and 4. Experiment 3 was designed to see whether emotional prosody has recency effect. 20 undergraduates were asked to listen to a serial of emotional prosody and then immediately wrote down what they heard. Results indicated that emotional prosody had recency effect. The purpose of Experiment 4 was to investigate whether emotional prosody has suffix effect. Participants did the same task as in Experiment 3. The suffix was either consistent or inconsistent with the final item's emotional information. The results of Experiment 4 were compared with those of Experiment 3. It was found that emotional prosody had suffix effect when the suffix was inconsistent with the final item's emotional information, but not when the suffix was consistent with the final item's emotional information. The relationship between the suffix and the final item could be the key factor causing the suffix effect.The present study verified that lexical tones and emotional prosody could be stored in PAS. According to previous research, a suffix that rhymes with the final item of the serial was found to improve the recall accuracy. The rhymed suffix has been supposed to serve as a cue to recall the final item. However, the same phenomenon was not found for Chinese lexical tones, which indicated a special processing of lexical tones in short-term memory.