Prominence, Contrast, and the Functional Load Hypothesis: An Acoustic Investigation

Vogel, Irene; Athanasopoulou, Angeliki; Pincus, Nadya

doi:10.1017/9781316212745.006

Cited by 54 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…As such, it is not subject to manipulation for prominence as it is in the other two languages. In fact, this follows the more general observation that properties used for lexical contrasts in a given language will be avoided as cues for other phenomena in the language so as to preserve their contrastive value [11].…”

Section: F0mentioning

confidence: 77%

“…This is not to say that we found no acoustic effect of focus in the three languages. In fact, they all showed an increase in duration under focus, though it was not localized on a single syllable, as in a stress language (e.g., Greek [11]). Instead, in Indonesian and Korean, the last two syllables were lengthened; in Vietnamese, all three syllables were lengthened.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Athanasopoulou

Vogel

2016

Interspeech 2016

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Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese, comparing real three-syllable words in non-focused and focused contexts. Despite other prosodic differences, our findings confirm that none of the languages exhibits stress in the absence of focus, and under focus, no syllable shows consistent enhancement that could be indirectly interpreted as a manifestation of focus. Instead, a combination of boundary phenomena consistent with the right edge of a major prosodic constituent (Intonational Phrase) appears in each language: increased duration on the final syllable and in Indonesian and Korean, a decrease in F0. Since these properties are also found in languages with stress, we suggest that boundary phenomena signaling a major prosodic constituent break are used universally to indicate focus, regardless of a language's word-prosody; stress languages may use the same boundary properties, but these are most likely to be combined with enhancement of the stressed syllable of a word.

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Section: F0mentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Athanasopoulou

Vogel

2016

Interspeech 2016

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“…One interpretation of the present findings is that there is actually more freedom to implement focus phonetically in unstressed syllables relative to stressed syllables, the latter of which already possess certain of the same features that mark corrective focus for the male speaker. In a cross-linguistic study of the acoustic interaction between focus and stress in four languages (Greek, Hungarian, Spanish, and Turkish), Vogel et al (2016) find differences between languages in the realization of stress under focus, even observing a reduction in the prominence of stress under focus.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Prosodic and morphological focus marking in Ixcatec (Otomanguean)

Adamou

Gordon

Gries

2018

Studies in Language Companion Series

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This paper presents the first description of the expression of focus in Ixcatec, a nearly extinct language of Mexico. The study is based on experimental tasks carried out with the last three fluent speakers of Ixcatec. Prosodic analysis shows that in Ixcatec, a language with three lexical tones, contrastive focus is associated with raised F0, lack of focus is marked through lowered F0 and decreased duration, and corrective focus is signaled through various speakerspecific means. Finally, this study shows that morphological and phonetic properties display a complex interaction that contradicts the view that focus may be conveyed through either morphological or phonetic exponents but not both.

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“…Following Berinstein's (1979) work, various languages have been reported to conform to the predictions of the FLH. Other languages with contrastive vowel length which eschew duration as a cue to stress include Anejom (Lynch 2000), Bhojpuri (Shukla 1981), Creek (Martin 2011), Fijian (Dixon 1988), Halkomelem/Musqueam (Suttles 2004), Hungarian (White & Mády 2008, Vogel et al 2016, Konkow (Ultan 1967), Nisenan (Eatough 1999), and Palula (Liljegren 2008).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The exception to the language-specificity of many publications referencing the FLH is the ongoing work of the University of Delaware Stress Lab, whose website lists 15 languages that are being investigated with standardized methodology that separates word-level stress from sentence-level focus (sites.google.com/site/udstresslab/home). The results of the acoustic investigation of four of these languages (Greek, Hungarian, Spanish, and Turkish) are presented in Vogel et al (2016). The authors found results consistent with what they refer to as an extended version of the FLH: Hungarian, the language of the four with contrastive vowel length, was found not to use duration as a cue to stress (also see Vogel et al 2015), and Greek and Spanish were found to use different cues for word-level stress (F0, in both cases) and sentence-level focus (duration, in both cases).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel-length contrasts and phonetic cues to stress: an investigation of their relation

et al. 2017

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The functional load hypothesis of Berinstein (1979) put forward the idea that languages which use a suprasegmental property (duration, F0) contrastively will not use it to realise stress. The functional load hypothesis is often cited when stress correlates are discussed, both when it is observed that the language under discussion follows the hypothesis and when it fails to follow it. In the absence of a more wide-ranging assessment of how frequently languages do or do not conform to the functional load hypothesis, it is unknown whether it is an absolute, a strong tendency, a weak tendency or unsupported. The results from a database of reported stress correlates and use of contrastive duration for 140 languages are presented and discussed. No support for the functional load hypothesis is found.

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Prominence, Contrast, and the Functional Load Hypothesis: An Acoustic Investigation

Cited by 54 publications

References 41 publications

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Prosodic and morphological focus marking in Ixcatec (Otomanguean)

Vowel-length contrasts and phonetic cues to stress: an investigation of their relation

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