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Abstract
This study presents the first acoustic examination of prominence relations in entire contours associated with different information structures in Egyptian Arabic. Previous work has shown that topics and foci are typically associated with different pitch events, whereas it is still a matter of debate whether and how Egyptian Arabic uses prominence relations to mark narrow focus. The analysis of data from 17 native speakers showed that narrow focus was marked by on-focus pitch expansion as well as post-focus compression. Post-focus compression was realized as a large downstep after focus, compressed pitch range, lower intensity and shorter duration. The results also showed further register lowering after a contrastive focus, but no further pitch boost of the focused word. By contrast, a contrastive topic showed higher scaling of the topic as well as an expanded pitch range of the overall contour. The findings of this study stress the significance of whole contours to convey intonational meanings, revealing gradient prominence cues to focus across the utterance, specifically post-focus register lowering to enhance the prominence of a contrastive focus.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of Interspeech 2020 |
Place of Publication | Shanghai |
Pages | 1883-1887 |
Number of pages | 5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2020 |
Event | 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association: INTERSPEECH 2020 - Shanghai, Virtual, China Duration: 25 Oct 2020 → 29 Oct 2020 |
Conference
Conference | 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association |
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Abbreviated title | Interspeech 2020 |
Country/Territory | China |
City | Shanghai, Virtual |
Period | 25/10/20 → 29/10/20 |
Keywords
- Acoustic cues
- Information structure
- Narrow focus
- Post-focus compression
- Prosodic prominence
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Signal Processing
- Language and Linguistics
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Modelling and Simulation
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Dive into the research topics of 'An analysis of prosodic prominence cues to information structure in Egyptian Arabic'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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FWF - CLCS_2 - Cross-layer prosodic models for conversational speech
1/10/18 → 30/11/21
Project: Research project