Abstract
Acoustic correlates of narrow focus in Turkish focus is known to affect the acoustic properties of the lexical element under focus. Its effect on the pre-focus and post-focus domains has attracted much less attention. This study aims to investigate the acoustic changes as a function of focus in the pre-focus and post-focus domains as well as in the on-focus domain in Turkish and listeners' sensitivity to those changes in retrieving information from the acoustic signal. For this purpose, a production and a perception experiments have been conducted. For the production study, speakers read sentences in which the location of focus was manipulated via wh-questions preceding those sentences. For the perception study, listeners heard selected sentences recorded for the production study and were asked to judge the prominent word in the sentence. Results showed that focused words had increased duration and intensity, and post-focus words had reduced F0, duration and intensity. Interestingly, pre-focus words were found to have increased F0 and duration. Listeners' identification of focus was positively affected by the presence of acoustic changes especially in the post-focus domain. These findings have implications for speech perception and modelling prosody.
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