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Intonation: Theory, Models, and ApplicationsAthens, Greece |
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Intonation: Theory, Models, and ApplicationsAthens, Greece |
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This paper presents a comparative study investigating
the relation between the timing of a rising
or falling pitch movement and the syllable it accentuates
for three different languages: Dutch, French
and Swedish. In a perception experiment, the five-syllable
utterances /mamamamama/ and /a.a.a.a.a/
were provided with a relatively fast rising or falling
pitch movement. The timing of the movement was
systematically varied so that it accented the third or
the fourth syllable. Subjects were asked to indicate
which syllable they perceived as accented. The
accentuation boundary (AB) was then defined as the
moment before which more than half of the subjects
indicated the third syllable as accented and after which
more than half of the subjects indicated the fourth
syllable.
The results show that there are significant differences
between the different languages as to the location
of the AB. In general, for the rises, well defined
ABs were found, which for French were located in
the middle of the vowel of the third syllable, while
for Dutch and Swedish the ABs of the rises were located
later in the vowel. For the falls, only for the
Dutch and the Swedish listeners WAS a clear AB obtained.
This was located at the end of the third syllable.
For the French listeners, the fall did not yield
a clear AB. This corroborates the absence of accentuation
by means of falls in French. Finally, especially
for the stimuli with the longer pauses between the
/a/'s in Dutch, and perhaps Swedish, an interval was
found were the fall induced ambiguity as to accent
location.
Bibliographic reference. Beaugendre, Frédéric / House, David / Hermes, Dik J. (1997): "Accentuation boundaries in dutch, French and Swedish", In INT-1997, 43-46.