No abstract

This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker. Analyses of the prominence ratings reveal a greater likelihood of perceived prominence for words introducing discourse-new referents, as well as words occurring in a non-canonical sentence position, and featuring acoustic-prosodic enhancement. The results show that prosody and word order vary probabilistically in relation to information structure in read-aloud narrative, suggesting a complex interaction of prosody, word order, and information structure underlying the perception of prominence.

This study examines prosody in read productions of two published narratives by 15 Russian speakers. Two distinct sources of variation in acoustic-prosodic expression are considered: structural and referent-based. Structural effects refer to the particular linearization of words in a sentence or phrase. Referent-based effects relate to the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse referent of a word, and to grammatical roles that are partially dependent on referent characteristics. Here, we examine referent animacy and the related grammatical function of subjecthood, and the relative accessibility or information status of a word. We document patterns of prosodic augmentation and prosodic reduction due to structural and referent-based factors, as evident from change in values of acoustic-prosodic measures mean intensity, duration and f0 range. Prosodic augmentation due to structural effects is observed for words positioned ex-situ, independent of their semantic, grammatical or pragmatic features. Prosodic augmentation due to referent-based effects is observed for words that are grammatical subjects with animate referents. Prosodic expression is further affected by referent information status. Discourse-given and discourse-new information show greater prosodic augmentation than inferable information. A closer look at individual speakers' production styles reveals that structural and referent-based variations occur in combination and interact.