Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba

Abstract

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.

Prominence in French Dual Focus

“… 1. The question of whether an H tone is prominent is also sometimes discussed for other languages, as in two other articles in this special issue, namely on Medumba (Franich, this issue) and on Taiwanese (Ou & Guo, Language and Speech , this issue). …”

The Language-specific Use of Fundamental Frequency Rise in Segmentation of an Artificial Language: Evidence from Listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min

“…Yet, there might be other sources of influence such as phrasal prominence, which can exist in languages with lexically contrastive tones. For instance, Franich (this issue) provides experimental evidence for a prominence-lending “high phrase edge tone” in Medʉmba (a Grassfields Bantu language), which is functionally distinct from the lexical high tone of the language. There have been phonological analyses that argue for phrasal stress in Mandarin and TSM (e.g., Duanmu, 1995, 2000).…”

Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

“…One study is concerned with head prominence and, in particular, looks into typical segmental timing patterns that are usually found in prominent positions accompanying the realization of a pitch accent (Jepson et al, this issue). Two other papers are concerned with edge prominence and tackle the question as to whether the structural attractor of a prosodic edge expresses prominence (Franich, this issue) or not (Destruel & Féry, this issue). Franich tackles the issues of a structurally prominent position within the utterance in a tone language, investigating the prominent role of H tones in the language.…”

“…In languages in which prosodic phrasing is the only mechanism available for cueing prominence, referred to as edge prominence, both the prosodic phrasing itself, as well as tones associated with phrase edges, contribute towards making constituents stand out (Jun, 2014). One of the papers of this special issue (Franich, this issue) contributes to this line of research, reporting on a H tone in the Bantu tone language, Medumba. This H tone appears in a privileged structural position (demarcating the pre-verbal phonological phrase), but expresses prosodic prominence in a similar way to phrase accents in intonation languages (Grice et al, 2000), where these latter associate with both prosodic boundaries and metrical prominences.…”

“…In this special issue, we explore prominence from a typological perspective covering a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language; Jepson et al, this issue), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language; Calhoun et al this issue), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic; Kember et al, this issue; Calhoun et al this issue; Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue), French (Romance; Destruel & Féry, this issue), and Russian (Slavic; Luchkina & Cole, this issue), Korean (Koreanic; Kember et al, this issue), Medumba (Bantu; Franich, this issue), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin (Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue) and Taiwanese Southern Min (Ou & Guo, this issue). The empirical basis is either production (Jepson et al, this issue; Franich, this issue; Destruel & Féry, this issue), perception (Destruel & Féry, this issue; Calhoun et al, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue) or processing (Ou & Guo, this issue; Kember et al, this issue; Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue), dimensions along which we organize our discussion of the individual papers below.…”