Volume 6, Issue 1 -

A reading experiment was designed to examine the effects of word boundaries and metrical structure on the temporal alignment of the accentual peak and the end of the fall in nuclear rising-falling accents. Participants were speakers of a number of closely related dialects and languages from the coastal area of the Netherlands and North-West Germany, covering Zeelandic Dutch, Hollandic Dutch, West Frisian, Dutch Low Saxon, German Low Saxon, and Northern High German. Our findings suggest that in no variety is the timing of the nuclear peak or the end of the fall systematically affected by the location of the final word boundary or that of the following stress. In most cases, the accentual peak was found to be stably aligned with the beginning of the nuclear accented syllable, while the end of the fall occurred at a fairly constant distance from the preceding F 0 peak. These findings do not support a representation of the nuclear fall by a sequence of a high accentual tone and a ‘phrase accent’ that is secondarily associated to a postnuclear stress. In addition, we found substantial cross-linguistic variation in the overall timing of the beginning and end of the fall. One component in this variation is a geographically gradient shift in the alignment of the pitch gesture.

In this study we analyzed temporal alignment between F 0 turning points and acoustic landmarks in rising (L+¡H*) and falling (H+L*) nuclear pitch accents in Peninsular Spanish wh-questions. In the research design we devised two experimental factors based on nuclear syllable configuration: syllable structure (open vs. closed) and stress position (penultimate vs. ultimate). Regarding leading tone alignment, the L point of L+¡H* displayed close synchrony with the start of the nuclear syllable, whereas the H point of H+L* was more variable within the pretonic syllable. These findings provide only partial (i.e., accent-specific) confirmation for the syllable onset anchoring hypothesis . Regarding starred tone alignment, both accents showed the same result: syllable structure did not affect alignment in words with penultimate stress. Although these findings support the principle of segmental anchoring in nuclear position, we propose that anchoring landmarks for tonal targets may constitute entire segments themselves. All in all, this work contributes to the study of intonational phonology by documenting that patterns of temporal alignment are specific to individual pitch accent specifications.

The study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono- vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic sackt-sagt and sackte-sagte continua, they were shown to compensate for the syllable count differences, but to a lesser extent in a deaccented context. Deaccentuation may therefore provide the conditions for sound change to take place by which /aː/ shortens in polysyllabic words; it may do so because the association between coarticulation and the source that gives rise to it is hidden to a greater extent than in accented contexts.

This study tests how prosodic boundary strength (i.e., categorical differences between Accentual Phrase, AP, and intermediate phrase, ip, boundaries) per se affects the syntactic parsing of spoken utterances in French. Two forced-choice perception experiments demonstrated that French listeners use prosodic boundary strength (either AP or ip boundaries) at the end of noun phrases (e.g., La nana du sauna ‘The girl who manages the sauna’) to choose whether NPs are likely to be followed by a prepositional phrase (e.g., d’Héléna ‘of Héléna’) or instead by a verb phrase (e.g., déconseille ‘advises against’). Experiment 1 employed fragments extracted from natural speech stimuli, while Experiment 2 made use of resynthesized speech, in which fundamental frequency and durational cues to AP and ip boundaries were independently manipulated. In Experiment 1, results show that listeners prefer PP completions following AP boundaries and VP completions after ip boundaries. Experiment 2 shows that preboundary duration cues consistent with the presence of an AP boundary successfully guide listeners to prefer PP completions, while both fundamental frequency and duration cues consistent with an ip boundary are necessary to induce VP completions. We hence argue that prosodic boundary strength at the right edge of an utterance fragment influences syntactic parsing decisions in French.