Prosodic marking in Russian multiple wh-questions: A sentence production study

Although the prosody of regular constituent/wh-questions is increasingly often discussed in the context of theories of prominence, focus and prosodic constituency (e.g [1]), prosodic contours of multiple wh-questions (cf. English Who bought what?) received surprisingly little attention in the literature so far. Slavic languages offer an additional dimension of interest to the problem as all wh-phrases are typically fronted in the clausal left periphery forming a wh-cluster, cf. Russian (1). Investigation of prosody of multiple wh-questions in these languages is likely to bring new theoretical insights, in particular, regarding realization of units with very similar prosodic properties, limits of prosodic autonomy of wh-phrases and the degree of mapping between prosodic and syntactic boundaries (cf. [2]

Acquisition of word order and prosody in polar questions with indefinite pronouns by Italian learners of Russian

Since Russian possesses a rich system of indefinite pronouns [1], the instruction on the correct choice of a pronoun is considered an essential part of L2 Russian curricula. However, explicit teaching usually does not include information on prosody and word order in constructions with indefinites. Namely, no instruction is provided in learning books on the prominence placement constraints in Russian, such as deaccentuation of specific and nonspecific indefinite pronouns (the series with affixes -to and -nibud’): Я что-то УСЛЫШАЛ or Я УСЛЫШАЛ что-то ‘I heard something’. These constraints are by no means universal. For example, as pointed out in [2, pp. 237–238], the indefinites in Italian are normally accented: Ho sentito QUALCOSA ‘I heard something’. Language learning theories predict that such cross-linguistic differences can lead to the transfer of L1 features. To test these predictions, an experiment was designed. We chose to focus on Russian information-seeking yes/no questions, since their prosody is relatively well-studied within the autosegmental metrical model [3]–[5]. Another reason for choosing yes/no questions is that they normally require the non-specific -nibud’ series of pronouns. The segmental structure of this suffix facilitates the pitch measurements in post-accented syllables

Perception of Prosodic and Aspectual Cues to Politeness in Teacher Directives in L1 and L2 Russian

Background: Several studies in interlanguage pragmatics have reported Russian directive speech acts to take a particular position within the dimensions of linguistic politeness and (in)directness, when compared to some Germanic and Romance languages extensively studied in this framework. Purpose of the study: The present paper aimed to investigate the role of language specific cues to politeness in Russian requests by examining their perception by native speakers and L2 learners in a scenario of teacher-student interaction. Methods: An experiment was conducted in which L1 and L2 groups rated the politeness of teacher directives in Russian on a discrete 7-point scale. Three variables were controlled for in the experimental design: the directness of the speech act (manifested in the choice between an imperative or an interrogative construction), verbal aspect, and the type of nuclear pitch accent. Findings: The obtained data generally corroborate existing studies, demonstrating that both native Russian speakers and learners of Russian with Chinese L1 do not judge as impolite direct imperative strategies employed in teacher requests. Though both groups of participants similarly relied on intonational cues in their judgements, the L2 learners did not perform target-like in evaluating the pragmatics of verbal aspect. Within the native group, the usage of imperfective verbs both in direct and conventionally indirect constructions was perceived as a highly salient indicator of impoliteness. Conversely, the size of this effect in L2 judgements did not reach a significance level, implying that this language specific cue is not acquired through incidental learning at pre-intermediate or intermediate proficiency levels. Conclusions: Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of explicit pragmatic instruction even for students who have sufficient experience studying abroad; furthermore, they outline new directions for empirical studies in Russian from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics

Students' attitudes towards foreign accents: general motivation, the attainability of native-like pronunciation, and identity issues

The study examined attitudes of 372 first-year bachelor Italian university students towards various aspects of foreign-accented speech. The data showed that the respondents have generally positive attitudes towards pronunciation teaching, while the most divisive statements regarded the relative importance of studying L2 phonetics and the sufficiency of comprehensibility in L2 communication. Correlations between these attitudes and the students’ biographical data were discussed. The predictor that revealed significant effects most frequently was the students’ extrinsic/intrinsic motivation in choosing foreign languages as their major

Duration and formant values of unstressed vowels in Russian as acoustic cues for segmentation: a perceptive experiment based on nonce words

The research deals with natural perception of word boundaries by native speakers of Standard Russian. A specific feature of Russian word rhythmic structure is a so-called “prosodic core”: not only stressed, but also first pre-stressed vowels differ in duration and quality from vowels that occur in other positions, a phenomenon that is also commonly described as two degrees of reduction. The purpose of this study is to find out whether native Russian speakers are able to use acoustic differences between vowels [ɐ] (Degree 1 reduction) and [ə] (Degree 2 reduction) in order to recognize word boundaries correctly. The stimuli for the experiment were nonce words, five-syllable sequences including two stressed vowels; they were presented to the participants of the experiment in a form of fictional foreign names. The listeners were asked to choose between two possible ways of segmentation of these fivesyllable sequences into a first name and a second name of a person. The results of the experiment show that native Russian speakers used the acoustic differences between vowels for segmentation, but the results were statistically significant only for some of the stimuli. However, for half of stimuli the listeners performed correct segmentation at chance level. In addition, artificial modification of first pre-stressed vowel duration was performed for some of the stimuli; the participants’ responses show that vowel duration influences the degree of success in the segmentation task

“Kartina, korzina, kartonka…”: Prosodic labelling of enumeration contexts in poetry reading in Russian

The present exploratory study aimed to test some notions regarding the prosody of enumeration in Russian on a small corpus of readings of a poem Luggage by Samuil Marshak performed by six speakers of Standard Russian. The recordings were labeled manually in Praat. A high degree of interspeaker variability was attested in the data. In accordance with previous findings, the data demonstrates that the choice between two pitch accents most widely used to mark enumeration in Russian (L*+H and L*) correlates with speech tempo. Within the lines read at a lower speaking rate the speakers produced more frequently the combination of accents H* L* H%, a tune referred to as IK-4 in traditional descriptions of Russian prosody

Fonetičeskaja realizacija russkich tonalʹnych akcentov v kontekstach sopostavitelʹnogo voprosa i perečislenija (Articolo in rivista, in russo, titolo in inglese: The phonetic realization of Russian tonal accents in contrastive questions and enumeration contexts)

This paper presents the results of a phonetic experiment that compares the acoustic features of rising pitch configurations used in contrastive questions and on non-last elements of a list in enumeration contexts in Russian. 23 native Russian speakers were instructed to read aloud pairs of stimuli with similar segmental structure embedded in larger texts. Significant differences were found between the two syntactic context conditions. In enumeration contexts, both local minima and maxima associated with the prominent syllable had a significantly earlier and more stable alignment, and the slope of the rise between the tonal targets was steeper. In addition, the effect of the speech rate on these acoustic features was tested. The effects of fast and slow reading turned out to be asymmetric. In line with the segmental anchoring hy-pothesis, no significant effect of fast speech rate on alignment and pitch range was found; only the effect on slope was significant. Conversely, while reading the texts intentionally slowly, the participants consistently used melodies with later alignment of local minima and maxima and larger pitch range. On the one hand, these data can be indicative of the interchangeability of stylistically marked pitch accent postulated for the incompleteness contexts in traditional descriptions of Russian intonation. On the other hand, this interpretation cannot account for the fact that the rightward shift in alignment in slow tempo was also found in the contrastive question condition