Acoustic Analysis of Tones in Contemporary Standard Slovene: Preliminary Findings

Abstract

Včlanku so predstavljeni predhodni rezultati obsežnejše akustičneštudije o prozodiji slovenščine. Pričujoča raziskava o akustičnih lastnostih leksikalnega tona v slovenščini obravnava trajanje samoglasnikov, jakost in osnovno frekvenco. Statistično značilnih razlik ni bilo med prvima, medtem ko so bile razlike v F0 visoko statistično značilne. Rezultati se precej razlikujejo od predhodnjih. Dvozložnice se razlikujejo v relativnem F0 posameznih samoglasnikov. V trizložnicah z naglasom na prvem zlogu se F0 najbolj razlikuje v zadnjem zlogu.The author presents preliminary findings of a larger acoustic study into prosodic structure of Slovene. This investigation in acoustic properties of tones in Slovene addresses vowel duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. Although no statistical differences between both lexical tones (or pitch-accents) were found in the first and second variable, the third was found highly significant. The results differ greatly from what was previously established. Disyllables differ in F0 of the individual vowels. In trisyllables with antepenultimate stress, the F0 difference is the highest in the final syllable.

Information Structure in Slavic

“…This may be different in (dialects of) BCS and Slovenian where pitch accents are assigned lexically (see e.g. Smiljanić and Hualde, 2000;Jurgec, 2007). However, also in those dialects one word in a sentence tends to be more prominent than the others.…”