Repetition Reduction Revisited: The Prosody of Repeated Words in Papuan Malay

Abstract

It has frequently been shown that speakers prosodically reduce repeated words in discourse. This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate. However, a literature review provided in this paper reveals that most evidence comes from English, where prosodic marking of information status often coincides with repetition reduction. The current study investigates to what extent repetition reduction occurs in Papuan Malay, spoken in the western part of the island of New Guinea (Indonesia). The work on Papuan Malay prosody available to date suggests fundamental differences compared to English and other Germanic languages. An acoustic analysis is carried out on repeated words in short stories produced by native Papuan Malay speakers. The results show that upon repetition, words were shortened and produced with higher F0. In a subsequent word identification task, it was found that first and second mentions were equally intelligible. Conclusions partially confirm previous work and challenge theories on how the prosody and information value of a word are related.

Acoustic correlates of word stress in Papuan Malay

“…A second word of caution concerns Papuan Malay phrase prosody, of which to date little is known. While recent work suggests that this language does not make use of pitch accents (Kaland & Himmelmann, 2019;Riesberg et al, 2018), a direct assessment of the functions of F0 in Papuan Malay phrases is lacking. While the influence of phrase level phenomena was kept to a minimum in the current study, it cannot be fully excluded that some of the words in the data subset were subject to acoustic processes resulting from phrase prosody.…”

“…As for phrase prosody, the few studies available suggest that marking of information structure using pitch movements (i.e. pitch accents) is limited to phrase boundaries in Papuan Malay (Kaland & Himmelmann, 2019;Riesberg, Kalbertodt, Baumann, & Himmelmann, 2018).…”

Demarcating and highlighting in Papuan Malay phrase prosody

“…The limited F0 data available for Papuan Malay do not necessarily shed light on this issue. A recent study (Kaland and Himmelmann, 2019) investigated the extent to which repeated words in discourse were prosodically reduced. Although duration showed the expected reduction effects, F0 was unexpectedly higher in second mentions than in first mentions.…”