Which Prosodic Features Matter Most for Pragmatics?

TL;DR

This paper identifies the most crucial prosodic features for conveying pragmatic functions, highlighting the importance of duration, initial features, and neglected acoustic cues like nasality and vibrato.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of prosodic features' relevance to pragmatics, revealing which features are most impactful for perception and modeling.

Findings

Duration features are more important than pitch features.

Utterance-initial features matter more than final features.

Neglected features like nasality and vibrato are pragmatically significant.

Abstract

We investigate which prosodic features matter most in conveying prosodic functions. We use the problem of predicting human perceptions of pragmatic similarity among utterance pairs to evaluate the utility of prosodic features of different types. We find, for example, that duration-related features are more important than pitch-related features, and that utterance-initial features are more important than utterance-final features. Further, failure analysis indicates that modeling using pitch features only often fails to handle important pragmatic functions, and suggests that several generally-neglected acoustic and prosodic features are pragmatically significant, including nasality and vibrato. These findings can guide future basic research in prosody, and suggest how to improve speech synthesis evaluation, among other applications.