The prosody of focus and emphasis in Sepedi

Processing of Prosody and Semantics in Sepedi and L2 English

“…Our experiments replicate the pattern of results found in Akker and Cutler's (Biling Lang Cogn 6:81-96, 2003) experiment for Dutch L1/ English L2 listeners, even with listeners whose L1 does not use prosody the way English does.prosody. If we compare the mean values of early/late targets with/without prosody reported in Raborife et al (2016) with the mean values reported in the present paper, the direction of the results is similar. In the current model, however, this interaction is not significant.…”

“…prosody. If we compare the mean values of early/late targets with/without prosody reported in Raborife et al (2016) with the mean values reported in the present paper, the direction of the results is similar. In the current model, however, this interaction is not significant.…”

“…Notice that the model reported inRaborife et al (2016) showed an interaction of prosody and target position: compared to early and late targets without raised pitch, early targets with raised pitch were detected slower than late ones. However, early and late targets with raised pitch were not significantly faster than early and late targets without…”

“…section 2.2). Parameters which might be relevant for a perceptual impression of emphasis in Sepedi include loudness, pitch, duration, pauses and tonal variations (see also Raborife et al 2016 for more details). In the stretch preceding the phonemebearing word, narrow focus sentences were realized with a raised pitch in 13 cases out of 48, as compared to the broad focus condition.…”