Volume 69, Issue 1-2

The paper is concerned with the ‘edge of intonation’ in a twofold sense. It focuses on utterance-final F0 movements and crosses the traditional segment-prosody divide by investigating the interplay of F0 and voiceless fricatives in speech production. An experiment was performed for German with four types of voiceless fricatives: /f/, /s/, /ʃ/ and /x/. They were elicited with scripted dialogues in the contexts of terminal falling statement and high rising question intonations. Acoustic analyses show that fricatives concluding the high rising question intonations had higher mean centres of gravity (CoGs), larger CoG ranges and higher noise energy levels than fricatives concluding the terminal falling statement intonations. The different spectral-energy patterns are suitable to induce percepts of a high ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the questions and of a low ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the statements. The results are discussed with regard to the possible existence of ‘segmental intonation’ and its implication for F0 truncation and the segment-prosody dichotomy, in which segments are the alleged troublemakers for the production and perception of intonation.

In this paper, we investigate how lexical tones interact with intonation, using data from the Austroasiatic language Kammu, one of few languages with two dialects whose only major phonological difference is the presence or absence of lexical tones. Northern (and Western) Kammu have developed tones in connection with the merger of voiceless and voiced initial consonants, while the non-tonal Eastern dialect kept the segmental opposition with no tones. We found the following prosodic hierarchy: (1) lexical tones, (2) phrase-final boundary tone, (3) focus marking. The results strongly suggest that the intonational systems of the two Kammu dialects are basically identical, and that the main differences between the dialects are adaptations of intonation patterns to the lexical tones when the identities of the tones are jeopardized.

Phonetic inquiry, particularly of the kind which looks at large numbers of items, frequently asks what a ‘typical’ example of a phenomenon of speech is like. For example, in describing the plosives of a language, it is common to calculate average closure durations or voice onset times in some contexts. In this paper, the focus is on examples from natural conversation where there are untypical patterns, and where the item of interest is, in statistical terms, an outlier. Outliers are generally excluded from linguistic analysis, and may be treated as e.g. production errors. The paper shows instead that at least some outliers are in fact part of a meaningful practice, and an orderly method by which speakers can create meaning. The phenomenon more precisely is that of intensifying emphasis, which has been described for German. We consider its phonetic exponents in American English, which are both ‘prosodic’ and ‘segmental’. We provide an account of function based on participants’ own use and displayed understanding of the phenomenon, and argue for a structurally rich account of the phenomenon which includes aspects of turn construction and sequential organisation.

Several decades of research, focusing on English, Dutch and German, have set up a hierarchy of acoustic properties for cueing lexical stress. It attributes the strongest cue to criterial-level f0 change, followed by duration, but low weight to energy and to stressed-vowel spectra. This paper re-examines the established view with new data from German. In the natural productions of the German word pair Kaffee ‘coffee’ – Café ‘locality’ (with initial vs. final stress in a North German pronunciation), vowel duration was manipulated in a complementary fashion across the two syllables in five steps, spanning the continuum from initial to final stress on each word. The two base words provided different vowel qualities as the second variable, the intervocalic fricative was varied in two values, long and short, taken from Café and Kaffee, and the generated test words were inserted in a low f0 tail and in a high f0 hat-pattern plateau, which both eliminated f0 change as a cue to lexical stress. The sentence stimuli were judged in two listening experiments by 16 listeners in each as to whether the first or the second syllable of the test word was stressed. The results show highly significant effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and fricative duration. The combined vowel-quality and fricative variable can outweigh vowel duration as a cue to lexical stress. The effect of the prosodic frame is only marginal, especially related to a rhythmic factor. The paper concludes that there is no general hierarchy with a fixed ranking of the variables traditionally adduced to signal lexical stress. Every prosodic embedding of segmental sequences defines the hierarchy afresh.

In the field of second language research many adhere to the idea that prosodic errors are more detrimental to the intelligibility of non-native speakers than segmental errors. The current study reports on a series of experiments testing the influence of stress errors and segmental errors, and a combination of these, on native processing of words produced by intermediate speakers of Dutch as a second language with either Mandarin Chinese or French as mother tongue. The results suggest that both stress and segmental errors influence processing, but suprasegmental errors do not outweigh segmental errors. It seems that a more ‘foreign’ generic pronunciation leads to a greater impact of (supra)segmental errors, suggesting that segmental and prosodic deviations should not be viewed as independent factors in processing non-native speech.