Ka-Fai Yip publishes paper in LabPhon

Ka-Fai Yip (recent PhD alumnus 2026) has published a joint paper “Pragmatic skill modulates sensitivity to phonetic cues to prominence, especially pitch-based cues” in Laboratory Phonology, with Jason Bishop, Mei-Ying Ki, and Chen Zhou (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

The abstract of the paper is below:
A number of studies in recent years have shown that, at least for English and typologically similar languages, the perception of phrase-level prosodic prominence reflects a combination of phonological, phonetic, and top-down factors. In the present study, we explore whether the effects of these three kinds of factors are modulated by individual differences in pragmatic skill. Data came from a previous investigation reported in Bishop et al. (2020), in which 158 American English-speaking listeners engaged in Rapid Prosody Transcription, a task involving speeded identification of prominent words in connected speech. Two indirect measures estimated listeners’ pragmatic skill: the communication subscale of the Autism Spectrum Quotient and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (assumed to be tests of pragmatic communication skills and Theory of Mind ability, respectively). Though exploratory, we framed the investigation in terms of two basic hypotheses. First, we tested the hypothesis that individual differences in pragmatic skill would modulate sensitivity to gradient phonetic cues to prominence but not coarse phonological ones. Second, we tested the hypothesis that pragmatic skill would predict sensitivity to top-down factors related to both discourse meaning and lexical statistics. Results provided some support for both hypotheses. First, one of the two measures of pragmatic skill (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task) was found to interact with phonetic cues to prominence, especially pitch-based cues (i.e., pitch accent type contrasts and the phonetic height of F0 peaks) such that prominence judgments by listeners with higher levels of pragmatic skill were more sensitive to phonetic cues. Pragmatic skill did not interact with phonological cues (accentual structure) to prominence. Second, prominence judgments by listeners with higher levels of pragmatic skill were found to be more sensitive to discourse prominence (words that were discourse new) but less sensitive to lexical frequency. We discuss the study and its findings in the context of both the intonational phonology approach to understanding prosodic prominence and the contribution of individual differences approaches to understanding prosodic phenomena.