Intonation of Finnish Verbs

A production experiment investigated the tonal shape of Finnish finite verbs in transitive sentences without narrow focus. Traditional descriptions of Finnish stating that non- focused finite verbs do not receive accents were only partly supported. Verbs were found to have a consistently smaller pitch range than words in other word classes, but their pitch contours were neither flat nor explainable by pure interpolation.Peer reviewe

Materials for "No prosody-syntax trade-offs: Prosody is an integral part of cleft constructions in Mandarin"

This project contains data sets and R scripts for their analysis from two experiments on cleft sentences in Mandarin: a production experiment and a perception experiment. It also contains supplementary materials listing the target sentences used, as well as results of statistical analyses

Finnish prosody : studies in intonation and phrasing

This dissertation provides an analysis of Finnish prosody, with a focus on the sentence or phrase level. The thesis analyses Finnish as a phrase language. Thus, it accounts for prosodic variation through prosodic phrasing and explains intonational differences in terms of phrase tones. Finnish intonation has traditionally been described in terms of accents associated with stressed syllables, i.e. similarly as prototypical intonation languages like English or German. However, accents are usually described as uniform instead of forming an inventory of contrasting accent types. The present thesis confirms the uniformity of Finnish tonal contours and explains it as based on realisations of tones associated with prosodic phrases instead of accents. Two levels of phrasing are discussed: Prosodic phrases (p-phrases) and intonational phrases (i-phrases). Most prominently, the p-phrase is marked by a high tone associated with its beginning and a low tone associated with its end; realisations of these tones form the rise-fall contours traditionally analysed as accents. The i-phrase is associated with a final tone that is either low or high and additionally marked by voice quality and final lengthening. While the tonal specifications of these phrases are thus predominantly invariant, variation arises from different distributions of phrases. This analysis is based on three studies, two production experiments and one perception study. The first production study investigated systematic variation in information structure, first syllable vowel quantity and the target word's position in the sentence, while the second production experiment induced variation in information structure, first and second syllable type and number of syllables. In addition to fundamental frequency, the materials were analysed regarding duration, the occurrence of pauses and voice quality. The perception study investigated the interpretation of compound/noun phrase minimal pairs with manipulated fundamental frequency contours using a two-alternative forced-choice picture selection task. Additionally, a pilot perception study on variation in peak height and timing supported the assumption of uniform tonal contours.Diese Dissertation bietet eine Analyse der Prosodie des Finnischen auf der Satzebene. Die Dissertation beschreibt Finnisch als eine Phrasensprache, d.h. eine Sprache, deren prosodische Variation durch Phrasierung und mit prosodischen Phrasen assoziierte Phrasentöne bestimmt wird. Bisherige Untersuchungen der finnischen Intonation haben diese als durch Akzente, die mit betonten Silben assoziiert sind, beschrieben, d.h. ähnlich wie typische Intonationssprachen wie Englisch und Deutsch. Diese Akzente werden jedoch übereinstimmend als uniform, also vom gleichen Typ, dargestellt, so dass kein Inventar an kontrastierenden Akzenten aufgestellt werden konnte. Die vorliegende Dissertation bestätigt die tonale Uniformität von Kontouren des Finnischen, die als Realisierungen von Phrasentönen beschrieben werden. Dabei nimmt die Arbeit auf zwei Phrasierungsebenen Bezug: prosodische Phrasen (p-Phrasen) und Intonationsphrasen (i-Phrasen). P-Phrasen werden hauptsächlich durch zwei Töne markiert, einen hohen Ton am Anfang der Phrase und einen tiefen Ton am Ende. Realisierungen dieser Töne sind für die steigend-fallenden Konturen verantwortlich, die traditionell als (uniforme) Akzente beschrieben wurden. I-Phrasen enden mit einem hohen oder tiefen Ton und weisen weitere Markierungen wie finale Längung und nicht-modale Stimmqualität auf. Während die tonale Markierung von prosodischen Phrasen weitgehend gleichbleibend ist, entsteht prosodische Variation durch Unterschiede in der Distribution der prosodischen Phrasen. Die hier vorgestellte Analyse beruht im Wesentlichen auf drei Studien, zwei Produktionsexperimenten und einer Perzeptionsstudie. Die erste Produktionsstudie untersuchte systematische informationsstrukturelle Variation, sowie Variation in der Quantität des Vokals der ersten Silbe und der Position des betrachteten Wortes im Satz. Das zweite Experiment erzielte Variation in der Struktur der ersten und zweiten Silbe, der Silbenanzahl und Informationsstruktur des Satzes. Zusätzlich zur Grundfrequenz wurden Dauer, Pausenvorkommen und Stimmqualität untersucht. Die Perzeptionsstudie erkundete die Interpretationen von Minimalpaaren mit manipulierten Grundfrequenzkonturen, die entweder als Komposita oder als Nominalphrasen verstanden werden konnten. Eine zusätzliche Pilotstudie zur Wahrnehmung von Höhe und Timing von tonalen Gipfeln lieferte weitere Unterstützung für die Annahme tonaler Uniformität

Modelling the Interplay of Multiple Cues in Prosodic Focus Marking

Focus marking is an important function of prosody in many languages. While many phonological accounts concentrate on fundamental frequency (F0), studies have established several additional cues to information structure. However, the relationship between these cues is rarely investigated. We simultaneously analyzed five prosodic cues to focus—F0 range, word duration, intensity, voice quality, the location of the F0 maximum, and the occurrence of pauses—in a set of 947 simple Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentences uttered by 17 native speakers of Finnish. Using random forest and generalized additive mixed modelling, we investigated the systematicity of prosodic focus marking, the importance of each cue as a predictor, and their functional shape. Results indicated a highly consistent differentiation between narrow focus and givenness, marked by at least F0 range, word duration, intensity, and the location of the F0 maximum, with F0 range being the most important predictor. No cue had a linear relationship with focus condition. To account for the simultaneous significance of several predictors, we argue that these findings support treating multiple prosodic cues to focus in Finnish as correlates of prosodic phrasing. Thus, we suggest that prosodic phrasing, having multiple functions, is also marked with multiple cues to enhance communicative efficiency.publishe

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking : Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.publishe

Aren't Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

As first observed by Ladd in 1981, English polar questions with high negation (e.g., Aren't they adding a menu item?) can be used both to check the speaker's belief that the proposition p is true (e.g., p = they are adding a menu item) and to check the addressee's belief that p is not true (¬p). We hypothesized that this ambiguity can be disambiguated prosodically. We further hypothesized that the prosodic disambiguation is absent in German, because the checked proposition can be marked morpho-syntactically, with questions with high negation checking p and low negation questions (e.g., Are they not adding a menu item?) checking ¬p. A production study tested these hypotheses with 24 speakers of Western Canadian English and German each (764 and 767 total utterances, respectively). The results showed that, when the speaker originally believed p and the addressee implied ¬p, English speakers preferred questions with high negation over low negation questions, confirming Ladd's observation, and used intonation to mark whose proposition they were checking, as hypothesized. By contrast, German speakers marked this distinction morpho-syntactically, realizing mostly questions with high negation to check their own proposition and low negation questions to check the addressee's proposition. Their prosody, in turn, was largely determined by the morpho-syntactic question form. The study further manipulated the speaker's certainty of the checked proposition, but, in contrast to studies on Romance languages, found that certainty itself was not marked.publishe