Abstract
This study presents two experiments designed to disentangle various influences on syllable pronunciation. Target syllables were embedded in carrier sentences, read aloud by native German participants, and analyzed in terms of syllable and vowel duration, acoustic prominence, and spectral similarity. Both experiments revealed a complex interaction of different factors, as participants attempted to disambiguate semantically and syntactically ambiguous structures while at the same time distinguishing between important and unimportant information. The first experiment examined German verb prefixes that formed prosodic minimal pairs. Carrier sentences were formulated so as to systematically vary word stress, sentence focus, and the type of syntactic boundary following the prefix. We found clear effects of word stress on duration, prominence, and spectral similarity as well as a small influence of sentence focus on prominence levels of lexically stressed prefixes. While sentence boundaries were marked by particularly high prominence and duration values, hardly any effect was shown for word boundaries. The second experiment compared German function words which were segmentally identical but appeared in different grammatical roles. Here, definite articles were found to be shorter than relative pronouns and still shorter than demonstrative pronouns. As definite articles are also much more common than the other two lexical classes, effects of lemma frequency might also have played a role.
Highlights
Syllables can vary strongly in the way they are pronounced, even when in canonical pronunciation they are segmentally identical
Duration seems to be a main correlate of word stress in German, but differences were found for formant values, fundamental frequency, and various voice quality parameters (e.g., Kohler, 1987; Claßen et al, 1998; Kleber and Klipphahn, 2006; Schneider and Möbius, 2007; Lintfert, 2010)
We examine the extent to which canonical word stress differences and additional semantic contrasts triggered differences in the word and sentence stress patterns which in turn were visible in the acoustic realization of the target syllables
Summary
Syllables can vary strongly in the way they are pronounced, even when in canonical pronunciation they are segmentally identical. For English and Dutch, spectral tilt, i.e., the intensity in higher compared to lower frequency bands, appeared to be another robust correlate of word stress in accented as well as unaccented contexts (Sluijter and van Heuven, 1996; Okobi, 2006; Plag et al, 2011). Dogil and Williams (1999) found no significant differences between accented and unaccented words in German in terms of fundamental frequency, intensity, or duration, studies for other languages showed stress-related differences in fundamental frequency and intensity to be strongly reduced when target words were not accented (Sluijter and van Heuven, 1996; Plag et al, 2011). The first experiment aims to disentangle influences of lexical stress, sentence accent, and syntactic boundaries, while the second experiment analyzes effects of lexical class and word frequency
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