Dr. Simon Roessig

Syntagmatic prominence relations in prosodic focus marking

This talk is about the role of prenuclear prominences and their relation to nuclear accents in German and English. The production results (German) that I will present show that the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on whether it is focal or prefocal. The prenuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima, and longer durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on the following focus type: The prenuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains with an inverse relationship in the syntagmatic dimension. In addition, the study contributes further evidence that continuous phonetic detail is used to encode information structural categories. An important question that arises from the production data is whether this phonetic detail can be used by listeners in perception. I will present first results from a series of perception experiments (German and English) to investigate this question.