Responses to time pressure on phrase-final melodies in varieties of Dutch and West Frisian

Abstract

In order to investigate the effect of time pressure on the execution of falling and falling-rising pitch movements on phrase-final syllables, we ran a production experiment with 119 speakers distributed over five regional varieties of West-Germanic spoken in the Netherlands and Standard Dutch. They realized nuclear Falls and Fall-Rises on four IP-final monosyllabic target words in which the duration of the sonorant portion of the syllable rhyme was varied by combining a short and a long vowel with a sonorant and obstruent coda consonant. The different contours were elicited with the help of a ‘Statement’ dialogue and a ‘Rhetorical question’ dialogue, respectively. Phonetic adjustments fell into three categories, target undershoot, increased f0 slopes, and durational easing, the latter either by f0 target retraction or sonorant rhyme lengthening. Talkers produced monosyllabic Fall-Rises quite generally, although avoidance in favour of a plain rising contour was evident in one-fifth of the cases of the shortest sonorant rhyme in the more prestigious varieties. Broadly, southwestern Zeelandic Dutch and northeastern Low Saxon differed most noticeably from each other in their treatment of the valley of the Fall-Rise, which Zeelandic maximally undershot and Low Saxon faithfully preserved. Urban Hollandic and Standard Dutch were similar, while West Frisian shares some features with Hollandic and some with Low Saxon.Apart from these effects of geographic contiguity, the data argue for an interpretation of the various measures alleviating time pressure within the more general conception of speech as a compromise between the interests of the speaker and those of the hearer in the process of speech communication.