Prosodic boundary cues in German: Evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists

Abstract

International audienceThis study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses,phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In linewith the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while finallengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations fromexpectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects.That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrastbetween different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in whichwe tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results fromidentification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift inlisteners' prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence,pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show differentsensitivity to the three acoustic cues

An analysis of prosodic boundary detection in German and Austrian German read speech

“…Besides numerous linguistic studies that investigated the relationship between pause and boundary perception (e.g., [11,12]), the electrophysiological study by Männel and Friederici [13] revealed that 3-year-olds perceive the boundary also when the existence of a pause is the only acoustic cue marking the boundary. This is in line with the findings of Petrone et al [14], showing that adult German listeners give categorical responses for prosodic boundaries in the case of pauses, while more gradual transitions were observed with f0 and final lengthening cues. Their experimental design, however, did not allow to show the weights of these three cues.…”

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

“…For our manipulation of constituent structure, we used coordinated names (following Lehiste, 1973;van den Berg et al, 1992;Wagner, 2005;Féry and Kentner, 2010;Kentner and Féry, 2013;Petrone et al, 2017). The intended syntac-tic constituent structure was indicated by the placement of commas.…”

Perceptual Reorganization of Lexical Tones: Effects of Age and Experimental Procedure

“…In intonation languages, pitch movements have post-lexical functions indicating prosodic (and syntactic) phrasing and pragmatic functions, such that infants growing up with a non-tone language are not fully naïve to pitch variations. In German, rising pitch contours with a nuclear pitch accent (L * H) are related to sentence internal boundaries of prosodic phrases and to Yes-No Questions (Grice and Baumann, 2002 ; Gussenhoven, 2004 ; Petrone et al, 2017 ). Since questions are frequently used in communication with infants and toddlers to catch their attention (Spinelli et al, 2017 ), and even infants and toddlers show discrimination of question over declarative intonation contours (Geffen and Mintz, 2011 ; Soderstrom et al, 2011 ), our finding that German toddlers discriminate high-rising from mid-level tones at 18 months of age lines up with findings from other studies that assume that the native language intonation system has an impact on lexical tone perception in speakers of non-tone languages.…”