Relative influences of information structure and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of nuclear pitch accents

Abstract

The phonological and phonetic realization of a nuclear pitch accent has been claimed to reflect aspects of its information structure (IS). As the rightmost accented word in an intonational phrase, the nuclear pitch accent often co-occurs with utterance-final position, which in American English, is often cued by prosodic means such as creaky voice and domain-final lengthening. The present study investigated the relative influence of IS and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of words in nuclear position. The IS of an object noun phrase occurring in nuclear position was manipulated to be given, accessible, new, or contrastive relative to a parallel object noun in the preceding sentence. The critical object noun occurred in utterance-final position in experiment 1 and in non-final position and preceding a semantically vacuous syntactic phrase in experiment 2 (e.g., “that was there,” “for it). Given that contrastive information significantly influenced the prosodic implementation of the object noun in both experiments with respective reduction and enhancement effects, but utterance-final position nevertheless regulated the particular phonetic instantiation. While IS modulated the degree of creakiness, duration, and intensity in final position, IS conditions in non-final nuclear position modulated the type of f0 contour and duration.