Do Germans produce and perceive the Swedish word accent contrast? A cross-language analysis

The present paper presents the results of a cross-language analysis with 10 L1 German speakers who have learned Swedish for at least 18 months. In an imitation and a perception experiment they had to produce and identify the Swedish word accents in the first post-focal position. 15 L1 Swedish speakers took part in the same perception experiment and also evaluated the imitations of the L1 German speakers. Results were analysed according to the type of the experiment and to the native language of the subjects. As expected the L1 German speakers could not identify the word accents. Surprisingly 5 of the L1 Swedish speakers were not able to identify them either. The imitations of the L1 German speakers were arbitrary and did not show a preference towards the accent I as it was assumed from a comparison of the tonal inventory of Standard German and Standard Swedish. Introduction & Background Although German and Swedish are both Germanic languages, they developed differently concerning the use of the fundamental frequency (F0). German as an intonation language uses pitch only at the utterance level. However, Swedish as a pitch accent language uses pitch to mark one of the stressed syllables of a prosodic word by associating this syllable with a word accent. A comparison of the tonal contours of the two Swedish word accents with the tonal inventory of Standard German shows that there is at least one contour tone that can be found in both languages according to the Lund model for Swedish (Bruce, 1977; Bruce and Gårding 1978; Bruce, 2005) and GToBI (German Tones and Break Indices, Grice and Baumann, 2002; Grice et al., 2005) for German. In the notation of these models, the two Swedish word accents are represented by H+L* for accent I and H*+L for accent II. The former is similar to the H+L* in GToBI in that in both cases the F0 falls from a peak to a valley that is in the stressed syllable: for this reason, the H+L* accent is sometimes called an early peak in other notational systems (e.g. Kohler, 1987). On the other hand, there is no direct equivalent in GToBI to the H*+L accent in Swedish. The fundamental frequency in Swedish is influenced not only by word accents but also on the position of the word accent in relation to the focus accent in the phrase. The focus accent marks the prosodic word that is prominent in the phrase by associating it additionally with the focus tone H-. All accents, focus accent as well as word accents, are produced with a single F0peak. The sole exception occurs in the first postfocally accented word. In this position the F0peak of the word accent is the final part of a F0plateau and has no directly preceding rise. (Bruce, 1977) Hence, the only difference between the two word accents is one of timing. The timing contrast of the word accents can be observed in the first post-focal position. Figure 1. Accent I word anden (the duck) and accent II word anden (the spirit). The vertical lines mark the beginning and the end of anden in the sonagram. accent I accent II TMH QPSR Vol. 51