Linguistics

Narrow focus refers to accent placement that forces one interpretation of a sentence, which is then often perceived contrastively. Narrow focus is formalised in terms of alternative sets, i.e. contextually or situationally salient alternatives. In this paper, we investigate whether this model is valid also in human utterance processing. We present an eye-tracking experiment to study listeners' expectations (i.e. eye-movements) with respect to upcoming referents. Some of the objects contrast in colour with objects that were previously referred to, others do not; the objects are referred to with either a narrow focus on the colour adjective or with broad focus on the noun. Results show that narrow focus on the adjective increases early fixations to contrastive referents. Narrow focus hence activates alternative referents in human utterance processing.

Recent results on segmental anchoring suggest that rising prenuclear accents have two fairly invariant tonal targets . For German, however, there is introspective evidence that the rising topic accent (or theme accent) is realised differently when signalling contrast than when not. In this article, the acoustic basis for these reported intuitive differences is investigated in terms of the scaling (height) and alignment (positioning) of tonal targets.

This paper evaluates articulation rate measures and rate char-acteristics of read and spontaneous speech on the basis of a manually labelled database for German. The results of phone classification experiments for three different articulation rates only partially confirm our expectations. ...

Larynx movements and intonation in whispered speech John Coleman, Esther Grabe and Bettina Braun (Summary of research supported by British Academy grant ... were elicited by using prior sentences for which the letters are an affirmative reply (R! E!) or an echo-question (R ...

... Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Bettina.Braun@mpi.nl ... Our origin is not only (most easily) conveyed by diphthongs and vowels ([1]), but also by the speech melody ([2,3,4]). This paper deals with the intonational properties of Northern and ...

Semantic theories on focus and information structure assume that there are different accent types for thematic (backwardlooking, known) and rhematic (forward-looking, new) information in languages as English and German. According to Steedman [1], thematic material may only be intonationally marked (= bear a pitch accent), if it "contrasts with a different established or accommodatable" theme [p. 656]. We shall show that intonational marking of themes in German seems rather gradual. Themes in contrastive contexts have a significantly longer stressed vowel, a higher and longer rise which results in a higher and more delayed peak than non-contrastive themes. Moreover, speakers can use different strategies to signal the contrast.

The adverb now in English (nu g Now put X in Z'). In Dutch, but not English, the position of this sequential adverb may disambiguate which constituent is contrasted. We investigated whether and how the intonational realization of now/nu is varied to signal different scopes and whether it interacts with word order. Three contrast conditions (contrast in object, location, or both) were produced by eight Dutch and eight English speakers.

How does language experience shape pitch processing? Do speakers of tone languages, which use pitch to signal lexical contrasts (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) attend to pitch movements more closely than speakers of intonation languages (e.g., English)?

This study compares how Dutch and German, two closely related languages, signal a shift from a negative to a positive polarity in two contexts, when contrasting the polarity relative to a different topic situation (In my picture the man washes the car following after In my picture the man does not wash the car, henceforth polarity contrast) and when correcting the polarity of a proposition (The man washes the car following after The man does not wash the car, henceforth polarity correction). Production data show that in both contexts German speakers produced Verum focus (i.e., a high-falling pitch accent on the finite verb), while Dutch speakers mostly used the accented affirmative particle wel. This shows that even lexically and syntactically close languages behave differently when it comes to signalling certain pragmatic functions. Furthermore, we found that in polarity correction contexts, both affirmative particles and Verum focus were realized with stronger prosodic prominence. This difference was found in both languages and might be due to a secondary (syntagmatic) effect of the information structure of the utterance (absence or presence of a contrastive topic).

This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect online speech comprehension in British English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /əә/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration, intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard sentences ending in monosyllabic prime fragments -produced by either an English or a Dutch speaker of English -and performed lexical decisions on visual targets.

Although the pitch of the human voice is continuously variable, some linguists contend that intonation in speech is restricted to a small, limited set of patterns. We test this claim by asking subjects to mimic a block of 100 randomly generated intonation contours and then to imitate themselves in several successive sessions. The produced f 0 contours gradually converge towards a limited set of distinct, previously recognized basic English intonation patterns. These patterns are 'attractors' in the space of possible intonation English contours.

In a previous production study we explored the prosodic marking of thematic material in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts in German. While both conditions resulted in a prenuclear rise, we found that themes in contrastive context exhibited a significantly longer stressed vowel, together with a higher and later peak. Interestingly, speakers varied as to whether they used peak alignment, peak height or both for signalling thematic contrast. This might indicate that there is a continuum in contrastmarking rather than distinct accent categories.

Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral for Dutch, and as contrastive for German. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance realised with a double peak pattern. In particular, this study showed shorter lexical decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., PELIKAAN, ''pelican'') following a contrastively related prime (e.g., flamingo, ''flamingo'') only when the primes were embedded in sentences with a contrastive double peak contour, not in sentences with a neutral hat pattern. The present study replicates Experiment 1a of Braun and Tagliapietra (2009) with German learners of Dutch. Highly proficient learners of Dutch differed from Dutch natives in that they showed reliable priming effects for both intonation contours. Thus, the interpretation of intonational meaning in L2 appears to be fast, automatic, and driven by the associations learned in the native language.

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared to a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.