Local and Global Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure in Bulgarian

In this study the local and global prosodic exponents of information structure are examined in the production of six Bulgarian question-answer elicited sentences under different focus conditions (broad focus and non-contrastive and contrastive narrow focus). Local cues are the phonetic properties of the nuclear accented syllables, while global cues reflect broader phonetic patterns in the intervals before and after the nuclear accented syllable, which in some cases vary independently of the tonal accent. Results show that speakers consistently discriminate broad and narrow focus by both local and global acoustic cues. Contrastive and non-contrastive accents are differentiated exclusively by local cues, but only when the focus is early in the sentence.