The Role of Prosody in Expressing Subjective and Objective Causality in English.

Numerous studies have established that prosody plays an important role in expressing meanings and functions. However, it remains unknown whether prosody is employed to convey the distinction between subjective causality (CLAIM-ARGUMENT) and objective causality (CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE). This study aimed t...

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Publicado en:Language & Speech Vol. 69; no. 3; pp. 753 - 778
Autores principales: Hu, Na, Chen, Aoju, Quené, Hugo, Sanders, Ted J. M.
Formato: research tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Sage Publications Inc. Sep2026
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The Role of Prosody in Expressing Subjective and Objective Causality in English.
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          Hu, Na
          Chen, Aoju
          Quené, Hugo
          Sanders, Ted J. M.
        affil: Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Institute for Language Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
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        subj:
          Speech Acoustics Evaluation
          Causality
          Cognition
          Language Disorders
          Human
          Adult
          English Language
          Videorecording
          Mean Length of Utterance
          Task Performance and Analysis
          Data Analysis Software
          Phonetics Evaluation
          Male
          Female
          Funding Source
          Consonants Evaluation
          Vowels Evaluation
          Adult: 19-44 years
          Male
          Female
      ab: Numerous studies have established that prosody plays an important role in expressing meanings and functions. However, it remains unknown whether prosody is employed to convey the distinction between subjective causality (CLAIM-ARGUMENT) and objective causality (CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE). This study aimed to address this issue in English, where both types of causality are typically expressed using the same connective. Two production experiments were conducted, focusing on causality in backward order (Q "because" P) and in forward order (P "so" Q), respectively. The results show that subjective causality exhibited a larger F0 range, less integrated prosody, and a distinctive F0 contour shape compared with objective causality. These findings highlight the role of prosody in expressing subjective and objective causality in the absence of explicit lexical markers in English.
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        tables/charts
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    language: English
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