Complex prosodic focus marking in Finnish: Expanding the data landscape

Arnhold, Anja

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2016.02.002

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Our prosodic analyses revealed effects of information structure on f 0 range, duration and the use of pauses. The study further found significant effects of information structure on voice quality, a dimension that has, to our knowledge, not previously been investigated for information structure marking in child language (but on focus effects in adult speech, Epstein, 2002; Ní Chasaide et al, 2011, for English, Vainio et al, 2010; Arnhold, 2016, for Finnish).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…The prosody of given constituents shows the opposite characteristics, i.e., shorter durations, reduced intensity and absence of following pauses. Further, Vainio et al (2010) reported a less tense voice quality in narrow focus, while Arnhold (2016) found increased use of different kinds of non-modal voice quality (e.g., creaky voice and whisper) on the second syllables of constituents in narrow focus and all following words in the same sentence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, constituents in narrow focus have longer duration (Mixdorff et al, 2002; Suomi, 2007), higher intensity (Vainio and Järvikivi, 2007; Arnhold, 2016) and are followed by pauses more often than constituents in broad focus (Arnhold, 2016). The prosody of given constituents shows the opposite characteristics, i.e., shorter durations, reduced intensity and absence of following pauses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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“…Arnhold (2014aArnhold ( , 2016 found that information structural manipulations affected several prosodic measures. Here, we directly investigated their role as prosodic cues to focus condition.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We provide a new analysis of the materials reported in Arnhold (2014aArnhold ( , 2014bArnhold ( , 2016, altogether 2841 words in 947 sentences. Materials were based on eight simple SVO sentences containing three disyllabic words.…”

Section: Data and Analyzed Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the Interplay of Multiple Cues in Prosodic Focus Marking

Arnhold

Kyröläinen

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Focus marking is an important function of prosody in many languages. While many phonological accounts concentrate on fundamental frequency (F 0 ), studies have established several additional cues to information structure. However, the relationship between these cues is rarely investigated. We simultaneously analyzed five prosodic cues to focus-F 0 range, word duration, intensity, voice quality, the location of the F 0 maximum, and the occurrence of pauses-in a set of 947 simple Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentences uttered by 17 native speakers of Finnish. Using random forest and generalized additive mixed modelling, we investigated the systematicity of prosodic focus marking, the importance of each cue as a predictor, and their functional shape. Results indicated a highly consistent differentiation between narrow focus and givenness, marked by at least F 0 range, word duration, intensity, and the location of the F 0 maximum, with F 0 range being the most important predictor. No cue had a linear relationship with focus condition. To account for the simultaneous significance of several predictors, we argue that these findings support treating multiple prosodic cues to focus in Finnish as correlates of prosodic phrasing. Thus, we suggest that prosodic phrasing, having multiple functions, is also marked with multiple cues to enhance communicative efficiency.

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Closure duration as an acoustic correlate of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay

Hamzah

Fletcher

Hajek

2016

Journal of Phonetics

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Closure duration has been established cross-linguistically as the universally most reliable and consistent acoustic feature of consonant gemination. In this study, we conduct an acoustic phonetic analysis of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) in order to explore the extent to which closure duration marks such a contrast in this Malay variety. KM is particularly unusual among the world's languages in that the contrast is restricted to word-initial position. A corpus of elicited materials consisting of singleton/geminate voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants were produced in words in isolation (i.e., utterance-initial position) and in a carrier sentence (i.e., utterance-medial position) by sixteen native speakers of KM. Results show that closure duration is a robust acoustic correlate of the consonant contrast in KM, i.e., word-initial geminates in KM are always associated with significantly longer closure duration than their corresponding singletons. The closure duration differences between singletons and geminates are also similar across utterance positions (at least for voiced stops and sonorants). In utterance-medial contexts, the effect is particularly strong in the closure duration of voiceless stops. Overall, closure duration is indeed a highly robust acoustic marker for this cross-linguistically rare word-initial consonant contrast in KM.

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Complex prosodic focus marking in Finnish: Expanding the data landscape

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Modelling the Interplay of Multiple Cues in Prosodic Focus Marking

Closure duration as an acoustic correlate of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay

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