Truncation and Compression in Southern German and Australian English

Abstract

Nuclear pitch accents are realized differently when there is little sonorant material (as in monosyllabic compared to disyllabic words): Southern British English speakers compress rises and falls, while Northern German speakers truncate falls and compress rises [1] (Grabe 1998). This leads to different phonetic surface patterns for final falls. Within these languages, dialectal variation affects alignment and the frequency of occurrence of nuclear tunes. We test whether the differences in compression and truncation use are a stable crosslinguistic phenomenon (and occur in other varieties of English and German) or whether they are limited to the varieties tested in [1]. Here, we investigated productions of rises and falls in Australian English and Southern German in words with different proportions of sonorant material. Australian English speakers compressed rises and falls, while Southern German speakers only compressed rises but truncated falls, consistent with Grabe's findings for Southern British English and Northern German. This indicates consistent use of strategies within a language, even though the varieties under investigation display other phonetic differences from previous varieties tested. We discuss implications of these findings for automatic labelling.

The Prosody of Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions in German

“… 7. One reviewer argues that the choice of nuclear accent and boundary tone may also depend on the number of syllables between nuclear accent and the utterance end (Grabe, 1998; Hanssen, 2017; Rathcke, 2006; Yu & Zahner, 2018). In our materials, all object nouns had a final unstressed syllable and stress was either penultimate or antepenultimate.…”

Alternation preferences affect focus marking in German and English differently

“…This means that speakers had less material to realize a focus accent. This may have resulted in compressed accents that may not have been perceived as prominent (see Yu and Zahner-Ritter, 2018 on truncation and compression in Australian English and Southern German, which are the varieties considered here).…”