This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, the domain of tone interaction, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Sixty-four sentences produced by six native speakers of NKK were digitized and f0 values of each syllable as well as the f...

Abstract The primary aim of this study was to investigate prosodic prominence across three groups Sylheti-English bilinguals: first-generation who arrived as adults, children, and second-generation, i.e., born in the United Kingdom parents grew up Bangladesh. To measure prominence, f 0, duration, intensity were measured disyllabic words Sylheti English. results showed significant differences f0...

Contrastive topic is an information structural category that is usually associated with a specific intonation, which tends to be similar across languages (a rising pitch accent). The aim of the present study is to examine whether this also true of Estonian. Three potential prosodic correlates of contrastive topics are examined: marking with a particular pitch accent type, an emphatic realizatio...

The present study investigates the prosodic realization of split noun sentences in Chinese, like ‘shu, wo mai le san ben. (Book, I buy ASP three CLAS. ‘I bought three books.’). The question and answer paradigm was used to induce sentences where the noun was either the topic or the focus. In the topic context, the question was of the form, ‘I heard you bought books and pencils. Is that true?’ In...

Mainland Southeast Asia is often viewed as a linguistic area where five different language phyla – Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Hmong-Mien, Sino-Tibetan and Kra-Dai – have converged typologically. This chapter illustrates areal features found in their prosodic systems, but also emphasizes their oft-understated diversity. The first part of the chapter describes word level prosodic properties. A ...

Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and the Northern Bizkaian dialects of Basque (NBB) are known to have similar pitch accent systems, and in both languages the focus status of words affects the prosodic phrasing. A cross-linguistic experiment was conducted to investigate whether the effect of tonal proximity on the phonetic realization of lexical pitch accent is conditioned by focus-related prosodic phrasing ...

This paper investigates whether the sentence mode of a context leads to differences in the prosodic realization of focus. Semantically, a communicative reaction in terms of a correction is expected to differ if the context is an assertion or a polar question. In two production studies using a picture naming task, 12 speakers of Mandarin Chinese were recorded reacting to context questions and co...

This study investigates the prosodic realization of organizational features of texts. Twenty read aloud news reports were annotated according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). This theory defines the clustering of elementary units (clauses) into larger segments (hierarchical organization), the relative importance of units (nuclearity) and the rhetorical relations between segments. The proso...

A recent study reported that post-focus compression (PFC) previously found in Beijing Mandarin is absent in two related languages, Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin, and that PFC is beneficial to focus recognition. This paper presents the results of acoustic and perception experiments for Hong Kong Cantonese, another Chinese dialect, which show that PFC does not occur in Hong Kong Cantonese, making...

This study explores the relationship between prosodic strengthening and linguistic contrasts in English by examining temporal realization of nasals in CVN# and #NVC, and their coarticulatory influence on vowels. Results show that different sources of prosodic strengthening bring about different types of linguistic contrasts. Prominence increased N-duration ([nasality]) but the vowel’s [orality]...