Prominence in French Dual Focus

Characterizing prosodic prominence relations in African tone languages is notoriously difficult, as typical acoustic cues to prominence (changes in F0, increases in intensity, etc.) can be difficult to distinguish from those which mark tonal contrasts. The task of establishing prominence is further complicated by the fact that tone, an important cue to syllable prominence and prosodic boundaries cross-linguistically, plays many roles in African languages: tones often signal lexical contrasts, can themselves be morphemes, and can also interact in key ways with prosody. The present study builds on phonological generalizations about tonal patterns in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language, and uses the speech cycling paradigm to investigate relative timing of syllables varying in phrase-level prominence. Specifically, we investigate timing asymmetries between syllables hypothesized to occur at the edge of a phonological phrase, which carry a high phrase accent, and those in phrase-medial position, which do not. Results indicate significant differences in the temporal alignment of accented versus non-accented syllables, with accented syllables occurring significantly closer to positions established as prominence-attracting in previous speech cycling research. We show that these findings cannot be attributed to differences in tone alone. Findings demonstrate the importance of relative temporal alignment as a correlate of prosodic prominence. Findings also point to increased duration as a phonetic property which distinguishes between syllables bearing phrasal prominence from those which do not.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba

Franich

2019

“…Prominence judgements for French natural speech by humans and machines can mismatch due to this complexity (Goldman, Auchlin, Roekhaut, Simon, & Avanzi, 2010). Further, realization of prominence in French often differs in scope from the equivalent expressions of information structure in the Germanic languages (see for instance Destruel & Féry, this issue), which would make it difficult to construct scope-matched materials such as those of the study we report. We conclude that language-specificity of prominence processing may extend beyond the level of family groupings such as prominence realization type.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Processing of Linguistic Prominence

Kember

Choi

Yu³

et al. 2019

Prominence, the expression of informational weight within utterances, can be signaled by prosodic highlighting ( head-prominence, as in English) or by position (as in Korean edge-prominence). Prominence confers processing advantages, even if conveyed only by discourse manipulations. Here we compared processing of prominence in English and Korean, using a task that indexes processing success, namely recognition memory. In each language, participants’ memory was tested for target words heard in sentences in which they were prominent due to prosody, position, both or neither. Prominence produced recall advantage, but the relative effects differed across language. For Korean listeners the positional advantage was greater, but for English listeners prosodic and syntactic prominence had equivalent and additive effects. In a further experiment semantic and phonological foils tested depth of processing of the recall targets. Both foil types were correctly rejected, suggesting that semantic processing had not reached the level at which word form was no longer available. Together the results suggest that prominence processing is primarily driven by universal effects of information structure; but language-specific differences in frequency of experience prompt different relative advantages of prominence signal types. Processing efficiency increases in each case, however, creating more accurate and more rapidly contactable memory representations.

“…In regards to focus, as might be expected, we saw that listeners interpret syntactic and prosodic cues to focus differently depending on expectations about how these are used in their language (cf. Destruel & Féry this issue, Kember et al this issue). Somewhat surprisingly, in both languages, syntactic cues seemed to outweigh prosodic, and in Samoan prosodic cues did not clearly play a role, although there was a lot of variability in responses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is well established that nuclear accents are an effective cue to focus position in canonical word order utterances in English and other languages where prosodic prominence is the principal cue to focus (e.g., see Botinis, Fourakis & Gawronska, 1999, Breen et al, 2010, Lee et al, 2015). However, prosody seems to be a less effective cue to focus in languages where prosody is a less important marker of focus, particularly for “complex” types of focus such as focus within a constituent, for example, see Lee et al (2015) for Korean and Japanese, or dual focus, for example, see Destruel & Féry (this issue) for French (however, see further discussion of the results in Lee et al, 2015 in Kember et al, this issue).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic Prominence and Focus: Expectation Affects Interpretation in Samoan and English

Calhoun¹,

Wollum

Va’ai

2019

This paper looks at the perception of prosodic prominence and the interpretation of focus position in the unrelated languages, Samoan and English. In many languages, prosodic prominence is a key marker of focus, so it is expected that prosodic prominence would affect judgments of focus position. However, it is shown that focus position, in turn, influences the perception of prosodic prominence according to language-specific expectations about the alignment between focus position and nuclear accent placement. Two sets of parallel perception experiments in Samoan and English are reported. In the first, participants judged the most prosodically prominent word in sentences which varied in syntactic construction (cleft/canonical) and intended stress position (subject/object). In both languages, participants were more likely to choose the intended stressed word if it was in the focus position. However, this effect was much larger in Samoan, which fits with its relatively lower functionality of prosodic prominence. In the second experiment, participants were asked to choose which question had been asked, consistent with subject or object focus. It was found that in both languages, participants weighted syntactic and prosodic cues to focus in line with expectations from their language. These findings have implications for how we conceive the role of prosodic prominence in speech processing across languages.