Are There “Shapers” and “Aligners”? Individual Differences in Signalling Pitch Accent Category (original) (raw)
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Pitch Accent Alignment in Romance: Primary and Secondary Associations with Metrical Structure
Language and Speech, 2005
The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM m odel, the article develops the notion of 'phonological anchoring' as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by , and later adopted by Grice , and others to explain the behavior of edge tones. The Romance data represent evidence that not only peripheral edge tones seek secondary associations. We claim that the phonological representation of pitch accents should include two independent mechanisms to encode alignment properties with metrical structure: (1) encoding of the primary phonological association (or affiliation) between the tone and its tone-bearing unit; and (2), for some specific cases, encoding of the secondary phonological anchoring of tones to prosodic edges (moras, syllables and prosodic words). The Romance data described in the article provide crucial evidence of moraedge, syllable-edge, and word-edge H tonal associations.
Sources of variation in tonal alignment: Evidence from acoustic and kinematic data
Journal of Phonetics, 2009
This study is concerned with the alignment of f0 peaks in rising LH pitch accents in German, both in relation to acoustically defined segments, referred to as segmental anchors, as well as to dynamically defined speech gestures, referred to as articulatory anchors. The effects investigated were the effects of syllable structure (test words " CV:CV and " CVCV, where the test syllable is open or closed, respectively), dialectal background (the varieties of German spoken in Düsseldorf and Vienna), and accent status in the intonational hierarchy (prenuclear and nuclear accents).
In this production study, we investigate the effects of phrasal position and metrical structure on alignment patterns of nuclear rising pitch accents in German. In the acoustic domain, peak alignment varies across open and closed syllables. In the articulatory domain , these effects of metrical structure disappear. The peak shows a stable coordination pattern with the vocalic target of the accented syllable. However, effects of phrasal position occurred in both domains leading to a leftward shift of the peak towards the accented vowel. We conclude that alignment is best understood as coordinative structures between tones and oral constriction gestures instead of co-occurrence of nearby-landmarks on the acoustic surface.
Alignment and pitch-accent identification — Implications from F0 peak and plateau contours
The study scrutinizes the role of alignment of F0 move-ments in identifying two different pitch accents. Although this general issue was addressed for German, the pitch-accent contrast that was studied occurs cross-linguistically and is known as 'early' vs. 'medial' or H+L* vs. L+H*. The early pitch accent reaches the F0-peak maximum befo-re the accented-vowel onset and hence falls into the vowel, while the medial pitch accent peaks after the vowel onset. This alignment-based identification model was recently un-dermined by studies that varied the slopes and ranges of the F0 movements or the extension of the F0-peak maximum. The latter parameter is taken up in the present perception experiments. Starting from a pointed rising-falling peak ali-gned at the accented-vowel onset, a peak and a plateau series were resynthesized by shifting either the entire peak or just the rising or falling movement into and away from the ac-cented vowel. The peak and plateau stimuli were...
This paper is concerned with the relationships between ‘early’ pitch accents in German and with whether downstep in German is phonological or phonetic. At the core of our analysis is an investigation into the differences between two kinds of pitch accents in which the pitch peak precedes the accented vowel: these are H+!H* and H+L* which are claimed to be phonologically contrastive in German. We made use of two experimental procedures: (1) a production experiment in which speakers were asked to imitate synthetically manipulated sentences and (2) a semantic differential experiment in which listeners rated the perceived meaning of those sentences on eight semantic scales. Although both the imitation and perception experiment provided evidence for a distinction between an early and a later (H*) peak accent, the results pointed neither to a three-way distinction, nor to a categorical distinction between H+!H* and H+L*. Finally, we present some results from an analysis of both English and German corpora which suggest that the difference between these two peaks may be phonetic and attributable to the number of syllables following the nuclear accent in the tail. Based on these results and from theoretical considerations, we argue that H+!H* is an inappropriate pitch accent category in the inventory of paradigmatic phonological intonational contrasts of standard German.
Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German
Journal of Phonetics, 2008
The influence of information structure on tonal scaling in German is examined experimentally. Eighteen speakers uttered a total of 2277 sentences of the same syntactic structure, but with a varying number of constituents, word order and focus-given structure. The quantified results for German support findings for other Germanic languages that the scaling of high tones, and thus the entire melodic pattern, is influenced by information structure. Narrow focus raised the high tones of pitch accents, while givenness lowered them in prenuclear position and canceled them out postnuclearly. The effects of focus and givenness are calculated against all-new sentences as a baseline, which we expected to be characterized by downstep, a significantly lower scaling of high tones as compared to declination. The results further show that information structure alone cannot account for all variations. We therefore assume that dissimilatory tonal effects play a crucial role in the tonal scaling of German. The effects consist of final f0 drop, a steep fall from a raised high tone to the bottom line of the speaker, H-raising before a low tone, and H-lowering before a raised high tone. No correlation between word order and tone scaling could be established. r
Perceived tone'targets' and pitch accent identification in Italian
2000
This study investigates the role of temporal alignment, and peak shape in determining perceived tonal target values in Neapolitan Italian. In this variety, the alignment of the accent peak appears to be a strong perceptual cue to the question/statement identification (D'Imperio and House, 1997), everything else being equal. In the present study, the contour of a question, uttered by a female speaker of Neapolitan Italian, was stylized and resynthesized by means of PSOLA. A set of stimuli was created in which either tonal alignment was varied, while height was kept constant, or height was varied orthogonally to alignment. For the alignment manipulation, an additional variable was the shape of the accent peak, which could be either flat (creating a short plateau) or sharp. Thirty Neapolitan subjects listened to the stimuli and identified each as a question or a statement. The results suggest that the contribution of peak height to the question/statement identification is much less important than that of target alignment. Moreover, peak shape affects the perceived alignment of the target tone, in that flat peak stimuli cause the perceived target to be displaced towards the end of the plateau.
Tonal association and derived nuclear accents—The case of downstepping contours in German
Lingua, 2009
We report on two production experiments which together provide additional support for treating downstep as orthogonal to the tonal structure of utterances, in the sense that certain intonational meanings are expressed by a downstep relation between two H tones, rather than by a particular accent type or accent sequence. The intonational meanings investigated were inferentially accessible information on the one hand and broad focus on the other. In the first experiment an increase in pitch span provided evidence for an analysis of the early peak accent under investigation as H+!H* rather than H+L*, since the starred tone was raised along with pitch span increase, as would be expected of a high tone. Thus we confirmed the presence of a downstepped tone in this accent. In the second experiment we showed that the distribution of accents favoured a downstep in broad focus utterances, as opposed to narrow or contrastive focus utterances.