Volume 79, Issue 3

The prosodic structure of under-researched languages in the Trade Malay language family is poorly understood. Although boundary marking has been uncontroversially shown as the major prosodic function in these languages, studies on the use of pitch accents to highlight important words in a phrase remain inconclusive. In addition, most knowledge of pitch accents is based on well-researched languages such as the ones from the Western-Germanic language family. This paper reports two word identification experiments comparing Papuan Malay with the pitch accent language American English, in order to investigate the extent to which the demarcating and highlighting function of prosody can be disentangled. To this end, target words were presented to native listeners of both languages and differed with respect to their position in the phrase (medial or final) and the shape of their f0 movement (original or manipulated). Reaction times for the target word identifications revealed overall faster responses for original and final words compared to manipulated and medial ones. The results add to previous findings on the facilitating effect of pitch accents and further improve our prosodic knowledge of underresearched languages.

Post-focus compression (PFC), in which words following focus are compressed in F 0 and intensity, is recently found to be effective in encoding focus. Recent studies find that PFC is present in Egyptian, Hijazi and Lebanese Arabic, and hence they are classified as +PFC languages. However, there are languages from the same family language which differ mainly in terms of the presence and absence of PFC. The current study investigated the production and perception of prosodic focus marking in Makkan Arabic, an under-researched Arabic dialect. Systematic acoustic analyses and statistical tests show that (a) the on-focus word is realized by expanding the excursion size, increasing the F 0 and strengthening the intensity of its stressed syllable, (b) information and contrastive focus are not prosodically distinguishable, (c) Makkan Arabic lacks PFC, and (d) focus recognition is low compared to Hijazi Arabic (+PFC), Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin (other −PFC languages). The new findings, taken together with recent findings, suggest that (1) the prosodic encoding of focus is different across Arabic dialects productively and perceptually, and (2) the on-focus raising is not a sufficient factor in recognizing prosodic cues to focus. These results contribute to broadening our understanding of different prosodic focus markings cross-linguistically and cross-dialectally.