The prosodic properties of distinct types of focus and wh-interrogatives are compared in Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and South Kyeongsang Korean (SKK). The results of a production study demonstrate that there are limited prosodic differences between the intonation patterns of Informational Focus (IF) and Contrastive Focus (CF) in both languages. Also, it is revealed that the intonational realization of...

This study investigates the realization of stop-fricative sequences across prosodic boundaries in German. According to phonological descriptions of German, voiced fricatives following voiceless obstruents undergo assimilatory devoicing. Results from acoustic analysis show that this process is gradient rather than categorical, and sensitive to prosodic structure, showing a larger extent of assim...

This study investigates the realization of stop-fricative sequences across prosodic boundaries in German. According to phonological descriptions of German, voiced fricatives following voiceless obstruents undergo assimilatory devoicing. Results from acoustic analysis show that this process is gradient rather than categorical, and sensitive to prosodic structure, showing a larger extent of assim...

In this paper we present a preliminary speech production study concerning the prosodic realization of the syntactic and information structure in German. Firstly, we made predicitions for the relative prominence and their assignment with tonal patterns. Secondly, exhaustive acoustic analysis were used to test the expectations. The data of a production experiment with seven non-instructed normal ...

This study compares the read and spontaneous speech prosodic characteristics of two relatively small corpora in French (about 3 minute’s length). Acoustic data such as syllabic rate, number of effective stressed syllable vs. theoretical prediction, prosodic hierarchy and realization of melodic contours are compared for both styles. The predicting power of two theoretical approaches, autosegment...

The Minor Phrase (MiP, aka accentual phrase) is the prosodic constituent that immediately dominates the prosodic word (PWd) in the prosodic structure hierarchy; it may consist of one or more PWd. In Japanese all MiPs are marked by an initial LH rise. This paper examines the scaling of the initial rise in single-word MiPs in Japanese as a function of the syllable/mora length of the word constitu...

The realization of prosody varies across speakers, accents, and speech conditions. Listeners must navigate this variability to converge on consistent prosodic interpretations. We investigate whether listeners adapt to speaker-specific realization of prosody based on recent exposure and, if so, whether such adaptation is rapidly integrated with online pragmatic processing. We used the visual-wor...

Recently it has been proposed to base intonational typology on the way languages convey focus (pragmatic prominence). Generally, languages can enhance, add or delete phrase boundary tones (phrase languages) or add an extra pitch accent (intonation languages) to mark focus. Tone languages are somewhat problematic for this typology as it is difficult to make direct observations on their sentence ...