Page 211 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

186 Bel et al.

the first phonetic features acquired by a child … but also the last to
be lost either through aphasia … or during the acquisition of another
language or dialect’ (Hirst and Di Cristo 1998: 2).
These cognitive aspects of intonation lead us to construct the hypoth-
esis that, in the absence of formal training, spontaneous speech and
improvised singing may rely on communication skills acquired at the
early stages of language acquisition. Similar skills are supposedly at
work in the informal acquisition of elementary compositional structures
of north Indian traditional drumming (Kippen and Bel 1989).
The grounding hypotheses of our cognitive approach to speech
prosody (Caelen-Haumont 2001) are the following:

1. the speaker needs to make the message known (both making it
heard and understood);
2. the speaker needs to make the message believed;
3. to be believed, a message needs to carry a subjective dimension;
and
4. a great part of the subjective dimension lies in the F0 (fundamental
frequency) excursion within lexical items (and other related
prosodic cues).

The permanence and redundancy of linguistic/musical structures
on the one hand, and the strength of the situation that greatly con-
tributes to reducing ambiguity on the other, give the speaker/singer
a relative freedom to disrupt the conventional framework. Phonemes
are far from realizing their canonical forms, various disfluencies break
the ‘right’ (in effect, textual or academic) linguistic structure, and
lexical prosody often disrupts the syntactic organization. Nonetheless,
spontaneous speakers understand each other well, and often better
than in the conventional speech of readers. Since the language model
and structures may (or may not) be activated independently from the
effective realization of speech, speakers can ‘appropriate’ language
forms at the acoustical, phonetic, prosodic, semantic, syntactic and/or
emotional levels.
In dialogue conditions, it is observed that the form of speech is
conditioned by the feedback about understanding or agreement that
the speaker expects from the listener (Tomlin et al. 1997). In the
new exploration of this domain, some studies in prosody show that
all these means of omissions, substitutions, repetitions, breaks and