On the Specification of Sentence Initial F0- Patterns in German

It is widely accepted that linguistic high level information like information structure (focus-background-division, topicalization) influences accent placement and accent type (rising, falling, hat pattern etc.) in German. Previous research was concentrated on tonal patterns associated with focus and topic ([1],[2]). We will demonstrate that 1) sentence initial tonal variation and 2) syllable duration depend on the location and the type of focus in the sentence. We assume that focussed material forms its own prosodic domain. Both prosodic parameters show a significant variation depending on whether they are associated with prosodic categories inside or outside of focussed domains.* 1. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND PROSODY Prosody, i.e. the variation of fundamental frequency (F0) and duration is an important means to convey higher level linguistic information such as Information structure (IS often also called "discourse structure") and grouping of speech items (i.e. phrasing). Prosodic parameters and their acoustic realizations are of course linked to informational related aspects of utterances ([3]). A common assumption implicit in the phonolo-gically orientated analysis of prosody is that IS is preferably encoded in German by tonal patterns which are acoustically realized as F0-variation. Recently, a second general basic effect of information structure on the processing of prosody was encountered ([4]). Durational variation (i.e., segmental length in different positions: the length of prosodic heads, distances between heads of prosodic constituents, lengthening in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries) is one of the possible prosodic cues to distinguish different meanings related to information structure. We suppose, following recent analysis in this field (e.g., [5] for American English), that high linguistic discourse entities are part of the factors which are responsible for the variation in syllable duration. According to these studies, two main factors have a more or less direct association with IS: F0 and duration. We found that varying the information structure e.g., changing a widely focussed declarative sentence into a sentence with a narrow focus on a nonsentence-initial constituent, caused the speaker to alter his strategies for encoding this discourse information prosodically. Both the F0and the duration cue were altered. This alternation of prosodic parameters can be explained in the terms of articulation ([6],[7]). In order to signal important information to the hearer as fast as possible and to convey to * This work has been supported by the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (grant no. P10822-MAT). Financial support for the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence is provided by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Transport. We thank Harald Trost and Johannes Matiasek for