Interactions among F0, duration, and amplitude in the perception of focus

Abstract

F0, amplitude, and durational cues are considered the primary acoustic correlates of focus or sentence-level stress. However, questions remain regarding: (a) the degree to which each of these cues are necessary or sufficient for signaling focus; (b) the relative importance of each of these cues; and (c) how they interact in the perception of focus. Natural productions of the sentence ‘‘Bob bought Bogg’s box,’’ in which focus was varied over each of the four words of the sentence were altered to produce prosodic cue neutralized versions. The alterations were applied singly and in all possible combinations to form eight experimental versions of each original sentence (the original and seven cue-neutralized versions). The sentences were presented to listeners with the task of identifying the focused item in the sentence. Results indicated that: (a) neutralizing any acoustic cue produced some degradation in performance, but even with all cues nullified, performance remained above chance for at least some words; (b) overall, F0 was more important than either amplitude or duration in signaling focus; and (c) F0 was more important early in the sentence while amplitude and duration played relatively more prominent roles late in the sentence. [Work supported by NIDRR and Nemours.]

English Focus Perception by Mandarin Listeners

“…As shown in Figure 2, no significant difference in pitch values were found for any portions of the question uttered in the narrow object focus and the broad sentence focus contexts. In addition, Bunnell et al (1997) found F0 to be less effective in focus perception at the end of the utterance (Bunnell et al 1997). Furthermore, Xu (1999) argued that the full realization of a focus requires that the F0 of all words after the focus be suppressed.…”

“…According to (Xu 1999, p. 95), "the full realization of a focus requires that the F0 of all words after the focus be suppressed." When this cannot be implemented, as when focus is on the last word, for example, utterances with final narrow focus may not be reliably differentiated from utterances with broad focus (Xu 1999;Cooper et al 1985;Jin 1996) due to a lack of a reliable F0 as perceptual cues (Bunnell et al 1997). Post-focus compression is a highly effective perceptual cue for focus in Mandarin (Xu et al 2004(Xu et al , 2012Liu and Xu 2005;Chen et al 2009).…”