Speech Prosody and Eye Movements in Processing Discourse Information: A Preliminary Study in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates variations in speech prosody and eye movements and their potential correlations in processing discourse information of map direction in Mandarin Chinese. A production experiment was conducted to collect mean duration, F0, intensity of target words in speech prosody and fixation counts and fixation duration of target areas of interest in eye movements for statistical analyses. The results show fixation counts, fixation duration, and syllable duration of the target words decreased, syllable intensity increased, but syllable pitch remained intact as the information became old to the speaker in the discourse. Prosodic reduction of duration, F0, and intensity was found in speech repetition and in the processing of old information.