Cover not available
Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 13:1 (2015) ► pp.191–219

Intonation unit boundaries and the storage of bigrams

Evidence from bidirectional and directional association measures

Much recent work on language and cognition has examined the psychological status of collocations/formulas/multi-word expressions as mentally stored units. These studies have used a variety of statistical metrics to quantify the degree of strength or association of these sequences, and then they have correlated these strengths with particular behavioral effects that evidence mental storage. However, the relationship between intonational prosody and storage of collocations has received little attention. Through a corpus-based approach, this study examines the hypothesis that boundaries between successive intonation units avoid splitting word bigrams that exhibit high statistical association, with such high association taken to be an index of mental storage of these bigrams. Conversely, bigrams exhibiting lower statistical association ought to be more likely to be split by intonation unit boundaries under this hypothesis.

Keywords: intonation units, multi-word expressions, bigrams, association measures, collocations
Published online: 23 June 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.13.1.08wah
References
Altenberg, B
(1990a) Automatic text segmentation into tone units. In J. Svartvik (Ed.), The London-Lund corpus of spoken English: Description and research (pp. 287–324). Lund, UK: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
(1990b) Predicting text segmentation into tone units. In J. Svartvik (Ed.), The London-Lund corpus of spoken English: Description and research (pp. 275–86). Lund, UK: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Amir, N., Silber-Varod, V., & Izre’el, S
(2004) Characteristics of intonation unit boundaries in spontaneous spoken Hebrew: Perception and acoustic correlates. In B. Bel & I. Marlien (Eds.), Speech prosody 2004 (pp. 677–680). Conference proceedings. Nara, Japan, March 23–26.Google Scholar
Arnon, I., & Snider, N
(2010) More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62(1), 67–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barth-Weingarten, D
(2013) From “intonation units” to cesuring: An alternative approach to the prosodic-phonetic structuring of talk-in-interaction. In B. Szczepek Reed & G. Raymond (Eds.), Units of talk: Units of action (pp. 91–124). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brook O’Donnell, M
(2011) The adjusted frequency list: A method to produce cluster-sensitive frequency lists. ICAME Journal, 351, 135–169.Google Scholar
Bybee, J
(2002) Sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure. In T. Givón & B.F. Malle (Eds.), The evolution of language out of pre-language (pp. 109–132). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2010) Language, usage, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J., & Scheibman, J
(1999) The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don’t in English. Linguistics, 37(4), 575–596. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W.L
(1987) Cognitive constraints on information flow. In R.S. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 21–51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1994) Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Croft, W
(1995) Intonation units and grammatical structure. Linguistics, 331, 839–882. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A
(1997) Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D
(1969) Prosodic systems and intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Daudaravičius, V., & Marcinkevičienė, R
(2004) Gravity counts for the boundaries of collocations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(2), 321–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, J.W
(2008) Intonation unit cues in context. Unpublished manuscript. University of California, Santa Barbara.
Du Bois, J.W., Chafe, W.L., Meyers, C., & Thompson, S.A
(2000) Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, part 1. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J.W., Chafe, W.L., Meyers, C., Thompson, S.A., & Martey, N
(2003) Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, part 2. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J.W., & Englebretson, R
(2004) Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, part 3. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
(2005) Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, part 4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Dunning, T.E
(1993) Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics, 19(1), 61–74.Google Scholar
Durrant, P., & Doherty, A
(2010) Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2), 125–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N.C., & Ferreira-Junior, F
(2009) Constructions and their acquisition: Islands and the distinctiveness of their occupancy. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 71, 187–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N.C., Frey, E., & Jalkanen, I
(2009) The psychological reality of collocation and semantic prosody. In U. Romer & R. Schulze (Eds.), Exploring the lexis-grammar interface (pp. 89–114). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N.C., Simpson-Vlach, R., & Maynard, C
(2008) Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 42(3), 375–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erman, B., & Warren, B
(2000) The idiom principle and the open choice principle. Text, 20(1), 29–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evert, S
(2005) The statistics of word cooccurrences: Word pairs and collocations. Dissertation. Universität Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Ferreira da Silva, J., Dias, G., Guilloré, S., & Lopes, J.G.P
(1999) Using LocalMax algorithm for the extraction of contiguous and non-contiguous multiword lexical units. In P. Barahona & J.J. Alferes (Eds.), Progress in artificial intelligence: 9th Portuguese conference on artificial intelligence – EPIA ‘99 (pp. 113–132.). Conference proceedings. Evora, Portugal, September 21–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gregory, M.L., Raymond, W.D., Bell, A., Fosler-Lussier, E., & Jurafsky, D
(1999) The effects of collocational strength and contextual predictability in lexical production. In Proceedings of the 35th annual Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago.
Gries, S.T
(2013a) 50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next … International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(1), 137–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013b) Statistics for linguistics with R. Boston: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gries, S.T., & Mukherjee, J
(2010) Lexical gravity across varieties of English: An ICE-based study of n-grams in Asian Englishes. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(4), 520–548. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K
(1967) Intonation and grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M., & Raymond, W.D
(2000) Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In J. Bybee & P. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 229–254). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Knowles, G., & Lawrence, L
(1987), Automatic intonation assignment. In R. Garside, G. Leech, & G. Sampson (Eds.), The computational analysis of English: A corpus-based approach (pp. 139–148). London: Longman.Google Scholar
Lin, P.M.S
(2010) The phonology of formulaic sequences: A review. In D. Wood (Ed.), Perspectives on formulaic language: Acquisition and communication (pp. 174–193). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Manning, C.D., & Schütze, H
(1999) Foundations of statistical natural language processing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mcdonald, S.A., & Shillcock, R.C
(2003) Eye movements reveal the on-line computation of lexical probabilities during reading. Psychological Science, 14(6), 648–652. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nespor, M., & Vogel, R
(1986) Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.Google Scholar
Onnis, L., & Thiessen, E
(2013) Language experience changes subsequent learning. Cognition, 126(2), 168–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pecina, P
(2009) Lexical association measures: Collocation extraction. Prague: Charles University.Google Scholar
Perruchet, P., & Peereman, R
(2004) The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 171, 97–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S
(1999) Words and rules. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Reali, F., & Christiansen, M.H
(2007) Word chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psycholinguistics, 60(2), 161–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rescorla, R.A
(1968) Probability of shock in the presence and absence of CS in fear conditioning. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 661, 1–5. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J., Newport, E., & Aslin, R.N
(1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cures. Journal of Memory and Language, 351, 606–621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shannon, C.E
(1948) A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 271, 379–423. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steedman, M
(1990) Structure and intonation. Technical reports (CIS). Paper 571. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Wahl, A
(2014) A computational approach to extracting (dis)continuous collocations of un-prespecified length. 6th international conference on corpus linguistics . Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, May 22–24.
Wulff, S
(2008) Rethinking idiomaticity: A usage-based approach. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Chen, Alvin Cheng‐Hsien
2019. Assessing Phraseological Development in Word Sequences of Variable Lengths in Second Language Texts Using Directional Association Measures. Language Learning 69:2 ► pp. 440 ff. DOI logo
Gilquin, Gaëtanelle
2024. The Processing of Multiword Units by Learners of English: Evidence from Pause Placement in Writing Process Data. Languages 9:2 ► pp. 51 ff. DOI logo
Meng, Fanqi, Yujie Zheng, Songbin Bao & Jingdong Wang
2021. 2021 10th IEEE International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), ► pp. 886 ff. DOI logo
Schneider, Ulrike
2018. ΔP as a measure of collocation strength. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0 DOI logo
Wahl, Alexander & Stefan Th. Gries
2018. Multi-word Expressions: A Novel Computational Approach to Their Bottom-Up Statistical Extraction. In Lexical Collocation Analysis [Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ], ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Wahl, Alexander & Stefan Th. Gries
2020. Computational extraction of formulaic sequences from corpora. In Computational Phraseology [IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature, 24], ► pp. 84 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.