Pitch downtrend in Spanish

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

“…12 The remarkably wide pitch excursion in the predicate at the onset of the utterances could be due to utterance preplanning. Utterance-initial F 0 and F 0 at the first pitch peak in an utterance has been shown to increase with utterance length, see Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984); Prieto et al (1996Prieto et al ( , 2009) for discussion. Because of this initial pitch excursion and the short length of the predicate, it is very difficult to be confident about determining whether an H-is present in the predicate before an immediately following absolutive argument, so we don't consider that issue for these utterances.…”

Intonation in Spanish Classroom-style Didactic Speech

“…Based on these trends, the fact that F0 peaks are present in general in speech directed to L2 learners is important. While such peak decay has previously been associated with broad focus (Prieto et al, 1995(Prieto et al, , 1996, the results here indicate that it definitely reflects slower speech, that is overall more animated and engaging, even when the items tied to downstep are not the most communicatively heavy. That is, it could be the case that downstep and related peak displacement are a manner of keeping the audience involved and attentive by facilitating comprehension, but at the same time distinguishing less important information from more important information, the latter of which is cued through increases in F0 and earlier peaks.…”

“…This approach has been implemented in many studies that describe the function of intonation and its phonetic and phonological properties in a wide variety of contexts in both laboratory and spontaneous speech, such as declaratives with different focus types, absolute and pronominal interrogatives, imperatives, and the chunking of discourse into phrases (Beckman et al, 2002;Face, 2000Face, , 2001Face, , 2002Face, , 2003Face, , 2006, among others; Hualde, 2002Hualde, , 2003Nibert, 2000;Prieto et al, 1995Prieto et al, , 1996Prieto et al, , 1998; O" Rourke, 2005Rourke, , 2006Sosa, 1999;Willis, 2003; among many others). These aforementioned studies mainly revolve around native speakers of various dialects, with studies involving the connection between second language (L2) learners and intonation being much less common.…”

“…1 Declaratives in broad focus generally demonstrate F0 movement at or near stressed syllables, gradual peak decay (i.e. downstepping), and final lowering of F0 (Face, 2000(Face, , 2001(Face, , 2002Hualde, 2002;Prieto et al, 1995Prieto et al, , 1996; among others). In nuclear sentence position, F0 peaks often align with the stressed syllable due to the presence of an upcoming phrase boundary that blocks displacement.…”

Sentence planning and f0 scaling in Wenzhou Chinese

“…Avesani, 1987 for Italian, Ladd & Johnson, 1987 for English, Prieto, Shih, & Nibert, 1996 for Mexican Spanish, Rialland, 2001 for Dagara, Arvaniti, 2003 for Greek, Kubozono, 1993 for Japanese, Laniran & Clements, 2003for Yoruba, Connell, 2004 for Mambila Prieto, D'Imperio, Elordieta, Frota, & Vigário, 2006 for several Romance languages, and Heuven van, 2004 for Dutch). Results of these studies, however, are mixed and have been further complicated by between-speaker variation.…”