A focus intonational morpheme in European Portuguese: Production and perception

Abstract

Production studies of the intonational signalling of focus in European Portuguese (EP) have shown that focus is expressed by a specific pitch accent type, thus revealing a systematic contrast between nuclear accents associated with different meanings . In declarative utterances, the contrast between the neutral/ broad focus reading and the narrow/contrastive focus reading is essentially realized as an alignment difference: H+L* (neutral accent) and H*+L (focus accent) . A pilot perceptual study using natural stimuli has shown that subjects are able to distinguish between members of neutral/focus minimal pairs and to match them to the appropriate production context . However, the perception of the contrast found in production has not yet been investigated in detail . The present paper revisits the production contrast and investigates its categorical nature using a multiple methodology approach that resorts to semantically motivated tasks . Several experiments tested whether differences in F0 peak and valley alignment would trigger a perceptual change from one meaning to the other, and whether the alignment differences pattern alike in stimuli based on a neutral and a focus sentence . In Experiment 1, stimuli were classified in a context-matching identification task . In Experiment 2, participants rated appropriateness of stimulus to context in a semantic scaling task . Finally, in Experiment 3, pairs of stimuli were discriminated in a context-matching discrimination task . The results of the three experiments provide converging evidence for the distinction between H+L* and H*+L . Moreover, they support the claim that the neutral/focus accent distinction is primarily an alignment contrast phonologically encoded at the pitch accent level . These findings have implications for the understanding of the nature of intonational contrasts, and the discussion about the approaches and methods to define prosodic categories .

Surface and Structure: Transcribing Intonation within and across Languages

“…Given the phonetic difference found in production data and the way it systematically correlates with meaning, the two pitch falls constitute a good candidate for a categorical distinction in alignment patterns that is part of the intonation system of the language. Perception experiments examined how the sound-meaning relations are organized in EP nuclear falls, namely whether they have a gradient/phonetic or a contrastive/phonological nature (Frota, 2012). Results from semantically motivated perception tasks (contextmatching identification, semantic scaling, and context-matching discrimination tasks) provided evidence for a discontinuity in the perception of the phonetic alignment continuum between an early peak fall category (H+L*) and a late peak fall category (H*+L), showing that the difference in EP nuclear falls is primarily an alignment contrast phonologically encoded in the intonation system.…”

Tempo and the perception of sentence modality

“…Future studies on the interplay between temporal and melodic cues should definitely take into account the possibility of evaluating cue integration as time unfolds. On-line tasks might prove especially useful in this sense, as shown by recent work on the use of semantic scaling in the perception of focus placement in European Portuguese (Frota 2012) and on indirect identification for sentence modality contrast in Northern Standard German (Petrone and Niebuhr in press). 7 As for the more restricted purposes of our study, given that intonational (and possible temporal) cues unfold in time, the use of response latencies relative to utterance end is a factor which could have limited the conclusiveness of H2 validation.…”

Infants’ Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus

“…In addition to the timing of the pitch fall, these two melodies are usually accompanied by duration and intensity differences (Frota 2000). The pitch timing contrast has been shown to be perceived by adult native speakers of EP, independently of the duration and intensity differences (Frota, 2012).…”