Effects of syllable onset on the timing of pitch accent in Belgrade Serbian

Robin Karlin

doi:10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4324

Abstract

In this paper, I present the results of an acoustic study on Serbian, a pitch-accent language with sonorant-sonorant onset clusters like /mr/ and /ml/. I show that peak timing in falling accents is not affected solely by syllable onset duration, as suggested by the segmental anchoring hypothesis, but rather is determined by an interaction between syllable onset complexity and syllable onset duration, indicating a gestural representation of tone.

Highlights

This experiment uses acoustic data to both directly examine the predictions of the segmental anchoring hypothesis, as well as a proxy for articulatory data to probe some of the predictions of Articulatory Phonology
There is a general trend of increase in lag between the left edge of the word and the peak as one moves from short syllable onsets to long syllable onsets. This is generally consistent with the segmental anchoring hypothesis, in that it appears that peaks are aligned to some point in the rime; because the rime is delayed by longer syllable onsets, so is the peak
This data shows that the timing of pitch excursions is affected by both phonetic and phonological characteristics of the syllable

Summary

Introduction

Under some conceptualizations of Articulatory Phonology, only the onsets of gestures can be controlled and timed; this is unlike the segmental anchoring hypothesis, which again, argues that both the onset and the target of a pitch excursion are timed. Given the wide range of possibilities for onsets of F0 excursions, the c-center hypothesis seems overly strict; the extent to which targets can be more freely timed (given some non-ballistic model of tone gesture duration) and still be coordinated in a c-center structure has not been thoroughly investigated.

Results

Conclusion