Intonation in Language Acquisition - Evidence from German

This dissertation studies the role of intonation in language acquisition. After a general introduction about the phonetic and phonological aspects of intonation and its different forms and functions within language, two different models of language acquisition and the role of intonation within these two models will be presented. Following this, I will present and discuss empirical data on the question, whether young German learning children use intonation in order to acquire language. Two comprehension studies will be presented. Here, I concentrate on the question whether children understand the referential function of intonation and whether they can use this knowledge in order to learn new words. Additionally, I will present empirical evidence that focuses on the question whether children use intonation in resolving participant roles in complex syntactic constructions as well as in resolving syntactic ambiguities development. Finally, I will present two production studies that investigate the prosodic realization of target referents that have different informational statuses within a discourse from both young children and parents, talking to their children. Overall, the data from these studies suggest that language learning children do use the intonational form of an utterance from early on in order to understand another´s intention. Young language learning children do understand that a certain intonational form conveys a function. Additionally, the studies presented in this thesis suggest that children also use intonation in order to convey their own communicative intentions. Thus, intonation is an important instrument for young children‘s language acquisition as they use the information that is provided by intonation, not only to learn words and to combine them to syntactic constructions, but also for the understanding of paralinguistic properties of language. The findings of the studies presented in this thesis are discussed with regard to different theories of language acquisition. Additionally, I will give insight into the understanding of the development of young children´s use of intonation

Information status marking in spontaneous vs. read speech in story-telling tasks - Evidence from intonation analysis using GToBI

de Ruiter L. Information status marking in spontaneous vs. read speech in story-telling tasks - evidence from intonation analysis using GToBI. Journal of Phonetics. 2015;48:29-44

Re-enacted and Spontaneous Conversational Prosody — How Different?

Wagner P, Windmann A. Re-enacted and Spontaneous Conversational Prosody — How Different? In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016. Boston; 2016

The phonological and phonetic encoding of information status in American English nuclear accents

Information structure is said to play an important role in determining phrasal prominence and the assignment of nuclear pitch accents in English. Early accounts claim that discourse-new or focused words receive a prominence-lending high/rising pitch accent, while given words are unaccented, with reduced prominence. Empirical findings are varied, but paint a more complex picture of the prosodic encoding of information structure. The present study investigated the phonological and phonetic encoding of information status and contrastive focus in nuclear position in American English, from speech read under neutral and lively affect. Given information was associated with decreased phonological and phonetic prominence, contrastive information with enhanced prominence, while new information corresponded to increased phonological, but not phonetic prominence, as assessed in pitch accent type, duration, intensity, and voice quality. The findings indicate a probabilistic relationship between information structure and nuclear pitch accent type, and gradient expression of information structure in acoustic prominence

Analytical decisions in intonation research and the role of representations: Lessons from Romani

This paper presents an analysis of the intonational system of Greek Thrace Romani. The analysis serves to highlight the difficulties that spontaneous fieldwork data pose for traditional methods of intonational research largely developed for use with controlled speech elicited in the laboratory or under laboratory-like conditions from educated speakers of standardized languages. It leads to proposing a set of principles and procedures which can help deal with the variability inherent in spontaneous data; these principles and procedures apply particularly to data from less homogeneous speech communities but are relevant for the intonation analysis of any linguistic system. This approach relies on the understanding that autosegmental-metrical representations of intonation are phonological representations, not means of faithfully depicting pitch contours per se. It follows that representations should capture what is contrastive in the intonational system under analysis. In turn, this entails that new categories are posited, taking the meaning of tonal events into account and after due consideration of all legitimate sources of phonetic variation. It is argued that following this procedure allows for more robust analyses and is particularly advantageous when data are highly variable. This view is discussed in light of the analysis of Greek Thrace Romani, and in combination with recent proposals for greater uniformity and phonetic transparency in intonational representations, traits which are said to lead to greater insights in typological and cross-varietal research. It is shown that these goals are not better served by a level of broad phonetic transcription which encodes an arbitrary selection of phonetic variants

Right Dislocation and Afterthought in German - Investigations on Multiple Levels

When investigating the right sentence periphery in German, two constructions are encountered that appear to be rather similar at first glance: right dislocation and afterthought. Irrespective of this superficial similarity, right dislocation and afterthought can be distinguished at multiple levels of linguistic description. This thesis aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of right dislocation and afterthought by providing empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, employing analyses of experimentally acquired data as well as corpus analyses. It is shown that right dislocation and afterthought are best defined on the basis of the functions they take in discourse rather than on the basis of their prosodic realisations, and that their functional differences are reflected in a number of linguistic parameters, such as their morpho-syntactic con¬straints as well as their degree of syntactic integratedness, their prosodic features, and even their punctuation in written texts

Focus Particles and Extraction – An Experimental Investigation of German and English Focus Particles in Constructions with Leftward Association

In my dissertation on leftward association of English and German focus particles, I investigate the following overall research questions: How strong is the c-command relation between focus particles and their associated focus? Is their relation fixed or are there factors which can license leftward association? In my study, I focus on the English particles "only" and "even" and the corresponding German particles "nur" and "sogar". These particles preferably c-command their associated focus constituent (as in "Only SAM will eat chocolate). It is controversial in the literature how strong this c-command relation is and whether leftward association of these particles is acceptable (as in "SAM will only eat chocolate"). To my knowledge, my study provides the first experimental investigation dealing with this phenomenon. In the analysis of examples from everyday language and in various acceptability judgment studies, I identified the following factors which license leftward association of the German particles under consideration: (i) prosody, (ii) speaker evaluation, and (iii) special emphasis. I conclude that the c-command relation between focus particles and their associated focus is strong but not fixed in such a way that leftward association is impossible, as there are factors which improve and license this construction. Moreover, German examples I collected from spontaneous speech provide evidence that leftward association of the German particles under consideration occurs in spoken language. I base my explanations of the data on theories dealing with emphatic syntactic constructions and on theories dealing with salience and cognitive prominence. I propose an account which combines information structure, pragmatics, and processing

Intonation & Prosodic Structure in Beaver (Athabaskan) - Explorations on the language of the Danezaa

This dissertation reports on qualitative and quantitative investigations on the intonation and the prosodic structure of Beaver, an endangered Athabaskan language of Northwest Canada. The focus of the study is on the Northern Alberta dialect of Beaver, which has lexical tone and is a high marking Athabaskan language. The theoretical framework of the analysis is the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory. Following some background on intonation and prosody as well as the theoretical modelling, we summarize contributions dealing with intonation in languages that share certain features with Beaver, i.e. tone languages, polysynthetic languages and finally the related Athabaskan languages. After a brief introduction to the grammatical structure and the sociolinguistic situation of Northern Alberta Beaver, the database of the present study is introduced. It consists of narratives and task oriented dialogues as well as recordings elicited with stimuli sets. In the domain of intonation and prosody, three topics are investigated in detail. First, domain initial prosodic strengthening is analyzed. We show that a boundary initial position at higher constituents of the prosodic hierarchy has a lengthening effect on VOT of both aspirated and unaspirated plosives, while nasals are shortened in this context. Additionally, effects of morphological category (stem vs. prefix) and intervocalic position � two mechanisms that have been described for other Athabaskan languages � are also attested for Beaver to some degree. Second, the intonational tones that have been found in the corpus are analyzed within the AM theory. In Northern Alberta Beaver, boundary tones and phrase accents make up the intonational inventory. Most notably, an initial phrase accent is used to mark contrast, which is a device that has not been reported for the marking of information structure in other languages. Lastly, the interaction of information structure with pitch range in complex noun phrases is tested in a controlled experiment. Here, we find that pitch range is significantly wider for new information than for given, which is due to a raising of the top line, while the baseline is not affected to the same extend

Prosodic prominence in English

In English, certain words are perceptually more salient than other neighboring words. The perceptual salience is signaled by acoustic cues. Prominent words are higher, longer, or louder than nonprominent words in English. Perceptual prominence is associated with meaning of a word in discourse context. Prominent words are usually new or contrastive information, while nonprominent words are given or noncontrastive information. This dissertation addresses English prominence in two separate studies. The first study investigates the prosodic prominence in relation to pitch accents, acoustic cues, and discourse meaning of a word in a public speech. The second study examines the cognitive representation of prosodic contour in a corpus of imitation. Linguists claim that the information status of a word determines the types of pitch accents in English. Prior research informs us about prominence (1) in relation to the binary given-new distinction of lexical givenness, and (2) in minimally contextualized utterances such as question-answer prompts or excerpts from a corpus. The assignment of prominence, however, can vary in relation to referential meaning as well as lexical meaning of a word in natural, more contextualized speech. This study examines the prosodic prominence as a function of pitch accents, acoustic cues, and information status in a complete public speech. Information status is considered in relation to referential, lexical givenness and alternative-based contrastive focus. The results show that accent type is probabilistically associated with information status in this speech. The accent assignment differs between referentially vs. lexically given words. Despite the weak relationship between information status and pitch accents in the speech of the speaker, non-expert listeners perceive prominence as expected: they are more likely to perceive prominence on words carrying new or contrastive information or words with high or bitonal pitch accents. Surprisingly, the listeners perceive acoustic cues differently depending on the information status or accent types of a word. Based on these results, the first study suggests that (1) the relationship between information status and accent type is not deterministic in English, (2) lexical givenness differs from referential givenness in production and perception of prominence, and (3) perceived prominence is influenced by information status, pitch accents, acoustic cues, and their interaction. The second study examines how an intonational contour is represented in the mental lexicon of English speakers. Some linguists find that speakers are able to reproduce the phonetic details of intonational features, while in other research speakers are better at reproducing intonational features than imitating phonetic details of an utterance. This study investigates the domain of intonational encoding by comparing several prosodic domains in imitated utterances. I hypothesize that the domain which best captures the similarity of intonational contour between the model speaker and imitators is the target of imitation, and that imitation can be considered as the domain of intonational encoding in cognitive representation. The results show that the f0 distance between the model speaker and imitators is best explained over an intermediate phrase. Based on these results, the second study proposes that speakers encode a time-varying f0 contour over a prosodic phrase in their mental lexicon and supports the exemplar encoding of intonational contour