The following study investigates the acoustic cues that British and German speakers rely on to assign the beginning of suspense during live football commentaries. In a perception experiment, participants were asked to listen to goal scenes broadcasted on British and German public radio, German private radio, and German public television, and to determine the point at which they felt that the suspense began. To disentangle textual cues from prosodic factors, a subgroup of participants were presented with delexicalized audio files that had been processed through a low-pass filter to eliminate any textual information, while a further group of participants based their decisions only on orthographic transcripts of the reporters' speech. The results indicated that British and German participants alike regarded a steep increase in fundamental frequency as a clear signal for the onset of suspense, while the verbal content of what was said played a subordinate role. However, there were also differences in the way in which suspense was perceived by German and English listeners. In particular, German participants were more consistent in their interpretation of delexicalized files than English participants, and did not gain as much from the additional information presented in the original files.
Most prominence annotation methods have certain drawbacks. Simple binary scales may be too coarse to capture fine-grained prominence differences, and multi-level annotation schemes have been shown to be time-consuming and difficult to use for non-expert annotators. This study proposes a novel method for fine-grained and fast prominence annotation by exploiting the prosody-gesture link. On a sentence-by-sentence basis, native German participants were instructed to listen to audio recordings and reiterate them by beating on an electronic drum pad either once per syllable (experiment 1) or once per word (experiment 2), modulating the strength of each beat according to how strongly the syllable or word stood out in the sentence. The velocity profiles of MIDI outputs were then interpreted as correlates of perceived prominence and compared with fine-grained prominence ratings by three expert annotators. While wordlevel drumming showed high correlations to conventional ratings for some of the subjects, inexperienced participants often had considerable difficulty performing the task. Syllable-level drumming, on the other hand, proved to be a time-efficient and intuitive method for experienced and naive subjects alike. Especially by pooling velocity results from several participants to create mean values, it was possible to maintain high levels of correlation with expert prominence ratings.
German demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, and definite articles are segmentally identical but differ strongly in the frequency with which they appear. We examined the production of five such particles in a reading task. In a comparison of orthographically identical word pairs belonging to different lexical classes we found small but significant differences in word and vowel duration, prominence, and spectral similarity. Three of the particles in particular tended to be longer and more prominent when they occurred as demonstrative or relative articles than when they were assigned their usual role as definite articles.
This study presents two experiments designed to disentangle various influences on syllable pronunciation. Target syllables were embedded in carrier sentences, read aloud by native German participants, and analyzed in terms of syllable and vowel duration, acoustic prominence, and spectral similarity. Both experiments revealed a complex interaction of different factors, as participants attempted to disambiguate semantically and syntactically ambiguous structures while at the same time distinguishing between important and unimportant information. The first experiment examined German verb prefixes that formed prosodic minimal pairs. Carrier sentences were formulated so as to systematically vary word stress, sentence focus, and the type of syntactic boundary following the prefix. We found clear effects of word stress on duration, prominence, and spectral similarity as well as a small influence of sentence focus on prominence levels of lexically stressed prefixes. While sentence boundaries were marked by particularly high prominence and duration values, hardly any effect was shown for word boundaries. The second experiment compared German function words which were segmentally identical but appeared in different grammatical roles. Here, definite articles were found to be shorter than relative pronouns and still shorter than demonstrative pronouns. As definite articles are also much more common than the other two lexical classes, effects of lemma frequency might also have played a role.
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