This study investigates fundamental frequency alignment to segmental landmarks in Drehu, an Oceanic language. We present a production experiment that aimed to evaluate the marking of prosodic prominence, within the autosemental-metrical phonology, since stress and prominence system of the language has not been phonetically investigated. A rate manipulation paradigm was chosen to test the segmental anchoring hypothesis, namely to see whether prominence lending tonal movements exhibit a constant slope due to rate manipulation and whether tonal targets can be associated to segmental anchoring points in the speech stream. We find, that a rising tonal movement, between a word initial low (L), and a word final high (H) tone, is the most frequent tonal pattern. The word initial L tone seeks to align with the left edge of the word whereas the H tone, at the right edge, seeks to anchor to the last full syllable. In fast speech, tonal targets are produced closer together but the slope remains constant in both speech rates. It is shown that high tones seek to anchor to the word-final syllable, yet not to any specific segment which suggests a weak version of the segmental anchoring hypothesis applies.
This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.
Clause chains are a syntactic strategy for combining multiple clauses into a single unit. They are reported in many languages, including Korean and Turkish. However, they have seen relatively little focused research. In particular, prosodic features are often mentioned in descriptions of clause chaining, however there have been vanishingly few investigations. Corpus-based studies of the prosody of clause chains in two unrelated languages of Papua New Guinea report that they are typically produced as a sequence of Intonation phrases united by pitchscaling of the L% boundary tones in each clause with only the final, finite, clause descending to a full L%. The present study is the first experimental investigation of the prosody of clause chains in Pitjantjatjara. This paper focuses on one type of clause chain found in the Australian Indigenous language Pitjantjatjara. We examine a set of 120 clause chains read out by three native Pitjantjatjara speakers. Prosodic analysis reveals that these Pitjantjatjara clause chains are produced within a single Intonational Phrase. Speakers do not pause between the clauses in the chain, there is consistent linear downstep throughout the phrase and additionally phrase final lowering occurs at the end of the utterance. This differs from previous impressionistic studies of the prosody of clause chains.
Prosodic phrasing is a topic that has received considerable attention over the last decades. However, most research has dealt with well studied (mostly European) languages, and quantitative production studies of under-resourced languages are underrepresented. To better inform the field of intonational phonology, more data from a more diverse set of languages is needed. This study investigates pitch range modulations in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. Recent experimental work suggests Drehu is edge-marking and the right-edge is prosodically salient. In this study, the phonological and phonetic realisation of prosodic boundary marking is investigated. To determine whether pitch range modulations contribute to phrasing, the intonational marking of noun phrases of different sizes is analysed. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which fundamental frequency (F0) modulations contribute to the signalling of right-boundaries and if these are associated with the marking of different prosodic levels. The results show evidence for pitch range adjustments between a phrase initial low tone and a phrase final high tone depending on the position in the noun phrase. These modulations show a blocking of downstep and suggest pitch range adjustments could be indicative of an intermediate phrase (ip) level.
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