Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

Peer reviewe

Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers

This article provides an introductory tutorial on prosodic features such as tone and accent for researchers working on little-known languages. It specifically addresses the needs of non-specialists and thus does not presuppose knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of prosodic features. Instead, it intends to introduce the uninitiated reader to a field often shied away from because of its (in part real, but in part also just imagined) complexities. It consists of a concise overview of the basic phonetic phenomena (section 2) and the major categories and problems of their functional and phonological analysis (sections 3 and 4). Section 5 gives practical advice for documenting and analyzing prosodic features in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Prosodic focus in Vietnamese

This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis

Focus in production : Tonal shape, intensity and word order

Peer reviewe

Word order and tonal shape in the production of focus in short Finnish utterances

Published on CD-ROMThis paper presents results from a study on the production of Finnish prosody. The effect of word order and the tonal shape in the production of Finnish prosody was studied as produced by 8 native Finnish speakers. Predictions formulated with regard to results from an earlier study pertaining to the perception of promi- nence were tested. These predictions had to do with the tonal shape of the utterances in the form of a flat hat pattern and the effect of word order on the so called top-line declination within an adver- bial phrase in the utterances. The results from the experiment give support to the following claims: the temporal domain of prosodic focus is the whole utterance, word order reversal from unmarked to marked has an effect on the production of prosody, and the pro- duction of the tonal aspects of focus in Finnish follows a basic flat hat pattern. That is the prominence of a word can be produced by an f 0 rise or a fall, depending on the location of the word in an utterance. The basic accentual shape of a Finnish word is then not a pointed rise/fall hat shape as claimed before since it can vary depending on the syllable structure and the position within an ut- terance.Peer reviewe

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

Acoustic-perceptual Correlates of Sentence Prominence in Italian

Research on the acoustic correlates of perceived accentual prominence has generally focused on fundamental frequency (F0) alone, while few studies have attempted to shed light on how other parameters, such as duration and intensity, might interact with F0. A previous study on Italian lexical stress perception shows that duration has a major role. The present work reports on results of an experiment using synthetic speech to test which aspects of the signal, among F0, duration and intensity, are more influential in the perception of prominence structure at the sentence level and whether there are differences between questions and statements. To this end, a series of hybrid LPC-resynthesized stimuli were presented to 22 Italian listeners for forced-choice judgments. The results suggest a bigger impact of the hybridization on interrogative utterances

Intonation Production And Perception In Children With Developmental Language Impairment

Studies on intonation production and perception in children with developmental language impairment (LI) have reported mixed outcomes. Some suggest that intonation processing is impaired in this population but others fail to find any evidence of such a deficit. The issue is further complicated by findings that indicate that these children perform poorly on some intonation tasks but not on others. The source of the discrepant findings is unclear. However, one shortcoming is that most previous studies do not report information on severity of LI of participants. Thus, it may be that the mixed findings on intonation processing in children with developmental language impairment is attributable to severity of the disorder. The present study sought to investigate this possibility. Participants were 33 children with LI and 36 age-matched typically developing controls. Thirteen of the children in the experimental group had mild, 10 had moderate and 10 had severe language impairment. In two experiments, these childrenâs ability to produce (Experiment 1) and perceive (Experiment 2) intonation was assessed. In Experiment 1, participants were asked questions which required them to respond using broad or narrow focus constructions. Fundamental frequency, tonal alignment, word duration and intensity of the intonation contours produced were measured. In experiment 2, participants were presented sentences produced in broad and narrow focus and asked to discriminate between the two types of constructions. The results showed that children with mild LI performed comparably with typically developing peers on the production of all measures. However, the moderate and severe groups demonstrated difficulty producing word duration and intensity. In the perceptual experiment, all children with LI had difficulty discriminating between broad and narrow focus, with children in the severe group performing the poorest followed by the moderate and severe groups. The findings of the present study suggest that severity of language impairment plays a role in the discrepant findings on intonation processing in children with LI. It also suggests that these children may have more difficulty in the production of some acoustic correlates of intonation compared to others. The implications of these findings are discussed