Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the  perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the  perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the  perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements

Fine phonetic detail and intonational meaning

International audienceThe development of theories about form-function relations in intonation should be informed by a better understanding of the dependencies that hold among different phonetic parameters. Fine phonetic detail encodes both linguistically structured meaning and paralinguistic meaning. <BR /

The effect of pitch span on intonational plateaux

Previous research has indicated that the H (high) of a nuclear accent may be realized as a flat stretch of contour rather than as a single turning point. Both the duration of this plateau and its alignment within the accented syllable are affected by the segmental and prosodic structure of the utterance. The present work investigates whether a non-structural variable, namely pitch span, also affects the realization of the plateau. Speakers replicated all-sonorant utterances in different pitch spans. Results show that both the duration and alignment of the plateau vary with pitch span but in ways different from the way they vary with prosodic structure. Importantly, results also indicate that, when using a proportional measure of alignment, the end of the plateau is anchored within the syllable for each speaker and may be a marker of linguistic structure

L1 Influences on Bulgarian-Accented German : Prosodic Units and Prenuclear Pitch Accents

This study investigates the L1 influence on the use of accentual patterns, choice of prenuclear pitch accent types and their realization on L2 prosody. We use Mennen’s LILt model as a framework for our analysis. We recorded ten Bulgarian female speakers of German and ten female native German speakers who read Aesop’s fable The North Wind and the Sun. We found that the tendency for the Bulgarian native speakers to use more pitch accents than German native speakers is transferred to the L2 German of the Bulgarian learners. L*+H was the most frequent prenuclear pitch accent used by all groups. We also found that the Bulgarian learners stressed more function words and tolerated more stress clashes than the native German speakers. When speaking German, under the influence of the statistical regularities that relate to prosodic word patterns in their mother tongue, Bulgarian learners phrased their L2 speech into a higher number of shorter prosodic words, and therefore realized more pitch accents and aligned the high tonal target earlier than the native speakers. Concerning the variable alignment of the high target, we propose the prosodic word or the two-syllable window as the tentative candidate for an anchorage region. Our findings can be explained with respect to age of learning, as proposed by LILt’s general theoretical assumptions

On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements

Post-focal compression as a prosodic cue for focus perception in Hindi

Focus in Hindi is prosodically marked by means of post-focal compression (PFC) and the present study examines whether PFC is a prosodic cue that is functionally used by listeners to perceive the focus. In a production study with 30 native Hindi speakers uttering six different ambiguous contrastive ellipsis structures PFC occurred after the focused indirect object, thought not after a focused direct object. These structures served as input for a forced-choice sentence-completion experiment, in which 18 listeners listened to sentence fragments of the matrix clause and were asked to decide which of the two possible objects contrasts (direct object or indirect object) would correctly complete the sentence. Results show that if PFC was absent listeners were unable to choose the intended sentence completion. If PFC was present correct sentence completion judgements increased significantly. Thus PFC is a cue for focus perception in Hindi. Based on the functional load of the pitch register in Hindi, we argue that pitch register represents a further intonational category to consider, at least for languages like Hindi