Koreman, J., van Dommelen, W., Sikveland, R., Andreeva, B., Barry, W. (in press) Cross-language differences in the production of phrasal prominence in Norwegian and German. Proceedings of Nordic Prosody 2008, Helsinki, Finland.
Most languages employ prominence-giving mechanisms to highlight the informational importance of particular words in a phrase (e.g., topic accent, focus accent). At some basic production level, the speaker invests more effort in these (accentuated) words, and the observed acoustic effects are greater duration and intensity, higher or changing fundamental frequency (F0); and in some way more distinct spectral properties (Bertinetto, 1981, Dauer, 1987, Sluijter, and van Heuven, 1996, Kochanski, Grabe, and Coleman, 2005). Some of the change in these properties can be considered a universal, but the degree to which each of the four parameters underlying prominence are used to signal prominence may be expected to vary between languages. The variation is likely to be a function of the degree to which they are required for other parts of the phonology.
In this study, we examine the production of different accentuation levels in Norwegian and German, our basic presumption being that the control of accentuation is subject to language- specific strategies.
The acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with three different levels of accentuation (de-accented, pre-nuclear and nuclear accented in broad-focus and nuclear accented in narrow- focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences produced by six Norwegian and six German speakers. For detailed comparison across the two languages iterative imitations (on the syllable da) were also produced. The sentences were constructed containing two one or two- syllable "critical words" (CWs), one early (but not initial) and one late (but not final) in the sentence.
The following acoustic-phonetic properties were calculated and normalized for each sentence: 1) durations for all feet and syllables in the CWs; 2) mean F0 across the syllable nucleus of the lexically stressed syllable of CWs and the unstressed syllables preceding and following them; 3) signal strength: (i) normalised mean intensity (dB) and (ii) spectral balance of the syllabic nuclei in the lexically stressed syllable of the CW; 4) spectral definition: mean F1-F3 of the syllabic nucleus in the lexically stressed syllable of CWs.
Normalised parameter values allow a comparative weighting of the properties employed in differentiating the three levels of accentuation. Clear differences are found between Norwegian and German in the weighting hierarchy of the acoustic properties. Details of inter-language variation in relation to this general finding will be presented and discussed.
References
Bertinetto P. M. (1981). Strutture prosodiche dell’italiano. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca. Dauer, R. (1987). Phonetic and phonological components of language rhythm. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Vol. 5, 447-450. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Sciences. Kochanski, G., E. Grabe, and J. Coleman (2005). Loudness predicts prominence: fundamental frequency lends little. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118, 1038-1054. Sluijter, A., V. van Heuven (1996). Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100, 2471-2485.
