The Effect of Focus and Phrase Position on East Norwegian Lexical Tonal Accents

Abstract

Two experiments examined the acoustic correlates of the disyllabic tonal accent contrast in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian, and how narrow focus and phrasal position shape the contrast. Production results showed that both tonal accents have a high-low (HL) pitch contour, with different timing. In narrow focus, the pitch contrast was enlarged through asymmetrical F0 changes. When at the right edge of an accent phrase (AP), the accents were shown to have a higher L, lower AP H% tone, shorter stressed vowel, and longer final vowel. The alignment changes reflected tonal crowding while segmental modifications were due to the phrase-final lengthening in AP-final position. This work contributes to the literature on prosodic typology as well as on the implementation of prosodic focus and sentence intonation in languages with lexical pitch contrasts.

Perception of the Lexical Accent Contrast in One Variety of East Norwegian

“…Specifically, the study sought to determine whether changes in F0 minimum alignment, F0 maximum alignment, F0 minimum height, and HTP alignment contribute to the shifts in accent identification. In the production study, Kelly and Smiljanić (2017) found that in broad focus, accent 2 has a higher and later F0 minimum, later F0 maximum alignment and later HTP alignment compared to accent 1. The perception experiment conducted here showed that listeners were most sensitive to an early F0 fall, leading to a majority of accent 1 identifications, and an initial salient high tone, which led to a majority of accent 2 identifications.…”

“…F0 minimum alignment was kept constant. Based on the production study, F0 maximum alignment and HTP alignment were manipulated separately because they were independent landmarks, often distantly separated from one another (Kelly & Smiljanić, 2017).…”

“…The words were extracted from carrier sentences eliciting the accent type and broad versus narrow focus reading, and equalized for loudness. The stimuli were chosen because they were representative of the accents in broad and narrow focus conditions, in that they contained the cues found to differ between the accents and focus conditions in the production experiment (Kelly & Smiljanić, 2017). Each stimulus was presented 10 times for a total of 40 stimuli (2 focus conditions × 2 accents × 10 repetitions).…”

“…Most recently, Kelly and Smiljanić (2017) examined in detail the acoustic correlates of the two accents produced phrase-medially and phrase-finally under broad and narrow focus by 10 speakers of the Trøndersk dialect (Kelly, 2015; Kelly & Smiljanić, 2014, 2017) (all studies used the same data). Disyllabic target words with either accent 1 or accent 2 were examined, all with initial stress and controlled for vowel and surrounding consonants.…”

“…These results indicate that the alignment of the F0 contour is a salient cue for the perception of the lexical pitch contrasts in a variety of Scandinavian dialects. The current investigation expands on this by manipulating more cues, specifically based on the production results for the Trøndersk variety (Kelly & Smiljanić, 2017).…”