Pitch Accent Research Articles

Standard Lithuanian

The Lithuanian language, together with Latvian, belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family and to the group of Eastern Baltic languages. The two surviving Baltic languages have many common features of phonemic inventories: opposition of long and short vowels, an abundance of diphthongs, a system of pitch accent. They have also developed substantial differences, e.g. Latvian has fixed stress and a set of palatal consonants, while Lithuanian has free (distinctive) stress and a phonological opposition between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants (Poliakovas 2008: 9, 42; Dini 2019: 577; Jaroslavienė et al. 2019: 263; Gelumbeckaitė & Pakerys 2020). In contrast to other Indo-European languages, the Baltic languages have lost j between a consonant and a front vowel, and have preserved m, rather than assimilated it, before the dental consonants d, t, which has not become n1 (Endzelynas 1957: 8). Lithuanian has preserved the manner of articulation of Indo-European plosive consonants (Bonfante 2008: 40). As a result of the continuous and long-lasting contact of Baltic with Slavic languages, these language groups also share common linguistic features (discussed later).

Do Different Majority Languages Lead to Different Intonational Grammars? A Case Study of Yes/No-Questions in Heritage Russian

Abstract Based on production data of yes/no-questions (YNQ), our research shows that the intonational grammar of YNQ s of heritage speakers of Russian in the United States and in Germany differs from the one of monolingual speakers in various aspects, namely considering the number of additional pitch accents on subjects and objects, the preference for H* on subjects, and, in the case of heritage speakers in the United States, an increased use of upstepped accents on the verb, a lower rate of H%, and a different alignment of rising pitch accents in intransitive questions. The differences can be categorized as differences of phonetic implementation and frequency of use. They cannot easily be attributed to transfer from the majority languages. Rather, the increased use of upsteps on the verb can be characterized as a compensation strategy to make the pitch accent on the verb the most prominent, even if an earlier accent has been realized on the subject.

Intrinsic vowel pitch in Hamont Dutch: Evidence for If0 reduction in the lower pitch range

This study investigated Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (If0) in the Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont. Its main aim was to investigate a potential correlation between If0 and f0, which has been attested in previous research, especially on contour tone languages. The Hamont dialect is particularly interesting because it has a pitch accent distinction, but also because the vowel system has a high and low vowel contrast in the front and the back dimension of the vowel space. The results of this study are generally compatible with If0 research on many languages but adds some new insights. Firstly, it was found that If0 in the Hamont dialect is comparatively large (1.97 semitones). Secondly, it was confirmed that the front–back distinction in vowel articulation has no significant effect on If0. Thirdly, when If0 is expressed on a semitone scale, no significant differences in If0 were found between male and female speakers of the dialect. The most important finding of the paper is the significant positive correlation between f0 and If0 in that If0 is smaller in the lower pitch range and bigger in the higher pitch range. This phenomenon in Hamont Dutch is much the same to what is observed in contour tone languages that have been examined for this. There are indications that a similar tendency exists in register tone languages and intonation languages. Although the cause of this progressive If0 reduction is not entirely clear, its wide distribution across prosodic systems seems to point towards a universal tendency.

Alternation preferences affect focus marking in German and English differently.

This study investigates the interplay between alternation preferences and corrective focus marking in the production of German and English speakers. Both languages prefer an alternation of strong and weak, and both use pitch accenting to indicate focus structure. The objective of the study is to determine whether the preference for rhythmic alternation can account for variations in the prosodic marking of focus. Contrary to previous claims, the results obtained from three production experiments indicate that rhythmic adjustment strategies do occur during focus marking. However, despite the similarities between the two languages, they employ different strategies when alternation and focus marking work in opposite directions. German speakers often employ a melodic alternation of high and low by realizing the first of two adjacent focus accents with a rising pitch accent (L*H), while English speakers frequently omit the first focus accent in clash contexts. This finding is further supported by a second experiment that investigates pitch accent clashes in rhythm rule contexts under various focus environments. The findings suggest that the preference for alternation can influence the prosodic marking of focus and contributes to variation in the realization of information-structure categories.

Hierarchical distinctions in the production and perception of nuclear tunes in American English

In Autosegmental-Metrical models of intonational phonology, different types of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones concatenate to create a set of phonologically distinct phrase-final nuclear tunes. This study asks if an eight-way distinction in nuclear tune shape in American English, predicted from the combination of two (monotonal) pitch accents, two phrase accents, and two boundary tones, is evident in speech production and in speech perception. F0 trajectories from a large-scale imitative speech production experiment were analyzed using bottom-up(k-means) clustering, neural net classification, GAMM modeling, and modeling of turning point alignment. Listeners’ perception of the same tunes is tested in a perceptual discrimination task and related to the imitation results. Emergent grouping of tunes in the clustering analysis, and related classification accuracy from the neural net, show a merging of some of the predicted distinctions among tunes whereby tune shapes that vary primarily in the scaling of final f0 are not reliably distinguished. Within five emergent clusters, subtler distinctions among tunes are evident in GAMMs and f0 turning point modeling. Clustering of individual participants’ production data shows a range of partitions of the data, with nearly all participants making a primary distinction between a class of High-Rising and Non-High-Rising tunes, and with up to four secondary distinctions among the non-Rising class. Perception results show a similar pattern, with poor pairwise discrimination for tunes that differ primarily, but by a small degree, in final f0, and highly accurate discrimination when just one member of a pair is in the High-Rising tune class. Together, the results suggest a hierarchy of distinctiveness among nuclear tunes, with a robust distinction based on holistic tune shape and poorly differentiated distinctions between tunes with the same holistic shape but small differences in final f0. The observed distinctions from clustering, classification, and perception analyses align with the tonal specification of a binary pitch accent contrast {H*, L*} and a maximally ternary {H%, M%, L%} boundary tone contrast; the findings do not support distinct tonal specifications for the phrase accent and boundary tone from the AM model. 

Standing out in context: Prominence in the production and perception of public speech

This study investigates the relationship between signal-based factors and discourse context in the production and perception of prominence, extending prior work on prominence in American English by examining speech from complete TED Talks as examples of a public speech style. First, we conduct a production study. The TED Talk speech samples are analyzed for relationships between (1) phonological pitch accent, (2) acoustic prosodic features, and (3) information structure, modeled here in terms of referential and lexical givenness as well as focus related to semantic alternatives. Second, we conduct a perception study. Word-level prominence ratings obtained from untrained listeners are analyzed for the effects of these (1) phonological, (2) acoustic, and (3) information structural factors. The aim of this study is to evaluate the interaction of the three kinds of factors on prominence ratings with speech that is fully contextualized, allowing for information about the speaker, the situational context, and the discourse context to interact with and possibly mediate signal-based cues to prominence. Results from the production analysis show a weak probabilistic relation between pitch accent assignment and information structure for these TED Talk speakers, but only in the presence versus absence of pitch accent with differences between lexical and referential information status. No systematic relationship is found between a word’s phonological pitch accent type and information structure category, though we do find some evidence of the expected gradient variation in the acoustic expression of prominence: Words that are more informative tend to have higher pitch and a wider pitch range. Despite the weak association between signal-based prominence and information structure in production, listeners perceive and rate prominence in a manner that is, to varying degrees, in accordance with the Accentual Prominence and Givenness hierarchies. In sum, the findings contribute new evidence of the mediating effects of contextual factors relating to the phonological status of pitch accents, information structure, and speech style on the interpretation of acoustic cues to prominence.

Multimodal cues to intonational categories: Gesture apex coordination with tonal events

This study argues for a multimodal view of the identification, representation, and implementation of intonational structure, with evidence from gesture apex-tone coordination in Turkish. Many studies have reported consistent synchronisation of atomic prominence markers across modalities (i.e., pitch accents and gesture apexes). This is prima facie evidence that gesture and prosody are implemented together, and therefore the former can play a role in the identification and perception of the latter through apex-tone synchronisation. However, only few studies considered the full intonational context when investigating synchronisation (e.g., potential alignment of apexes with boundary tones). This is particularly relevant for Turkish as there is disagreement in the literature about whether all words in Turkish bear a pitch accent. In this study, we test the synchronisation of apexes with all intonational events in Turkish natural speech data annotated for gesture and prosody, resulting in 820 gesture apex and 3697 tonal event annotations. The study uses syllable duration (160ms) to determine synchronisation between these anchors via equivalence tests while also integrating gestural and prosodic context as factors that can affect the temporal distance between these units through mixed-effects linear regression. The findings showed that apexes were chiefly synchronised with pitch accents (71%), indicating that prominence was the primary constraint for synchronisation. However, analysis of cases with no prosodic prominence provides the first evidence for a hierarchical constraint on synchronisation, since apexes were preferentially synchronised with the tones marking prosodic words (76%) and not with the markers of prosodic constituents higher in the hierarchy. This finding supports the claim that there may be accentless words in Turkish since the absence of prominence caused a systematic shift in the synchronisation behaviour of apexes. More generally, the study shows how multimodal evidence from gesture can be used in the identification of phonological categories, and that prosodic structure is likely to be expressed through multimodal cues as a composite signal.

Musical Evidence for Low Boundary Tones in Ancient Greek

Abstract Several scholars have suggested that in ancient Greek there was a low boundary tone at the end of a relatively small prosodic constituent such as a clitic group or maximal prosodic word. The boundary tone may phonologically motivate some puzzling pitch-accentual phenomena in the language. One is the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to the circumflex pitch accent (HL) on penultimate syllables (the “sōtêra rule”). Another is the intonational phrase-internal downstepping or deletion of a word-final acute accent (H); that conversion of an acute to a grave accent is known as “lulling” or “koímēsis”. If such a low boundary tone existed, its effects should still be audible in ancient Greek non-strophic vocal music, where there is a significant correlation between the pitch movement of the text and the movement of the melody to which it is set, i.e. between tone and tune. Specifically, proponents of such a low boundary tone would predict that the turning point between falling and rising melody, the “musical trough”, should center around the word-final mora or syllable. The present study provides the first full description of troughs in the Delphic Hymns and finds that they are indeed closely aligned with word-end. Furthermore, once other factors that could lead to word-final troughs are set aside, i.e. once potential confounds are controlled for, the association of the trough with word-end remains strong, suggesting that we should in fact reconstruct the low boundary tone.

The f0 perturbation effects in focus marking: Evidence from Korean and Japanese.

Many studies showed that prosodic cues such as f0, duration and intensity are used in focus marking cross-linguistically. Usually, on-focus words exhibit expansions of acoustic cues such as f0 expansion, whereas post-focus words may show compression of acoustic cues. However, how features in a sub-syllabic level are employed in focus marking remain to be investigated. F0 perturbation refers to the phenomenon that vocal folds vibration is affected by the preceding non-sonorant consonant. The current study aims to examine how f0 perturbation is realized in focus marking in two languages Japanese and Korean. Tokyo Japanese is a pitch-accent language and Seoul Korean is considered to be at the stage of quasi-tonogenesis. Our results showed that f0 perturbation effects were enhanced in on-focus positions and compressed in pre- and post-focus positions for both narrow and contrastive focus in both languages. In addition, our results showed that pitch accent can also affect the realization of f0 perturbation in various focus conditions. Compared to Korean, our results in Japanese showed that f0 perturbation effects were less restricted. These results provide new insights into the current model of communicative functions that sub-syllabic level acoustic cues such as f0 perturbation can also be employed in focus marking.

The prosody of surprise questions in Estonian

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

The influence of musical abilities on the processing of second language prosody: An eye-tracking study

The perception of speech prosody in a second language (L2) remains challenging even for proficient L2 users. Eye-tracking evidence indicates that Dutch listeners show difficulty in the processing of pitch accents that signal a contrast (i.e., contrastive focus) in English, whereas native English listeners use this cue in perception to anticipate upcoming information [Ge et al., Appl. Psycholinguist. 42, 1057–1088 (2021)]. Prosody perception abilities in foreign languages have been associated with individual differences in musical abilities [Jansen et al., Speech Prosody, 713–717 (2022)]. We investigated whether musical abilities influenced the processing of prosodic cues by 45 Dutch adult L2 English users, using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. Participants listened to sentences with pitch accent cues to contrastive focus on different words, while viewing pictures showing objects and characters mentioned. We investigated to what extent participants showed anticipatory fixations on the image reflecting the alternative of the contrast, after hearing the accented word. We measured participants’ music perception abilities with a standardised test and analysed its influence on anticipatory fixations. Initial analyses indicate that individuals with stronger musical abilities show more anticipation. This suggests that having stronger perceptual resources underlying both music and speech processing [Patel, Front. Psychol. 2, 142 (2011)] may benefit L2 prosody perception.

The acoustics of the alignment of focus prosody and lexical stress: A production study of native speakers and second language learners of English

In English, the tonal target of a pitch accent is aligned with lexical stress. Therefore, the phonetic realization of contrastive focus prosody, phonologically marked by a H*/L + H* pitch accent, is expected to vary depending on the stress pattern of the focused word. This study explored acoustic effects of the alignment of lexical stress and focus prosody and examined how it is learned by Korean learners of English, whose first language lacks lexical stress. Ten native English speakers (L1) and 19 Korean learners of English (L2) participated in a read-aloud task, in which they produced nine trisyllabic words with primary stress on one of the three syllables with contrastive focus (e.g., Animal, vaNILla, engiNEER). For each syllable, three acoustic measures were extracted: the height of pitch peak, periodic energy mass, and the direction of pitch movements (Albert et al., 2021; Cangemi et al., 2019). Results revealed that the height of pitch peak, a conventional measure of both lexical stress and contrastive focus, did not properly demonstrate their alignment. Instead, the stressed syllable of the focused words was marked by its overall prominence (mass) or the direction of pitch movements, depending on the stress pattern. The L2 speakers’ productions were similar to the L1 productions, but there were indications of an influence of their L1 prosody and English proficiency. [This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A8052482).]

The status of lexical stress in understudied Kabyle Tamazight-Berber: “Acoustic evidence from Kabyle dominant speakers.”

Until now, the classification of the prosodic systems of some languages (including Berber languages) is not conclusive and open to alternative interpretations. The question is: are these languages better classified as lacking stress or more controlled and systematic studies of these languages are needed? This study asks three main questions: (1) Is there lexical stress in Kabyle?, (2) what are the acoustic properties that manifest stress (if it turned out “it exists”)? and (3) which syllable in the word is prominent? Results from a closely controlled acoustic production study of 6 male Kabyle-native speakers, showed some evidence of lexical prominence in root words, which was manifested by intensity, duration (for vowel /æ/), and vowel quality (higher and more peripheral prominent syllable for /æ/ vowels). Louder, and higher and more peripheral vowels were observed in initial syllables while longer vowels (/æ/) were found in penultimate syllables. Surprisingly, based on the present data we did not see strong evidence of F0 being a meaningful correlate; however, we observed acoustic patterns consistent with an enhancement of the initial syllable corresponding to the focus condition, which led us to suggest that the pitch results looked like an intonational pitch accent that is location-sensitive. Implications and further work are discussed in the paper.

Disentangling word stress and phrasal prosody: A view from Georgian

This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studying the distribution of acoustic cues (duration, intensity, F0) in controlled data. The results show that initial syllables in Georgian words are marked by greater duration than all subsequent syllables, regardless of syllable count and phrasal context. After excluding domain-initial strengthening as an alternative explanation, this finding provides evidence in favor of fixed initial stress. Likewise, initial syllables are marked by greatest intensity, but the consistent gradual drop in intensity throughout the word suggests that this effect may not be stress-related. The F0 results align with the existing accounts: individual lexical words form ACCENTUAL PHRASES, marked by a low pitch accent on the initial syllable and a high final boundary tone on the final syllable. Additionally, new evidence for a phrasal accent, aligned with the penult, is presented. F0 targets are shown to be completely absent in the context of post-focal deaccenting, which shows that F0-marking in Georgian is reserved for phrasal prosody and is not intrinsic to stress-marking. These results help account for the facts related to word stress, phrasal intonation, and their interplay in Georgian, the object of debate in the literature.

Prosodic marking of information status in Italian

Previous studies on the prosodic marking of information status argue that Italian tends to resist deaccentuation of given elements. In particular, Italian reportedly always accents post-focal given information within noun phrases (NPs), so that it is not possible to reliably reconstruct the information status of the items from the acoustic signal. However, descriptions have so far been concerned with categorical accent patterns, lacking crucial information about continuous phonetic parameters and their distribution in the utterance in ways that can contribute to prosodic marking. In this paper, we use a novel approach based on periodic-energy-related measures to explore how speakers of the Neapolitan variety of Italian modulate continuous prosodic parameters to differentiate information structure. We show that, contrary to previous findings, Italian speakers of the Neapolitan variety do mark information status prosodically within noun phrases. The discrepancy with previous work is explained by the fact that the prosodic marking of post-focal givenness is not achieved through the categorical presence or absence of a pitch accent on one specific syllable, but through the gradual modulation of phonetic parameters at various locations. Moreover, we find that these modulations occur early in the noun phrase. We also show that native speakers can make use of their knowledge of these modulations to reliably identify post-focal given elements in the absence of the pragmatic context, that is, directly from the acoustic signal.

The enduring effects of default focus in let alone ellipsis: Evidence from pupillometry.

The study of clausal ellipsis in sentence processing has revealed that comprehenders are sensitive to multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures when recovering elided content. This paper presents a pupillometry experiment investigating how the human language processing system responds to sentences in which the location of a pitch accent clashes with global preferences for local correlates. The results are discussed in light of existing literature, including the Enduring Focus Principle, in which locations for default pitch accent continue to influence focus-sensitive processes regardless of overt markers of focus.

Internal structure of intonational categories: The (dis)appearance of a perceptual magnet effect.

The question of whether intonation events are speech categories like phonemes and lexical tones has long been a puzzle in prosodic research. In past work, researchers have studied categoricality of pitch accents and boundary tones by examining perceptual phenomena stemming from research on phoneme categories (i.e., intonation boundary effects-peaks in discrimination sensitivity at category boundaries, perceptual magnet effects-sensitivity minima near the best exemplar or prototype of a category). Both lines of research have yielded mixed results. However, boundary effects are not necessarily related to categoricality of speech. Using improved methodology, the present study examines whether pitch accents have domain-general internal structure of categories by testing the perceptual magnet effect. Perceived goodness and discriminability of re-synthesized productions of Dutch rising pitch accent (L*H) were evaluated by native speakers of Dutch in three experiments. The variation between these stimuli was quantified using a polynomial-parametric modeling approach. A perceptual magnet effect was detected: (1) rated "goodness" decreased as acoustic-perceptual distance relative to the prototype increased (Experiment 1), and (2) equally spaced items far from the prototype were more frequently discriminated than equally spaced items in the neighborhood of the prototype (Experiment 2). These results provide first evidence for internal structure of pitch accents, similar to that found in color and phoneme categories. However, the discrimination accuracy gathered here was lower than that reported for phonemes. The discrimination advantage in the neighborhood far from the prototype disappeared when participants were tested on a very large number of stimuli (Experiment 3), similar to findings on phonemes and different from findings for lexical tones in neutral network simulations of distributional learning. These results suggest a more transient nature of the perceptual magnet effect in the perception of pitch accents and arguably weaker categoricality of pitch accents, compared to that of phonemes and in particular of lexical tones.

The Temporal Alignment of Speech-Accompanying Eyebrow Movement and Voice Pitch: A Study Based on Late Night Show Interviews.

Previous research has shown that eyebrow movement during speech exhibits a systematic relationship with intonation: brow raises tend to be aligned with pitch accents, typically preceding them. The present study approaches the question of temporal alignment between brow movement and intonation from a new angle. The study makes use of footage from the Late Night Show with David Letterman, processed with 3D facial landmark detection. Pitch is modeled as a sinusoidal function whose parameters are correlated with the maximum height of the eyebrows in a brow raise. The results confirm some previous findings on audiovisual prosody but lead to new insights as well. First, the shape of the pitch signal in a region of approx. 630 ms before the brow raise is not random and tends to display a specific shape. Second, while being less informative than the post-peak pitch, the pitch signal in the pre-peak region also exhibits correlations with the magnitude of the associated brow raises. Both of these results point to early preparatory action in the speech signal, calling into question the visual-precedes-acoustic assumption. The results are interpreted as supporting a unified view of gesture/speech co-production that regards both signals as manifestations of a single communicative act.

Phrase Prosody of Two Eastern Middle-Russian Dialects

This paper deals with the phrase intonation of two neighboring Eastern Middle-Russian dialects with okan’je and akan’je spoken in Melenki and Gus’-Khrustal’ny districts of Vladimir region. The study, based on the material of dialectal speech recordings made in the 2008 and 2009 (nine speakers born in 1914–1940, total duration — 19 hours), reveals that the prosodic system of these dialects is relatively similar to that one of the Modern Standard Russian, sharing with it most pitch accents (L*, H*+L, L*+H) and association of tonal structures with the basic communicative categories — statements, yes-no questions, wh-question, non-finality, commands and requests. The main distinctive properties of the Vladimir dialect as compared to Standard Russian are: 1) phonological distinction between two rising pitch accents — L*+H and L+H*; 2) probable H* pitch accents in dialects with akan’je; 3) “falling set-up” on pretonic syllable for rising pitch accents; 4) earlier timing of rising L*+H and falling H*+L pitch accents; 5) phonological distinction between two initial boundary tones — %L and %H; 6) the wide distribution of falling final boundary tone HL%; 7) some traces of ‘word-to-word’ tonal prominence. Meanwhile, the difference between the two Vladimir dialects themselves is not that noticeable and lies in the domain of phonetic realization and the degree of manifestation of particular elements of prosodic structure, as well as in the degree of their prevalence rather than in the set of prosodic units.

Nuclear pitch accents of statements in the Spanish of Mexico City. Data from the corpus norma lingüística culta (1971)

Nuclear pitch accents of statements in the Spanish of Mexico City. Data from the corpus norma lingüística culta (1971)