A study on the perception of prosodic cues to focus by Egyptian listeners: Some make use of them, but most of them don't

Abstract

The role of prosody in the encoding of information structure in Egyptian Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between morpho-syntactically identical utterances expressing a topic-comment and a focus-background structure. This paper presents the results from two perception experiments testing Egyptian Arabic listeners’ ability to infer the two pragmatically different structures from acoustically different prosodic realizations. In the first experiment, naturalistic stimuli were used while in the second experiment, the stimuli were gated after the first target word whose pitch contour was manipulated. In addition, the first experiment was repeated with German-speaking listeners to compare their performance to that of the Egyptian listeners. The results suggest that Egyptian listeners perform only slightly above chance-level in both conditions, while the German-speaking listeners were more successful (75% correct). We interpret the results as a difference in conventionalization of the mapping between prosodic form and pragmatic meaning. This difference may be due to the non-categorical character of post-focus compression and the strong variation within and across speakers in Egyptian Arabic. Thus, the results lend some support to the distinction between ‘deaccenting’ and ‘non-deaccenting’ languages in terms of the conventionalization of a prosodic structure.