Pausing as a prosodic correlate of speech units in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish)
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reliability of pausing as a correlate to prosodic, syntactic and discourse units has been debated in commonly-studied languages (outlined, for instance, in Krivokapic 2007). Preliminary research in Nxaʔamxčín (Interior Salish) (Caldecott & Czaykowska-Higgins 2012) has shown that pausing could be a more reliable acoustic correlate of these structures than pitch, in line with previous research indicating that Salish languages do not exhibit a strong reliance on pitch to mark information structure (Caldecott 2017; Caldecott & Czaykowska-Higgins 2012; Davis 2012; Koch 2008, 2011). The current study further tests this hypothesis by examining the occurrence and duration of pauses in a 9.5-minute spontaneous narrative by a fluent speaker of St’át’imcets (Interior Salish). Pause distribution with respect to syntactic and prosodic boundaries is analysed. Preliminary analysis suggests that St’át’imcets follows previous research on spontaneous narratives in some respects but not others. Very long pauses (<5.5 s) mark major thematic shifts (Oliveira 2000) and most pauses (70%) occur clause-finally (Henderson, Goldman-Eisler & Skarbek 1966). Most clause-medial pauses occurred between a determiner and noun, following Goldman-Eisler (1968), but contra Gee & Grosjean (1983). A t-test indicates that clause-final vs. clause medial pauses are not significantly different in duration (p>.05) (contra Goldman-Eisler 1972).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it