A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

Yong-Cheol Lee , Bei Wang , Sisi Chen , Martine Adda-Decker (1, 2) , Angelique Amelot (2) , Satoshi Nambu , Mark Liberman

1 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

Domaines: Linguistique; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Yong-Cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angelique Amelot, et al.. A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus. 40th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2015, Brisbane, Australia. pp.4754-4757. ⟨halshs-01253243⟩