A well-known factor affecting sentence prosody is Information Structure, including the givenness vs. newness of the information conveyed by a constituent. In many languages, givenness is expressed prosodically either by deaccentuation (e.g. [1]) or by a less prominent realisation of the accent, which may be achieved either by phonological means like accent type (e.g. [2]), or by phonetic means ...

In this paper we present a preliminary speech production study concerning the prosodic realization of the syntactic and information structure in German. Firstly, we made predicitions for the relative prominence and their assignment with tonal patterns. Secondly, exhaustive acoustic analysis were used to test the expectations. The data of a production experiment with seven non-instructed normal ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the rates of psychiatric disorder and personality variables in a sample of older people who had committed suicide and to compare the rates in a subgroup of this sample with those in a control group of people who died from natural causes. DESIGN Descriptive psychological autopsy study, including interviews with informants, of psychiatric and personality factors in 100 su...

French accentuation is held to belong to the level of the phrase. Consequently French is considered ‘a language without accent’ with speakers that are ‘deaf to stress’. Recent ERP-studies investigating the French initial accent (IA) however demonstrate listeners not only discriminate between different stress patterns, but also prefer words to be marked with IA early in the process of speech com...