Nuclear Intonation in Swedish : Evidence from Experimental-Phonetic Studies and a Comparison with German

This thesis investigates Swedish intonation patterns and their interaction with word accent realisation in various pragmatic conditions, using German as a reference language. The point of departure is the wide-spread assumption that Swedish, as a language with a tonal word accent distinction, has a considerably smaller repertoire of nuclear intonation contours than German and other so-called intonation languages. In particular, whereas only one sentence accent has been modelled for Swedish so far (a high focal accent H-), a multiple paradigmatic contrast of sentence accents (e.g. H*, L*+H, H+L*) has been assumed for German. It is hypothesised, however, that the contemporary models of German and Swedish intonation are based on different research traditions, and hence, that the intonation of the two languages might be more similar than commonly assumed. Three production studies, based on recordings from 21 speakers, and one perception (reaction time) experiment involving 20 listeners are reported. In the first two production studies, the intonation of test phrases elicited in German and Swedish speakers in a variety of pragmatic conditions is compared by analysing F0 and to some degree duration patterns. The most central pragmatic distinction treated in this thesis involves the focussing of new vs. given information, the latter case occurring in confirmations. The main result of these studies is that Swedish and German seem to have a similar inventory of nuclear intonation patterns, which have basically the same pragmatic functions in the two languages. For instance, an "early fall", a pattern involving a fall onto a low-pitched stressed vowel, can signal a confirmation in both German and Swedish. This result suggests that, in addition to the well-established high accent (H-), Swedish also has a paradigmatic choice of sentence accents, involving a falling accent (H+L-). The third production study and the reaction time experiment concentrate on the "early fall" found in confirmations and investigate the interaction of word accent and intonation. The results show that the Swedish word accent distinction can be neutralised in connection with the "early fall", a situation which may be related to the perceptual enhancement of the intonational contrast between a high (H-) and a falling (H+L-) sentence accent

Dip and hat pattern: a phonological contrast of German?

Is the high plateau in a ‘hat pattern’ a phonetic artefact, or does it reflect a phonological feature? Can it contrast with a low plateau, i.e., a ‘dip pattern’? The presented perception experiment supports the phonological point of view, since it shows that the dip/hat contrast can disambiguate German oder-constructions, which are interpretable as ‘alternative’ or ‘yes/no-questions’. This specific function may be derived from a more general substance–function relation: While a hat pattern has a ‘bracketing function’, a dip signals detachment

Towards classification of head movements in audiovisual recordings of read news

In this paper we develop a system for detection of word-related head movements in audiovisu-al recordings of read news. Our materials consist of Swedish television news broadcasts and comprise audiovisual recordings of five news readers (two female, three male). The corpus was manually labelled for head movement, applying a simplistic annotation scheme consisting of a binary decision about absence/presence of a movement in relation to a word. We use OpenCV for frontal face detection and based on this we calculate velocity and acceleration features. Then we train a machine learning system to predict absence or presence of head movement and achieve an accuracy of 0.892, which is better than the baseline. The system may thus be helpful for head movement labelling

Swedish word accents in a ‘confirmation ’ context

An exploratory study on the prosodic signaling of ‘confirmation ’ in Swedish is presented. Pairs of subjects read short dialogs, constructed around selected target words, in a conversational style. The target utterances were produced with a risingfalling intonation, lacking any typical ‘focal accent ’ (FA). Qualitative observations and acoustic measurements reveal that the signaling of the word accent contrast appears to be, to a certain degree, optional in a confirmation context. The results support the view that no tonal target needs to be assumed for accent I, and further suggest that utterance-level prominence can be realized by other means than the FA