Prosodic Focus Within and Across Languages

The fact that purely prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, purely prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space

Japanese ToBI Labelling Guidelines

The work reported in this paper was supported in part by a Title VI Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and by a university relations summer fellowship from AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

English prosodic marking of Information Structure by L1-Japanese second language learners

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Pitch range modulations in an edge-marking language

Prosodic phrasing is a topic that has received considerable attention over the last decades. However, most research has dealt with well studied (mostly European) languages, and quantitative production studies of under-resourced languages are under-represented. To better inform the field of intonational phonology, more data from a more diverse set of languages is needed. This study investigates pitch range modulations in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. Recent experimental work suggests Drehu is edge-marking and the right-edge is prosodically salient. In this study, the phonological and phonetic realisation of prosodic boundary marking is investigated. To determine whether pitch range modulations contribute to phrasing, the intonational marking of noun phrases of different sizes is analysed. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which fundamental frequency (F0) modulations contribute to the signalling of right-boundaries and if these are associated with the marking of different prosodic levels. The results show evidence for pitch range adjustments between a phrase initial low tone and a phrase final high tone depending on the position in the noun phrase. These modulations show a blocking of downstep and suggest pitch range adjustments could be indicative of an intermediate phrase (ip) level