Does Context Matter? A Prosodic Comparison of English and Spanish in Monolingual and Multilingual Discourse Settings

Different languages are known to have typical and distinctive prosodic profiles. However, the majority of work on prosody across languages has been restricted to monolingual discourse contexts. We build on prior studies by asking: how does the nature of the discourse context influence variations in the prosody of monolingual speech? To answer this question, we compare the prosody of spontaneous, conversational monolingual English and Spanish both in monolingual and in multilingual speech settings. For both languages, we find that monolingual speech produced in a monolingual context is prosodically different from that produced in a multilingual context, with more marked differences having increased proximity to multilingual discourse. Our work is the first to incorporate multilingual discourse contexts into the study of native-level monolingual prosody, and has potential downstream applications for the recognition and synthesis of multilingual speech.