Speaker-specific intonational marking of narrow focus in Egyptian Arabic

Cangemi, Francesco; Zarka, Dina El; Wehrle, Simon; Baumann, Stefan; Grice, Martine

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2016-69

Cited by 44 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The results of the present study indicate that this effect is due to the longer duration of the stressed syllable. As far as peak scaling is concerned, our results confirmed the findings of prior studies on focus in EA with respect to the effect of narrow focus [7,1,8,2,6], however, across a larger number of speakers and tokens. [6] had already shown that for some speakers, peaks are higher in narrow focus than in broad focus (all-new).…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…The random variables are both incorporated in terms of random intercept models. A detailed analysis of speaker-specific strategies, as for instance presented in [6], is left for future work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other experimental studies have only studied the acoustic characteristics of accents associated with target words uttered in different focus conditions (broad focus, narrow information focus, narrow contrastive focus). All studies agree that focus may enhance the excursion size of an accent [1,2,3,4,6,7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Concerning the alignment properties of the accent, they have yielded different results: whereas [1,8] found no alignment difference under focus, [6] found that some speakers use alignment to differentiate between narrow and broad focus while others do not. According to the pilot experiment described in [2], foci also exhibit longer overall durations than topics in EA.…”

Section: Figure 1 F0 Tracings Of a Rising Accent On A Topic Constitumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More specifically, we investigate the effect of information structure (i.e., of sentence-initial narrow (subject) focus vs. sentence-initial topic) on syllable duration, the alignment of the rise endpoint (H) and of the fall endpoint (L), and H scaling. Thereby, we extend the method used in [6] (who studied broad vs. narrow focus) to the investigation of topics and additionally analyze durational features. This will allow us to test the following hypotheses:…”

Section: Figure 1 F0 Tracings Of a Rising Accent On A Topic Constitumentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acoustic Cues to Topic and Narrow Focus in Egyptian Arabic

2019

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This study investigates acoustic cues (duration, scaling and alignment of peaks and valleys) to the prosodic realization of topics and narrow subject foci in a declarative SVO sentence in Egyptian Arabic. Morpho-syntactically identical sentences were elicited in appropriately designed contexts from 18 native speakers by means of a question-answer paradigm. The results show that the stressed syllable of a focused word is longer than the stressed syllable of the same word in topic condition. Additionally, the peaks of foci are generally scaled higher than those of topics. These differences clearly point to varying degrees of prosodic prominence. Furthermore, the alignment of the F0 peak and the subsequent low endpoint of a rising-falling tonal contour is earlier in foci than in topics, indicating that focus is signaled by an early sharp fall whereas the falling part of the tonal gesture starts later and is shallower in the case of a topic. Overall, our results suggest that narrow subject foci and topics tend to be associated with different pitch events.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Figure 1 F0 Tracings Of a Rising Accent On A Topic Constitumentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Figure 1 F0 Tracings Of a Rising Accent On A Topic Constitumentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acoustic Cues to Topic and Narrow Focus in Egyptian Arabic

2019

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Filled Pauses Produced by Autistic Adults Differ in Prosodic Realisation, but not Rate or Lexical Type

Wehrle

Grice

Vogeley

2023

J Autism Dev Disord

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We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal “uhm” or non-nasal “uh”), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling) of filled pauses. We used Bayesian modelling for statistical analysis. We found an identical rate of filled pauses and an equivalent preference of “uhm” over “uh” across groups, but also a robust group-level difference regarding the intonational realisation of filled pauses: non-autistic controls produced a considerably higher proportion of filled pause tokens realised with the canonical level pitch contour than autistic speakers. Despite the fact that filled pauses are a frequent and impactful part of speech, previous work on their conversational use in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited. Our account is the first to analyse the intonational realisation of filled pauses in ASD and the first to investigate conversations between autistic adults in this context. Our results on rate and lexical type can help to contextualise previous research, while the novel findings on intonational realisation set the stage for future investigations.

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Prosodic encoding of focus in Hijazi Arabic

Alzaidi

2019

Speech Communication

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This paper presents findings of the first systematic acoustic analysis of focus prosody in Hijazi Arabic (HA), an under-researched Arabic dialect. A question-answer paradigm was used to elicit information and contrastive focus at different sentence locations in comparison with their neutral focus counterparts. Systematic acoustic analyses were performed to compare all the focus conditions, in terms of both continuous F 0 trajectories and specific acoustic measurements. Results show that focused words have significantly expanded excursion size, higher maximum F 0 and longer duration. Post-focus words have significantly lowered F 0 (except in the case of penultimate focus). Pre-focus words, in contrast, lack systematic changes. These patterns are consistent with previously reported prosodic patterns of focus in other Arabic dialects. They are also consistent with a number of others languages that have also been applied similar systematic acoustic analyses. Thus Arabic appears to belong to a group of languages that all exhibit post-focus compression (PFC), as opposed to languages that lack PFC. In addition, the results also show evidence of prosodic differences between contrastive focus and information focus. This difference, however, is interpreted as due to a methodological feature that allowed elicitation of incredulity related to contrastive focus, rather than as a language-specific property. It is also argued that the possible involvement of incredulity in focus marking needs further research.

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Speaker-specific intonational marking of narrow focus in Egyptian Arabic

Abstract: { f cangemi , swehr l e2, s t ef an. baumann, mar t i ne. gr i ce} @ uni-koel n. de, di na. el zar

Cited by 44 publications

References 11 publications

Acoustic Cues to Topic and Narrow Focus in Egyptian Arabic

Acoustic Cues to Topic and Narrow Focus in Egyptian Arabic

Filled Pauses Produced by Autistic Adults Differ in Prosodic Realisation, but not Rate or Lexical Type

Prosodic encoding of focus in Hijazi Arabic

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