In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between topdown expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and nonnative subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast —prosodically very different — speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective promine...

The present study investigates effects of Boundary and Prominence (focus) on the /a/-to-/i/ tongue movement in Korean in two contexts: V#V and V#/m/V. Results show that the tongue movement at an IP boundary is larger, longer, and faster. Prominence effects show a relatively weaker but comparable pattern to the boundary effect, showing a larger, longer, and faster movement. The observed boundary...

The instructions under which raters quantify syllable prominence perception need to be simple in order to maintain immediate reactions. This leads to noise in the rating data that can be dealt with by normalization, e.g. setting central tendency = 0 and dispersion = 1 (as in Z-score normalization). Questions arise such as: Which parameter is adequate here to capture central tendency? Which refe...

This study explores prosodic strengthening in the production of fortis plosives in Italian as a function of four structural levels of prominence, reflecting differing focal conditions (in order of increasing prominence: postfocal, broad focus, narrow focus and contrastive narrow focus). The overall analysis indicated that for lingual consonants closure duration was the most important acoustic p...

This study investigates prosodic correlates of phrasing in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. The analysis is concerned with the demarcation levels language, namely Accentual Phrase and Intonation Phrase. First impressionistic descriptions Drehu state there fixed word initial stress, however recent experimental evidence does not support this claim. Instead, it has been suggested tha...

Prosodic prominence and phrasing has some general principle commonly existed in the world languages, but their execution is language-specific, especially in tone languages like Chinese. The kernel of the issue is that how the pitch manifestation of individual tones accommodate to achieve prominence and phrasing within certain prosodic domain. This paper tries to explore the peculiarity on pitch...

Within language, systematic correlations exist between syntactic structure and prosody. Prosodic prominence, for instance, falls on the complement and not the head of syntactic phrases, and its realization depends on the phrasal position of the prominent element. Thus, in Japanese, a functor-final language, prominence is phrase-initial, and realized as increased pitch (^ Tōkyōni "Tokyo to"), wh...

This study explores phrase-level prosody and prominence in the Māori language. Limited existing prosodic analysis and anecdotal evidence of diachronic change have motivated the present investigation into alignment of descriptions of intonation and stress with prominence perception test results and pitch analysis of speech data. In general, we find the expected case does occur most often, but ex...