This work investigates the tonal structure of the focal accent in narrow focus statements of Neapolitan Italian. The formal properties of this accent lend themselves to two competing analyses. Specifically, this accent could equally be described as a HL accentual fall or as a LH rise. The two analyses were evaluated on the basis of a set of utterances containing focus constituents with varying ...

This study investigates the acquisition of second language (L2) rhythm by speakers of Dutch and Spanish, two languages that traditionally are considered to be rhythmically different. Specifically, it investigates whether the direction in which the L2 is learned (from Dutch to Spanish, or vice versa) influences the ease of acquisition. Dutch has relatively complex syllable structure and uses ext...

Muka Qiang has two phonological tones. Contrary to typological expectations of a two-tone system, both are types of high tone: non-high syllables are toneless. The first type of tone is a high word tone that aligns with the left edge of the word and spreads rightward, linking to as many as four syllables; lexical prosodic domains longer than four syllables have not been observed. The other tone...

Durational contrasts can be used to signal prosodic boundaries (utterance-final lengthening) and discourse focus (accentual lengthening). Durational differences can also signal phonemic vowel length contrast such as in non-rhotic Australian English where vowel length distinguishes lexical items (such as, cart /k :t/ and cut /k t/). This raises the question of how and when children acquire phone...

Sunghye Cho, University of Pennsylvania There is an ongoing debate about the nature of pitch accents. Even in Tokyo Japanese (TJ), which is the most widely cited pitch-accent language, the pitch accent is analyzed in two distinct ways: an accentual approach and a tonal one ([2, 3, 4, 7], among others). In the accentual approach (1a), an accent marks the position of a pitch drop from High (H) to...

This paper presents a prosodic phrasing model for Korean to be used in a textto-speech synthesis (TTS) system. Read text corpora were morpho-syntactically parsed and prosodically labeled following the Penn Korean Treebank [Han et al., 2002] and K-ToBI prosodic labeling conventions [Sun-Ah, 2000] respectively. Decision trees were trained with morpho-syntactic and textual distance features to pre...

The aim of this research is to examine whether Spanish speakers transfer some accentual acoustic properties from Spanish to French L2. Native Spanish learners of French and native speakers of French were instructed to read French sentences containing a trisyllabic target pseudoword. In some sentences, the pseudoword was in a stressed position, while in others it was in an unstressed position. A...

Within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation [1,2], there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our proposal is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure, while predicting that an alignment constraint (ALING-XP,R; ip,R) conspires to place an ip boundary at th...

1. Introduction Beckman (1986) draws a distinction between stress-accent and non-stress-accent (i.e., pitch-accent) languages. Stress-accent languages, such as English, convey accentual prominence by a combination of phonetic cues, including pitch, intensity and duration. Non-stress-accent languages, on the other hand, use only pitch as a correlate of accent. Tokyo Japanese is an example of the...