On the one hand, these different researchers differ from each other in identifying exactly what the prosodic correlate of topic/theme is. Büring (2002: 27) and Kadmon (2001: 380), following Pierrehumbert (1980), suggest that ‘contrastive topics’ are realized by an entire tune, either H* LH% or L+H*LH%. Steedman (2000) associates his ‘theme’ with the pitch accent L+H*. Gundel & Fretheim (in pres...

This study presents new data on prosodic effects of focus in wh-questions in Tokyo Japanese, by examining prosodic effects of focus on and after lexically unaccented compound wh-words (e.g., nani.iro ‘what.color’). The results show that the realization of post-focal reduction differs considerably depending on the accentedness of the wh-word as well as of post-wh-words. When there is an accent o...

The prosody of the left periphery of the sentence is investigated by means of acoustic analysis of read speech data. In Italian, syntactic constituents can be left dislocated when they represent the topic or focus part in the sentence. In this paper, the characteristics of topic and focus constituents are then compared, in particular when different types of prosodic focalization affect them. Re...

There has been a growing realization of the importance of authentic human interactions attendant to both first and second language learning. By contrast to L1 learners, the older L2 learner faces a greatly changed learning environment and more adult-oriented communicative opportunities, and must overcome loss of aural sensitivity and limited exposure to the prosodic systems of expressiveness ap...

This paper sheds light on the question of whether French resorts to post-focal compression (a reduction of pitch range), and the conditions under which it can do so. We present evidence from a production task in which thirteen native speakers of Standard French read scripted material; i.e. canonical sentences in which we manipulated the type of constituent found in post-verbal position (argumen...

This paper reports a cross-linguistic investigation into the syntax-prosody mapping in German and Hindi. For both languages, comparable speech production experiments were carried out, using ambiguous coordination structures with four names in different syntactic conditions. Pitch contours and duration values were compared at syntactic boundaries of the different coordination structures within a...

Speakers can be taken to be committed to utterance content even when that content is contributed in the scope of an entailment-canceling operator, like negation (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). We develop a probabilistic model of this phenomenon, called ‘projection’, that relies on the prosodic realization of utterances. We synthesize existing theoretical claims about prosody, informa...

Previous studies indicated that the rightmost unit is the default position for bearing nuclear accent in multiple-focus condition in Standard Chinese. The present research investigated the accent realization for dual-focus sentences which has a leftmost nuclear accent. The syntactic form of [Subject Verb (Modifier1) Object1 (Modifier2) Object2] was adopted. A corrective focus was always assigne...

A foreign accent involves discrete phonetic features which can be acoustically analyzed. However, these phonetic features are often masked perceptually by other features, such as prosodic features. This study presents an acoustic analysis of the postvocalic /l/ in Chinese learners, as an example, and puts these results into context with a perception test, which targets the overall aspects of an...

Learning the stress patterns of English words presents a challenge for L1 speakers from syllable-timed and/or tone languages. Realization of stress contrasts in previous studies has been measured in a variety of ways. This study adapts and extends Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), a method generally used to measure duration as a property of speech rhythm, to compare F0 and amplitude contrasts a...